It is impossible for us today to fathom the world view that the ancients who created these stories must have had.  We really cannot grasp what it was like to look out in the stars, to travel, to watch the days get shorter with no obvious reason,  to deal with the seasons, watch babies be born without an understanding of basic biology, science,  without airplanes, space ships, Hubble telescopes, physicists, calendars, let alone computers and GPS. These were people, after all, who believed that the earth was flat and covered with a dome that had holes in it. For them, the stars were God's or the gods' light shining through those holes. 

As I sat there that morning, pondering these ancient stories that have been analyzed, dissected and repeatedly reanalyzed for maybe three thousand years, my mind flashed back in time, maybe four or even five thousand years back. I saw a nomadic tribe sitting around their fire pit cooking their meal and talking quietly, much like the Bedouin tribes I observed when I traveled to Israel.  There was an old woman talking quietly to a little girl, maybe five years old, tucked into her side for warmth and comfort. 

"Savta," the little girl almost whispers, "why did Alaha make my Ima cry and scream so much when my little brother came out? Did she do something wrong?"

A vast segment of humanity has been telling itself this same story of a baby born in a manger in Bethlehem for many centuries now; peace and goodwill towards all the clan of Homo sapiens. But nothing has changed. Bethlehem itself has become synonymous with violence. Just now, as the Christmas fervor is being driven towards its annual climax, once-Christian nations are waging war against other countries.

What is the deeper story that has somehow been twisted wholly out of shape and so layered over with trite or fraudulent wrappings that the real gift is rarely ever envisioned let alone observed and gratefully received? Is there, was there ever some precious thing of matchless beauty, power and grace at the very heart of Christmas something-with flaming potency to transform our lives, our world? The answer is a resounding, all-embracing yes, but it's not won by glib or lazy wishful thinking. Mere repetition of literalistic tales and pious traditions can never get us there. One can go through the entire process by rote or on automatic pilot, and miss the "many splendored thing."

This brings us to what many may find to be a tough medicine or even drastic surgery. But if one is to pass beyond the childish and the external to the core of what Christmas is all about, it's an essential step. What one has to realize first of all is that the story of the birth of Jesus is a myth. No, not a fairy tale, not a legend, not a piece of fiction to be seen through and dropped at puberty or before, but a spiritual myth-in other words, a truth so vast and so important to our human condition that it can only be told in the most profound language of all, the language of symbolism, allegory and metaphor.

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from: www.religiondispatches.org

"Until well into the modern period," Armstrong contends, "Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible literally, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation." Myths were symbolic, often therapeutic, teaching stories and were never understood literally or historically. But that all changed with the advent of modernity. Precipitated by the rediscovery of Aristotle and the rise of scholasticism in the late middle ages, rational systematization took center stage, preparing the way for a modern period that would welcome both humanistic individualism and the eventual triumph of reason and science.

The early modern world was astir with cultural renewal, technological innovation, and religious reformation. The printing press captured the oral tradition on the written page, and the printed word became a matter of depersonalized, static precision. Henceforth, all religious quarrels (both those between Rome and the reformers and those amongst Protestant sects) would be suffused with an ever-increasing need to define oneself and one's dogmatic opinions in relation to the (often heretical) other.

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My Granddad recently passed.  It was an amazing gift to be able to be present for part of his passing.  The full circle of life became so evident- to me it only makes sense that the circle would continue to revolve.  It doesn't come to some halt, to some mythical place where souls are distributed.  Little by little as he was stripped of his body, his mind and his fear, his true Spirit was evident. He died in peace- thankfully.  It had not been a peaceful three years. 

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