THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD CHRISTMAS

In much of America, Christmas shambles along like some zombie, driven forward ever onward but with no life in its eyes.

What did Scrooge say towards the end of THE CHRISTMAS CAROL?

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirts of all Three shall strive within me."

But is that we and the others around us seem to be saying with our scurryings?

We yearn for tomorrow and the promise that it represents.

But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where are the ghosts of yesterday's promises?

Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been or what we choose to remember of it.

But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, and the present slips through our fingers unlived.  We become hungry ghosts.

Our eyes see more than our minds can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to so much that lies before us.

We yearn for the simple world of childhood, but we live in the complex arena of adulthood,

and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less frightening. 

Is that what Christmas has become: a comfortable filter of illusion?

For many I fear the answer to that question would be 'yes.'

“The sky is deep, the sky is dark.
The light of the stars is so damn stark
When I look up, I fill with fear,
if all we have is what lies here,
this lonely world, this troubled place,
then cold dead stars and empty space...

I see no reason to persevere,
no reason to laugh or shed a tear,
no reason to sleep and none to wake.
No promises to keep and none to make.

So at night I still raise my eyes
to study the mysterious skies
that arch above us, cold as stone.
Are you there God? Are we alone?” 

- THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS (Dean Koontz)

The answer to Dean's question is Christmas.

For those who despair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a loneliness so terrible that it has withered their hearts,

for those who hate because they have no awareness of the destiny they share with all humanity,

for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they were born,

for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of childhood, where the sacred nature of life was lived without the toxic filters of greed, envy and endless fear.

And there is where you go in the Spirit of Christmas:

 In dream woods and fields, along misty shores of dream seas, with reawakened awareness of the joy abiding in all newborn things,

You look up into the magic night of the Nativity with its Star shining bright and what thus far you only dared to hope is true:

that although you have often felt no one loved you, there is One who always has.