Do You Accept Santa
Claus As Your Personal Savior?
by Michael Arvey
Ho, ho, ho, and I'm not invoking
Uncle Ho, but that old
socialistic, long-haired hippy
who, decked out in red, flies
without a license and doesn't have
a national ID card. Who knows
what's in those free boxes,
anyway. At the very least, he's a
dangerous liberal--who else would
dress and look like that?--who
gives to the poor as well as to
the rich, and to the infirm as
well as to the healthy.
Santa Claus, arbiter of gifts and
justice, is coming to town. Better
be nice, better not cry. He sees
you when you're sleeping, he knows
when you're awake. He's knows if
you've been good or bad, so be
good for goodness sake! Sound a
bit like a Homeland Security agent
who can always find you wherever
you are?
One can't help but notice how
Christian fundamentalists often
treat God or Jesus as if they're
both Santa Claus: "Please Lord,
I've been good, bring me this list
of things and the help I deserve.
And remember God, when I go to war
with relatives, friends or other
nations, you're on my
side." But, notice what Jesus
taught, "Your father knoweth what
things ye have need of." He
doesn't talk about what you
want, perhaps because he
recognized there is no end to
wants. In fact, Psalm 23:1
instructs, "The Lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want."
However, to act kindly or good to
get something for yourself is a
projection of conditional, egoic
consciousness, which bears no
resemblance to a spiritual being
and to the unconditional
selflessness of the Higher Self.
Apparently when
fundamentalists find their worldly
desires have been fulfilled, they
believe God must have beneficently
smiled down and blessed them
through Jesus, the mediator.
Strangely, however, once these
Christians have accepted Jesus as
their savior, they no longer seem
to think for themselves, nor do
they read and study the Scriptures
in a deep way, preferring to
listen to someone else's
reflective distillation of
Biblical writings--easier to bow
down to the altar of television,
America's favorite false prophet.
The faith they speak of and
espouse is considered, in some
eastern spiritual traditions,
simply a by-product of
enlightenment, or an immersion in
God awareness, rather than being a
postmortem stepping-stone to God.
And from that state of
consciousness, one prays from God,
not to God, and those prayers are
infused directly with sparkling,
divine energy.
George W. Bush, for example, is a
born-again case in point. Although
he claims he's doing everything he
can to keep Americans safe, his
entire political sub-text is a
short-term philosophy: Grab while
the grabbing's good. Does the
Bible not proclaim that is it
better to give than to receive?
Bush's faith is entrusted to
economic Darwinism, the survival
of the richest, and still his
flock remain impervious to
clear-headedness. Is Bush a bona
fide Christian? Regardless how
well he plays his facade with his
fundamentalist constituency, he's
more of a Deuteuronomic (one of
the five books of the Pentateuch)
Old Testament guy who is, as
linguist George Lakoff would
describe such men, a strict father
figure. Within Bush's and
the fundamentalists' point of
view live the stock platitudes
with which everyone is familiar:
Vengeance is mine, just and right
is he, father knows best, mothers
stay at home, America is the
greatest, communism is bad. There
are countless other comforting,
black and white,
absolutist platitudes that earmark
this mindset. One can't help
suspect that this simplistic black
and white framework is the
paranoiac source of the Bush
administration's watchword "You're
either with us or against us"--a
rigid distinction that leaves no
middle ground. Interestingly, this
same friend or foe dichotomy can
be located in the dictatorships of
Hitler and Stalin. If Bush knew
his Bible, he'd know that his sin,
sooner or later, will find him
out.
The fundies probably fall far
short of the example Christ made
of his whole life through service
and sacrifice for others based on
a foundation of love that
manifested through his healing,
teaching and dying, and through
his parables that brimmed with
such profundity none of us can
ever really grasp their entire
breadth and depth, floating down
as they do from higher dimensional
experience. "But he that is the
greatest among you shall be your
servant." Matt 23:9. Jesus served
and walked with the poor, with
sinners, with prostitutes and with
the sick, and as a result,
Christians were always a minority.
Even Jesus could described as a
socialist freely giving from the
whole of creation that belongs to,
and is, God, as some eastern
spiritual traditions teach, to
those in need or who have little
or nothing in the material realm.
In addition, Jesus, unlike Bush
and his followers, fits Lakoff's model
of a nurturer rather than that of
a strict father.
Jesus the moral Christ would never
in all eternity countenance the
napalming and nuking with depleted
uranium the thousands of innocents
in that distant slaughterhouse,
Iraq. And the with the love of
money being the root of all evil,
he would never engineer tax cuts
and social security privatization
schemes for Pharisaic, rich
money-changers.
Certainly, the devil would.
