The birth of wisdom over power

Remembering the essence of Christmas amidst the excess of Christmas

“Happy Christmas!” I said. “Happy Holidays! She said.

“Merry Christmas!” I said. “Seasons Greetings!” They said.

These exchanges are familiar to everyone at this time of year. A kind of competitive social communication takes place and it feels like both sides leave feeling less than fully seen.

The presumed hegemony of Christianity in a pluralistic society can be problematic, but there is nonetheless something slightly off about the asymmetric greeting. One side bids for a shared recognition of the possibility of a relatively sacred time, while the other side resists precisely the kind of cultural coercion that happens in the name of sacralization. One side seeks intimacy in the name of shared tradition, and the other seeks solidarity in secular pleasure. It’s as if one person reaches forward for a hug, while the other stands back to establish a safe distance for a handshake.

You don’t have to be religiously Christian to feel that something is lost at Christmas time when it is merely a holiday that might be happy, or a season worthy of greetings.

But what exactly is lost? Was there anything there to begin with?

My older son Kailash is now 14 but I remember that when he was seven and fresh from his role as one of the sheep in the nativity play, he asked me a startling question:

Is it true Daddy, is the 2000-year-old story true?

The question was challenging not because I didn’t know the answer but because I did not recognise the question. It was no longer even culturally familiar to me to seriously ask whether the Christmas story contained some kind of literal or metaphysical truth.

We’re not going to answer that one here, but keeping the possibility in mind is partly why I don’t want to lose the explicit reference to Christmas. When I say “Merry Christmas!” I am not saying: “We must all celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ who is God incarnate”, not least because I don’t think I believe that, insofar as I know what it means. But I think I am saying something like: “Isn’t it amazing that this time of year is characterized partly by a beguiling story that is suffused with possibility and enchantment?” And if you say “Happy Holidays” in reply, it feels like your answer to that question is: “No”. That’s disspiriting for me, but of course there are many other ways to frame what’s going on, and nobody wants to feel hostage to a cultural imperative.

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How can it be that we all see it so differently?

Back at Perspectiva’s Christmas party in 2017, Elizabeth Oldfield gave an excellent short speech in which she described why Christmas can be thought of as three festivals happening at the same time that are conflated or confused. There is the secular consumerist frenzy festival, the mostly pagan inspired festival about winter, darkness, fire and family; and there is the Christian festival about an historical claim of religious importance.

With this threefold structure in mind, Christmas can be thought of as the season of shallow critique, where we lament festive consumerism without really grasping the extent of our entanglement with it as a way of life. As I have indicated before, the familiar critiques of consumerism include its deleterious ecological impact, its failure to offer enduring satisfaction, and the comical absurdity of ‘spending money you don’t have to buy things you don’t want to impress people you don’t like.’ So consumerism is unsustainable, unrewarding, and ultimately absurd. Yet it endures because it meets a range of emotional and social needs, and because it is conveniently operational — ‘it works’ in a bureaucratic sense, or at least it seems to. It is certainly hard to imagine replacing it. And yet we have to sail our imagination in precisely that direction, not least because we are transgressing a range of ecological boundaries.

We need to imagine a world beyond consumerism for other reasons too, not least to help clarify what we are living for(!) but any such social imaginary will have to better meet social and emotional needs at scale within ecological limits. This focus on emotional need and social logic is, by the way, one of many places to start with design principles and constraints for rethinking the world, but it is also relevant at this time of year. As the Philosopher and Psychotherapist Mark Vernon put it to me, there is a sense in which we try to create the significance of Christmas through what we buy, as if the consumerist frenzy was an attempt to make real something that we feel should be real.

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On the pagan/darkness/family huddling together side of things, Christmas is supposed to be about gift exchange, love, renewal, peace on earth, and the experience of convivial homecoming (aspects of justice, reward, consolation, transcendence, ontological security and eschatology) but it can also be a challenging time. Wendy Doniger’s essay on Christmas—Hang Santa—goes deeply into the anthropological heart of the challenge:

“Christmas is supposed to be a ritual, but it has become a game.”

While rituals are communal and have predictable and meaningful outcomes, games have winners and losers and don’t always go to plan. We are meant to feel close to family, but can feel estranged. It’s meant to be a time of plenty but money is scarce for many. If it were a ritual we would be in it together, but many feel left out.

“Even within a single traditional family, Christmas is problematic, precisely because it is not supposed to be problematic. In England, the Samaritans receive approximately eight thousand calls of anguish on each of the three main Christmas days (as compared with five thousand at other times of the year). The Swiss even have a word for it: Weihnachtscholer (‘Christmas unhappiness’).”

A cartoon shared by Maria Dorthea Skov in her talk (in the wise women video below) captures this challenge:

Which brings us to the meaning of the religious festival, and an opportunity to share the Dharma teaching on Christmas by Traktung Khepa. The full talk has a somewhat macho vibe, and is not to everyone’s taste, but I found it atmospheric and darkly beautiful. I have quoted from it at length below.

The central idea is that the Christmas story marks the birth not just of a person, but of the idea that wisdom triumphs over power. Here is a heavily edited extract:

“Jesus confronts Pilate, who's the representative of the king. This is when wisdom teachings meet power in a political and bureaucratic sense. What happens is there's a confrontation of sorts in which worldly power attempts to prove its dominance. And spiritual wisdom proves itself incorruptible and untouchable. So Pilate says to Jesus, don't you know the power I have over you? And Jesus says, you have none. You know this. This is this world. And he means that the human domain in which Pilate is living is not my kingdom. In his kingdom, he has power, and Pilate has power in his kingdom.

When Guru Rinpoche first met the king of Tibet, the king had come to greet him. He'd asked him to come and help with some problems there. This yogi from Yang Lesho caves above Kathmandu. And the king was waiting for him on a hilltop. So the king is higher. And Guru Rinpoche walks up and they both stand looking at each other for a while.

And finally, the king says, I'm waiting for you to prostrate to me. What do you when you meet the king? First is - you bow. And Guru Rinpoche laughed and said: Oh, I was waiting for you to prostrate to me. And the guru became very angry and, the king became very angry and Guru Rinpoche made this threatening mudra and the king's beard caught on fire.

The king put out the beard and quickly prostrated. And it was making a point that with power in the worldly sense, the only correct disposition is to kneel or prostrate to wisdom.

And this is what always happens when there's an encounter of wisdom and power. Wisdom never kneels. Now, power doesn't always kneel either. So Jesus is beaten, tortured, humiliated, crucified, and killed. And yet, he rises again. Because there is no possible way to kill wisdom. You cannot kill that which is beyond birth.

That which is beyond birth can't be destroyed. The real, what is ultimately real, can't be destroyed. Ordinary worldly power comes and goes all the time…

So worldly power comes and goes, is born and dies. And wisdom is incorruptible and never dies. But then you see in the fourth century when Constantine accepted Christianity, and you see in the 11th century when Buddhism came back and integrated itself with the political structure of Tibet…

And there remain within the religious tradition little threads of wisdom. The true wisdom remains, it has to go to some degree or another underground because true wisdom is unacceptable to worldly power. When wisdom speaks truth to power, either power kneels, which is extraordinarily rare, and that was an incredible moment in world history in Tibet, or wisdom is executed.

And you see this again and again. You see Al Halaj Mansur in the Muslim tradition, who in the ecstasy of his realization dances in the market, saying, Al Haq, I am the truth, I am, I am the divine. And he's executed, cut to pieces, literally cut to pieces while alive.

In the same way that it's the story of the world, it's the story of us, of each of us as individuals. Whether one looks at the esoteric meanings of Christmas, or Easter, or Guru Rinpoche's birth on a lotus, it doesn't matter. There's a way in which human beings as a whole are living out one vast mythopoetic drama.”

Around this time last year we had a Christmas party at St Ethelburga’s including a semi-structured open microphone session, part of which, as a play on ‘the three wise men’ we offered ‘at least four wise women’ speaking about Christmas from Jewish, Christian, Sufi and Buddhist faith traditions. (The fuller Christmas video is here).

This diversity of perspective on the Christmas story really matters, and it’s much better to hear that range of responses than not speaking of Christmas at all. Traktung Khepa puts it as follows:

 Jesus's birth is heralded by signs. The sign of the star of Bethlehem. And beings who are wise can see this star, recognize this star, and understand its portent… Always interesting in the external story, the three wise men who travel a great distance, none of them are Jewish. They are of other religions…the point of the story is that the wisdom aspects don't necessarily come from the tradition you're thinking. And in oneself, there's always this birth of Jesus coming. There's always the pregnancy. I was speaking with somebody yesterday about Meister Eckhart's statement that God is a pregnant nothingness.

It's so beautiful. That no thingness, that nothingness is our own wisdom mind, and it's always pregnant and always wishing to give birth and parts of ourselves are always noticing the star of Bethlehem all the time. They're noticing it and they're traveling towards it. And the import of the fact that all three Magi are from other traditions.

The import of that. Is that, the wisdom is recognized not necessarily in the parts of ourselves where we expect it to be seen. Wisdom awakens in us in ways we are not expecting. And we need to pay attention. We need to allow it. We need to allow its disruptive force. And that wisdom travels and looks like the three wise men come and they're coming looking for this new wise being and they look in the parts and places that are least expected.

They don't go to the synagogue, they don't go to a temple, they don't go to a castle or a place of power. They go to a manger. And wisdom chooses to be born in a manger. In the most rejected part. In this place, human beings don't even belong. Where just animals would live. In the rejected parts of ourselves, in the tossed-out parts of ourselves, in the cut-off parts of ourselves.

Wisdom finds its own birth in those parts. It doesn't reject anything. It doesn't choose power as its place of showing itself. You find Jesus' story in two different places. One in the 40 days in the desert where Satan offers Jesus all forms of power and all forms of pleasure. And you find this in Buddha's story when Buddha sits through the night before the Maras, the demons of delusion, attack him.

First, they offer him political power and infinite pleasures. They offer him all delights. Same with Yeshe Soyo when she was meditating in her cave. Same with the king over time with Guru Rinpoche. Power and concern with power are always worldly.

There is no other kind of power. As Carl Jung said, where there is the will to power, there is no love. And where there is love, there is no will to power. And so wisdom, which is love, wisdom and love are the same...They are one single thing. When they are alive, they are one single being. So, you have to allow in yourself, always, again and again, no matter what stage of the path you're on, you have to allow your ordinary tradition. And so inside of you, what is the tradition? Your habits. Your habits are the traditions.

Your habit is the synagogue. Your habits are the Pharisees who uphold and defend the habit teachings. And so you have to allow disruption in your life. You have to allow uncomfort in your life. You have to take account of the parts of yourself you would throw out. You have to look in the places you look away from.

 And this is so the divine comes into birth. The divine wishes to come into birth in every moment. In every moment, Jesus is trying to be born.

And Joseph and Mary are looking for a place where that can be born. The male and female aspects, the red and white drops that want to usher in wisdom are looking for a place where wisdom can be born. And it can't be born in the places where our ego finds its power. They can't be born in the places where the ego finds its prestige.

It can't be born in the places where ego feels it wins. That's where it can't be born. It can be born in the thrown-out parts and the unaccounted-for parts….

..It's not about dinner. Christmas is about giving up the known. It's about the birth of the divine. Coincident with the giving up of the known, the giving up of comfort, the giving up of security. That is, that whole constellation is an event, an event inside yourself, which we celebrate on Christmas. We think about it on Christmas, and we make the most real on Christmas.

And we understand that that birth, that giving up in that birth is not the end of a journey, it's the beginning. That's the beginning, again and again, every year. It's the beginning of the journey of Jesus through his life. With all of its trials and tribulations, with its garden of Gethsemane, with its miracles, with its crucifixion and its resurrection, Christmas is the beginning of that. Moment after moment, after moment, after moment…

Finally, Perspectiva’s last event of the year was our 9th event on our series called Attention as a Moral Act, about Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Matter with Things, published by Perspectiva.

The conversation was not about Christmas, but it covered a lot of ground, including premonitions and angels, as well as renewable energy and education, and it did have a jovial feel. It features two wise men, which is one less than usual, but still not bad, according to Meat Loaf.

I was particularly struck by Alastair’s bibliophilic tree fairy, who kept providing him with references that were germane to the points at hand.

2023 has been a good year for Perspectiva, with plenty to look forward to in 2024. Thank you for your interest.

A reminder that Perspectiva is a charity, and our work depends upon donations of various kinds. One of the most effective ways to support us is by becoming a paid member of this Substack. We are offering a 25% Christmas discount until 2024.

• It just remains for me to say: Happy Christmas!