My title sounds kind of like a long string of swear words, doesn’t it? Maybe all swear words come from the cry of the heart to understand and the realization that gosh darn it, I just don’t understand and never will and that makes me crazy. So here is a rapidly written improvisation on thoughts that go way, way down deep inside of me and a reflection on the season and my choice of how to spend the Big Day.
*
Please do not think that in any way I have the ability or the right to speak about the horrors of the Holocaust or the experience in history of being a Jewish person. I do however, hope to be a person who tries to “come alongside” others in what makes us different and what makes us have the commonality of being human beings. I have also spent a long life trying to understand a religion that began honorably as the religion of the Hebrews or Jews, and that has morphed into a religion based supposedly and almost solely on the experience and life of one Jewish man named Yeshua, Joshua, or now known as Jesus.
*
There are far better scholars, historians, theologians, and mystics than I who can write about Auschwitz, America, and Jesus. But tomorrow I hope to spend what will be for me, the strangest Easter day I have ever chosen to spend. Tomorrow I will go spend the day in which others are celebrating spring, and chocolate, and the idea that one man conquered death, by rising from a grave; and I will spend it by visiting the world-renowned exhibit, “Auschwitz”, now at the Reagan Library in Southern California. Yes — I know, your head just went — POW! Your mind is exploding with just, like, okay, wow — so much to unpack there, Miss Jane.
*
I will spend tomorrow at a presidential library, that is a super wonderful place to go to look through a historical lens, and my husband and I have enjoyed learning much at the Reagan Library among other museums throughout America and the world. But let’s be clear, on the other hand, our American monuments have been created in honor of a nation of exacerbating excess and ego and power and greed as only an uber-capitalistic nation can be, and as, if you look to history and any spiritual teaching, all nations are prone to go, more or less, sooner or later.
Tomorrow, I will be looking at the truth of the horrors and evil that humans can do to other humans in the name of nation or religion and the underlying reasons of power and excess and ego and greed, and I will do that while the world celebrates a man who was crucified by a nation and religion dedicated to power and excess and ego and greed. And I will have to look deeply within myself at my own proclivity to “sin”, my desire and use of my own human tendency to deny who I am created to be and who all of us were created to be, and instead act on my own dedication to power and excess and ego and greed. My own evolving worldview continually throws up at me that there can be no “hostis humani generis” (enemies of mankind) if there is no acceptance on my part of mea maxima culpa (my own most grievous fault).
*
And what I hope is that as I desire more and more to live a life of Rising, a life of Resurrection to the Divinity in myself and therefore, in each Child of God; a life that dies to the excess and power-needs and greed and false sense of ego within myself; I hope and yes, pray that I will glimpse that there is a Life that is the opposite of all those things because True Life has no need of them. I honestly believe that deep down, to riff on the famous quote by the dear suffering, murdered Jewish girl of the Holocaust, Anne Frank, that “people are really truly longing to be good at heart.” I want to believe that every one of us, really only desires a Life without fear or hatred that is eternal, full of Truth and Love. And I hope I will find tomorrow, in the remembrance of a horrible, horrible thing that humans did to others humans, and the despair I feel knowing it happens again and again in my world, over and over again and is happening in my very own backyard now — I hope I will also remember and as those who suffered most at Auschwitz say to “never forget”, that there is also, even in the darkest of times, the darkest of days, the darkest of hopes, there is always a remnant, there is always a person, there are always those who Rise above and create in themselves that which Jesus created in himself, there is always a harbinger of Light. Today, may you accept, may I accept, this assurance from Jesus, “You are the Light of the World. Let your light shine”.
*
May I, who so often, fear there is no more light at the end of this tunnel, know that, though the tomb may be sealed and death may be certain, there will always be just enough, just enough of us, to keep the Divine Light of the Human Spirit Alive! And that that Holy Spirit will always find a way to Rise above. Tomorrow I will choose to suffer with those who have suffered the worst that a human being can suffer. I will remember the Jews of Auschwitz and those others who are “different” according to the Powers that Currently Are. Tomorrow I will let my heart and mind suffer with those who suffered for their belief in a God Who is their One Truth, The One Love, The One Who Saves. I will honor with my small little day upon this Earth, those Jews who suffered as the descendants of a man named Yeshua /Jesus. Tomorrow, I will come to pay my respects to those who also had to suffer the worst that a human being can suffer for their belief in One God, a god above all others, a god above all nations and other powers that would fear the power of Love. And tomorrow, on a day that we celebrate the Risen Spirit of Salvation, I will pay my respects to the Jew, Yeshua, called the Christ, who was a single little human being who in his fight against nations and the religions who worship the power of nations, in his fight against the false gods of excess, greed and ego, conquered them all by simply dying to all of them, and rising to a whole new existence and a whole new awareness of what it means to be a Child of God.
May I, as I look upon the cross of Auschwitz, know what it means to “take up my own cross”. Yes. I must choose, in much smaller ways every day, to suffer with others, to suffer for what I have chosen wrongly, and then to know that we all have a choice every day — to stay in the tomb, to stay in the suffering, or to Resurrect to New Life.
May all the faith and love and goodness that lies within you today, be resurrected to the hope of salvation and the assurance that eternal life is yours to choose in Divine Love. Today. Let your light so shine.
My friend got me thinking today about racist policies and systemic racism in this country. Well, how are not we thinking about that — we should not “move on” from incident to incident like lemmings. So I thought I would share some meditations on that here as well (does Jane never get tired of putting targets on her metaphorical back, you ask? No, heaven forbid when so many people of color have not just metaphorical but literal targets on their backs.)
Thank you, Kathleen — Tough conversations on racism in our policies and systems sounds like a good conversation. Especially religious people (and unbelievably sadly those who claim the religion of The Christ) people in this country seem to have totally lost any comprehension that evil, injustice, prejudice, selfishness, lies, false pride, yes, racism, misogyny, ignorance, hate, foolishness — all are not just part of the individual’s human condition, but also part of human created and run systems. How could it not be otherwise and yet we cling to an ignorant understanding that it is only about the morality and ethics of individuals and not communities, businesses, and nations.
By denying systemic racism, or any other ill, we can hide in our closets of self-protected self-denial — the “I’m not racist” argument. Which for Bible readers should make us tremble since it sounds much like the defensive arguments of the goats on Christ’s judgment day. America’s worship of individualism and what makes someone a success is in complete contradiction to the principles of any religion’s idea of God’s mandates, but it is a complete travesty of what Jesus taught and lived. Mea culpa!
Racist policies and a racist history that continues to be a racist present, when not seen as one of America’s great ongoing sins can never be fixed and healed if we don’t even acknowledge our mutual acceptance of “the ways things are”. By continuing to point fingers, we neglect the four pointing back at us. By focusing only on “me”, and whether I think I am racist, I will never see that just because I myself, am not drowning, does not mean I am not flailing about in the same sea of systemic racism. We need to pull everyone up on the raft, and then fix the ship, folks.
Any one who reads the Bible should know better, and yet…. In America, we keep looking at the individual and trying to assess with our excruciatingly self-centered thinking: “is he/ she racist or not?” But that is like looking at a whole forest and picking out one diseased tree that is racist in a forest of disease and racism. We must look to the forest’s diseases as well and join hands and hearts to root out the bad and heal and nurture the good. I must help to make the hard and good and Godly choices for all if I want to be better and good and Godly myself.
God, help me today to do something for someone else and help me to find whatever I can do to use my own little hand, joined with others’, to fight the breakage in the dam continuing to break with the weight of racism in this nation, in our world.
If only they had listened to Jefferson: “The idea of amending constitutions at regular intervals dates back to Thomas Jefferson. In a famous letter, he wrote that we should “provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods.” “Each generation” should have the “solemn opportunity” to update the constitution “every nineteen or twenty years,” thus allowing it to “be handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation, to the end of time.”(The New Republic)
Lately I have realized how little I know about how things “should” work in my own nation and how they “do or don’t” work comparatively. I completely agree it is time every citizen was more educated in civics and through that education that the people are heard in terms of changes that need to be made yesterday. We must ask ourselves — when does a document like a government charter (which is what our Constitution is) become an idol to worship and not a tool to use for the good of the people? There are a couple other idolized documents I can think of that we should be better educated in and asking these questions about as well, but that’s a whole other can of manna.
As Jesus, the brilliant student of Torah law and the expert in the government charters of Israel said, we are meant to fulfill and live out these truths as guides, not worship or desecrate our written guides by our inability to change and be changed by “these truths that God and humans hold self-evident”…. We will be thinking about the story of that great statesman Pilate soon and his sad, sarcastic, narcissistic and oh so telling question that he asked of Jesus: “What is Truth?” We should not put up with our officials today asking the same thing — we should be the answer — We are the Truth of which you are merely the temporary guardians of.
To riff on an oldie — instead of “following the money”, we must start to “Follow the Truth”. And the questions are always the same for individual, community, and nation: Who do we want to be? What are we called to do? What changes do we need to make to be and do that which is our highest calling?
~~ Let’s do this, folks. Let’s help each other. I know I could use it. ~~Jane
There are going to be a lot of family firsts this year, most of them foisted on us, or chosen by us for the newest “reason for the season” ; the reason being The 2020 Worldwide Pandemic. I was lying in bed this morning at 3:30 a.m. deciding whether or not to get up AGAIN! to let-out the old senile barking -for -no- reason Daisy the Dog and then wondering afterwards whether I should just stay up or try to fall back to sleep before starting my at-home temp job answering phones and taking payments for grumbling scared people (who just don’t have quite enough this year to make those payments but if they don’t they lose their job but I usually end up after we hang up feeling that at least they reached me and I am a good listener and empathizer so there’s that, so….) since I can rarely fall back asleep after rising any time after about 3:00 am, I decided — well, here I am, aren’t I?
As the coffee gurgled, and the old dog ate her third treat, one from the TJ’s Advent Calendar for dogs that I bought this year, I started thinking about how many things were going to be different for me and for my family specifically this year. Starting with the dog. This is the first year Daisy will not have her evil step-sister, Jolie, the Golden-Coyote, to fight over Christmas stocking treats with. We helped Jolie across that Rainbow Bridge this past June and it was a sorrowful time. We miss that crazy coyote so much. (And yes, we did a DNA test if you can believe we would spend that kind of money on it and she is indeed, as we always knew half “Wolf, Coyote, CanFam”. Jolie was a street dog we rescued from the pound and she never got the “wild” completely out but we loved her almost as fiercely as she loved us, so….). Our first Christmas in fifteen years without Jolie, will be a couple of big black chalk marks on the negative side of life’s score sheet for all of us. On the plus side, we don’t have piles of shedded hair to clean up daily, a terrorized mailman, the hard times of watching Jolie be in pain, and Daisy gets to keep all her treats without getting beat up and bit, so…. Pros and cons but man, do I miss that crazy old coyote-dog.
So I started making a mental list, as any good mixed breed mongrel (I am part Native American, Scottish, Irish, German, English, and Godonlyknowswhat pronoun-ed she/her.. And no, I haven’t done a DNA test because my husband’s greatest nightmare is for him to be falsely imprisoned and somehow he fears that if my DNA is on record, he will somehow be arrested for something he didn’t do, and no we are not first cousins and yes he is a scientist, so go figure, but anyway…..) Here are some other firsts I thought of at about 4:00 am while the coffee perked and Daisy farted (another sad thing about old dogs is they really have a lot of gas and it smells like the worst meat packing factory you could possibly imagine spewing fumes constantly in your very own living room but The Guys at my house swear that Daisy’s farts actually smell likewhat- ever we ate for lunch or dinner that day, and they are scientists, you know so I have to accept that as fact, and I feel for my sake and Daisy’s that from now on I will only eat rose petals or lavender bud so Daisy’s farts will smell like that, according to “The Guys”, so….). And so it goes, and so here is a short list I made this morning while the rest of the world slept-on, with pleasant memories and dreams of Jupiter and Saturn kissing (See!? A year of firsts!)
Firsts of 2020 Christmas
(which I hope mostly not to repeat except for maybe a few of them but mostly no, so…..)
We did not buy a Christmas tree this year. With a pandemic on, there were very few places to buy a tree and my adult kids were unavailable to go along and play “Who Picks the Tree we Buy this Year? Race”. Raoul and I went to Home Depot just the two of us, and he was fairly excited, knowing he would win this year, but when we saw the prices for the scraggly little Charlie Brown trees and the even bigger prices for the decent looking trees, we both balked. We thought about it for a few days and decided this year we would not get a tree. (Sad, but on the plus side, I am working down to the wire this year, and even though I am working from home, I don’t have the motivation or really the time to decorate the tree all by myself and pretend the rest of the family helped me because I make whomever is around put a few ornaments on so we can pretend everyone helped and I dread having to undecorate it all by myself, and that’s a positive, so….). But we love the lights and the smell of real tree. So I strung a bunch of lights inside on our windows and bought some pine and balsam scented candles –and Bob’s your Uncle! Win-win. And on the super duper plus side – Raoul and I decided that money we would have spent on a Christmas tree? – we will give the money to a charity like The Bail Project or Feeding America. For Pete’s sake, I said to myself when I felt a bit teary over no Christmas tree in my home for the first time in over 35 years, “Jane, Old Girl, there are people starving in, well, in your own backyard today and people who are in prison at Christmas time because they can’t afford bail, I think you can go without a Christmas tree this year, right girlfriend?”
And then I remember the year we got a call from Raoul’s dad that his mom was worse, and we had to literally toss our Christmas tree out on the stoop so it wouldn’t die inside our house and maybe catch the house on fire (okay, so not too rational in our frightened worry and while gathering up our two kids with another one on the way, quickly packing clothes and dashing to the airport) and we left a message for our neighborhood teen, Robin, who used to baby sit our kids, to ask if she could sometime come over and take all the decorations off the stoop Christmas tree for us because we were rushing across the country to see Raoul’s mom who had suddenly had a very bad turn from the cancer and so then, twenty-five years later — I remember what family is all about and how much I miss those who have gone on before us and how very much and how very many people will be missing loved ones for the first time this pandemic season, and well, not having a dead tree in my living room is small sacrifice to pay if instead this year I instead put some live people ahead of my traditions. Because while I love traditions, I hope, when asked, to love people more.
Christmas Past
2. Our family of six will not all be together this Christmas. This is the big cry, the big waaa-waaaa for me and for my husband. Our eldest is stuck in North Carolina, a gazillion miles away during a no-travel pandemic. We have not seen Justine for over a year, having to cancel our plans to go there last spring and her plans to come here this summer, even for her big birthday event this past June. And while this makes me super-duper sad, I am so very, very grateful that all six Tawels are still alive. We have survived a year of a pandemic. And we all have jobs, and more than enough food to eat, and roofs over our heads, and no one is being conscripted into a war, and we aren’t being hunted down and persecuted, and as long as we wear masks we can walk our streets safely, even at night. So, to keep the world a little safer and my own family a little safer, not traveling, not gathering is a small price to pay, isn’t it? And when you think about the prices so many have paid and are still paying in this life to keep their own families safe, who am I to complain?
To be alive and able to say to Justine and all of us – “we will wait, and we will hope”, that is a wonderful spiritual gift when I think about it. That is the idea that Christmas is actually supposed to be about, not getting, not even giving, but “waiting and hoping”. Too many people have to live lifetimes with nothing but waiting and hoping to keep them going. For me to do it now in 2020 is a time to engage in more reflection, more empathy, and more “owning” of what being fully human in community with all humanity should be like – and isn’t that the message of the Christ baby who came to be human with all of humanity? Isn’t that what the God of the People of Jesus kept telling them: “Remember. Wait. And Hope.”
3. The rest of my list of firsts pales in comparison after the biggie of missing a family member, but here goes:
We will not share a fondue this year on Christmas eve (leaning over a communal pot with sticks is not advised I imagine, by Dr. Fauci and his ilk. Besides my daughter Verity who is our family’s Pandemic Health Czar has forbidden it, which is another positive thing about changes because your adult children sort of gradually take over bossing each other and their parents around and maybe they will forget all the bossy things you pulled on them as a parent when they were young, so….). And we will read our favorite Christmas stories wearing our pandemic masks (“The Nativity” with illustrations by Julie Vivas, “Wombat Divine” by Mem Fox, and this year, we will definitely add the classic version, not the movie version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” because he really almost did this year for a lot of us, so….). We will gather with just our little family and sadly not be able to invite our various friends and “spares and strays” that we love to include in our feasts and our lives. We will wear masks when we talk and when we play Christmas trivia and Christmas bingo. We won’t snuggle except in our individual house pods as we watch Christmas classic movies and later I will sanitize all blankets used. We won’t pile into the car to go see Christmas lights, but we may take a walk around the ‘hood to see the lights.
And so, it will go, like a lot of things this past Pandemic Year of 2020, this Christmas Season, a lot of things will change; there will be a lot of firsts I didn’t plan on. They aren’t the fun exciting firsts of a new car or a new house or a new baby or a new citizenship. But if I can change my perspective, I can maybe shift my worldview into something more truly True and more worth leaning into and living out.
A lot of families will have much, much harder and more sorrowful firsts to lean into this year than we will. Far too many will have the loss of jobs and income, the loss of a place to live, the loss of the hope of gaining citizenship, the loss of a town and a place one grew up in, the loss of a place to worship, the loss of one’s health, or the loss of a loved one. So, I tried to make my list of “Firsts in a Year of Pandemic Christmas” seem as inconsequential and small as they are in comparison, and add a little bit of “Jane-humor” besides. Because in the scope of things, my own year’s changes, both foisted and chosen, are rather small when I compare them to how very, very, very much others have suffered and suffer, and how very, very much I have had my whole life and continue to have even in these strange and mind-bending, heart-rending times.
And just one more thing – when I think about a season of firsts this year, I realize that is what Christmas and the Coming of Jesus, the Messiah of God is all about. It was a first for Jesus, a first for his World Parent, Adonai. It was a first for human beings and a first for angels and the devils alike. Jesus came and for the first time the Son of God was without a Parent, without a home, without power, without a healthy environment, without resources, and without any security for future survival. Remember, the “first Noel” was to “certain poor shepherds who slept rough in the fields.” And even in all those “firsts”, he brought hope. He brought joy. He believed that “the first would be last and the last first” in a new Kingdom of Humans centered around the Divine Love that humans were meant to live out. The Christmas Child grew into a human being and brought a new way of looking at life and a new way of living this life. When Jesus first became a human, he became one of us; and he lived and suffered among us, and he laughed with us and celebrated with us and he wept with us and he loved us.
I hope that is what 2020 Pandemic Christmas can teach me, and maybe enough of us to make a different world. I hope we can learn first, how to be more fully and divinely human; how to first, love more with less; how to first, care more for others than for myself; and how to not just be more grateful but to be more responsible and more worthy.
The Message of This Season is Change; but The Story is Open-Ended
By Jane Tawel
December 15, 2020
The Year 2020 has been the most remarkable paradox of stagnancy and change. This is true on a global scale, (due to what it’s always due to, which is that old theme of Good vs. Evil); but it has been brought home to us as individuals on a vastly more knowable and just plain bigger-impact scale. Health, Wealth, Stealth, The Poor and War — those are the things that have always effected nations, communities, and individuals. The Year 2020 decided to “go all out” on all of the above.
I have known people this past year who have raged against the dawn of big changes either foisted on them from outside or accumulated by a lifetime of choices. I have known those who stick their heads in the sand or pull them back into their shells like turtles, pretending none of it is happening. There are good friends who abhor change and decide that they don’t have to accept it but instead can recreate a past where changes were all in their favor and everyone like them went to bed happily, healthfully, and securely, singing out “Goodnight, John Boy! Goodnight Mama! Goodnight Moon!” And I have friends, who have been hit by the changes like a sudden bolt of lightning, suddenly understanding things in a very different light, a light that reveals the darkness for what it has always been and the great need for changes, both personally and systemically. Of course, at various times in the past year and throughout my life, I could check the box of being all of the above “sorts of person”. So Change in order to make a difference must be both reflected and mirrored back.
There are those in my own country and in countries around the world, who protest against change and those who protest for change. There are those who long for change, write songs about change, or work to prolong the winds of change. It seems that John F. Kennedy was partially right when he said, “There is nothing more certain and unchanging than change and uncertainty”. But there is also nothing more certain that when change and uncertainty combine on a world-wide scale, people will either rise to action or fall into inaction. Which brings me to what some call their “reason for this season” which is also called Christmas.
Christ-Mass is supposedly in celebration of the start of a story. It is a story that begins with the birth of and the earthly journey of the god-figure and ancient Hebrew man named Jesus, later called Messiah, or The Christ. The story told for a couple of thousand years now, has become rather stale and stagnant for many believers and non-believers alike. The same bath-robed small shepherds appear in Children’s Nativity Plays and the same people gather to see how to best combine Jolly Old St Nick and lots of overspending on Christmas gifts with the reality of the birth of a poor, minority, despised class of person of color religious minority human being who somehow revealed to humanity the nature of God. But this year of 2020, everything is slightly askew, isn’t it? And because of that, anyone who wants to celebrate the reality of Jesus should be rejoicing. Because if there is any one word that we should associate with the person of Jesus The Christ, it is Change.
From babe born in a sheep’s straw pile to convicted and state-sanctioned-murdered religious radical, Jesus was the personification of “Be the Change”. Change with a capital “C”. CHANGE writ large. Change that is painful, unnerving, invigorating, unexpected, programmatic, outstanding, surprising, awe-inspiring, terrifying! Change that is individually and systematically, outside, inside, upside-down Change. A Change that was meant to effect me; and that “e” in effect is not a typo, since the old usage of Effect is intended. The kind of Big World-View Change that Jesus represents is world-upending Causal and meant to Effect you, Effect that guy, that woman, that child; Effect that town, that family, that nation; that river and tree and rock and lion and bird; that friend and that enemy. Jesus was and is meant to be the Changing Causal Reality that was and is meant to Effect the whole World. In fact, when compared to Jesus The Christ, pandemics can look rather small change.
So how can people who claim the Name and espouse the Belief-System, be surprised when we “Christ-ians” are asked, required, forced or even blind-sided and run-over by Change. It is, after all, the Stunning Way of God- Change that the person of Jesus was meant to signify; a change that was meant to effect this town, that nation, this government, that education, that art, this science, that environment, and this whole world. It is The Change that was mean to effect and infect the user with Love and Hope. It is the earth-shaking, evil-shattering Change that is meant to Effect the walk in The Way of all who would claim to want to be changed by a knowledge of Jesus.
If Christ-Love and Christ-Life is the Cause, then surely we who call ourselves “little-Christs” are meant to embrace the Effects of Changed Lives lived-out boldly but humbly in an ever-Changing World.
Followers of Jesus were meant to be changed by unanticipated pandemics and by anticipated stumbling’s. We are meant to be changed by not just the knowledge, but by personal involvement with starving children, with immigrants and sojourners, by the plight of prisoners, and by the reality of long injustices. We are meant to care deeply and rise to the challenges needed to heal fetid waters and burning forests and dying ice-caps. We are called to believe that we can change our violent ways and turn guns into farm tools and eradicate wars and rumors of wars. We are meant to protest greed in our places of commerce, government, and worship as well as practice personal commitment to root out greed insidiously lurking in our own selfish ways. We are meant to abhor the lies of any Judas, whether friend or official. We are meant to give freely, love fiercely, and practice peace; and we are required to practice rest and restoration as is the intent in the meaning of Sabbath.
Followers of Jesus are also meant to be changed by the homeless person on their very own street corners. Followers of Jesus are meant to be changed by someone else’s pain, to mourn with all mourners, to grieve with others, and to be willing to give up everything to follow in the ways of The Son of Man, a homeless, family-less, in the end friendless radical Lover of the One Parent that Jesus himself sought to be shaped and changed by. This is what it means to see Change as ultimately not Against us, but For us. Change is For our good. Change is for making us Good. But it can only make us Good if we receive Change as Gift, not curse; as Life-affirming, not Freedom-stealing; as the Truth of what we are meant to be, not a threat to who we are. This is what it means to believe in our great ability to change into something / someone we haven’t yet imagined; some one amazing and miraculous and profoundly whole-ly Human. As one of Jesus’ early followers said, “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it is not yet revealed what we will be. We know that, when he is revealed, we will be like him; for we will see him just as he is”. (I John 3:2)
So here is a little story for this 2020 Year of Changes:
“In the fullness of Time”, Jehovah Jireh sent a Savior, The Begotten One, to bring change to a world stuck in the stagnancy of sin, sorrow, helplessness, hopelessness, brokenness, pain, and death. The Begotten One was born among the poor, uneducated, country-less, minority, despised of this world, to show the world where and how Change had to happen. He was educated by radicals living off the land in the desert; lived life away from his family and the comforts of work and home, and gathered a rag-tag bunch of students that he could teach the meaning of Life to. He was crazy-smart and very, very kind, miraculously so. He loved life and lived it with abandonment and joy de vivre. He showed people what humans were meant to be like and he lived to tell his stories and teach his disciples for a scant three years before the Religious / State Combo Powermongers of his day, used the inquisition of their time to convict him and the capital punishment of their day to murder him. But before that sad death came to be; something had already happened…..
Everything had changed.
Changed with a Capital C.
Because when Christ with a Capital C was around, “the blind received their sight and the lame walked, lepers were cleansed and the deaf heard, and even the dead were raised up, and the poor had good news preached to them.” (Matthew 11:4)
And once His life was “over”, Life had really and truly only just begun.
And in His Changed Life, New Life for All had just begun and was forever Changed.
Jesus lived so that we might be changed, “reborn”, reshaped, renewed, resurrected — because that is What he taught, that is What he lived, that is What he offered, that is What his life was. But the story of Jesus Christ really changed the world because that is Who he was and Who he is and Who he will one day be and Who we can become in him. The Christ asks only one simple thing of any one who wants to claim to follow him and worship His Father; Christ asks simply that we be willing to be completely and utterly Changed.
We who say we love Him, must be “formed into his likeness”. In the same way that in The Beginning, The Genesis, humans were formed “in the likeness of God”, we “second-wave humans” are to be “formed in the likeness of The Messiah, Yeshuah. We do this by becoming like him but more importantly by seeing him in everyone we meet and treating them like the King we claim Jesus is. Jesus says, “I can guarantee this truth: Whatever you did for one of my brothers or sisters, no matter how unimportant [they seemed], you did for me.” “Give up everything, come, follow and learn to Be Me. Be completely changed from who you are to Who I AM.”
When Saul / Paul of Ancient Tarsus got this part right, he was a man completely changed by his experience in understanding who Jesus was, what Jesus offered, and the extreme changes that Jesus required. The disciple John got this part right, and was able to not only seek to be changed in the here and now, but to imagine great change in the world through the radical realization in changed lives of those living in and leaning into The Kingdom of God and Christ. John received a dream, a revelation, a vision of reality that John recorded in the Revelation, and one that compares with the great dreams recorded by the forerunners of Jesus, the Jewish prophets Ezekiel and Daniel and Isaiah. The dreams of the prophets were that there would be a “new creation” on Planet Earth that would compare with that we can now only imagine to be in God’s Heavenly Places — a world changed into what it was all meant to be, a Kingdom where Love rules, Goodness reigns, and Peace, Joy, and New Life are internalized, externalized and actualized. Change will ultimately mean an Abundantly Healthy and Whole reality for All of us.
For All Good Teachers, All Messiahs, All Gurus, Rabbis, Preachers; All Saints and Prophets and Radical World-Changers, The Message has always been the same. The Message is — Change. But my story, your story, even the whole planet’s and World’s Story is open-ended. Because Change must be allowed into not just our halls of power or our own front doors, but into the deepest recesses of our hearts, our lives, our very souls. Change must be, if not welcomed and embraced, at the very least, given room, given a chance, given, if not a leading role, at least a small role to play in our stories. The role change plays in my life might be as large as a pandemic or as small as a virus. The change that changes me might be as sweeping as an army of Angels or as small as a baby in a manger. Change is always, however, one type of catalyst or another, throwing me back upon my stubborn insistence on self-centering, or leading me forward into a centered wholeness. The Story of Jesus is not told as history but as prophetic dream of mythological proportions. The Story of Jesus is the archetype of what real change can do in the human condition we all live and die in. And we are promised that all who seek, will find. And all who change, will be changed. “It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be changed. We will all be transformed” (I Corinthians 15:52).
The Story of Jesus, that we celebrate at Christmas, is the paradigm-shifting story of Embraced Change, of Worshipped Change. There are always people who fight that change, the Herods and Pilates, the religiously powerful, the nationalists and legalists, and even the common-place, normal friends and family members who reject change, who want to live in the past and stay in control, keep things as they were. But there are always the unexpected change-makers, too, and the amazing thing about this year 2020, is that we each have had the possibilities of real and radical change revealed to our imaginations as perhaps never before in our life-times. The revelations have not come without great pain, great fear, and much sorrow or depression, but if we look past the clouds, we can see Light, and if we keep the Darkness in perspective, we can walk forward with Hope. Like the trumpets of Angels or the brilliance of a previously unknown Star, Change has been born. And humble shepherds will listen to it, and Wise humans will seek it.
This is the message of The Year 2020: Change happens and each of us is Effected, one way or another. Am I going to fight Change, or let Change, change me into something better? To believe in the Cause of Christ, is to believe in the Effects of Radical Change. To believe in the World’s and my own ability to Change for Good, is to believe in the Power of Love. And the Power of Love is the most powerful force for Change in the Universe.
That is the Story of The Christ Child, the Story of Jesus. It can be the story of you and me as well.We just need to change the ending to be a new beginning.
Jane Tawel 