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