Tropical Marianas at Christmas. Joy, joy, joy.

The SVES monthly assembly focused on the Tropical Marianas at Christmas, highlighting the musical and dance traditions as well as current practices of most of the prominent ethnic groups who have resided in the Marianas.

By the day’s title, tropical Marianas was what was on display; Christmas was simply the time of year, though in previous years Christmas practices and traditions were intentionally put on stage. Some may think that there is a splitting of hair in this minor shift, and they would be right.

Some religious groups have taken exception to participating in the December assembly on religious grounds, and last year the program was a specifically stated as a cultural celebration. The events, however, were still on Christmas as a religious dramaturgy. In Tuesday’s assembly, the focus shifted and it may take another year before members of religious groups who oppose religious Christmas in their public schools may eventually decide to allow their children to participate in the school program, but at least the option will already be there.

Community Church of Saipan choir’s rendition of the Craig-Clarr and Clydesdale’s contemporary musical Joy, Joy, Joy to diners at Aqua Resort Club Friday evening was spectacular, at least to those who shared in mainstream Christian metaphors prior to WWII, the metaphor of Empire, of sovereign Lord and the Liege Savior.

It was not until the ascendancy of the Christian Church within the Roman Empire, first with Constantine and later with Theodotius, that the Christian community started celebrating Christmas as the birth of Jesus. In the eastern tradition, the birthday was either in January or in April, but the Romans needed to counter Bacchanalian debauchery in the introduction of new wine, so a shift to bread and wine as the Eucharistic elements central to liturgy, as well as the promise of newness in the end of the longest night at winter solstice.

No self-respecting historian, Christian or otherwise, would ever seriously claim Dec. 25 as the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth. The evolution of Christian piety and the need particularly of the feudal structures of Medieval Europe to highlight the sovereign authority of either emperor/king or pope/bishop resulted in the idolatry of Jesus, thus in some circles, we might as well rename Christmas to Jesusmas. In Christian theology, Christ is the role, the messianic role that Jesus’ disciple ascribed to his life’s meaning, thus the religion was called Christianity and not Jesusism! And lest we forgot, Jesus was not a Christian; he was a Jew!

Conversant as I am as a Methodist cleric with the Christian metaphors of a bygone age, I am thus concerned that after the theological revolutions accompanying the two World Wars with the rediscovery of G_d, that is YHWH in the Semitic sense, is but a devotional term to radically living one’s life before Reality sans illusions of the mind, delusions of the heart and the external mirages that many cultural inventions are heir to.

Zoroaster coined the eternal battle between good and evil, and of course, when President Reagan dubbed more than half of the world as belonging to the Evil Empire, American reality was defined as history’s “good guys,” and it did not take us long to justify every conceivable atrocities that we would not normally countenance from the other guys were it not that we were literally ushering the Armageddon and saving the world in our war against terror. The Egyptian pharaohs gave us heaven, and the decline of the Roman empire gave us purgatory and hell.

Serious, committed and educated Lutheran chaplains, Roman priests and Spanish clergy pronounced the invocations and benedictions to the gatherings of forces of the Third Reich, Mussolini’s and Franco’s fascism.

Christian piety in converting the Jesus of history into the idolatrous worship of a cosmic savior (evolution for the curious in holy writ goes from Paul’s good guy, to Mark’s divine son, to Matthew and Luke’s royal King, to John’s cosmic Logos) with insistence on one’s literal interpretation of scriptural metaphors has led to centuries of Christian-initiated wars in defense of the faith and the promotion of holy Christian Empire!

So I get concerned when devotees continue to insist on their limited observation of Christmas to the idolatry of Jesus. The Joy, Joy, Joy theme of the musical rendition last Friday was sufficient for me to appreciate the 6th grade boy at SVES who rendered the best Santa with the sexiest moves this side of the Arctic. And when 5th grader girls threw their jackets off to bump-and-grind it to today’s music, there was an affirmation of the physiology of our existence that is missing in today’s education.

If Christmas is about birthing, then let it be about the infants cry of new air in the lungs and the instinctive protest against being pulled out of the room service and regulated temperature in the womb, the cutting of umbilical cord that is a prerequisite to liberation into glorious freedom.

Let Christmas be a celebration of the way life is, in the here and now, and the glorious struggle with all the contradictions we have created in only five millennia of human civilization. Then, Christmas becomes a “Yes” to life, and in my Christian understanding, that is what it is all about.