I never intended to use this blog to talk about guns or politics or turn it into a Bible study. So just roll with me; I know a lot of blogs are covering Christmas right now but here is my take.
The other day I was having a chat with an associate who explained to me in no simple terms, Christmas was great and all but really, Jesus came to lift us to the next level of spiritual development. The miracles – restoring sight, raising someone from the dead, etc. – were all simple parlor tricks intended to teach us to look inward and work harder toward an elevated level of consciousness. He was formerly Buddhist but had incorporated Christianity into his worldview and that’s how he saw things.
If you mix yellow and blue paint you get green. I guess this is what you get when you mix two incompatible systems of thought as well.
Then I remembered a T-shirt logo I had designed in the early 1990s using a cutting edge layout program under Windows 3.1. I had it on the wall of my cubicle and for some reason, dragged it around in a file folder all these years.
The word empyreal means originating from the highest heaven. Before English massacred the conveyance of meaning, people believed there were actually three heavens like ever larger spheres: the sky, then space and then a realm were God (or the gods) existed. So anything empyreal originated from that highest sphere. It wasn’t of you, it was beyond you. Maybe even beyond your comprehension.
What my associate missed is that we celebrate Christmas because it was God doing something for us that we could not accomplish on our own. He reached down in the form of a man – starting as a baby – to patch a bombed out road and take us home with Him. An empyreal rescue.
This has nothing to do with TV preachers, megachurches, violating your free agency, the hypocrisy you see in others of faith, etc. It has to do only with you and God making peace within a just system that is out of your control.
So maybe when you think of all the trappings of Christmas in the American embodiment you can now also view it as a one man strike team sent to exfiltrate you from certain doom. That is something to be merry about!
Thank you for reading my blog in 2023.