God R Us

Hello and happy holidays! It's been way too long between blog posts. Sorry for the delay. Just been busy with all the seasonal stuff. I hope you're all enjoying this most wonderful time of the year.*

I usually go home for the holidays, but this year I didn't have enough vacation days coming to me to warrant a trip out east, so I stayed around Toronto. Had a nice time getting together with friends and making music. Also took in the Kensington Market Festival of Lights procession, which has become something of a holiday tradition for me. This was my third.

It's a procession that takes place on the solstice to celebrate the return of light to the Earth (i.e., the days get longer after the solstice). People join in the procession--some carrying home-made lamps, candles and other forms of light, some dressed up in elaborate costumes--as it winds its way through the streets of Kensington Market. Along the way we are treated to fire-breathers, costumed characters on stilts, and various kinds of tableaux (some up on the rooftops and balconies), depicting a variety of things, from Asian tales to Aboriginal myths to some that are just plain... interesting. It all ends in a small city park where a huge papier machÈ icon of some sort (last year it was a phoenix; this year it was the sun) is burned in a bonfire, while the various costumed and stilt-wearing characters dance and a rag-tag band of Salvation Army deserters plays joyfully.

Here are some photos from previous years.

Christmas eve, I went to a church service/caroling night at Roy Thompson Hall. This was held by the Metropolitan Community Church Of Toronto, primarily known as a gay-positive church, so there was a nice feeling of inclusiveness in the air. My friend Sue and her family have been going to this Christmas eve service for a few years, and she graciously invited me to join them. The service featured a 50-person choir, a band with a small string section and a few horns, drums, bass, piano, organ. It was quite kick-ass. Lots of singing. Joy To The World, O Come All Ye Faithful, etc.

Now, it's been years since I stopped attending church. Recovering Catholic, don't you know. But I've always considered myself spiritual to some degree, more so in recent years. What do I believe? Well, although it's likely that my spiritual views will keep evolving throughout my life, at present they go something like this: There is no God, in the sense of a bearded man sitting on a throne in the clouds, directing things, handing out punishments and rewards. But "God" as the eternal, the divine? Maybe. Probably. If so, if there is "something out there", some energy or power, I believe it resides not "out there" at all, but in all of us, not as something external to us, which we then assign as the source of good (God) or evil (The Devil). The spiritual buck stops here. It is what we do in the world that causes good or evil.

And maybe not only does it (give "it" the name "God" if you want, or any of the many other names) reside in each of us, but in all living things. Maybe "it", "god" the "universal energy", whatever, is the sum total of all souls that have existed or will exist, or something, is some dimension of collective spiritual existence that we in this dimension can't begin to understand. Maybe. I haven't quite figured out this "unknowable" bit yet. I'm working on it.

It's closer to a neo-Pagan idea, I suppose. (see Festival Of Lights, above.) And I like that. Thinking that there is something beyond (further along, as the song says), that we rejoin after we leave this mortal plane. But not something foreign. A one-ness. Unity. Eternal. Not blessed or damned, divine or evil, just...everything. Peace. Eternal Composure.

The sea refuses no river.

Anyway, I say all that because the sermon at this service, delivered by the church's pastor, Reverend Brent Hawkes, marked the first time that a preacher actually made the Christmas message sound like something real and meaningful to me. He said he wanted to stress a different aspect of the Christmas message; that Jesus in the manger represents God becoming human, yes, but put another way, God in human form. God as us. God in us. And he ended by saying, imagine when the God in me encounters the God in you... imagine what we could accomplish.

Here was a minister from one of the world's major religions--the very ones that I'd largely written off years ago--presenting the concept of the Christmas story to me in a way that fit quite nicely into my current relatively alternative spirtual beliefs.

Another Christmas miracle!

After years of Catholic sermons that seemed lost in their own dogmatism and stale rhetoric, smothered in a fog of incense and ceremony, this was like a breath of fresh air. I never truly felt anything about the Christmas story held any relevance in my own life. I suppose since I never quite accepted the idea that we are all branded as "sinners" from birth, the idea that Jesus was sent to save us...well, as a message, it always struck me about as relevent as the pitch from those people who phone me up to sell me carpet cleaners for my hardwood floors. Yes, I'm sure it's a fine product, but y'see...

But now, here was a way for me to conceive of the Christmas message as a metaphor (as all good religious messages should be taken) that I could finally internalize: God is us.

Not that I have any plans to start attending church services again, but at least in years to come, whenever I see a nativity scene or a silver star atop a tree, I'll see not a stale icon I've long disconnected from, but rather a representation of the light that shines within us and amongst us.

That's a good message.

Peace, out.



* level of wonderfulness experienced may vary.