11-02-13: 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sirach 15:15-20 / Psalm 119 / 1 Corinthians 2:6-10 / Matthew 5:17-37

Today’s gospel brings me back to the 1970s when then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter admitted in a Playboy Magazine interview that he had committed adultery –” in his heart,” as the gospel says - because he had looked on women with lust. Carter went on to win the presidency, proving the point that thinking and doing remain two very different things in the minds of most people. Gary Hart, on the other hand, acted on those same feelings in 1988 and lost his chance for the presidency. And just last year, well-known Miami priest, Father Albert Cutié, was photographed on the beach kissing his girlfriend. After the pictures appeared in the news, he was immediately suspended by his bishop. He has since become an Anglican, married his girlfriend, and become a father. I’m sure Father Cutié was not unique among priests in the desires of his heart; his actions, however, and not his unexpressed desires, are what incurred the drastic consequences.

We’re enticed by scandal. It’s a juicy and complicated thing. Scandal simultaneously produces two reactions in the onlooker: shock and relief. Shock that someone acted on a forbidden desire; relief that that someone wasn’t me. The danger of scandal, though, as the gospel implies today, is that it deludes us into thinking that the desires that led to the act that caused the scandal are somehow so outlandish or perverse that they are not part of our “normal” human experience. The gospel points out that just the opposite is true: those desires are all too human, we all possess them to one degree or another, whether or not we choose to act on them.

Did Jesus, as a human being, experience these feelings and desires as well? Did he know anger? Was he sexually attracted to anyone? Those questions in themselves have caused not a little scandal over time. Jesus fashioned a whip out of rope and chased the merchants from the Temple. Angry, or just making a dramatic point? When Jesus sat and talked with the Samaritan woman at the well (just the two of them), forbidden on a number of levels, you don’t think people talked? Truth is: we’ll never know what Jesus’ unspoken desires were, but we do know that he invited scandal in a manner that trumped both anger and sexuality. Today’s gospel is proof of just that.

Scholars debate whether Jesus really said the words recorded in today’s gospel, but I would suspect he did since they are so radical it’s hard to believe the evangelist would have invented them. Jesus claims he has come to fulfill rather than abolish the law. In this admission he reveals what he was accused of – breaking the law. And, despite revisionist attempts, can anyone who reads the gospels not conclude that Jesus did, in fact, break the law on several occasions - and not only “in his heart.” Of course, we admire the fact that he chose to heal on the Sabbath when the law forbade it; and that he and his disciples did not observe the law regarding ritual washings and the like. But nothing would have scandalized his hearers more than the commission of blasphemy which we witness in today’s gospel. When Jesus announces: “You have heard it said that,” he is actually saying: God told you this, but I tell you… Jesus is taking the place of God Himself. Jesus makes himself into the Divine Lawgiver. In this he is committing blasphemy in the most egregious way imaginable to a first century Jew. Whether you believe Jesus to be God or not is to miss the point, for none of his hearers would have understood Jesus to be God in the way we do. All would have recognized that he was, at the very least, playing with blasphemy; all would have been profoundly scandalized.

Jesus invites scandal. In so doing he robs scandal of its power to persuade us to suppress rather than face our innermost feelings. Admitting that you have uncomfortable or unattractive feelings is the first step in mastering them; denying those feelings only gives them more power. Scandal always tempts us to whitewash the truth, as if that will ever free us from the burden of uncomfortable desires. Sort of like trying to eliminate racism by rewriting Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn without using the “N” word.

11-02-06: 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 58:7-10 / Psalm 112 / 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 / Matthew 5:13-16

When George W. Bush was running for president the first time, his bona fides as an evangelical Christian made the news when he declared Jesus his “favorite philosopher.” W was really just following suit in a long line of Christians who found in Jesus exactly what they wanted to find, from philosopher to revolutionary to proto-hippie. Reading today’s gospel about the properties of salt and light we might be tempted in the same vane to add chemist and physicist to Jesus’ resume. Problem is, if we take the parable about salt literally, Jesus would have failed the chemistry final.

Do we detract from Jesus’ importance, his uniqueness, or even his divinity, if we admit he was no scientist? Is it disrespectful, or downright blasphemous, to declare the Bible not a science textbook? Some evangelicals would have you believe so. Convinced in the literal truth of Genesis for example, they suggest God placed the fossils in the rocks so as to create the impression (and not the evidence) for evolution.

Science and religion are often viewed through dualist eyes: one true, the other false. For fundamentalists who base their faith on the literal word of scripture, that has long been the case. Everything, including scientific conclusions, must coincide with the Bible in a literal fashion or be rejected. We, as Catholics, are warned against making that dualist error. Science and religion do not represent opposing truths but are simply two differing ways to express what is discovered or revealed to be true. The late Stephen Jay Gould, admitted atheist that he was, often debated with Biblical literalists. Apart from his conclusions concerning evolution he made a valuable contribution to the debate by suggesting that science and religion represent two separate “magisteria” or “teaching authorities” concerning human experience and discovery. In this he echoed (probably unknowingly) the recently beatified Cardinal Newman who said much the same thing in his Idea of a University. “Theology is one branch of knowledge, and Secular Sciences are other branches,” Newman wrote. “Theology should not interfere with the real freedom of any secular science.”

Newman found no difficulty in accepting the basic premises of his contemporary, Charles Darwin, concerning humanity’s physical origins. Newman, in fact, made a remarkable statement quite relevant to the discussion of evolution today: “I do not see,” Newman wrote, “that the accidental evolution of organic beings is inconsistent with divine design – It is accidental to us, not to God.” In other words, God not only reveals himself through the Bible but through nature as well. The tools we use to interpret each of these revelations are different; we do not serve the truth by switching tools, so to speak, in expressing a theological truth by scientific categories, or a scientific truth by theology.

The intersection of these two magisteria or ways of knowing is never more apparent than in the sphere of health care. Just last week Sr. Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, signed an agreement with Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, affirming the authority of the local bishop to interpret the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. The necessity of such an agreement comes, no doubt, in the wake of the extraordinary action taken by Bishop Olmstead rendering St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix no longer “catholic.” The question then becomes: for fear of misinterpreting the directives, must a hospital submit every case to the local bishop for his judgment. This, of course, is virtually impossible in cases requiring emergency action. Will the hospital then “err” on the side of caution in the increasing ambiguous areas of healthcare where the best interest of the patient can be argued from both sides of the debate. The unfortunate sound bite of “preserving a culture of life” now borders on a fundamentalism worthy of an evangelical, implying that physical life should be viewed as an absolute value.

This increasing inclination to insure Catholic institutions are not perceived to be influenced by the so-called “culture of death” – even when they are not – will lead before long to treat physical life as an absolute value that must be preserved at all costs. It won’t be long before some bishop, albeit with good intention, will venture from his theological domain into the ambiguous and complicated world of medical science and suggest that there is never a reason to withhold or withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration from a patient; or that palliative care may no longer be provided because it “may” be advancing death by a moment or two. A bishop’s legitimate jurisdiction may give him the right to rule on medical procedures performed in Catholic institutions – but it does not and cannot make him into a physician.

11-01-30: 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13 / Psalm 146 / 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 / Matthew 5:1-12

Humility is a paramount virtue in Christianity, exemplified in today’s reading from Paul, who tells us God uses the weak, the low-born, the despised and the foolish to teach us how to live and to love – to teach us how to be happy. Humility, you might say, is what separates the nobodys of this world from the somebodys. There’s a paradox though: you don’t know who’s a nobody until he becomes a somebody.

Then there’s the further complication regarding humility: the more you try to be humble, the less likely you are to succeed. I remember once being assigned with a priest, a good sincere man who wanted to live a simple austere life – his way of practicing humility. The day he moved into the rectory, much to his chagrin, he found a full size bed in his room. He immediately told the pastor that he really couldn’t have a full size bed; a single twin bed would be more appropriate for him. So, in order to help the priest feel more humble and poor, the pastor had to buy a brand new single bed and pay for the removal of the very good and little-used full size bed. The priest was not a hypocrite, just someone who perhaps tried too hard to be humble. It seems that we best practice humility by embracing what is made immediately present to us rather than creating our own litmus tests.

One of the most attractive aspects of the recently released film, The King’s Speech, was the unexpected example of just that on the part of someone you would least expect to be humble - the King of England. When Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936 “for the woman he loved,” his younger brother, Albert, was next in line to the throne. This upheaval in the line of succession couldn’t have happened at a worse moment in history as Hitler’s Nazi Party was solidifying power and moving the world ever closer to war. In Hitler, Germany had a remarkable orator, someone who could rouse a nation to such an extent that people would follow him to the precipice and then jump. Meanwhile as Albert, the Duke of York, was about to succeed to the British throne as George VI, a nation looked for inspiration from him and discovered instead a nervous stammerer, a man who couldn’t utter a full sentence in public without severely stuttering, causing those who were listening to him uncomfortable embarrassment and causing himself deep shame. The film examines how Albert dealt with this very personal humiliation. It is a sublime example of what it means to be humble.

“Humility is truth,” St. Therese of Lisieux wrote in her Story of a Soul, and it is in our deeply personal flaws, weaknesses and shortcomings that each of us is given the choice to face humiliation or run away from it. The practice of humility is not something you can learn from a book or get an advanced degree in – it is a lived experience which reveals to each the measure of his worth. How do you know if you’re on the right track? That may not be so easy. But you’ll know if you made a wrong turn along the way when you end up displaying humility’s opposite - pride. Pride, not in the sense of feeling good for another’s accomplishments or even your own, but pride as a response to hurt and humiliation.

Jazz artist, Nina Simone, seemed to have gotten it just right in the lyrics of a little known piece she sang - You’ve Got To Learn. You’ve got to learn, although it’s very hard, the way of pocketing your pride/ sometimes face humiliation while you are burning up inside. You’ve got to learn to leave the table / when love’s no longer being served. To show everybody that you’re able / to leave without saying a word. But why would you want to? The Gospel of the Beatitudes, that most revolutionary of documents, gives us a hint: Blessedness, real happiness, sublime joy, comes only when we learn to face our personal humiliations. And each of us has them, from the broken-hearted young lover to the king who stammers. The key to happiness, the gospel promises, lies in the recognition, the self-awareness, that in some very personal way we are each low-born, despised, weak and foolish. We are all nobodys whom God calls to become somebodys through the difficult but high-calling of the practice of humility.

11-01-23: 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 8:23-9:3 / Psalm 27 / 1 Corinthians 1:10-13,17 / Matthew 4:12-23

(Caught up this week with too many deadlines and so must offer a repeat reflection with a bit of editing. The following first appeared 1/27/08 – tfb)

One of my first college experiences was taking a class in ancient Egyptian history. The professor, a very short woman with a weather-beaten face, had a Texas drawl accented by a smoker’s rasp. She conveyed an underlying excitement in what she was about to say during that first class, though she must have said it many times before. There’s one thing you should take away from your study of ancient history, she began, and that’s that there’s no such thing as a pure race. We’re all mixed.

Modern genetics has since proven her right. A recent study in Britain, for example, revealed some inexplicable anomalies. The DNA of an English school teacher, whose family tree can be traced generations back within England, possesses a strand of DNA that is unique to Polynesian peoples. And a Scottish fisherman, somewhere in his ancient lineage, acquired a gene distinctive to Koreans. But what makes us who we are: nature or nurture, that unique genetic inheritance or the family we’re raised in, a combination of both? The gospel today suggests an additional possibility – geography.

When Jesus heard of John’s arrest, the gospel relates, he withdrew to the Galilee. Translation: when things were getting a bit dicey, Jesus slipped back into the hood. The Galilee was Jesus’ home turf, way different from Judea, a crossroads for trade and a stop-over for those on their way to the Mediterranean. Penetrated through the centuries by various gentile populations, it was notorious as a seedbed of unrest, the locus from which arose many an uprising against the powers-that-be. Galileans spoke their own distinct brand of Aramaic which Jews from Jerusalem no doubt thought low-class. The gospels give evidence of these regional prejudices: Can anything good come from Nazareth… and the like. Yet, on his return to the Galilee, Jesus doesn’t go to Nazareth but makes his home in Capernaum, deep in what Isaiah called heathen Galilee. It’s there, amidst the mix of cultures, amid the ambiguity of religious orthodoxy and the syncretism that ran rampant, that Jesus begins to teach and heal. Jesus and his apostles were at home in the Galilee and would have been judged by those from Jerusalem as impure and impious – tainted with gentile ideas and, possibly, with gentile blood as well. The light that had been prophesied to come to the Galilee is, in fact, the light that emerged from it.

The Jewish elite from Jerusalem sought to preserve the myth that theirs was a pure religion and a pure race, and so they resisted the Galilean movement originating among those they considered impure and impious. The rest, as they say, is history.

In his recent memoir, Brown, Richard Rodriguez claims his Indian and Spanish heritage as brown, meaning mixed, mescla, mestizo-ed. It’s an obvious autobiographical fact, but Rodriguez offers it as a metaphor for culture as well -- and American culture in particular. We’re each of us a mixed bag: genetically, culturally, linguistically, sexually -- products of a confluence of this and that. No use pretending otherwise. In other words, none of us is pure anything. Yet, there will always be those who insist that their race is pure, their ideology superior, their politics correct, their religion orthodox, while the rest of us fall into that category they might call ethnic, low class, heathen. It’s a vindication, of sorts, to know Jesus came from that side of the tracks as well. In the more accepted translations we read Jesus came from Gentile Galilee. The Greek word for gentile is ethnos, which might afford a more literal translation like ethnic Galilee (a loaded term in contemporary American English for sure). But the most straightforward translation says simply that he came from heathen Galilee. It’s comforting, somehow, to know that Jesus, the Galilean, was a man who was brown in so many ways.

11-01-16: 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 49:3,5-6 / Pslam 40 / 1 Corinthians 1:1-3 / John 1:29-34

I know I‘ve mentioned it before but the gospel today reminded me of the fact that I’m a dragon, not a snake. That’s according to the Chinese Zodiac, of course, which is divided among twelve animals representing each lunar month. Although I was born in January 1953 according to the Gregorian calendar, I was born in 1952 according to the lunar calendar, which makes me a dragon rather than a snake. I hadn’t realized that for a long time, thinking I was a snake all the while. Needless to say this caused a bit of confusion for me since I was acting like a dragon while seeming to be a snake. But, truth be told, most of us go around thinking we’re something we’re not, or pretending to act like someone we aren’t. Identity confusion and learning to feel comfortable in your own shoes – it’s a universal struggle.

Seeing in animal traits reflections of ourselves is nothing new. Freud though it as old as humanity and the source of both religion and neurosis: he called it totemism. Indigenous cultures are still highly influenced by animal associations. I’m told that American Indians, of late, have revived their belief in shape-shifting. Shape-shifting, if I understand it correctly, is the belief or fantasy that certain people whose lives border on the mysterious can change into the form of an animal and adopt its traits. Chinese astrology, so much a part of the Taoist tradition that spread throughout East Asia, still influences a great many people and plays a significant role: from the choice of a name for your new-born to your choice of a marriage partner (by the way: dragons are incompatible with ox and goat but more amenable to monkeys and rats).

The Church, of course, has always been highly suspicious of all this. At different points in history, in the midst of cultural conflict, the Church would label such astrological adventures outright pagan superstition. And, if you’re old enough, you might remember being taught it was a sin for a good Catholic to read his horoscope. That’s why I usually don’t admit to being a dragon in front of the bishop (I suspect he’s either an ox or a goat, if you get my drift). I even used to uphold the prohibition myself, instructing others to ignore Chinese astrology, forget all those animals, real and imaginary. Then, after Mass one day, an old Korean gentleman asked me my sign. I told him we Catholics shouldn’t be concerned about such superstition. He asked if that was what Jesus would want. I said of course. Then why did John the Baptist tell everyone at the Jordan River that Jesus was a lamb, he asked. Oops – you got me on that one, I thought to myself. Well, that’s different, I said. How come, he asked. Well, it just is, I said (I relied on my inner dragon for this authoritarian reply).

But is it any different? The Baptist is identifying Jesus quite strictly. He’s using the cultural myth of his day to let others know that Jesus embodied the traits of the Lamb. The Lamb which would have been known to Jewish sensibilities. The Lamb, upon whose head the penitent places his hands, symbolically transferring his sins onto the Lamb as the priest offers the Lamb on the altar of sacrifice. Jesus would be known ever since by that very designation as Catholics, each week at Mass, call upon Jesus as the Lamb of God.

Human appropriation of animal characteristics, or totemism, is a complicated and much debated phenomenon in cultural anthropology. And although I am a dragon and thus susceptible to thinking I know something I don’t, I’ll nevertheless use my aggressive dragon-like tendencies and offer my own explanation. I think it all has to do with our attempt to retrieve something we’ve lost long ago – our animal instinct. We humans seem to be the only animals that have lost that instinctual sense which is obviously part of the rest of the animal kingdom. Perhaps it was precisely instinct which was lost long ago in Eden when Adam and Eve disobeyed the Lord and ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At that moment instinct was overcome by choice and human freedom was born. The freedom to choose, as limited as it sometimes seems, is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Visiting the Zodiac is really just being a little nostalgic. But, as in the case of Jesus himself, the animal that best represents us can afford each of us a clue to the destiny our choices will one day bring us. Jesus would indeed become what the Baptist had always recognized him to be – the Lamb of God.

The Church teaches that the remedy for the loss of instinct suffered in Eden is Baptism, that sacrament which is said to cause an ontological change – a change in our being, our very nature. We human beings continue to share much with the animal kingdom but, through Christ, we have been elevated into the sphere of the divine. The price is the loss of our instinctual sense: the prize is our capacity to freely choose our destiny as sons and daughters of God.

Although it’s a glorious reality, this becoming a new creation, it doesn’t mean we are no longer connected to that animal kingdom from which we’ve emerged. There’s a great temptation to think we’ve done just that and to think that old wives’ tale just plain nonsense. You know: the one that says dog owners tend to look just like their dogs, and vice versa. I’m willing to concede that most of it may well be nonsense – except in the case of Puggs.

11-01-09: Baptism of the Lord

Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

Isaiah 42:1-4,6-7 / Psalm 29 / Acts of the Apostles 10:34-38 / Matthew 3:13-17

Beware of prophets – even the officially sanctioned ones. That could be a subtext for the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord we celebrate today. The image of John the Baptist standing waist deep in the Jordan dunking repentant sinners, preparing them for the Day of the Lord, has all the earmarks of a cult – and I’m using the word cult, here, in its most pejorative sense.

In this scene the Baptist takes his place in a very long line of end-of-the-world prophets who spend an awful lot of time scaring people. This type of phenomenon, by no means limited to the religious sphere, seems to coincide historically with significant political developments (I’m sure many of my generation were considerably shaken by the air raid drills we practiced in the event of nuclear Armageddon during and after the Cuban missile crisis). And sometimes coinciding with cultural upheavals and economic downturns – no doubt these days we’re ripe for the pickin’, as they say.

At the turn of the first millennium of the Christian Era – the year 1000AD – most of Christendom was consumed with end-of-the-world fever, awaiting Christ’s second coming and the day of judgment. It didn’t happen. On October 22, 1844 a widespread American following of the self-proclaimed prophet, William Miller, awaited that same second coming. It didn’t happen. On October 23rd some were already labeling the prediction, the Great Disappointment. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, predicted the end of the world in 1891. It didn’t happen. The Jehovah Witnesses have predicted the end of the world as well – more than ten failed predictions over the course of the twentieth century. And now Harold Campion and Family Radio are in the midst of a world-wide campaign to warn everyone that the Rapture will take place on May 21st of this year, followed by a very violent end of the world on October 21st. What Mr. Campion fails to mention on his radio show is that he had likewise predicted the end of the world would have occurred in 1994. It didn’t. The truly remarkable thing is that failed predictions seem to matter little to “true-believers.” Those disappointed Millerites of the nineteenth century would go on to found the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Jehovah Witnesses have increased their membership. And Family Radio’s ministry blossomed after that failed prediction of 1994. Go figure!

I remember during the 1990s, while living in the Korean community, a Korean Protestant preacher, a teenage boy, predicted the Rapture would happen on a certain date. Followers sold their homes, high school students didn’t bother with the SATs, business owners gave up their shops. When the date of the Rapture came and went, and Jesus didn’t appear, a number of suicides were reported, lives were wrecked, and the boy-preacher went missing. Some claimed (did they have any choice?) that he had actually been raptured.

Catholicism is not untouched by this cult-like phenomenon, but it has managed it better. The whole idea of Religious Life, the living of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience by monks and nuns down through the centuries, is a response to that mysterious promise that some day this world will indeed end and God will be all in all. Religious Life is an institutional way of pointing to the fact that there is something beyond this world, something fundamentally mysterious; yet a mystery that seeks our good rather than instill in us a groveling and paralyzing fear.

Although the Church might praise the Baptist as precursor of Christ, it’s significant to point out that it’s not John’s baptism with which we are baptized. Even Jesus doesn’t stay very long after he takes the plunge at the hand of the Baptist, but leaves immediately for the desert – a little peace and quiet, perhaps? Commentators are hard-pressed here: they suggest John’s baptism initiated Jesus’ public ministry. But isn’t it just as likely that Jesus had had it with John and his ilk, tired of the hackneyed harangue of divine retribution for all the mistakes we’ve made, tired of the repeated predictions of Armageddon, tired of the fear that such prophesying engenders in the impressionable and the innocent.

Having said all that, when the end does come and we’re all raptured in one way or another (they really should find another word), I would really like to know how Mr. Campion and Family Radio had invested their assets - and whose name was on that life insurance policy. Matter of fact, if Mr. Campion reads this before May 21st, I’d challenge him to put his money where his mouth is and, if he really believes what he preaches, to put my name down as beneficiary – and I promise to speak only nicely of him from May 22nd on.

11-01-02: Solemnity of the Epiphany

Solemnity of the Epiphany

Isaiah 60:1-6 / Psalm 72 / Ephesians 3:2-3,5-6 / Matthew 2:1-12

I couldn’t let the Epiphany go by without expressing my outrage over the billboard commissioned by American Atheists outside the Jersey-side of the Lincoln Tunnel. If you’re the suspicious-type like me, able to sense there’s something sinister in their intention, you might conclude with me that the Atheists are implying something so untenable and so unacceptable that outrage is the only possible reaction. The billboard pictures the Bethlehem star hovering over the manger where Jesus has just been born. From the left the three wise men are making their way towards the star as if they’re about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel too (would camels have to pay as cars or trucks?), as if they’ve been traveling with you – or you with them – which, of course, means that those sneaky atheists want you to believe that the magi might have come from New Jersey! Outrageous, totally untenable, quite inappropriate. Persia, maybe. Saudi Arabia, perhaps – but New Jersey? They’re supposed to be wise men after all – of course, you’re practically forced to conclude that it, indeed, must be a myth.

Apart from that – I rather like the sign. The slogan: You KNOW it’s a Myth – This Season Celebrate REASON! could just about have come from the pope’s recent Apostolic Exhortation, Verbum Dei (the Word of God). The slogan is reflective of the beautiful Prologue from John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God. The Greek word for “word” is logos, from which we obviously get our English word “logic.” Logos is, ironically for those atheists, often translated as “reason.” “Creation,” Pope Benedict writes, “is born of the Logos and indelibly bears the mark of the creative Reason that orders and directs it…we acknowledge the Creator by contemplating his creation…’every creature,’ St. Bonaventure would write, ‘is a word of God.’”

I suspect, though, the Atheists are using the term “reason” as it comes to us from the Age of Enlightenment when faith began to be understood as opposed to reason by both skeptics-become-materialists and believers, causing Pascal to note that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” Yet reason can lead us to wonder if the material world is all there is. Matter of fact, if you are an ardent materialist, where do you situate reason itself in a world that only judges things real if they can be detected and measured. Does your reason weigh an ounce or more? Is it only produced by synapses in the brain or might the heart have a say in it as well?

We’ve come to think of myths as inherently untrue. That’s too bad, really. Because myths, even if not historical, are meant to convey truth; or, at least, myths attempt to discern what’s true. C.S. Lewis, that student of myth, believed that myths are “man’s blind gropings for God” – trying to make sense out of things, employing reason in an attempt to understand nature, especially human nature. C.S. Lewis would say that Christianity is likewise a myth, but it is the myth that really happened in history, in time and space - not just in imagination.

Those magi traveling to Bethlehem hadn’t read the Bible. They didn’t know of any prophecy about would-be Messiahs or sons of gods. They were curious, though, searching the heavens for a key to help them understand life and its inherent mysteries. The magi were the scientists of their day, following the star, by the light of their own reason, to its unexpected end - the manger at Bethlehem.

If the American Atheists are proposing we do the same – then it’s not such bad advice. There will be doubt, even skepticism – but that is part of the process in this search for truth. The American Atheists seem to want people to confess that doubt and, in so doing, join their club. But they don’t realize it’s our club that they already belong to. It started way back on Mt. Sinai when Moses received that first commandment which commanded us to become atheists in a way: you shall have no other gods before me. Faith is born of doubt.

Christmas turns things upside down. It bids us question long-held assumptions, entertain doubt, even engage atheism. Christmas is a myth – how could divinity express itself in any other way – but a myth whose adherents claim to have taken place in history. A myth, not so much about the nature of divinity as it is about the nature of our humanity. That we human beings, so obviously related to other primates, nevertheless possess something that makes us quite different, enabling us to become receivers of divinity, fitting perfectly like hand-in-glove. Reason, according to the Atheists, might make you reject the Christmas story. But isn’t it just as reasonable to wonder why the possibility of Christmas even entered the human imagination in the first place. Christmas is a topsy-turvy myth that helps us see things that were once hidden and entertain possibilities never before considered, even the one sneakily suggested by that billboard: wise men from Jersey – indeed.