My Christmas, My Easter For Me, Every Day Is a Holiday
My Christmas
[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]E[/su_dropcap]very day that I wake up feeling okay . . . is a great day.
I don’t even have to feel great for it to be a great day. I don’t even have to feel good. I only have to feel okay . . . for it to be a great day.
For so long, I felt horrible . . . every day. I never woke up. I came to. Always in a quagmire of anxiety and regret.
But those were the days of alcohol abuse. And I have been gratefully free of booze now for many years.
It was Christmas of ’99 that I went on my last bender. And that was My Easter.
But first I want to tell you about My Christmas.
I grew up like most of us, with Santa Claus, Charlie Brown, Baby Jesus, and the awkward spectacle of opening presents with people you can’t stand. None of these was my Christmas.
My Christmas came in the summer of my 10th year when I went into my room one day, closed my eyes and said, Okay, God . . . if you’re real, please reveal yourself to me.
I began to see in my mind’s eye Jesus standing next to a big rock.
The rock itself was like an ancient tomb, the size of a man and shaped like a heart. Not a Valentine, but a human heart. Like a fist.
Jesus turned and knocked on the heart, and it split apart in the middle, vertically, opening toward me like French doors.
Floods of blinding light and warm water gushed forth from the cracked rock, over and through me. My heart raced. I had trouble catching my breath. Tears and sweat poured from body. It was as if I had crossed the finish line of a great race; when, all the while, I lay on my bed.
I also became aware for the first time of profound peace. Deeper than Momma’s boobs in bathwater. Wider than fish sticks and macaroni & cheese. Broader than Saturday morning cartoons.
Bugs Bunny helped me make sense of my childhood.↓
https://vimeo.com/207309703
I had no idea, until that moment, what a tremendous burden of fear I had been carrying my first 10 years. Fear, I suppose, of my family literally killing each other.
But Christ was born in my heart on that summer day in 1972. It was My Christmas. I was born again, as the Evangelicals say. I no longer needed to work up a faith in God. I knew God!
That’s the Gospel — the good news! The bad news is that it made me a weird kid. None of my friends could relate to this. To them I was a Jesus Freak. It’s all I ever wanted to talk about, along with my developing passion for classical music — another great conversation killer for adolescents.
The highlight of my day, every day for the next eight years, until I went off to college, was not school or basketball, or even girls. It was playing the piano and spending time alone in my room doing what Brother Lawrence called Practicing the Presence of God.
A 17th-century monk named Brother Lawrence found God in the little things. CLICK TO ENLARGE
In fact, had I lived in the time and place of Brother Lawrence, my family might have given me over to medieval friars. Here . . . do with him as you will. We don’t understand him. All he ever wants to do is hang out in his room and listen to Mahler!
My spirituality became a drug. Like all drugs, eventually it stopped working. I used it in high doses growing up to escape the violence in my household, as well as not fitting in at school.
I may as well have been committed to a monastery, since the only place I felt safe in those days was my bedroom with my Bible and my classical records — alone, seeking God on my knees. (How God got on my knees, I’ll never know!)
Indeed, He rewarded me with many hours of blissful communion. Me and God, walking naked in the Garden of Eden. Musical prayers. Visions of a rewarding life ahead.
However, I conflated those wondrous feelings with the quality of God’s approval and acceptance. Thus, if I wasn’t carried to mountaintops of bliss every day, then I felt like I wasn’t right with God; which made me feel worse.
My Easter
[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]P[/su_dropcap]erhaps it was my ever-growing ennui that triggered my rebellion. Regardless, in my early 20s, I became conscious of huge differences between my experience of Jesus and that of the Evangelical consensus. The consensus followed their dogma, without question; I didn’t.
I questioned a lot of things. More inconsistencies and contradictions than you can shake a stick at.
For instance, here’s a sampling of my concerns with our religion that I often discussed with my fellow devotees; unaware at the time of how counterintuitive this pastime was:
- What is it with this never-ending ping-pong game between joy and guilt!? Am I a beautiful child of God, created in his image; or a wretch? Which is it? Both? Neither?
- Am I really not right with God because The Last Temptation Of Christ makes me feel closer to Jesus? Not to mention, picketing movies is free publicity for them. Are they paying you to do that?
- Why do you feel compelled to pray for me because The Beatles are more profound to me than Amy Grant? How can you make it through an Amy Grant album without puking? And how can you make it through a Beatles album without feeling uplifted?
- And why do I have to vote for Ronald Reagan? Isn’t Jimmy Carter one of us? Or is he not right with God, too?
What I mean by “counterintuitive” . . . rather than opening channels for camaraderie with my fellow Christians by discussing these matters openly and analytically, in search of truths we hadn’t yet uncovered, my bringing up these matters served only to make the rest of the sheep run the other way.
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On Christmas of ’99, Christ died in me . . . and Christ rose again. I was born again, again!
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My objections went over like a dirty joke at a prayer meeting. Speaking of which, did you hear the one about the old ladies in the nursing home? They were listening to Mozart and one said to the other, “That’s a minuet. You remember the minuet, don’t you?” And the other responded, “Honey, I don’t even remember the men I screwed!”
I actually told that joke around this time at a prayer meeting. So obviously, I wasn’t the brightest bulb in those days. My comedian’s impulses often overwhelmed my sense of propriety. AND I was intolerant of the intolerant.
I carried a chip on my shoulder. And I got into it a lot with other Christians over little things.
That Greg . . . what a clown!
Always stirring up trouble!
I don’t even think he’s a Christian!
No one with ANY self-esteem can live like that, folks. A clown, a black sheep, a heathen. Really? Maybe you guys should get out and live a little.
But perhaps the biggest reason I fled the flock in the first place is that I got tired of people looking at me with fear in their eyes. I’m not an animal; I’m a human being!
I got angry. You hypocrites! And then I got depressed. How can people who claim to be filled with the love of Christ be so cold?
THE MISTLETOE SELLER, by Belle Epoque artist Adrien Barrère
Plus, I grew tired of being plunged into a furnace of guilt every time I tried sharing with my brothers and sisters in the Lord the burning beauty within me. The music and stories I cherished, as well as my most personal expressions — my poems, songs, even the classical music I wrote — were all suspect. My mother, to this day, cannot bring herself to read any of my writings or listen to any of my recordings without waxing nostalgic about the days when I was right with God. Whatever that means.
This was the beginning of My Easter. My Passion.
I remember standing in church one Sunday, around the time Pat Robertson ran for President, watching all these white, middle-class zombies raising their hands and speaking in tongues — working so hard to build some kind of meaningful encounter with the Divine — and I just felt empty and out of place.
I stopped going to church. I began hanging out at bars, instead. Jesus drank, right? And he hung out with other questionable types. So I began hanging out at strip clubs.
I hitch-hiked across America, not to stop at every stripper bar and billiard honky-tonk I could find — though that’s what I did — but because I just felt lost and I thought to myself,
Hey, if you’re gonna be depressed for a long time, you might as well see the sights.
And over the years, I had sordid encounters with all kinds of questionable types, including:
Prostitutes
Heroin addicts
Swingers
Republicans
Christmas of ’99 I almost died of alcohol poisoning. I probably should have gone to the hospital. But I was too embarrassed to call 911 for something as stupid as drinking oneself to death.
Instead, I got down on my knees and begged God for mercy. Then I passed out.
I suddenly came to, my heart pumping like a race horse. Then it stopped, and I lost consciousness.
Then my heart began galloping again.
This happened several times before it calmed down and I caught my breath.
Eventually, I crawled over to the phone book. (Those were the days!) And I called the AA central office in the Loop.
Nelly picked up the phone. By the way, she worked there for many years, well into her 90s. And her tone never changed.
When I explained my situation to her, she barked, “Git yo ass to a meetin’!”
I told her that I was having trouble walking at that moment. She responded, “Doesn’t sound like you had any trouble gettin’ to the liquor sto’!”
That was My Black Friday. And I began going to AA meetings the next day.
DARK CHRISTMAS, by Markus Grossalber
The philosopher William James, in his book The Varieties Of Religious Experience, describes two different but equally valid types of encounters with the Divine:
1. Instantaneous
2. Gradual
My Christmas was instantaneous. My Easter was gradual.
It took five days from my last drink to feel human again. The winter of 99/2000 was especially brutal, as you may remember. One could look down a residential street and see camel humps every 15 feet and realize that those were rows of parked cars buried beneath five feet of snow.
I drifted with the relentless snow flakes to an AA meeting every day for 90 days. 90 in 90, they call it.
As I said, it didn’t happen immediately. But by the end of those 90 days, I knew that I never wanted to drink or do drugs again. I was able to work without having to make excuses about my drinking. And I had friends who, to this day, have never had the misfortune of knowing the old me.
On Christmas of ’99, Christ died in me — or at least my failed notions of Christianity — and Christ rose again. I was born again, again!
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Lovely story, Greg.
Thanks, Lauren.