Mid-Week Musings 5

Christmas is coming!

How do you feel about Christmas? Do you love it? Do you not? And if you do, then do you know why? And if you don’t, do you know why not?

It’s interesting to look behind the paywall of our public persona. Behind there are so many things from childhood that haven’t gone away - but they haven’t grown up either. There they sit, dusty, out-of-date, entertaining themselves by pulling the levers of the present in ways that bewilder us.

This time of year, this cusp between a new year and the one that we are leaving, is an appropriate time to think about who we are. Are we still growing? Are we stuck? Are there attitudes we would like to shift? Are we inexplicably angry? Are we enjoying the self that we are?

Christmas brings out the best and the worst in people. We are conscious of those less fortunate than ourselves. We try to get into the spirit of the season. Sometimes that means getting drunk with folks we don’t care about. Sometimes it means visiting family we don’t like. It is an expensive time, for the wallet and the heart - because more is asked of us.

I think that ‘more’ is a challenge worth meeting.

And it’s a double challenge. Outer worlds and inner worlds.

What can we do in response to the outside world? Can we help a neighbour? Buy food for Christmas dinner for someone who can’t afford it? Can we volunteer? What does our neighbourhood need? Is there a friend we have neglected? Is there a child who is lost the way you were lost? Remember that feeling? The grownups on the big planet and you wondering where you belonged? For many of us, Christmas triggers painful memories. We can’t go back in time, but we can help someone now - and when we do, we start to help the neglected parts of our own self.

And that’s an important thing to do at Christmas. If you could go back in time, what would you change? What would you do differently? Life is stuffed to the brim with second chances.

I love Christmas because it was the only time of the year when my mother was happy. Our gloomy cold house was warm and bright. She baked mince pies and played carols on the piano. People were welcomed in, instead of being turned away. She didn’t like people, and her own childhood had been unhappy, leaving her morose and lonely.

My mother is still the loneliest person I have known.

She’s been dead a long time now. But that doesn’t change anything.

At home, this year, I am taking the time to be glad of my good fortune, glad that I am not lonely and broken, glad that I am not her. And I am trying to see myself a bit more clearly; where am I repeating the same mistakes? Repeating myself?

As a writer, you find that you return to the same themes. What you don’t want to do is to repeat yourself. The things that fascinate us, obsess us, trouble us, pull us in, continue to do so. The question is how to work creatively, and not repetitively, with those things.

I said that life is full of second chances. That’s the message of the Christmas story. You don’t need to be a believer to read it right. The shepherds were told the good news first - that is, the ordinary folks doing their job as best they could. The wealthy wise men were told the news, and they had to leave their comfortable palaces to find out what was going on. What was it that was going on? A dimensional shift. A rip-up of the rule book. A baby born who was going to make the world into a different place.

But clearly a new-born baby can’t do much in the world. At that moment - and for many years to come - the announcement was about something changing on the inside not the outside. A change of attitude. The beginning of hope. The dimensional shift.

The best of religion - all religion - is not its dogma but its mystery.

How does hope spring up like a flame? How do we begin again? To begin again is to be born again. That’s not a right-wing evangelical cult message; it is a second chance.

To begin again means shedding old attitudes and habits of mind. It’s not just a new lover or a new job or a new house. Those things can help, might be welcome, or necessary, but if it’s the same old you with the new this or that, well, you will soon be back in the shit.

What second chances do you need this Christmas?