A Pagan Christmas

“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” one of my friends told me this week. “I celebrate Saturnalia.” Many of my friends reject organized religion but dabble in paganism. Organized religion is dull, semantic, and censorious; paganism is exotic, exciting, and passionate. What’s not to love?

The ironic thing is, I know and love paganism far more than most of my friends do; they aren’t nearly as excited about it as I am. I love Psyche and Euridice and Antigone; I love stories of Athena and Madea. I love rituals and high and holy days. I well understand and am profoundly moved by the stories of paganism. That is why I am a Christian.

My friend has also told me that, while she doesn’t look to religion for meaning, she seeks to find meaning in other ways. She explained to me how moved she was by certain works of art or pieces of music. As she was explaining, though, she hastened to add a disclaimer – “I don’t want to equate my love of music with religion.” But that’s exactly what it is.

I also love music and art, and some of the most ancient and most beautiful music and art around was created by and for religious people. Why? Because music and art are not an alternative to religion; they are, when properly done, another form of religion. The fact that I have two degrees, one in Middle Eastern culture and philosophy, and one in theological studies, makes me still more certain that listening to a symphony can be a profoundly religious act. But in order to understand that, we have to understand both ourselves and religion more clearly.

It is a fundamental mistake to think that religion is primarily defined by cultural customs, organizational structure, or even moral laws. Religion, at its core and heart, is not about the rituals. It is not about church buildings, mosques, or temples. It is not about priests and robes and liturgy. It is not about rules and regulations. It is not about holy books and nice clothes. Those all came along long afterwards. So what is religion? It is something much more basic, much more visceral.

We are all born searching for a way to reconnect with something that is larger than ourselves. The Stoics thought, if we could just become perfect enough, we could reconnect with the forgotten divine inside of us. The mystics sought to find it through meditation, reaching back up to a state of perfect harmony by relinquishing all connection to the physical – but this isn’t living in harmony; this is ceasing to live.

Plato thought something very similar – that if we could break free from the corruption of this world, we could reconnect with the One, the Good, the archai, the unchanging logos, the hidden order of the world. The Egyptians, too, sought what they called the mata’a, the ordering principle underlying the universe. In China, mystics and philosophers alike sought to become one with the Tao, the ordering principle of all things.

None of these great thinkers ever found what they sought, and philosophers today have given up looking. But these examples I have given don’t cover most of the pagans; the people who began our winter festival were a different breed of believers. This was the pagan-on-the-street, you might call him. He didn’t hold with these fancy notions, because he wasn’t philosophical, he was religious.

The pagan-on-the-street understood something that the philosophers, with all their wisdom, failed to grasp – that this world is a world defined by personality. It is full of people, and the actions of those individual people, and their relations to each other, shape the world. Personality brimmed in the pagan world, and it is from their stories and myths, not the philosophers and mystics, that we take our most compelling pictures of human life.

But these stories, too, are about searching; they are about statues becoming living beings and about mortals becoming divine, about trying to be remembered, trying to be a hero, trying to do something that lasts, that matters. The pagan stories, too, tell us how to reconnect with the divine, but their solution is very different from the philosophers’ moralizing. They do not speak of rules and rituals. They speak of love and death.

In the end, then, the pagans and the philosophers and the mystics and the artists are all engaged in various forms of religion, if we count religion as an attempt to reach something beyond ourselves, beyond the physical, beyond the temporary, beyond the corrupt, a search for the transcendent meaning of the universe. We may search for it in different places, but our goal is the same, and it is the goal at the heart of the world’s religions.

If anything, in fact, of my friend and I, I am the less religious one. Because Christianity does not engage in this search. Christianity is about something rather different.

But that’s next week’s post!

“Christmas tree” by oatsy40 is licensed under CC BY 2.0