“A new command that I have given you; love one another. As I have loved  you, love one another.” – Jesus Christ

Like a movie buff drawn to horror films, I was drawn to streaming a half hour or so of the presidential debate last night, and it struck me two weeks before Christmas that I was feeling this epiphany; this strange moral inversion and confusion about religion as I watched, my stomach sinking all the while.

The candidates who professed to be the most religious among us and were described repeatedly by the media as having the most support of religious were saying things that were anything but  religious positions. They were certainly not the beliefs and positions of Jesus Christ, in whose name they were so often speaking, who so many of their followers so frequently invoke.

This country was founded by people seeking religious freedom, and who wanted religion to be separate from government. There  was an awakening in the second half of the  21st century. Many people of faith insisted that their religious values be inserted into our political system. This shift caused many secular people – people like me – to be drawn unwillingly into  conflict with some elements of the religious world that we never sought and has not been healthy.

I will never tell anyone else how to worship, I will never let anyone else tell me.

So there I was, watching candidates who called themselves the most religious saying things I could hardly believe I was hearing.

One of the most popular religiously-driven candidates called for the carpet bombing of radical Muslims, even if it meant the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people trapped in their cities. There was a call to ban people of one faith from our country.  Another called for immediate and internal war, the sending of many thousands of additional Americans to die again in a hopeless cause in the vast desserts for their angry elders. Another insisted that we abandon thousands upon thousands of starving, freezing, utterly vulnerable and exposed refugees to their camps  with nothing but the clothes on their backs while we figured out how best to keep most of them out.

Yet another proposed forbidding innocent civilians in murderous war zones from coming into our country, from escaping,  until the people persecuting them were destroyed, presumably by those bombs over many years. Leave them to their camps.

And that wasn’t all. There was one more proposal, it is worth stating separately. It went largely unchallenged by the reporters and politicians spread out over the stage. The reporters were paralyzed, they almost seemed to not want to hear it. It was to kill the families of people we decide are terrorists without cause or trial, to terrorize them into not harming us.  Because they must know something.

It was simple. The best way to stop the people from killing us was to become them.

Which Christmas is this, I wondered, whose birthday are we about to celebrate?

I may be losing my bearings, but one of the things I always loved about the much-admired religious people I followed – Merton, Gandhi, King, the Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ, Pope Francis  – is that none of them would have urged the carpet bombing of innocent people – “until the sand can glow in the dark.” All of them had good reason to hate and kill and bomb, none of them took that path. Isn’t that why we love and revere them?

Jesus was a radical, a profoundly moral man. His birthday will be celebrated by people who are morally dead.

I imagine there are people in Hiroshima and Dresden and Berlin who can testify to the experience of sand glowing on the dark, their spirits were up on that stage, I suspect, the angels were weeping.  It has been awhile – forever –  since a political leader in our country called for burning hundreds of thousands of people alive. And was applauded enthusiastically for it.

I wished for a moment that I was a reporter again, and that I had a chance to ask the leading warriors of the faithful if they thought Jesus Christ – almost all of the people proposing these things say they are devout Christians – would have stood with them on that podium in Las Vegas Tuesday. Do they know a single thing about him? Or care?

Did they know he would have led a righteous mob of believers and driven them from that Temple, that stage?

As I have loved you, he said, love one another.

On his birthday next year, will  the new command really be to carpet bomb countless innocent people until the sand glows in the dark?

I am a heretic and wanderer in every sense of the term, a birthright Jew turned Quaker, a lifelong admirer of Jesus Christ, a lifelong skeptic, as he was, of priests and rabbis and mullahs and organized religion.  There is no reason for anyone to care what I think about Christmas or anything else. But I do care about Christmas, and I am sorry to see it covered this year in a great cloud of hatred and fear.

These people, I thought,  as I sat with my Ipad, are destroying the very idea of Christmas, turning it into a festival of hate. What, exactly, are we to tell our children about this holiday this year?

Speaking only for myself, I cannot separate the holiday from them and the awful imagery they evoke. I can’t quite muster the disconnection required of me to be festive, to have that joyous Christmas.

I have enough problems with Christmas, I don’t need ignorant and hateful politicians crashing the party. I have no wish to be a political person, I am hopeful of one day of  being a good person.

If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give them to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.

Imagine if one of those politicians said that during a presidential debate, think of all the poor people who might have been helped. We live in a cloud of unreality. It was a substantive debate, said the commentators the next morning. It was a serious debate about the issues, it focused on the issues, they said with straight faces. There were clear winners, they said, they survived unscathed. And they were clear losers, they decried the madness around them.

There were no winners, I thought. Not if there is a Christ, I thought, not if he is, in fact, the son of God.

This is all a Christmas gift to me in a sense, because it awakens me to seek out the true meaning of Christmas, to give rebirth to it.  To mark it in a meaningful way. I do not tell other people what to do or how to celebrate their holiday, I never seek to be one of those people on those podiums. Everybody has to make up their own mind, I get to make up mine.

And here I am writing a series of articles on Christmas – not politics – a holiday whose inspiration seems to have been forgotten in the mad rush to host dinners, follow rituals, give elaborate and expensive gifts to celebrate a birthday, but not really. To celebrate ourselves. The odd thing about the holiday for me, apart from the epidemic waste and excess that is characteristic of anything that comes near capitalism, is that no one seems to remember any more what it is for. Or who.

It seems at those elaborate dinners there is an empty seat at the table, a lost and ghostly presence.

So I am re-thinking our Christmas, hand in hand with my wife and partner. I am a secular man on a spiritual path, but I am determined to honor Christmas in a loving and decent way. So this will be my Jesus Christmas, I will celebrate it simply, I will give some of my possessions to the poor, I will find treasure in generosity and meaning.

I will re-read my books on Jesus Christ and get to the core of what he is about.  And toast him over one of my gourmet pizzas, maybe the one with cranberry goat cheese and pears. I don’t have to be a Christian to do that, I only need to be a human.

This is the Givenness of my holiday, the point of my spiritual search, the quality of a Christmas that is beyond question or dispute or doubt.

I will be only too happy to celebrate this good man’s birthday and honor his memory with his truth.

So I say to you, ask and it will be given to you, search and you will find, knock, and the door will be opened for you.