The children of winter

Winter is blowing into Afghanistan. A very, very cold winter that defeated the Russians. Photographs from newspapers and magazines and television pictures are now showing the abandoned children huddling in snow to keep warm. Recent pictures from the Salang Tunnel, being used today by hundreds fleeing are enough to break your heart. I sit in my warm study…and close my eyes…and my mind becomes flooded with memories of another war with other children.

Christmas in Korea in 1951 with the children of winter and the profound effect it had upon my life.

I cannot tell you what a joy it is to allow these experiences to flood back into my mind…and to write them down to share with you in this season.

I was there again flying as an aircraft commander of a Marine Corps transport plane, a DC-3…the “gooney bird” as we called it. We had the responsibility of flying wounded evacuation. One of the most famous evacuation sites was a river bottom of hard packed sand;, called Inje. We would fly up the canyon, only a hundred feet or so above the river, land on the hard packed sand, pick up the wounded, turn the plane around and take off again. The wounded were brought to us in the helicopters. The blood was not even dry on some of them; Their was life and death in the more tragic dimensions.
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A Zen Jesus for Christmas

In 1945 an Arab peasant in the upper Egyptian desert near Nag Hammadi made a spectacular discovery. Buried in earthenware were 52 papyrus texts, some dating from the beginning of the Christian era and presenting a Jesus who said things that could have come out of the mouth of a Zen Master, or even the Buddha himself.

Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University has made the observation that one of these gospels in Particular, “The Gospel of Thomas” includes traditions even older than the Gospels of the New Testament, earlier than Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, and also closer to the actual life of Jesus.

These are known as the “Gnostic Gospels”, from the Greek word “gnosis”…meaning “to know”…to know oneself, to have an insight into oneself in an intuitive sense. “To know oneself is to know God”…says Jesus in these gospels. The self and the divine are identical and one. The living Jesus in these gospels speaks of an enlightenment, the same type that is taught by Zen Masters and Taoists. Jesus is never presented as Lord, but rather as a spiritual guide. The living Buddha could easily have said, and did, everything attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas and other texts.

These texts, with Jesus talking in this manner, were seen as a danger to the developing ecclesiastical structure because they encouraged insubordination to the authority of bishops, priests and deacons. Church father Ignatius warns the laity to “honor and obey the bishop as you would God.”
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The Christ myth and solstice

We are buried this time of year in mythology, legend and folklore. How many hundreds of times have we been told that Christmas celebrates the origin of Christianity? This of course is false. Christmas was around for eons before Jesus was ever born.

For thousands of years the Winter Solstice (Dec. 22-25) has been the most special time of the year and the most important date in human celebration. The sun has started its long journey home bringing Springtime.

Celebrating this event in this month of Solstice I am part of the line of descent that has been uninterrupted almost from the birth of humankind. There has been no time when someone, somewhere, was not celebrating this date.

Long before the mythological birth date of Jesus in the solstice period, our bloodstream ran in the veins of sun gods and sun worshippers…Greeks and Romans…Barbarians in the Germanic forests…Northern worshippers of Thor..and Egyptians…Jews..Gauls…Persians and Indians. No wonder that human beings have celebrated the date of the Winter Solstice for thousands of years considering that our very survival depends upon the return of the sun.
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