Why Can’t We Carry the Peace of Christmas Through the Entire Year?
Is it because we are Generation-X?
The time of the year I feel most peaceful, the most connected to ‘God’, the Universe or whatever you want to call it is at Christmas …
It’s on Christmas Eve to be specific. After the panic-attack inducing moment of realizing “Oh my God, Christmas is next week!” After the building-wide secret Santa, after the searching, buying, wrapping and baking are over. As the sun sets on that day, it begins to feel strangely quiet, and somehow holy. I can finally hear the steady drumbeat of my ragged human heart over the drone of politics, the Facebook/Twitter-chatter of society, and the capitalist consumerism that normally devours our waking minds.
For almost ten years, I’ve been some variation of agnostic (too afraid to accept that the Great Unknown doesn’t give an actual fuck about us) and a full-on atheist. As a Gen X’er, this felt like the disappointing but natural end-point of a life-time spiritual quest. One of those “Oh well,” eternal shrug moments. “So this is all there is then? Yeah, thought so but I was hoping ...”
Yet Christmas Eve has often anchored me, brought me closer to the ‘peace that passeth understanding’ that I often long to feel. For a time, I quietly attended Christmas Eve midnight mass with friends. This year I attended an earlier service with my ten-year-old daughter.
Shaking hands with everyone to wish them peace, and singing Silent Night by candlelight always moves me. Watching my little girl’s eyes shining as she took it all in — that was unspeakable magic. There is still beauty in the world; still kindness, friendship, connection, even … love. These things are the polar opposite of jaded cynicism, and I like it.
We’re a week into school now and my tree is still up. I don’t want to let it go. My life as a teacher is hectic and pressured. My place in the world as a woman in Trump’s America in 2019 feels cramped and tight — emotionally, socially, psychologically, financially.
It’s not just about lacking some annoying superficial version of ‘me’ time, where I take a bubble bath and drink a cup of chamomile tea and everything’s set to rights again. I have a beef with ‘self-care’, but that’s a discussion for another article.
It’s that there’s usually so little time for reflection, for true spiritual refreshment. No space to feel the ‘peace that passeth understanding’. I don’t know if I can ever ‘accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior’. It feels … intellectually dishonest, given my strong doubts about the existence of an omniscient Deity.
I also struggle with the fear that I’m being sucked back into religion because everything in the world is such an epic, apocalyptic man-made cluster-fuck right now. I should be out canvassing for someone instead, but there’s nobody that inspires me. There’s no Gen-X candidate left in the Presidential horse-race. I’ll end up voting for anyone who is not Trump. “Oh well”. This supposedly, is exactly what’s wrong with us — we can’t be motivated.
I know I’m hungry for something that society-as-it-is can’t give me. I have been, and Gen-Xers, in general, have always been this way. My spiritual life has been through many incarnations. But in this, my 49th year, I am so tired of searching for meaning, for answers. I just want to find those things and rest in them.
This is what they don’t understand about us. We were always looking for it all to make sense. We needed to know that someone cared about us, as individuals. We longed to know that we mattered. Christianity does offer all of that in spades by the way, if you can ignore the bit about the Virgin Birth, or healing blind people by rubbing clay and spit in their eyes. Oh, and walking on water. Not to mention the whole ‘hell and eternal damnation’ thing …
We desperately need a place to land right now. We need a way to carry the peace we feel at Christmas through the whole year, and perhaps through the rest of our lives.
We probably can’t, because we’re Generation X.
But now more than ever, I think it’s important for us to try.
