Snow under a full moon

A New Years resolution: Be it hereby resolved that we will more fully appreciate the grace of the present moments as they come to us one by one, and take nothing for granted.

You are reading this under a full moon. Are you even aware of it? Have you taken the time to look up and absorb the beauty, the wonder and the miracle of it all?

A good friend of mine in Idaho once described to me the most moving spiritual experience of his life. It was in January, about midnight. The snow covered earth sparkled under a dazzling full moon. Dormant feelings and energies surfaced. My friend awakened his family and told them to look out of the windows and see the miracle of this beauty and this wonder. The entire family put on their ski clothes and promptly went out into the night. For over an hour they skied in what he called…”a perfect, eternal silence.”

The family would never again take the full moon and the snow for granted. He said they had experienced a living, spiritual miracle.

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Christmas…as poetry

There was always one worship service, above all others, that I loved doing in my church. It was the Christmas Eve candlelight service at 8:00 and 11:00 p.m with standing room only.. In my Congregational church I made it a celebration of the human spirit, with song and dance, poetry and literature, meditation and joy.

I will never forget the spectacular ballet dancer doing Tai Chi to Gounod’s “Sanctus” as sung by Jessye Norman. The dancer said that the first time she practiced it she just stopped and cried, it was that moving for her.

We always closed with all lights out and everyone holding candles and singing “Silent Night, Holy Night” led by guitarists playing in the balcony, like the original Tyrolean alpine folk melody. The organ would then come in with such glorious chords we all had a near “out of body” experience. Some skeptics would always say to me “I can’t sing that stuff…I don”t believe any of that”. And I would tell them, and the congregation, “I don’t believe it either as factual or historical theological statements. That’s not what it is all about. You miss the point if you do not experience the beauty of the myth, a solstice myth that goes back by thousands of years before Jesus was ever born.

Our bloodstream runs into the veins of the gods, Greeks and Romans, Egyptian and Persians and barbarians in the Germanic forest. For thousands of years before Jesus, Greeks and Romans sang their hymns in honor of their gods and goddesses at the winter solstice and celebrated with gifts and singing, drinking and decorations, with flowers, palms, mistletoe and holly. Other gods celebrated during this solstice period were Marduk..Osiris…Horus…Isis…Mithra…Saturn…Sol and Apollo.

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The war prayer

Let me say, right here, in the opening line of this column, that before you write any knee jerk letters about my “lack of patriotism”, please do remember that I was a U.S. Marine Corps pilot for twelve years, flying in both World War Two and Korea, and personally decorated by the Commandant of the Marine Corps.

The United States today is on a “God Bless America” binge, (drunk). Bumper stickers by the millions are offering this prayer for the car behind them. Flags are sticking out of car windows, on billboards, stuck on business fronts, everywhere. Politicians and entertainers can hardly make a statement without ending it with “God bless you”, or “God bless America”. The massive hypocrisy of this obscene display makes you want to throw up.

At the National Cathedral in Washington, America’s clown of Christianity, Billy Graham told the audience that all the murder victims of September 11 were now in “paradise” and “happy to be there”… This same stupidity was said of the pilots of the planes by bin Laden. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, equally illiterate, said at a press conference that “the Christian God is a “good” God…but the Islamic God is an “evil” God”.

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