For a ten-year stretch in my life I was fortunate to spend every Christmas in Jamaica. In Jamaica, Christmas is a far more modest affair than it is here in the US. For sure, during the days leading up to "the Christmas," the markets are packed with shoppers and the transports whizzing up and down the coastal road are stuffed to over-flowing with passengers. But people are generally poor, at least where I stayed (on the southwest coast), and gift giving is relatively low-key or even nonexistent. Followers of the Rastafarian religion, for instance, eschew the holiday all together - calling it "Babylon Christmas" - preferring instead to observe Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas on January 7. And some families are more apt to observe Kwanza rather than Christmas.
For most Jamaicans, Christmas is a time for family gatherings and renewing old friendships. Because so many Jamaicans have to find work abroad - in Brooklyn, London, Toronto, Amsterdam, Stuttgart - there are always relatives who come home - "back a yard" they say - to see loved ones.
Where I always stayed, the family patriarch, "Daddy," would send for a goat to be slaughtered in the backyard on Christmas morning. Shortly after sun-up, the goat would arrive, usually in the "boot" of a Toyota, get strung up behind the house, and then summarily bled and butchered by a crew of rum-swigging cooks. As the meat stewed in a pot full of curry spices and vegetables, the head was seared over charcoal, stripped of its skin, and the brains and bones boiled for goat's head soup - called "mannish water" because it's "good for the bamboo." You get my drift.
Many people in Jamaica also go to church on Christmas day, and even many more, especially those working in the tourist industry - Jamaica's largest industry by far - have to go to work. So in general, Christmas ends up being a fairly subdued event in the Jamaican calendar. In contrast, the day after Christmas - Boxing Day - is a wild party scene.
Boxing Day is the day for many Jamaicans to go to the beach. Busloads of Jamaicans come down from the hills to line the shores and romp in the water. Jerk shacks, serving pepper-spiked chicken, pork, and fish roasted over hot coals, send up clouds of wood smoke all along the coastal road. Young men push drink carts up and down the tarmac selling Ting and Red Stripe "hot or cold." And wherever you go, there always seems to be a pick-up truck blasting reggae and dance hall rhythms from a sound system on its bed. In the evenings, the crowds move into the discos along the beach and party into the wee hours of the morning, regardless of whether tomorrow is a work day or not (many Jamaicans who are fortunate to have employment work 6-day work weeks, courtesy of the IMF.)
So where did Boxing Day come from? Most Jamaicans who I posed that question to aren't really sure. And in fact, the origin of the holiday is unclear. According to Wikipedia, the holiday dates back to Europe during the Middle Ages and either has something to do with opening up the church's "box" for the poor or with the upper classes giving charitable gifts in boxes to their servants.
But based on the Jamaicans who ventured to suggest a theory to me, the holiday stems from the custom of slaveholders on the plantation to "box up" the leftovers from their Christmas feast and give it to the servants and fieldworkers as a reward for their toil on the previous day. So it was the one day of the year that people on the lowest realm in society could live fairly care free, with nutritious food provided to them and the yolk of unrewarded labor lifted off their shoulders for a change.
That the poor people in life should celebrate the day that their overlords deign to show mercy on them seems ironic. But the idea that the poor should wait for the scraps of the rich before they get to have anything resembling the good life is certainly commonplace - even conventional wisdom. For example, early in my writing career I interviewed a wealthy baron in the global textile industry who proudly referred to himself as "a table-and-scraps man."
"You know," he bragged, "the rich man eats at his table and wipes the scraps off so those below can have something." The article I was interviewing him for was to run in an issue - the "Christmas issue" - of the in-house corporate rag for the company he owned. The editor discreetly deleted that passage before publication.
In the US, "table and scraps" is better known as "trickle down." Or more recently in the context of the tax debate, "job growth." We have to, we are told, continually give rich people a break so a little of their wealth can trickle down to our less well off.
For many, this code of conduct is a matter of biblical proportion. However, when you actually look up the passage in the Bible where this truism is derived from, the story is a quite a bit different from what is widely understood.
In Matthew 15:21-28, when a Cannanite woman (a non-Jew) begs Jesus to heal her stricken daughter, he compares her caste in life to that of a "dog," declaring, "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."
"Yes, Lord," she replies, "but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."
Jesus is so humbled by this desperate call to reason, her "faith" he calls it, that he then shows mercy and answers the woman's request.
For Jamaicans, and indeed most of the poor people of the world, dining on the crumbs from the master's plate is virtually a matter of course. But while they make that worldview into a holiday, we in the US have historically believed that life is supposed to be different. In this country, there has always been the explicit promise that instead of the rich man's table and the floor below, there is a level playing field where all are allowed to pursue their measure of happiness.
This is what makes the current situation so disturbing. Because what we are witnessing in the US is the reality of the developing world crashing down on the shores of our less-well-off communities. Public schools are being reduced to hollow shells of their former selves. Families are being turned out of their foreclosed homes. And our economy is driving men and women from their jobs or making them work two or three jobs just to keep up with their rising healthcare costs.
And whereas Jesus showed the Cananite mercy, our "masters" in DC and Wall Street seem intent on doing anything but that.
So happy Boxing Day. The third world come to America. Just without the party.
In our preparation for the New Year, let's pause to consider if that's the world we want our children to inherit. Or do we want to reassert that bold promise made so long ago that no, life can be different here. That there's a new testament we can live by. And the master's crumbs are the indifferent remains of a failed ethic.
This time of year my thoughts naturally turn to God and religion. Not because I'm conventionally religious: I'm not. Not because I have any certainty that God exists: I don't. But this is the most religion-oriented season for me: I hear and sing lots of Christmas carols with God and Jesus mentioned; I go to church for Christmas Eve services, and sometimes on Sunday morning as well; I listen to (and sometimes am even asked to say) lots of family pre-dinner prayers; I may well get into family conversations or even debates about theology and faith; and I do think of my religious upbringing and the Bible I read so much growing up, and still do fairly often. Talking politics and religion are two of my favorite things to do. The first one is my job, so I get to do it a lot. The second I mainly get to do with my family (outside of the random blog post), so that is part of why I enjoy this season a lot.
I stopped thinking or worrying much about whether there was a God about 35 years ago, when I was in high school. Once I realized that there was no way to be sure what the answers were to whether God existed, whether there was an afterlife and what kind it might be, whether there was a soul and what that meant, and all those other metaphysical issues, I stopped worrying about it much. I figured if God was the jealous, hot-tempered, unpredictable, sometimes even genocidal God of much of the Old Testament, I was screwed anyway: I have never been very good with that kind of authority figure. And I figured if I had to guess right as to which of the many religious dogmas that claimed to be the only path to salvation, my odds really sucked and I wouldn't make the cut anyway.
However, I did come away from my upbringing with certain core beliefs still intact. The moral teachings of the Jesus of the Gospels have never left me: treating others as I would wish to be treated; loving mercy and kindness and compassion toward those weaker and more vulnerable than I; being generally non-judgmental toward others, but caring passionately about justice. And I was raised to believe that at the end of my days, I would ultimately be judged by how I treated the poorest and most desperate among us: whether I fed the hungry, whether I gave thirsty water to drink, whether I clothed the naked, whether I gave shelter to the homeless, whether I helped those in prison and welcomed the stranger. That belief has never left me, although the judgment I expect does not necessarily come from God, but from my own sense of self worth and from the people I know.
I come out of my upbringing with the sense that something binds us humans together spiritually, with the feeling that we are something more holy than just a bucket of bolts. The humanity we share feels deeper than just a common ancestor 5,000,000 or so years back. I don't know what that common connection is, whether a godly creator, a universal soul, a collective memory as Carl Jung described it, a "force that flows through all things" as George Lucas described it, or something else. So maybe I do believe in some form of God after all, although I sure don't understand what it might be. I do still like to get into all those theological arguments back home, and I think if there is a god(s), he/she/it/they must have made us so we argue constantly about the existence of one mostly for its own enjoyment. I do some theological debating via email with a very conservative, very Christian nephew, and the way I put it to him recently was this:
This arguing back and forth is always interesting and enjoyable. But again, argument is all it can ever be, because the world of spirituality, of the soul, of God if he exists, is unknowable. However, in a sense, I do have faith, in the way the Greek word for faith is originally meant: trust. I trust there is a spiritual force in the world greater than myself, but I don't invest a dogma with that trust, I don't claim to understand what it all means. I have trust in something greater than myself, but I have doubt at the same time, because I don't claim knowledge or certainty about the unseen.
In my view, the Bible from its very beginning never had a single message. When its editors started to put together various books and oral traditions into a scripture, they happily and intentionally included different stories and different visions of God, sometimes literally side by side as in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And in those early days, writers and editors are known to have edited heavily, written new things to fit the political and spiritual needs of the times, and given entire new meanings and interpretations to the stories. These different visions and ideas and philosophies and interpretations made the Bible more holy in my view, not less. The fact that God casually walked among us in some parts of the Bible, and could not be seen or spoken to in another; that faith was more essential to Paul but works were more essential to James; that man was created before the animals and plants in one version of Genesis, and after in another; that Jesus was in utter despair on the cross in one story but peaceful and accepting in another: these variations and contradictions make the Bible all the more beautiful to me because they show the writers were wrestling with their beliefs about God. There was no dogma that all must follow; there were debates and ideas about what God was and intended all in the same scripture.
And so the debate goes on. We are meant to struggle with it. We are meant to wrestle with it. We become holier when we do so. At the end of the day, I have faith that what we believe has nothing to do with our soul's fate, unless that belief leads us to evil acts. Faith is not dogma or doctrine, it is trust in a spirit of goodness that we all have access to. And if we love our neighbor as ourselves, if we treat others as we would wish to be treated, if we love mercy and kindness, if we treat the least of these as if they were Jesus himself, we can come to the end of our days knowing that we have lived with grace and go happily to our resting place.
So that's my quasi-religious, somewhat-agnostic Christmas message. Let the debate go on, as long as us humans exist, but hopefully we can do it in a way where we aren't killing and condemning each other while argue. And hopefully, when we stop debating and start acting, we can embrace a community where we look out for each other in a way where the weak and the ill and the hungry and the stranger are welcomed into that community as brothers and sisters.
You all recall that Ralph Reed was the head of the Christian Coalition for many years and is still considered a leader of the Christian Right, fully forgiven for all his sins.
And you'll also recall that Elliot Spitzer is an immoral libertine who had to be run out of politics for sleeping with a prostitute.
Here' the tail end of the quoted interchange:
SPITZER: It's impossible to get a job out there. You cannot say to those folks -- we should not as a society say, we won't give you enough money to put food on the table for your kids. And the threshold that you're talking about, everybody agrees there should be a threshold. And you know what? We can set it when unemployment gets below 7 percent, 6 percent, 5 percent -- pick a number that we can agree upon that makes sense but not when it's 9.6 percent, or realistically, 16, 17, 18 percent.
This is simply not humane to say to people we won't give you food -- money for food and yet we're giving a tax break to millionaires. That's not the society I believe the United States represents.
REED: Well, that's the problem with making fiscal policy based on the misplaced compassion that doesn't work. The empirical evidence, Eliot, is very clear, which is that people are more likely to reenter the workforce and find a real job that carries with it dignity, self support and no longer being dependent upon the government when those unemployment benefits run out.
That's the empirical evidence.
And then digby says:
The empirical evidence that there are no jobs is simply not relevant to Reed, who evidently truly believes that the long term unemployed are all malingering cheats who need to be "motivated" and that government has no business being compassionate. It's a perfect example of the moral depravity and selfishness of the Christian Right. Meanwhile, it's the horrible (Jewish) commie libertine who's arguing for compassion for his fellow Americans --- as Jesus would surely do.
But this is surely far too intellectual. And far too secular, too.
So, what I want to know is where in the Bible does a poor man come to Jesus, asking what he needs to do to be saved, and Jesus tells him: sell yourself and all your family and all your descendents-to-be into slavery, and take all the money you get and give it to Pharaoh for a tax break.
Just show me one place in the Bible where it says that, and I'll sign up for the GOP economic program--BAM!--just like that.
Much to my amazement, a post I did on Christianity and conservatives on May 10th has generated as much buzz and reaction as anything I have ever written. I have been quite surprised by this, as it was a post I wrote as much for myself, my family and a few old friends as it was to generate a wider debate. The issues I raised go over well-covered ground by many other writers and preachers: that Jesus identified far more with the poor than the rich, that he treasured the beloved community far more than rugged individualism, that he would be appalled by the Social Darwinist, selfishness-is-a-virtue brand of conservative politics currently in vogue in the modern conservative movement.
But it did get people going. There have been at least a half dozen posts written in response; I have gotten hundreds of email and Facebook responses, many by people I don't know; I have been asked by bloggingheads.tv to do a debate with a conservative minister tomorrow- Bill Shuler- and as of this post, there are more than 2,300 comments on the post at Huffington Post, which blows by my old record for post responses by close to 2,000. Apparently, this post really touched a nerve.
The responses I enjoyed the most were the foul mouthed, sometimes even threatening, nasty grams from all those "true Christians" who look forward to seeing me in Hell. That's always fun. But I was also touched by the large number of warm, thoughtful responses who wanted me to know that they agreed with me and were glad someone was saying what I said. I got the sense that there are a lot of people who are tired of conservatives loudly quoting the Bible and claiming to speak for all Christians when they really don't know much about the religion they claim to speak for. I also did have some Christians write me who misinterpreted my post, and thought that I was saying that all Christians are conservative-they wanted to assure me that was definitely not true, as they were both a committed Christian and a strong progressive. Since I have a lot of family members and dear friends who are both of those things, I did not think that, but was glad to get the additional reassurance.
The funniest response someone sent me was from a man who, among other things, asked if I was anti-Jewish, because some people when they move to the left go against Jews and Israel. I hadn't heard that one before, but its always refreshing to get some completely new (and utterly off the wall) question or response.
One of the most interesting blog posts published in response was by a conservative writer named Jameson Graber. He contended that I had made two mistakes. The first, he said, was that I viewed economics as a "zero-sum game". The second thing he talked about as a mistake was creating a false dichotomy between rich and poor, because "prosperity comes from all of us".
I respond to these, and talk more about this, in the extended entry.
31 "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
37 "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
40 "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
Deal with it, so-called Christians. Or else...
41 "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
44 "They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
45 "He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
46 "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."
I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church web site," Beck urged his audience. "If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"
31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me....
We'll get to the rest of what Jesus has to say below, in the last section. But first, a word from His churches....
You have to love the pluck and persistence and creativity of the conservative movement. They always give us something to talk about.
Earlier today, I was debating as to whether to write about health care (my most frequent topic these days), or jobs, an incredibly urgent issue there's been some important articles about in the last 48 hours. And I will of course get back to those centrally important topics soon. But before I do, I have to spend a minute focused on my conservative movement friends. I really have to congratulate them on their creativity.
Some folks I know have been surprised at the level of violent and vitriolic rhetoric they have worked themselves into since Obama took office. Bringing assault weapons to Presidential events, while wearing t-shirts referencing quotes about spilling the blood of tyrants? Talking openly about secession and armed rebellion? Saying that giving women the right to vote was a bad idea? Saying that Obama hated white people? It's all been done in recent weeks by movement conservatives, openly, publicly. I haven't been surprised, because as a student of history, and a staffer for Bill Clinton, I have seen all of these rhetorical flourishes before throughout history.
But every once in a while, folks in the conservative movement surprise me and come up with something new. And this one is a doozy. Apparently the folks at Conservapedia are re-translating the Bible to make it fit better with conservative ideology.
Those among us who are familiar with the Bible will recall that Jesus Christ himself was an active member of the health care community as he traveled about the Holy Land.
It is reported that he practiced within multiple medical specialties, and his works as both an ophthalmologist and a neurologist are recounted within the verses of the Gospels.
But what if Jesus had been practicing medicine in the therapeutic environment we're familiar with today?
In today's conversation we'll be tagging along with Jesus as he takes a few calls at his HMO's Customer Care Center-and by the time we get done you should be able to bring a whole new take to those discussions you've been having about why reform matters.
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