The Yearning Underlying Each Day, Especially Each Holiday: How Do We Rescue Clarity and Order from Chaos?

We can expect so much from a holiday, like Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s. And it’s not just because of the hype, the commercialization, or the social demands. Just think of what and why we feel as we do about any holiday. The desire for a break, to let loose or rest, to see friends and family, to celebrate inspiring people, our history, culture, and coming together as a community, for a religious observance, or to start life anew.

 

We’ve all experienced the excitement and anticipation that preceded the opening of gifts or the joy of attending celebrations of a holiday. Or the sense of disappointment when things did not go as we wished they would. I remember as a teenager how awful and alone I felt when I didn’t have a date for one New Year’s party.

 

And it’s not just because as children or as adults we got off from school or work on a particular day or week. The social and commercial hype can be so strong only because there’s something in us humans that yearns for what the holiday hints at, something even beyond the social world.

 

Many of us know that Christmas, for example, has roots preceding Christ, in ancient Rome and beyond, in celebrations around the winter solstice; Chanukah, Kwanzaa and New Years are also about the solstice ⎼ and new beginnings.  The first month of the year was named for Janus, the double-faced Roman god of doorways and the portals to Heaven, who looks both forward to the future and back to the past.

 

According to author Diana Ferguson, in her book The Magickal Year: A Pagan Perspective on the Natural World, December 19th was the original date of the Roman Saturnalia. This holiday commemorated a lost Golden Age and was presided over by the fertility god, Saturn. As the old god relinquished his throne, the sun was hidden, and chaos and darkness ensued.

 

When the Julian calendar replaced the old Roman one in 45 BCE, the celebration was moved to the 17th and extended to the 23rd. The people of Rome let loose. All work came to an end, schools closed, criminals went unpunished, and sexual inhibitions were forgotten.

 

After a brief respite, came January. New consuls, or rulers took office. 3 more days of celebrating ensued. Fires were lit. People decorated their homes with laurels and there were celebrations, and groups singing in the streets. When Rome became Christian in the fifth century C. E., the church adopted much of the old revelry.

 

Christmas Day was originally set on January 6 and is still celebrated on that day by the Eastern Orthodox Church. (We now have a very new significance for this date.) With the adoption of the Julian calendar, 11 days were eliminated from the year, and the holiday moved to December 25th. That date had earlier been celebrated as the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, to Mithra, a personification of the sun, who first appeared in Persia around 1,400 BCE, and became popular with Roman soldiers by the first through fourth centuries CE.

 

According to Ferguson, even further back, in ancient Babylon and elsewhere, there were celebrations staged on that date for a seasonal rebirth of light out of darkness, and life out of death. The Babylonians celebrated the first birth of everything, the Creation itself, when the god Marduk was born from the formless, watery womb of the mother goddess, Tiamat (who Marduk killed when she threatened the world with chaos).

 

And before that, ancient peoples must have always wondered, as the world grew dark, would the light ever come again? Were these changes due to some cosmic drama, or just changes the whole universe naturally goes through? And what role if any could we humans play in these transitions?

 

There’s this yearning many if not all of us feel, to get beyond the human social world to something deeper or bigger, something more real, maybe; more meaningful. To feel the seasons in ourselves?

 

If we believe in God, to feel the truth of God. To understand death and its place in our lives. Maybe to get to the home of consciousness itself, to where feelings, thoughts, and explanations are created. To get to where mind emerges from matter, like light from darkness. Or maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe matter emerges from mind, or they both are born together from an indefinable emptiness, like Marduk from the formless womb of Tiamat?

 

How do we bring light to our world and rescue order from chaos? Or how do we bring more clarity and kindness to our moments of life, or to our decisions about how to live? How can we find in nature the strength to bring compassion and justice to the human world? This is one thing we might want from a holiday, time to put aside so we can wrestle with such questions.

 

Happy Holidays! And may some clarity come to us all.

 

*This post was syndicated by The Good Men Project.

 

 

How We Look Is Not Separate from What We See: Giving Form to What’s Most Intimately Ourselves

Sometimes, we surprise ourselves with what we can do, with what we know and don’t know.

 

I retired from teaching secondary school ten years ago. But last night, in my dreams I was once again teaching. In many classes, ten, twenty, thirty students or more showed up. In others, only one or two.  Maybe students had begun to assume that I would always be there and took me for granted. Or maybe they were too distracted by their personal lives, or I was getting too tired. Whatever it was, my dream-self decided it was time to retire.

 

In one room, a large group of students came to hear and join me in saying goodbye. It was surprising how full of feeling the situation was. We accepted each other so deeply. And I had nothing planned. It was all spontaneous. What I said emerged extemporaneously, as if from all of us together, and included nothing about goodbyes.

 

The way a moment forms has so much to teach us and is teaching us so much as it forms. There is so much there if we can see it and feel it. It’s the ultimate teacher. In fact, we are this forming of a moment. But will we look? Feel?

 

And I woke up. Sort of. The light outside was a gray mist emerging from the dark night, a dawn just beginning to gray. Outside the window, almost no discernible objects emerged from the mist, no trees, or bushes. But in the mostly dark inside, I could discern the placement but not the details of the bed, dresser, and other furniture. And as I wrote down the dream on a pad of paper by my bed, I wondered if anyone in the dream, any student had understood what I was saying.

 

Then I realized the answer in the dream was also a question. Do I understand my own answer?

 

Research and theories by psychologists and neuroscientists speculate one purpose of dreaming is to integrate emotional, and other material from our daily lives. Was the dream an example of that integration process? Was it telling me what my conscious mind couldn’t figure out or was it merely putting into words what I had already concluded? We often underestimate the role the unconscious and the resting mind plays in conscious and critical thinking. Our conscious understanding never gets it all. But if we humbly accept that, sometimes what we find surprises us with its depth and value…..

 

**To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

We Do It Because It’s What Needs to Be Done: Democracy Won in Georgia

It’s raining, hard, outside. But inside myself, it’s spring. Outside, the very air is misty-gloomy. Inside, I feel happy, hopeful. However, even after watching the returns, seeing him catch up and then slowly be declared the winner, I could hardly believe it. We won.

 

And then he delivered a wonderful speech that no GOP could ever give, because it directly called out the deep wrongs committed in the past by the Deep South. And it showed us someone who could transcend his own self-interest and proclaim that serving the good of we the people is who he is, and what he himself must and would do.

 

Senator Raphael Warnock won the run-off election for a full term in the Senate. And democracy won in Georgia.

 

And DJT lost. The would-be dictator who continues to lie, to cry that he didn’t lose, and badly, the 2020 election⎼ the supporter of White Nationalism who called for the termination of the constitution and who pushed for a person to run for office who was totally unfit to hold any high public office, lost. And Herschel Walker lost.

 

Warnock won despite all the efforts by the GOP to suppress the rights of black and brown and any person of color to vote.

 

This followed a week or more of wins for democracy and the rule of law.

 

Democracy won in New York City. DJT’s family real estate business was found guilty of 17 counts of scheming to defraud, tax fraud, falsifying records, and conspiracy. DJT was personally named in this trial as knowing about or authorizing some of the criminal activities and “explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.” This might lay the groundwork for further prosecutions by the NYC district attorney regarding other business practices and even hush money paid to Stormy Daniels.

 

Democracy won in New York State. New York State Attorney General Letitia James found DJT violated state and possibly federal criminal laws and referred the findings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. She had already asked a judge to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the company’s financial doings and oust DJT from running the company.

 

Democracy won in Washington D. C. Bernie Thompson, the Chairman of the House Jan 6 investigation committee said they will issue criminal referrals to the DOJ focusing on those who organized or incited the violence of Jan. 6 and the continuing attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.

 

Also in Washington, a federal appeals court on Thursday threw out the decision by Judge Canon, a DJT appointee, for a special master to oversee the examination of government documents stolen by DJT. Canon’s ruling gave support to efforts to slow down the DOJ investigation; and now that investigation can proceed more expeditiously. The 3-judge panel (all GOP appointees) ruled unanimously that Canon had violated basic principles of our laws, namely that laws apply to “all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank.”

 

Democracy won in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was named to oversee the investigation into stolen classified documents found at DJT’s home in Mar-A-Lago and into Jan 6, subpoenaed records of communications between DJT or his aides, and election officials in those states regarding election interference. The records include communications aimed at overthrowing the fair and accurate counting of ballots, and efforts to substitute fake electors for actual ones ⎼ replace electors who would follow the will of the voters with those who would do DJT’s will.

 

Democracy won this week in this country. But there’s clearly a race on. Can Democrats establish enough policies, strategies, and laws to limit the chaos, politics of hate, and continuing efforts to establish minority rule and undermine civil rights by members of the GOP when they take control of the House?

 

Can Democrats and responsible GOP get the reform of the Electoral Count Act passed, in order to eliminate some of the methods DJT used to try to seize unlimited power for himself. The Reform Act would clarify the role of the Vice President and how electors and elections are certified.

 

Can Democrats raise the debt limit so the GOP can’t hold funding the government hostage to carry out their intention to slash or destroy crucial anti-poverty programs or any program that serves the majority of citizens, like Social Security or popular healthcare programs, like Medicare and Medicaid?

 

Can Democrats stop investigations and impeachments planned by the GOP that are without merit.  Their plan includes investigations and impeachments of President Biden’s cabinet, administration, and family, the Department of Justice, and maybe the president himself, despite there being no evidence of anything untoward except the GOP’s own objectives.

 

The GOP aim to undermine the confidence people might still have in democracy, undermine the rule of law and any truly substantive investigations, including into the Jan 6 subversion attempt and other criminal actions. Their efforts serve the interests of autocrats like Putin instead of the interests of most Americans.

 

So, democracy has won this week. We need to enjoy and celebrate it. And remember why we do this ⎼ not that many of us could ever forget it. We need to make our voice heard, to vote whenever we have the chance, and help get out the vote, not only to protect our rights, our world, and our lives, but because it’s what we’re called to do in these times. It’s what people are always called to do, namely what’s needed and what’s right.

 

**This post was syndicated on Sunday by The Good Men Project.

 

Poetry the Universe Writes to Itself: Aging and the Gifts of Friendship

Friends can bring us back to ourselves. Over Thanksgiving with old friends, we each see ourselves in the others. Three of us have known each other for 57 years and we’ve come together for over 40 of those years to share the holiday together. We were freshman in the same college dorm at the University of Michigan. Our future wives entered our lives not long afterwards, anywhere from one to seven or eight years later. We see in each other how we’ve aged, faced threats and tribulations, pains, and losses, inspirations, and successes. How we are facing life now.

 

And it’s all out there for us to talk about. Right in front of us. Each friend with their own gifts and limitations. We give each other tips, perspectives to help us prepare for the next months, years, moment. We talk about illnesses, present and past work experiences, roof repairs, water pics, other friends, podcasts, music videos, movies, books, philosophy, and sleep. Sleep is so tenuous for half of us who, each night, have no idea how much or where in the house we will sleep. Nothing is assumed. We speak of dreams and family members. Deaths and losses. The threats to our world.

 

And then there’s the joy. So much to be grateful for. For the food, certainly. And sure, it’s an old stereotype, but all the men played football in one form or another when we were young, yet none of us attended a football game after our sophomore year. After a few years of college, it seemed so meaningless and violent. But sometime in our 50s, we began to pay attention once again and listen for scores. Especially Michigan v Ohio State. This year, we watched together, shouting and cheering. Even the women were drawn in by the drama and emotion. And then my wife and I had to leave early to return home. Ohio State was ahead by 3 points.

 

But about 3 hours later, still on the road, my wife checked her phone for the score. Michigan 45, Ohio State 23. We won. We actually won. We called our friends. What a celebration ensued.

 

And when we arrived home ⎼ we have 3 cats, but we couldn’t find any of them. They hide from our cat-sitter even though she feeds and talks to them. Sometimes, they punish us for leaving by not showing up. But this time, in 5 minutes or so, one emerged from the basement, one appeared by the door as we brought in the suitcases. Twenty minutes or so later, the third came up behind us, crying. They all cried for food and contact. And when my wife and I sat down later to eat dinner, they sat with us.

 

This year, something extra sat with us. There was a darkness in the house not attributable to the night. A warning in the air, or in me. How many more of these returns do we have? Aging is not about winning but presence. In the dark was a reminder to take in this moment more deeply. To embrace it as much as possible. To do everything I could to give back. This is all there is ⎼ feel it. Enjoy it. Be thankful for what we can be thankful for. Be kind, caring, even if it hurts. Pet the cats, love my wife. And maybe we will let more of the light in….

 

**If you live in Georgia, please vote on Tuesday, Dec. 6, to help protect your right to vote, the right for women to make their own health care choices, to protect the environment, Medicare, and Social Security ⎼ to help stop the politics of hate. Bring water, a photo ID, and friends. No matter where you live, you can help get out accurate voting information.

 

***To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.