On Being Blog

Illustration by Libby Levi

I played the Christmas game when my children were little. I was not reckless with the sense of wonder that collects around Santa Claus and the Baby Jesus and, alas, morphs the two together. I bought presents. Some years I even decorated a tree. Though some years I could let their father do this — a rare plus of raising children in two households. As he is an Episcopal priest, they would also go to church with him, leaving me to stew in my Scrooge-friendly juices.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy giving gifts. I think ritual is essential to human flourishing and to family life. We need more of it. I have a deep reverence for the incarnational heart of Christianity. I even still recognize faint glimmers of these impulses in the trappings of Christmas as we know it now, 21st-century style. But I think this season has more overwhelmingly become a distortion of them — a distortion of us as a culture, as humans, as families. And I for one am done.

Why do I dislike Christmas now? Let me count the ways.

I don’t like — don’t approve, refuse to throw myself into — the spirit of obligatory gift-giving. In my lifetime, this has become existentially linked to a commercial orgy that has now even co-opted the ritual angle. We have Good Friday and Maundy Thursday; we have Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Unlike Good Friday and Maundy Thursday, however (though like “fiscal cliff”) these terms are repeated and reported by the most serious of journalists. Like all mantras of ritual, they work on us from the inside. They are an economic event by which we measure a certain kind of cultural health.

This form of cultural health is not health at all. It is overwhelmingly an exercise in excess and trivia.

When I was growing up, even in a financially comfortable family, we waited all year for the new bicycle, the new Barbie, the new book. Christmas was a reward for a kind of patience. It was, in some sense, an exercise in delayed gratification. Those gifts were even presumed to be a reward for a year of goodness — a proposition, to be sure, that always had its fluff factor.

But we who are fortunate to have money to spend on Christmas presents inhabit a world now where the new bicycle — in modern-day translation: the new phone, the new video game, the latest greatest shoes — are purchased on demand throughout the year. I routinely wake up to find that my teenaged son has left my laptop desktop open to the “checkout” page, usually of a sports clothing website, where he has graciously filled in all the fields but my credit card number. I don’t always buy what he wants, but I cave in more than I’m happy to admit. That’s January through November.

Then there is the religious distortion of Christmas. Good Christians out there who do this with dignity, I don’t mean you. In most of the churches I’ve attended as an adult, Christmas is dressed up as a children’s holiday. A play. Not really for grown ups, not really about us. Make no mistake, I’ve teared up at that re-enactment of the manger scene many times myself, especially when my own children were sheep. It does not begin to do justice to the message of God become human.

When I became a mother for the first time, I was studying at Yale Divinity School, learning vocabulary like “Christology” — all the ways Christians have pondered the complex notion of Christ as both fully divine and fully human for the past two thousand years. So it was with incredulity and not a little annoyance that I found myself, in a state of severe sleep deprivation, singing “Away in a Manger” where “the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” Please.

More recently, there is also the maddeningly superficial way we’ve thrown other holidays into the mix, subsuming them all into general cultural buzz. The December that the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was full-blown, my daughter traipsed through the house playing with her imaginary friends and singing “Oh Monica! Oh Monica!” to the tune of “Oh Hanukkah!”

Here’s what I take seriously. There is something audacious and mysterious and reality-affirming in the assertion that has stayed alive for two thousand years that God took on eyes and ears and hands and feet, hunger and tears and laughter and the flu, joy and pain and gratitude and our terrible, redemptive human need for each other. It’s not provable, but it’s profoundly humanizing and concretely and spiritually exacting. And it’s no less rational — no more crazy — than economic and political myths to which we routinely deliver over our fates in this culture, to our individual and collective detriment.

So here’s what I’m thinking about this Christmas. Recently I followed up on a promise I’ve been making myself for years: to wash and sort and give away all the good clothing my kids have outgrown as they’ve left childhood behind. It’s embarrassing that I never took the time to do this all along. In the course of digging around for where to donate, I stumbled on the site of a charity that works with homeless teenagers. It turns out that they’re not asking in the first instance for all these Levis and good-as-new, cool t-shirts. They’re asking for donations of socks and coats. They’re asking for newly purchased underwear, noting that most of us take for granted our ever-renewable supplies of clean underwear that fits.

I’m not going to buy any presents this year. We will go shopping as a family for these homeless teenagers, and I’ll try to be honest about the equivalent I would spend on my own children on the commercial holy days if I believed in them. I report this in some hope of feeding a little rebellion I sense many of us are quietly tending. But I also make it public to be sure I follow through.

As I said, we need each other. And that impulse, surely, is deep in the original heart even of the most secular things like Santa Claus and surrounding your home with lights: examining what we are to each other and experiencing that, sometimes when we do this, something transcendent happens.

Anna Monroe of the Michigan Municipal League works with a young girl from Detroit during the holidays.

We live in difficult times. Stories of corruption, violence and down right evilness surround us. Trying to make sense of this state, it sometimes seems easier to close it all out, becoming numb to our pain and the pain of others. Often we pretend things will somehow get better tomorrow.

Many of us come to this holiday season with fear. What do we say to our children and our friends when there is no money for the "things" they have come to expect from us? What do we do when we cannot buy our way out of pain?

Many of us have been chasing the American Dream, trying to consume our way to our image of the "middle-class American." We have come to believe we are what we can buy. Everywhere we look, corporations encourage us to value things over people. Over the last fifty years the average American family has spent more hours working, chasing an ever-decreasing paycheck to buy things. We use these things to replace the time we no longer spend with families and friends.

The holiday season, sacred to all faiths, has become nothing more than a hyped-up consumer season and a wretched time of the year for those with no money. As more people are thrown off state support for the barest of necessities, as foreclosures increase and unemployment checks decrease, people are turning against one another. This season we have an opportunity to rethink our values and what it means to be a human being. Can we begin to look past the superficial ways we judge one another by what we wear, what kind of car we drive, or what church we go to? Can we learn to see each other in our hearts and not just with our eyes?

As a community we have a long history of transcending pain, of turning fear to hope and hope to action. We have learned to reach out to each other in service. We have known that a fragmented heart manifests a fragmented world. We have always made a way out of no way.

This holiday season is an opportunity for all of us to dedicate ourselves to building authentic relationships with our families, our friends and our communities.

We may not have money for toys and trinkets but we can wrap our arms around our children and show them how to love. We may not be able to spend money, but we can spend time. We can set aside time and talk to one other about our hopes and dreams. We can take time to reconnect across generations, sharing stories of family and friends that pass on the values and skills that have enabled us to endure for centuries.

We can ask ourselves what do we need to do to create peace in our homes, in our families and in neighborhoods? How do we decide what we need, not just what we want? How do we live more simply, to consume less and love more?

We are facing an economic and spiritual crisis that threatens our survival and our deepest humanity. But it also an opportunity. It is an opportunity to create a more just way of living. In earlier, more dangerous times we created families, villages, places of worship and respect for one another. We have that creativity within us still.

Let us all celebrate this holiday season through the eyes of a "beloved community," turning away from wanting things to valuing people. We can turn to one another and ask what kind of community we can create together.

Gloria Lowe is founder and CEO of We Want Green, Too!

In looking for a lead image for our show with Brené Brown, I tweeted out a request for people to send me "shots of vulnerability and shame." I was intentionally vague; I wanted to see how people might run with it. The truth is, I didn't receive that many submissions. I didn't need to.

All because of one powerful photo (above) from Brit Hanson, a poet and digital storyteller living in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. Here's the context as she tells it:

"Several weekends ago, I attended a commemoration of the massacre of 43 people in Segovia, Colombia on November 11, 1988. A group of young men and women from the area performed a theatrical vignette in commemoration of the victims of the massacre.

I love the story this photo tells. The one in which young folks in imminent danger act courageously. The one in which their creative act is a subversive and nonviolent statement of power. The one in which they remember the past and imagine a different kind of future.

These young folks were brilliant and brave and incredibly vulnerable as brutal violence continues in the Segovia community today. I thought this photo really captured the vulnerability of their courageous act of performing in such a volatile context. And that's the irony about vulnerability, isn't it? Vulnerability is always courageous, no matter how grandiose or mundane the expression.

Their vulnerability was performing. Mine was admitting that I was scared to even be there."

Thanks, Brit. It's just what we needed.

For many Christians, "Oh Come, Emanuel" was sung from choral sanctuaries and blasted from organ pipes at the back of the church on the first Sunday of Advent. In the spirit of the season, we posted a video of a pianist and cellist performing the classic hymn. It's gorgeous and definitely our most visited page this week.

Matthew 25: "I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me."

Krista shared this tweet by Bill Antholis (@wjantholis), managing director of The Brookings Institution, who cited this New Testament verse after reading a touching story about a NYPD officer who bought a new pair of boots for a barefooted, homeless man. The officer keeps the receipt in his pocket. When asked why, he replied:

"To remind me that sometimes people have it worse."

May we all be this aware of others and offer similar kindnesses during this holiday season.

For us Downton Abbey fans on staff, what a joy to have the British actor Dan Stevens (yes, the Matthew Crawley!) reach out to Krista from across the Atlantic:

@kristatippett recently discovered your podcast; an absolute revelation. Beautiful, engaging & important. Great work. Thank you!

@thatdanstevens I'm honored!

As many of you know, we take you behind the glass by offering our unedited interviews.

Public radio infrastructure at Minnesota Public Radio / American Public Media

While our technical director Chris Heagle (@caheagle) was sorting things out during Krista's interview with Seth Godin, I shot this "inside" perspective. Of course, our director of operations gave me some grief, but Tamara Brantmeier, an associate professor of art at the University of Wisconsin–Stout replied:

All I see is a painting.

I think it's beautiful too. And as Krista reminds us:

"Above all remember that the meaning of life is to live life as it if were a work of art." ~Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Some other good reads Krista shared this week:

Fascinating new correlation between the way galaxies, our brains, the internet grow - organically, by connection.

Good piece on the "Green Patriarch," His All Holiness Bartholomew.

More fodder for us converts who can't believe we love Twitter - it's present-oriented.

And, how about this observation:

Words for Friends is now a board game. The good irony that great things digital remind us why we like to get together in the flesh.

For a bit of levity and beauty, check out our Tumblr where you'll see the Smithsonian Magazine's absolutely brilliant photo of the Hindu festival of Janmashtami.The composition is outstanding. On Monday, Pope Benedict VXI put a smile on my face with this shot; sometimes man and beast are not in perfect harmony.

Poetry? One of our more popular Instagrams this week paired a refrain from Leonard Cohen's poem "Anthem" and Theophilos Papadopoulos' photo of church bells on the island of Crete:

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

More poetry? You must listen to Tom Waits reading of Charles Bukowski's poem "Nirvana." It's a pairing for the gods.

This week two cultural icons passed away. Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (who was 104!) once noted:

"For me, beauty is valued more than anything — the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity."

He created some of the world's iconic masterpieces such as the visually arresting Catedral Metropolitana de Nossa Senhora Aparecida and said:

"Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence, even if only for an instant."

I would've loved to have seen what he would have created on the Great Plains.

We also mourn the loss of one of this country's jazz legends, Dave Brubeck, who said:

"For as long as I'’ve been playing jazz, people have been trying to pigeonhole me. Frankly, labels bore me."

Take a moment (no puns allowed) to remember and listen to his music.