Givenness: the quality of being granted as a supposition; of being acknowledged or assumed; the quality of being beyond question or doubt.

Christmas has always been important to me, but it’s meaning and purpose have become muddled to me. I just have no idea what Christmas is really about anymore, unless it is to power the corporate economy and make restless and sometimes empty people feel better about themselves for a day or so.

This sets me apart from many good people I know and care about. Lots of them love Christmas, it lights up their lives and hearts. I know many other people for whom that is not true.

We each need to experience Christmas through our own prisms, but more and more I think I have come to see it as a runaway holiday, a bloated and hollow creation of the true American theology: Marketing. The Walt Disney Corporation has understood this for a while, Christmas is when more people come to their theme parks than at an other time of the year.

If you think about Christmas, you might also think about Marketing:

“Marketing,” according to Wickipedia, “is the adaptation of the commercial activities and  use of institutions by organizations with a purpose to induce behavior change on a short-term or permanent basis. The American Marketing Association recently defined “marketing” as the “activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Christmas has become a nearly impossible standard for most of us to bear, a Feast of Failure, as Graham Greene put it. According to the National Retail Federation, the average American will spend $700 on Christmas gifts and accessories, more than $465 billion was spent on Christmas last year. We are taught almost from birth that if we love our children, we will give them the things they want. They are taught the same thing about us. With Christmas comes pressure, cost, exhilaration disappointment. Life is not like Christmas. Perhaps that is the point.

Increasingly, the marketers have equated Christmas with the perfect life – the perfect family, the perfect house, the perfect joy, the perfect gift, the perfect meal, the perfect tree, the perfect people,  the most beautiful and evocative lights and wreaths and accessories. Add a touch of holiness, and it is a formula for  It is no longer possible for me to separate the idea of joy from the idea of wealth and privilege.

So many people have so many different ideas about it, no two seem quite the same to me. I am working hard to try to figure it out. What are my issues with Christmas, and how can I (we) come to celebrate it in a way that brings meaning and spirituality back for me?

I am trying to figure this out without trampling on the joy and pleasure of others, this is not always simple to do. Many people thank me for writing and thinking about it, but it has put some others on edge. They don’t really want to think about it much, they just want to be left alone to do it. Fair enough, it isn’t for me, a Jew turned Quaker turned spiritual wanderer, to tell anyone else how to celebrate anything.

But I want to do better. There is a starting point for me on this journey. Even thought his name is rarely mentioned by the marketers, or the people offering online discounts on flat screen TV’s and Ipads, the holiday is ostensibly about the birth of Jesus Christ. So that is the starting point for me, a lifelong admirer – rather than a worshiper – of Jesus.

This week, a spiritual journey for me.  I am reading several well reviewed and highly recommended books: Zealot, The Life And Times of Jesus Of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan; Jesus Of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, by Gerhard Lohfink; and Jesus, A Pilgrimage by James Martin. I have gone online, read journals and texts, done a bit of thinking. There is so much out there.

I saw right away that there is a Givenness about the life of Jesus Christ. He was about a number of different things, but more passionately and clearly than anything else, he was about caring for the poor and giving them hope.  Where there are few historical documents that quote Christ’s actual words, there are many that capture his beliefs. Some of the most reliable come from his brother James – “James The Just” – who continued to preach his brother’s message after Jesus was crucified by the Romans and the priestly hierarchy in Jerusalem.

James suggested in his writings, writes Aslan, that one cannot truly be a follower of Jesus if one does not actively favor the poor. “Do you with your acts of favoritism [toward the rich} really  believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?,” he asks. “For if you show favoritism, you commit sin and are exposed as a transgressor of the law.” In his epistles, James quotes from and reflects the words of Jesus: “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs to the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” Or from James 2:5: “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours.”

I think a lot of America’s most popular politicians – they all, every one, compete for the title of true believers –  might have reason to tremble, perhaps their so-called deeply religious supporters will figure out what Jesus Christ actually believed. Or if he is a God, he might just show up on one of those debate stages and smite some people. He had a temper, he was not afraid to carry a sword.

You don’t have to delve too far into Christ’s life to understand that it was essentially about one thing: the poor. So this the complex part of the path for me. Like most people, I pay some lip service to the idea of the poor and give them some money. I donate to food pantries, send money to charities, do literacy training, donate clothes and jackets and gloves in the winter. I try to help old farmers who are struggling to keep their homes, I try to support political leaders who seek to help the poor.

Truthfully, that is not a lot. I’m not even sure what it means to favor the poor. I imagine it means understanding the importance of caring for them beyond writing checks. I have to think about it.

Jesus has something else in mind, helping the poor, he thought, was a sacred task, not a once-a-year afterthought, or the dropping of some coins in a bucket. It was the pathway to heaven and the Kingdom of God.  I don’t see the poor mentioned in presidential debates. Or in all of those ads or Christmas movies. Or in the thousands of e-mails I get from companies selling things.  Poor people can’t go to Disney World at Christmas and see Mickey’s parade.

They can’t buy expensive presents and big turkeys or all of those lights and wreaths. The lucky ones get to Wal-Mart and fill some stockings.

Most, I suspect, can’t even do that. But I don’t think our celebrations of Christmas really favor the poor, I think they very much favor the rich.

In my rural county, the poor and the comfortable live alongside of one another,  there are not many rich people, they favor the cities. The poor are not hard to find or see and talk to. I asked one of them, a friend named Gina – she has four children, her husband died in a tractor accident some years ago, she works two jobs and is fighting with the bank to keep her decaying home – how she feels about Christmas.

“Pressure,” she said, “I feel pressure. I want to give them the things they see other kids get, I want to give them those great dinners in a beautiful dining room with lots of lights and a big tree. I can’t. I hate it, I guess, it just makes me feel so bad. It makes me feel like a failure, like I’m letting them down.”

Does it give you hope?, I asked. “Are you kidding?,” she answered.

I can’t speak for all of the poor, I don’t know that many, but I would imagine Gina’s answer might be typical. The holiday in honor of their most passionate advocate in all of history has nothing to do with them, really, it has become such a glorified and marketed spectacle, it is far beyond their reach. Lord, it is far beyond my reach.

I don’t think Christ meant to leave the poor alone in the hands of the Salvation Army. I don’t see the poor mentioned in any of the presidential debates or portrayed in any of the holiday movies.

I wonder if my growing sensitivity to this issue was triggered at all by the recent bankruptcy Maria and I went through. We were not poor and are not poor in the sense of being impoverished, but we did grasp what it was like to not be sure we had money for food sometimes. For us, it was a frightening crisis, for so many it is life itself. We came to grasp the poverty of fear, the hopelessness of it, the lack of color and light, the overpowering sense of vulnerability. We also got a taste of the contempt much of the world has for the poor, and the cruel and callous ways in which they are treated.

And we are the lucky ones. I will not forget those feelings. I hope I will not forget the poor.

Our culture has turned on the poor, we reject them as lazy and worthless, we turn our backs on the very idea of helping them, we elect people to office who refuse to offer the poor help, dignity or hope. At Christmas, we have turned out backs on Jesus Christ.  There are quite a few surprising analogies to connect Jesus’s world with ours. We have a lot of very rich people, more and more wealth flows into their hands and away from the poor, who grow in numbers and hopelessness.

Jesus and his brother showed a surprising anger towards the wealthy, he would have been outraged at how protected and worshiped they are in our time. “Come now, you wealthy ones,” wrote James, “weep and howl for the miseries that are about to come upon you. Your riches have rotted and our garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and the venom within them shall be a witness against you; it shall eat your flesh as thought it were fire.”

Christ was so embittered against the priests and the uncaring wealthy that he risked his life and  marched on the Temple of Jerusalem and chased out the money-lenders and the vendors who profited from the holy and feasted on the poor.  He outraged the Romans and the Priests. Soon after, he was arrested, tried and crucified. Would he have been treated much differently here?

How, I wonder, does this man fit into our time, when the sworn enemies of the poor campaign in his name, and pander to the people who worship in his name. For many people, Christmas has become a secular holiday, that is, I suppose, the simplest way around it. I know one friend, a devout follower of Jesus, who has decided Christmas has nothing much to do with him. It is all about gifts and dinners and trees. That is definitely easier.

I don’t quite know  how that works, it doesn’t work for me. I think my Christmas will be about getting to understand Jesus Christ better, and through this understanding, reclaim my love of the holiday and the spirit it generates. I wish everyone their joy and happiness, I don’t mean to take anyone’s pleasure away. But I have a good feeling about this path I am on, although several of my friends are already rolling their eyes about it.

That’s okay, some of the best people are crazy. I imagine Jesus was too.

There might be something more in all of this for me. I want things to believe in.

Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans had become almost exclusively a gentile religion. Two thousand years later, the letters of Paul the Apostle provided a new and gentile theology. The Christ of Paul’s creation utterly subsumed the Jesus of history, according to Reza Aslan.

The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with hope of establishing a Kingdom of God on earth, the charismatic preacher who defied the corrupt Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who defied the Roman occupation and failed, the fiercest defender of the poor the civilized world had known, has been lost both to history and now,  to the supposedly joyous celebrants of our contemporary Christmas.

“That is a shame,” wrote Aslan. “Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth – Jesus the man – is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. he is, in short, someone worth believing in.”

That definitely got my attention. If I never quite accepted Jesus as a God – I am, after all, a birthright Jew – I have always believed in him as a remarkable and worthy man, someone worth believing in. So this, then, is a meaningful turn in my own personal Christmas reclamation project. Why did I wait so long? Something to believe in that is both spiritual and true and right. Something to think about and celebrate besides gifts and forced joy. Something to help me learn to love the increasingly bloated and disconnected American Corporate Christmas once more.

As a child, Christmas was a day of joy for me, the one day my poor family took a day off from tearing one another to pieces and thought about each other in a different and more loving way. I have loved Christmas for much of my life.  In the Kabbalah, God tells his people that they must give the poor cause for hope, and if they do not, he will return and wreak havoc with the earth itself. Hmmm…. Perhaps Jesus was his son, after all.

I think of myself as a spiritual person, but not as a religious one. I am just not a joiner, dogma makes me edgy, like online mobs. Like Jesus himself, I choose to live outside of those conventional gatherings of people and thought, they never really seem to like and accept me anyway. Although I am not nearly powerful or influential or dangerous enough to be crucified, I am,  like Christ, a flawed and idealistic wanderer, hoping to be good and doing good but never quite sure how to do both. Many worship him as a God, but he was also a very human man.

This week, I’ll continue my work to get to know this man whose birthday many are celebrating in this coming week. I love the perspective that comes with exploring this life.  It is a powerful experience, like spending a year with the journals of Thomas Merton.

Writing this, my mind keeps wandering back to the idea that Jesus Christ and I are sitting in the Round House Cafe.

We order coffee – decaf for me, regular for him. I don’t see him as a chatter, so I get down to business. “Did you know,” I ask, “that Americans will spend more than $465 billion on Christmas this year?” I buy him one of those caramel pastries that Lisa Carrino makes. He scarfs it down.

People are staring, but they leave us alone.  I ask Jesus what he would do with that money, or how he thinks it should be spent. If every person who buys gifts, takes their $700 and commits it to the poor. A gift of a different kind.

Jesus does not take too long to respond. He says he would take the money and give every single poor person in America a good place to live,  school for their children, a cupboard full of food. Merry Christmas, he says.