The Whole Wide World Is Common Ground
Happy Holiday's --- a diatribe
Happy Holiday's !!!!
Well it is here again. The Holiday Season. Which springs upon us around Halloween and ends with New Year's Day.
Even before Halloween is here we begin to see the red and green and blue and gold and other sparkly things of Christmas on the shelves of the store's.
By Thanksgiving we are bombarded already with 'gift appeal'.
Children literally worship their own Deity at Christmas time. They call him Santa Clause. They await his visit to them all year long and some get even fearful of disappointing him.
Christmas, a masculine holiday, a holiday which has gone through soooooooooo many changes and has incorporated so many other cultural festival influences that we truly have no clue as to what all of it is really all about.
It is supposed to be the birth of Christ. A birth, that if you believe the legend, happened over 2000 years ago in an era and culture Westerners would have a challenging time to understand.
And to be brutally honest, if Yeshua Ben Yoseph were to walk among us today he might be considered a terrorist for being Middle Eastern. After all, all those paintings and sculptures of him show him to be more 'European' than Middle Eastern even though he is said to come from Bethlehem and Galilee. A Nazarene.
After years of studying the story of Yeshua, I personally did not find where he profess to be anything more than 'us'. In fact. He does not place himself above anyone. It is written that we should not be amazed by his acts for we too are capable of them. No where does he proclaim his sacred birth as a time for festival or that his followers should own a certain time of year just for him and to discount all his other brother's and sister's who might celebrate other faiths around the same time.
It is written that Yeshua Ben Yoseph also said he did not come to bring a new religion, that he came to help raise up his own. Which was Judaism. To release his people from bondage. Was it the bondage of political nature? Or Human nature? or religious nature?
He studied in Temple he sat with Rabbi's. He followed many Jewish laws and rebelled against others. Such as preaching to the Gentiles, working on the Sabbath. Teaching women. Teaching in the temple before the age of 13.
How about him going into a particular temple set up with booths of wares and money exchange stations and up turning them in a 'fit of rage'.
Or was this a statement being made that to turn Temple into a place of Monetary gain and material focus was sacrilege itself ?
Now think about the malls and credit card bills and debt you might incur in this the season of His birth.
Was it a political act because the Roman's had control over Jerusalem at that time and he saw many of His Jewish family being enslaved by the Roman law ?
Now ask : What is enslaving you today ?
We also know now that if Mar Yeshua was a historical man, that there is little evidence that he was born in December. And there are still today some people who celebrate his birth on January 6th which is also known as the annunciation.(the days between being the 12 days of Christmas).
It has even been theorized that, "Dec. 25 and January 6th tie into a time line of Yeshua's death. Theorizing he was conceived in March the same month of his death. Connecting Yeshua's conception and death in this way may seem odd to the current minds of our time. Yet it reflects ancient and medieval understandings of the of the whole salvation being bound together. For them the salvation was something they loved to bind life and death together.So conception must be the same month of crusifixtion. So the Dec/Jan birth could be contemplative perception sustained in ancient ways of thinking and not by a factual dating system.
The notion that creation and redemption should occur at the same time of year is also reflected in
ancient Jewish tradition, recorded in the Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud preserves a dispute between two early-second-century C.E. rabbis who share this view but disagree on the date: Rabbi eliezer states: "in Nisan they (our anscetors) will be redeemed in time to come." (The other rabbi, Joshua, dates these same events to the following month, Tishri.) Thus, the dates of Christmas and Epiphany may well have resulted from christian theological reflection on such chronologies: Yeshua would have been concieved on the same date he died and born nine months later."
So it works out in theory. But the logic is not there to point to a winter birth logistically.
So we look further and ask, what is and has been celebrated in December since before the story of Yeshua as a heavy ritualized festival ?
With many beautiful rituals that bring family/community together and warmth of hearth ?
Yule logs and Pine Trees decorated with lights ? Winter Solstice. And the ancient Roman's celebration of Sol Inictus. These festivals were amongst the first ones celebrated in this time of year. I point this out to show that Christianity's festivities came in much later in history and incorporated many traditions of other festivals into their Christmas celebration.
When the Roman's finally fully embraced Christ teachings and stopped slaughtering the followers of The Way (what Christ teachings were called in the early history of the religion) about 300 years after his crucifixion. -- think about that amount of time for a moment. 300 YEARS -- the USA is not even that old yet. And we have seen the manipulation of our own history and sacred doctrine in the time we have been a country. Imagine what the ancient Roman's could have done with The Way when they chose to adopt it and make it their own. They did what they always did when taking a country or in this case a new religion which replaced their pantheon of God's.
What they did was: They drew other celebrations into the fold of Christianity. They placed Christ's birth in the midst of a pagan ritualistic time slot.
Perhaps. No one really knows. It is all conjecture. What we do know is that tribe after tribe of human beings take time out during the winter month of December to break bread together to gather around a common theme and celebrate life.
Christ-Mass was created by the ancient Roman church, 300 years after the crucifixion. It has been celebrated in various ways all over the globe as the Roman church spread and later through the Lutheran (Protestant) based Churches.
You will find an array of ways to celebrate. All of which come from the cultures themselves and the festivals of the winter time they had before Christmas was introduced to them.It wasn't until 1870 that it
became an official US holiday. Until then it was a private small celebration usually done with village/township Churches and gathering together in celebration of community and Christ brotherhood. In the mid 1900's Coca Cola took over St. Nick and commercialization of the holiday began and no longer did this holiday belong to the spiritually minded.
OK, I have a purpose here. I receive email after email on The HOLIDAY Tree, disgust being placed on the season greeting : Happy Holidays!. People shouting, Don't take the Christ out of Christmas !!! Defend YOUR faith.
Faith? What faith is there when you believe Christ can be removed from anything? Do you not walk with Him? What does it matter what the holiday is called if you sit at the feet of the Master and love ?
No where is it written in the Gospels to rally up and go about in a fit of anger to save your holiday. This season has become so commercialized and no one seems to be yelling about that. Santa Clause is more important than Yeshua or what St. Nicolas represented and as I write this I wonder how many know the story of St. Nicolas? I trust people know he didn't live at the North Pole and work with elves. ;)
This is an acceptable manipulation of this sacred holiday. But let's not call the Christmas Tree a Holiday tree. Or wish everyone a Happy Holiday season.
This is a time in which many festivals come together to celebrate the bounty and beauty of life before winter takes us into a slumber period so that we may awaken renewed in the light of the anointed one and the promise of that which is to be.
It's really easy to shout 'save Christmas', but are they really? Are they being a savior or a persecutor? Are we the light in the darkness that has come to illuminate or a torch bearer come to crucify ?
If we walk in the Light there is nothing to defend my friends. Yeshua didn't ask anyone to defend him, he asked that you follow him. In others words, live and become the teachings.
Your heart needs no label upon a tree or holiday to know Christ. Or to celebrate the birth of Christ Consciousness. You don't need a holiday to celebrate the Consciousness of Higher being which lays within each of us.
My question is, can we Celebrate Christ every day and let go of petty differences?
Come together in love and show the glory of the season and BE the change you wish to see in the world.
I hope you pardon my diatribe and take heart in some of what I have shared. It is my sincerest belief that if Christ was awoken in all of us, none of this would even matter.
No one would care what the holiday was called and it would not be made for one babe in a manager but for all of humanity and the glorious creation we are.
If you can't imagine that, then this year, Imagine a man, maybe about 30 years old knocking on your door. He is Middle Eastern, charismatic and ask if he may join your celebration. Do you invite him in ?
Now until Dec 25, I plan on saying, Happy Holiday's. The 12 day's of Christmas begin on Dec. 25 and end on Jan. 6. Usually the Eve of Christmas is vital in our celebrations. This is when I usually shout, Merry Christmas!!!! Christmas and the entire holiday season for me is a celebration of the rising of our Christ Consciousness and the gathering of family and friends to share our light unto the world.
Much Love
Shar
Lucid Waking
spiritquestradio.com
Well it is here again. The Holiday Season. Which springs upon us around Halloween and ends with New Year's Day.
Even before Halloween is here we begin to see the red and green and blue and gold and other sparkly things of Christmas on the shelves of the store's.
By Thanksgiving we are bombarded already with 'gift appeal'.
Children literally worship their own Deity at Christmas time. They call him Santa Clause. They await his visit to them all year long and some get even fearful of disappointing him.
Christmas, a masculine holiday, a holiday which has gone through soooooooooo many changes and has incorporated so many other cultural festival influences that we truly have no clue as to what all of it is really all about.
It is supposed to be the birth of Christ. A birth, that if you believe the legend, happened over 2000 years ago in an era and culture Westerners would have a challenging time to understand.
And to be brutally honest, if Yeshua Ben Yoseph were to walk among us today he might be considered a terrorist for being Middle Eastern. After all, all those paintings and sculptures of him show him to be more 'European' than Middle Eastern even though he is said to come from Bethlehem and Galilee. A Nazarene.
After years of studying the story of Yeshua, I personally did not find where he profess to be anything more than 'us'. In fact. He does not place himself above anyone. It is written that we should not be amazed by his acts for we too are capable of them. No where does he proclaim his sacred birth as a time for festival or that his followers should own a certain time of year just for him and to discount all his other brother's and sister's who might celebrate other faiths around the same time.
It is written that Yeshua Ben Yoseph also said he did not come to bring a new religion, that he came to help raise up his own. Which was Judaism. To release his people from bondage. Was it the bondage of political nature? Or Human nature? or religious nature?
He studied in Temple he sat with Rabbi's. He followed many Jewish laws and rebelled against others. Such as preaching to the Gentiles, working on the Sabbath. Teaching women. Teaching in the temple before the age of 13.
How about him going into a particular temple set up with booths of wares and money exchange stations and up turning them in a 'fit of rage'.
Or was this a statement being made that to turn Temple into a place of Monetary gain and material focus was sacrilege itself ?
Now think about the malls and credit card bills and debt you might incur in this the season of His birth.
Was it a political act because the Roman's had control over Jerusalem at that time and he saw many of His Jewish family being enslaved by the Roman law ?
Now ask : What is enslaving you today ?
We also know now that if Mar Yeshua was a historical man, that there is little evidence that he was born in December. And there are still today some people who celebrate his birth on January 6th which is also known as the annunciation.(the days between being the 12 days of Christmas).
It has even been theorized that, "Dec. 25 and January 6th tie into a time line of Yeshua's death. Theorizing he was conceived in March the same month of his death. Connecting Yeshua's conception and death in this way may seem odd to the current minds of our time. Yet it reflects ancient and medieval understandings of the of the whole salvation being bound together. For them the salvation was something they loved to bind life and death together.So conception must be the same month of crusifixtion. So the Dec/Jan birth could be contemplative perception sustained in ancient ways of thinking and not by a factual dating system.
The notion that creation and redemption should occur at the same time of year is also reflected in
ancient Jewish tradition, recorded in the Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud preserves a dispute between two early-second-century C.E. rabbis who share this view but disagree on the date: Rabbi eliezer states: "in Nisan they (our anscetors) will be redeemed in time to come." (The other rabbi, Joshua, dates these same events to the following month, Tishri.) Thus, the dates of Christmas and Epiphany may well have resulted from christian theological reflection on such chronologies: Yeshua would have been concieved on the same date he died and born nine months later."
So it works out in theory. But the logic is not there to point to a winter birth logistically.
So we look further and ask, what is and has been celebrated in December since before the story of Yeshua as a heavy ritualized festival ?
With many beautiful rituals that bring family/community together and warmth of hearth ?
Yule logs and Pine Trees decorated with lights ? Winter Solstice. And the ancient Roman's celebration of Sol Inictus. These festivals were amongst the first ones celebrated in this time of year. I point this out to show that Christianity's festivities came in much later in history and incorporated many traditions of other festivals into their Christmas celebration.
When the Roman's finally fully embraced Christ teachings and stopped slaughtering the followers of The Way (what Christ teachings were called in the early history of the religion) about 300 years after his crucifixion. -- think about that amount of time for a moment. 300 YEARS -- the USA is not even that old yet. And we have seen the manipulation of our own history and sacred doctrine in the time we have been a country. Imagine what the ancient Roman's could have done with The Way when they chose to adopt it and make it their own. They did what they always did when taking a country or in this case a new religion which replaced their pantheon of God's.
What they did was: They drew other celebrations into the fold of Christianity. They placed Christ's birth in the midst of a pagan ritualistic time slot.
Perhaps. No one really knows. It is all conjecture. What we do know is that tribe after tribe of human beings take time out during the winter month of December to break bread together to gather around a common theme and celebrate life.
Christ-Mass was created by the ancient Roman church, 300 years after the crucifixion. It has been celebrated in various ways all over the globe as the Roman church spread and later through the Lutheran (Protestant) based Churches.
You will find an array of ways to celebrate. All of which come from the cultures themselves and the festivals of the winter time they had before Christmas was introduced to them.It wasn't until 1870 that it
became an official US holiday. Until then it was a private small celebration usually done with village/township Churches and gathering together in celebration of community and Christ brotherhood. In the mid 1900's Coca Cola took over St. Nick and commercialization of the holiday began and no longer did this holiday belong to the spiritually minded.
OK, I have a purpose here. I receive email after email on The HOLIDAY Tree, disgust being placed on the season greeting : Happy Holidays!. People shouting, Don't take the Christ out of Christmas !!! Defend YOUR faith.
Faith? What faith is there when you believe Christ can be removed from anything? Do you not walk with Him? What does it matter what the holiday is called if you sit at the feet of the Master and love ?
No where is it written in the Gospels to rally up and go about in a fit of anger to save your holiday. This season has become so commercialized and no one seems to be yelling about that. Santa Clause is more important than Yeshua or what St. Nicolas represented and as I write this I wonder how many know the story of St. Nicolas? I trust people know he didn't live at the North Pole and work with elves. ;)
This is an acceptable manipulation of this sacred holiday. But let's not call the Christmas Tree a Holiday tree. Or wish everyone a Happy Holiday season.
This is a time in which many festivals come together to celebrate the bounty and beauty of life before winter takes us into a slumber period so that we may awaken renewed in the light of the anointed one and the promise of that which is to be.
It's really easy to shout 'save Christmas', but are they really? Are they being a savior or a persecutor? Are we the light in the darkness that has come to illuminate or a torch bearer come to crucify ?
If we walk in the Light there is nothing to defend my friends. Yeshua didn't ask anyone to defend him, he asked that you follow him. In others words, live and become the teachings.
Your heart needs no label upon a tree or holiday to know Christ. Or to celebrate the birth of Christ Consciousness. You don't need a holiday to celebrate the Consciousness of Higher being which lays within each of us.
My question is, can we Celebrate Christ every day and let go of petty differences?
Come together in love and show the glory of the season and BE the change you wish to see in the world.
I hope you pardon my diatribe and take heart in some of what I have shared. It is my sincerest belief that if Christ was awoken in all of us, none of this would even matter.
No one would care what the holiday was called and it would not be made for one babe in a manager but for all of humanity and the glorious creation we are.
If you can't imagine that, then this year, Imagine a man, maybe about 30 years old knocking on your door. He is Middle Eastern, charismatic and ask if he may join your celebration. Do you invite him in ?
Now until Dec 25, I plan on saying, Happy Holiday's. The 12 day's of Christmas begin on Dec. 25 and end on Jan. 6. Usually the Eve of Christmas is vital in our celebrations. This is when I usually shout, Merry Christmas!!!! Christmas and the entire holiday season for me is a celebration of the rising of our Christ Consciousness and the gathering of family and friends to share our light unto the world.
Much Love
Shar
Lucid Waking
spiritquestradio.com
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