Jyms of Wyzdom for December 20 * Holy Days Edition

Holy Days: Yep, I said “Holy.” That means I intend to talk about religion, everyone’s favorite subject except for around the Thanksgiving/Christmas/Hanukah/New Year’s dining tables. Be that as it may, we have already celebrated Thanksgiving and now approach the Judeo-Christian Holy Days. Hanukah’s Festival of Light begins on Sunday, December 22, the first full day of winter and Christmas is celebrated on December 24-25. By the time we’ve done all that cooking and cleanup, it’s time for New Years Eve, and Day, to let go of the old and welcome the new. The Rose Parade in Pasadena has to be one of the grandest ways to get into the New Year. If you ever go (Bon and I have been twice) you can be overwhelmed by the scent of all those flowers as they float by you. Watch it on the House & Garden channel for the whole, uninterrupted spectacle.

I don’t know whether my life has been a success or a failure. But not having any anxiety about becoming one instead of the other, and just taking things as they came along, I’ve had a lot of extra time to enjoy life. [Comedian Harpo Marx]

I was reading last week’s Times Book Review and came upon a small book by Jack Miles, whose day job for quite some time was being the general editor of the new Norton Anthology of World Religions. If you have any memories as an undergrad taking just about any English class, you likely owned a copy of one of the other Norton anthologies on English or American Literature. I still have mine. Anyway, this small book by Prof. Miles [Religion as We Know It: an Origin Story] is the new General Introduction to the Anthology. In it he describes how religion took hold around the world. A new idea for me was his assertion that in each society, religion, in part, rose out of that society’s customs, folk lore, history, and PLAY…as in fiction, stories and legend. When I teach drama and Intro to Theater, I have to have a lecture about--“The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.” This is a state of mind the reader or play-goer willingly enters when the story requires the reader to enter a world utterly unlike the one he/she inhabits. It had never occurred to me to apply the willing suspension of disbelief to religion, but it makes all the sense in the world. To believe what any religion teaches, one must take on faith that these scriptural stories have anything to do with actual history or fiction. The Abrahamic faiths all have scriptures that were put together to explain how we began, gave us rules for living a good life, and provided examples of miraculous events to prove that all that theology worked.

Whatever your own faith tradition, enjoy the stories, the Nativity or Hanukah plays or stories about Mohammed hearing the first bits of the Holy Qur’an in his cave. Gift giving and family celebrations are traditionally intended to embrace the poorest among us and give hope to the hopeless that there is a new day dawning on January 1. By Twelfth Night—January 6—we can take down the dry twig of a tree, put away the shiny balls and tinsel, have a rest…and go back to work. Oh, yeah, there’s also football…someone else can write that willing suspension of disbelief!

When I was young, I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work. [Writer George Bernard Shaw]

Movies and Such: Today is when the usual avalanche of movies arrives at the local cinemas. On the list for this year are: Cats, the final Star Wars film, joining some other good possibilities: Knives Out and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, both on the Times and Time ten best lists. On January 11, we’ll get the next Met Opera in HD: Wozzeck, that I already wrote about last time. West Virginia Public Theater is presenting their holiday special, A Charlie Brown Christmas in the Clay Concert Theater, [check the Post for dates and times].

Please have a wonderful holy-day season of your choice with music, laughter, shared memories, movies and good food…and football if you really must!

Hugs, Jim