Dear Pneuma,

I want an existentialist, punk rock, postmodern Christmas this year. I want to celebrate the season the way strange people celebrate the season: with pink-tipped hair, gothic make-up and tattoos. I have this urge to shave my head, give away all my possessions (except my piano), and sing carols around a burn barrel underneath a bridge. I imagine a purist holiday, untouched by emotional entanglement and social expectation. I imagine a free holiday, where the only traditions kept are the ones that really matter, the kind of holiday single people without children have to make.

I told my Beloved this. I told my Beloved I want distance from the crowd. I said, I am tired of trying to fit into this vision that is projected of smiling people in sweaters transformed in a moment by something shiny topped with a bow. I shared how the irony is too painful: that the pursuit of cheer leads us to such acts of childlike depravity. My head actually hurts when I try to figure out what people want from this season-both those that claim it for Christ, and those that decry the coercive violence of religion, yet still need to participate in the sacrificial frenzy of food and purchase. I want space between me and the candy cane in-sanity. I am afraid it may be catching.

I said, there is so much violence, nastiness and despair around us. We are fighting about who has a right to hang up party decorations. We subsist in anger and fear because we cannot afford the trimmings, refusing to claim our power by setting boundaries for ourselves and our loved ones. We tranquilize our lives in alcohol, arguing, video games and fancy ornamentation. We are committing ourselves to destructions: in food, in finance, in fellowship. We fear so hard, we con and shut out our neighbors. We kill outsiders' children while mindlessly stuffing our own children's spirits with expectations of unlimited attainment. We try to fill our souls' emptiness in a frenzy of gifting that seems only to succeed in revealing the lie that getting and having equal happiness. I said, we do this in the name of something nobody even seems to believe in. What do we get out of it? What the hell does it mean? Why does anybody do it?

My Beloved can be wise and said, "If the picture you paint is true, all the more reason we need it." When we are at our most broken, we are the most susceptible to hear. Vulnerability is the pathway for God. When we are spinning out of control, we have the greatest chance to reach outside ourselves and be touched by something we never knew or believed in before. The only problem with Christmas is believing it has anything to do with parades, garlands, the Salvation Army, family gatherings, alternative gifting, shiny new stuff or in whose house we eat the turkey. It isn't even about the worship services we attend or the music that fills our bubble of air. Christmas means Hope when things die. Christmas means Peace in the midst of destruction. Christmas means Trust the best of the worst. Christmas means Love spites all fear.

Maybe it is true that this holiday season heightens my awareness of despair, faithlessness, dis-ease and terror, but the appropriate response for a person of God, is to stand still, reach into the chaos, touch and believe. God is in the guts of us. God is in the midst of us. God is with us. By withdrawing, judging, mistrusting and sharing hopelessness, I deny God. By refusing my heart to my brothers and sisters, I am feeding the Abyss. Christmas is not a panacea. Christmas is a spiritual discipline. Christmas is not that we have opened the Gift. Christmas is that the Gift has opened us.

May I practice Christmas. With shaved head or argyle sweater, may I practice Christmas.

Yours Always,

Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

I have done something surprisingly revolutionary and difficult. I decided to close my facebook account. As the comments of disappointment and concern flow across my status, I find myself questioning this decision. Yet, in a world with problems such as dwindling fossil fuel supplies, increased awareness of global climate change and uneven health care distribution, this seems like a small kind of decision.

Nevertheless, I rechecked my thinking. Is this a decision from an unhealthy place? Am I distancing from people and reality? Am I trying to hurt loved ones by "cutting them off?" I don't believe so.

I found myself surfing facebook every time I felt lonely. I found myself saddened, angered and vindicated by the political and social opinions being pasted like nametags as status. I found myself participating in a public dialogue where opinions were shouted, labels were applied and honest interchange of idea was impossible.

I decided that this was unhealthy for me. If I have opinions that I wish to share, I can share them with my neighbors, with people at church, with my representatives in office and with my family. If I need people to know what is going on in my life, I can take the time to fill them in. I decided that I prefer a more physical form of social contact. I decided that, for me, facebook was a filler, potato chips and a candy bar, for places of emptiness, but I am not afraid of my empty places. I refuse to become obese on illusions of contact.

I keep thinking of Naomi and Ruth. I keep wondering what people used to do when separated from all that they knew, forced suddenly to live with people unlike those with whom they grew up; being always in exile from the people and places that had been their identity. I think maturity means reaching through loneliness and fear to contact with the present. I found myself, via facebook, trying to hold onto and reconnect to my past.

So, I am going to reach through my loneness and fear to stay in contact with this place and time. I intend to be present here and to allow my past to be a time before, not a future longed for, or a hall of mirrors distorting my image of myself.

I must just be too complicated top handle facebook.

With a sly wink,

Yours,

Cobalt Dreams

Dear Pneuma,

Thank you for your last response. I am definitely feeling better now. Sleep and scotch really can work wonders. How is it with you? I hope that all is well.

Life here is rich-like chocolate cheesecake; like pumpkin beer. Do you know the music of Stuart Davis? I have been listening to several of his songs. The music often runs deep and explores questions that many don't even seem to consider. In one song, the artist sings "Love is so wide that there isn't a boundary." There is a book I have read titled House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. The book, among other things, is about a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Living is like these two things: the reality that a human's being is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, and the hard fact that a tape measure cannot be dropped along the edges of any relationship.

I seem to have learned somewhere that LOVE is bounded, defined, and connoted by society: a thing to be controlled and to which access must be limited. Somewhen, I began to believe that LOVE is shameful, humiliating, embarrassing and wrong unless it fits into an acceptable boundary, definition, or connotation. I became a stunted, twisted, wizened husk of a human being, living a life empty of meaning.

My Beloved entered my life and I said: "I LOVE you." Just like that, what was in me was freed to be without. Just like that, I connected to the LOVE that is all around-the LOVE that is immanent and in which my definition of love participates.

Why do so many parents and friends get it wrong? Why do we insist that we must learn to contain ourselves within locked and shuttered houses? Why do we persist in the idea that LOVE can only be as large as someone else's wounds?

I wish you a day free from the fear of LOVE and outside the inside parameters of your home,

Cobalt Dreams