Merry Christmas

The perspective of counter cultural is usually saved for 1960 hippies living in the Haight Ashbury, celebrating hash and shrooms. Words have baggage. They always have, they always will, but, I wonder, what would happen if the pictures that seem to drag behind the phrases, switched? Or maybe just morphed slightly.

On Christmas, what we celebrate as the birth of Jesus, something picks up a bit of irony in the air. The story goes a King born in a stable of a virgin. So beautiful in it's double meanings, immaculate conception in the dirty straw of muck. How sweet. And perfect for our current screenplays. Tradition hangs in the air, Norman Rockwellian pictures of middle class suburban life equalling nirvana. Simple beginnings parallel the blue collar tradition, or even the need of a sinner.

We forget though. This virgin, she would have been labeled a whore. Everyone could have done the math. Who would have believed she hadn't gotten her freak on with someone? Besides, the word of a woman, in those times, was worth about as much as the word of the Inquirer. For the rest of her life, she and everyone around her would have had the stigma of a woman that just couldn't keep her skirt down. Including Jesus, later, as a bastard child. Even if Joseph took him in, Joseph would have been seen as the cuckolded man, kind but stupid. And thus begins the Christmas story.

Jesus grew up in a hick town, as far as we know, with no higher education, and when he finally came on the scene, past middle age. He was 30 when His ministry began. The average age of death was 40. His disciples ranged in age from teens to mid 20's. He would have been scene as a little beyond His peak, if you know what I mean. Let me put this in different terms, we say 40 is the new 30, but to them, that's like saying 20 was the new 10. Ah, just as life is beginning. He was old. And he had no wife. Weird.

He preached a gospel in a time of violence, of non-violence. When bread was in short supply, he ate with tax collectors. He made time for anyone and everyone. Women paid His bills. He spoke a message, not caring who or what it challenged. He constantly moved outside of the realm of predictable, frustrating those that life was about clear paths and should's and should nots.

He specifically moved in ways that were enough to be understood, while putting common thought to shame. He took everything to the next level, asking for deeper, stronger, more intimate understanding. He called for more, knowing the path would be narrow, but wanting everyone to find it, to find life. Real life. He shed the illusions that held everything in place and proved you didn't need someone to define your life, other than Him. It was revolutionary. It was the ultimate counter culture.

And we celebrate it... in culture.

But to, what was the most revolutionary thing He ever did, He moved within the system and revolutionized it. He never let it break Him, instead, He broke it. Never someone so comfortable in His own skin, the skin of a stigma'd whore, deemed incompetent by the educational system, His family struggling with who and what He was, I can't imagine what He went through, for all of His life. Never understood, never truly accepted, outside the system, and yet subject to it, in a few short years He changed the world.

Movies about Rudy, Juno, About a Boy, these are the depictions we credit with showing the underdog, the mediocre finding exception, but the greatest story of all time, we forget the power of.

My family drives me nuts. I mean that literally. They have perspectives of me that I find myself playing to, no matter how wrong they are. Damn. I hear the words of those that I loved and found no need to stay, echoing through an empty chamber in my heart, inciting a need to prove them wrong, igniting a deep sense of defensiveness. I find myself feeling so uncomfortable being me, since so many told me it wasn't good enough. I want to get out, of here, myself and everything, to push back, to scream, to fight, to make it different, and then I realize I can't and I wonder what I ever really amount to. It scares the hell out of me.

And I forget, the story of the Christ, that is. I forget that there was a One that came from a place and time that should have amounted to nothing, a nobody, a mist in the wind. I'm sure, He was a nobody, to everyone, before He was an anybody, to anyone. The son of a whore, the half brother to the legitimate, the backwoods hick that started a career too late. Thank God.

He literally broke every norm, every prediction, every typicality. And on Christmas, the real meaning hits me. Yes, it's the birth of the Christ, and it's the saving of the world, but what does that really matter if it doesn't mean something for each of us right now, right in this moment? I am the product of my environment, but that doesn't matter, does it? The miracle is here and now. I am not over, and neither was He. His miracle was how amazing He was in the midst of the unamazing. He was a miracle as much in His life, as He was in His death and resurrection.

I want to follow that guy. I want to follow Him. My example is not a Rudy, or some figment on an imagination, but instead a man that truly changed the world. He lived a life counter cultural, fighting the systems of family, friends, city and state, and He won. Amen, Merry Christmas.