This season was obviously different for me - my first year celebrating Christmas as a Catholic. Everything revolves around my Catholicism it seems. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between what might be an authentic conversion or the sheer novelty of a new religious landscape. I hope it is a little of both, because a little of both is just the right combination to make sense to the world around me. Spirituality must always have an aesthetic limb, or else it is simply untranslatable to the world around it.I was able to drag my family along into a midnight Mass with me this year. It went over much better than last year. I am only curious as to what was floating through their minds as we participated in the Mass. I can understand the tension that must exist in their minds. Their awareness of my mind, associated with a separate sort of convictions, must spark a need for them to reconcile with the difference between my beliefs and their own.
At times, the only avoidance of broken relationships is to bull-shit through a conversation by ambiguous abstractions. Unfortunately, my convictions are rooted in articulated stances on what something is and what something isn’t (e.g., what faith is and what it isn’t, what the Church is and what it isn’t, what worship is and what it isn’t…) Not only so, but I am finding an increased ethical obligation to reference concrete points such as these when I am in a conversation. The poetic concepts that may be translated a million different ways by a million different people simply do nothing to help clarify who we are and what we believe as humans, or what SHOULD we believe. As this beautifully multicultural society in America expands more and more through the years, the need for clarity is becoming more imperative as we seek to understand what sort of people we are and what sort of people we should become as inheritors of all these different and diverse cultures and families. A social group that does not seek a category for itself is no group at all, and it deprives humans of a very definitive and objective human aspiration: that aspiration is to define ourselves. The more we seek unity without definition, the more we become sparse, disparate, and alone.
Because of this, our Holidays must have a definition. They must have objective value, and their cultural relevance simply can not be left in the dirt. To define things is not to exclude transcendence. This is why many people hate to confront theological topics or philosophical propositions, because they fear these propositions and arguments have lost the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of human life and God. The element of life which is missed is that life must be defined before it can ever be transcended, or else there is nothing to transcend; such are the attributes we give to humans, God, myth, and religion. Anthropology, theology, and the rest of the sciences can only go too far, and too many people misunderstand that most theologians and scientists understand this. Theologians and other scholars only seek clarity. They want to understand the human condition to help the human condition. We can only begin by defining ourselves against the backdrop of statements that contradict each other. This is the essence of Truth on a conversational scale. It must be referenced, and once something is referenced, it has taken a stance on what it is and isn’t.
