It's Sunday - Seeker's deadline day - five weeks to write some thing and do you think I did it? It's December - the month in which one alternates between visual pleasures from the varied lighting displays, aural pleasures from the seasonal music, the pleasures or winces from holiday hugs that seem epidemic and often meaningless, the loneliness of not seeing people that you'd like to be with at Christmas, the sweet smells of confectionary cooking, the sadness of not having money for special gifts to special people.

Two-three years ago, I loved the rehearsing and singing with my churches' choirs. What a special time it was to be with dear friends, to chuckle at the repartee, and then, on the Sunday before Christmas and on Christmas Eve, present a program of music that lifted people out of their intimate worries and fears - if only for a few minutes of song.

I'm not there, you see. Both physically and spiritually. And yet if I were there physically, I would join in again, even though the celebration of the story of the birth of Jesus has become, for me, the celebration of a myth rather than a memory of an historical event. But then, religions, generally speaking, are based on myths. Why should Christianity be any different?

A couple of years ago I gave a sermon at one of the churches in which I said I no longer considered myself a Christian and gave a number of reasons for rejecting that appellation. I truly believe that religions separate people and ultimately harm people. No matter how much one hears preachings of love, they cannot override the destructiveness with which the Bible (or portions thereof) or other books held holy by particular faiths are wielded on behalf of one religion or another.

The great truths which are found in the Bible are also found in every major belief system in this world. Which makes them natural laws not endemic to the Judeo-Christian system. Such truths do not need a religion to interpret them nor to tell one how to live by them nor to lay on such other interpretations as may be necessary to keep one a member of a religion. It is remarkably freeing to know this.

I say, let the church buildings become centers of community where agape is practiced without ceasing and official membership is not required. Forget the dogma. Forget the stories of Joshua murdering the babies in Jericho and never sing those Christian songs of war in the name of the fearsome god created by the story-tellers of the books of Scripture. And never, never scare children with horrible stories of hell and sin. Many people remember from their childhood the fears created by those who preached or taught what they interpreted to be God's love. These people have had to spend much energy ridding themselves of those fears.

I haven't figured out why the Bible has been considered such a paradigm of "good" living. There are so many atrocities described in it under the rubric that God commanded them to happen. Little wonder that our world remains full of continuing atrocities. The teachings ascribed to Jesus in the four Gospels come closest to being the only purely humanitarian pieces of Scripture. Certainly Paul's interpretations of them are not.

Let's face it, the Bible was put together by one group of men who chose what went into it, and it has been edited and reedited by men over the centuries. Once in printed form, it has been spoon-fed (and sometimes force-fed) to a group of people who were told to go and spread the "Good News" to all the nations and tribes of the world. Thanks to such proselytizing, native peoples lost much of their contact with their own piece of earth. If they didn't actually lose their life from the diseases brought by missionaries, they lost their spiritual good health by missionary despisement of indigenous beliefs and through physical separation from the land for Christo-political reasons.

I feel strongly that one should live in a manner reflective of one's beliefs, but one should not proselytize one's belief onto other people. And keep a far, far distance between religion and government. At least I feel that way when it comes to matters of spirit and religion. Talk to me about environmental degradation and recycling, and I'm not so hands-off. Perhaps it's because what you throw away or pollute affects my (and everyone else's) physical health in a direct manner. In both cases, living what you believe is a far better teacher than saying what you believe.

Back to the Bible, that book that many Christians believe is the end-all of their existence. Well, I don't. People can find passages in it to support any manner of activities - both hurtful and healing. Liturgical calendars (those directives that specify what passages to reflect on each week and written for various religious denominations) seem to repeat themselves ad nauseum, running through a fairly circumspect set of scripture readings, without addressing why and how the Bible came to be put together.

Where does this rant come from, I'm asking myself. I started out writing about December and the variety of feelings it arouses with its focus on gifting and happiness. It's the worst time of year for depressed people, not helped by the fact that short daylight also affects people in a depressing manner.

We are told that joy should be our experience at this time of year, and yet our super-consuming, non-spirit-seeking culture is essentially joyless. Heck, the culture doesn't know what joy is, since it can't be bought.

For an experience of pure joy (I had an English teacher once tell me that there is no such thing as a "pure" experience of anything), I go to the natural world - every time. Not even singing does it for me. The thing that makes my heart feel full to bursting is watching the red-tailed hawk circling in the late afternoon sun or swooping off the tree branch it was perched upon, the red clouds filling the evening sky, the meadowlarks' warble, the hermit thrushes' woodland song, the swallows' fly-catching swoops, the heron stalking the pond, the roll of green grass in a brisk breeze, the mountain ridges' snowy alpen-glow, the blues of a late afternoon mountain-scape, to name just a few.

Looking at that list, I would say that I am not a people person but a bird person. Remarkably, not one of the things I listed exists for my benefit. The beauty of it is that this planet does not exist for myself or for any other human being. And in all the flurry, worry, and hurry of December - artificially-induced as it is, awareness that the Earth beneath my feet exists for itself and the energy-consciousness of all will keep me grounded and open to those instances of joy, when suddenly I experience unity with All That Is.

(Copyright by Cherie Staples - No reproduction without express permission from the author)

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