Will the real God please stand up?

Nothing like dreading the deluge of treacly Christmas music on the radio to put a man off the anthropomorphized God of the Semitic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Let's face it: the only possible God is a specie of one who is nothing like us at all.

Traditionally, God is a He who supposedly cares whether you smoke, drink, eat pork or masturbate. This God is an egotist who wants lots of bowing and scraping, who picks winners and loser and demands invocations that use the particular human words chosen by the professionals of religion.

To my mind, God is an immaterial living being, perhaps a self-sustaining living energy (maybe she looks a bit like a multicolored flame), capable of bringing everything we know and everything we don't yet know into being. I doubt very much God speaks English or any human language, even though she intuitively knows everything that exists: she caused it to be.

My guess is that she is incredibly wise, having had sufficient forethought to produce history, from the big bang to the birth of the latest child ... and everything in between and beyond.

And, no, God doesn't really care whether you fornicate or fail to fast on certain days. Did you hear her yelp when Kennedy was shot or the planes crashed into the World Trade Center? I sure didn't.

Still, I am related to her as the one who, ultimately, made me be. To pray, all I need do is live. She has already spoken in reply everything for all time. Somewhere within what is around me is her "speech" to the universe, or at least they syllable of it I might just grasp, with a lot of luck.

When I do, I expect her to blow my socks off.

This Advent, I'm waiting for Godot

It takes going into a CVS drugstore, asking an employee where they have their Advent calendars and being met with a blank stare and a quizzical "an Advent calendar?" to realize that yes, Virginia, we live in a post-Christian era and there is no Santa Claus. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a conservative evangelical trying to "put Christ back in Christmas." I have other reasons for shopping for an Advent calendar (more on this later), but still, I am shocked.

It's as if I went up to a hot-dog stand and asked for a frankfurter and got "a frankfurter?" as a startled reply. The glue that holds a society together is a body of common knowledge that needs no explanation.

It wasn't that long ago that most people knew—as they had for about 1,500 years—that Advent is the season before Christmas. Named from the Latin adventus, meaning "coming," the season is observed by Christian churches in preparation for the feast of the birth of Jesus, traditionally celebrated by a Mass on that day, known in medieval England as Christesmas.

You knew at least some part of this, right?

Of course, there never was a Santa Claus, and one could debate whether there was a Jesus of Nazareth. If there was, he was certainly born one unknown day. In the second century of our era those in the know thought he had been born in the summer, say June. The celebration of Christmas, one of the lesser and most recent of the feasts in the Christian calendar, was purposely assigned a day in the middle of solstice debauchery associated with pagan and Roman gods.

Just as Lent was marked early on as a period of expectation for Easter—historically the first and most important of the Christian feasts—Advent came into being as a period of awaiting Christmas, beginning on the fourth Sunday before Christmas.

The Advent calendar is a Lutheran tradition, mostly for children. Physically it is a large rectangular card with 25 "windows," one for each day of December leading up to Christmas and one for the feast itself. Some have little boxes with candy or trinkets behind each window.

Like the Christmas tree it is not, strictly speaking, a Christian artifact. It's just, as a Jewish friend of mine said, one more item in a "heavily accessorized religion."

Why does someone who vaguely believes in God, go out looking for an Advent calendar? Because the idea of awaiting the birth of some presence of God is pleasant, even if it is only in one's heart, and even if it is based on an unproven, largely mythical, story. So sue me.

Now, does anyone know where I can find an Advent calendar?

What heaven was, what it could be

Heaven was always to me the afterlife alternative to hell. Now comes Justin Moore's "If Heaven Wasn't So Far Away" to speak of heaven as the afterlife itself. Indeed, what kind of being would God be if she consigned anyone to hell?

Let's be clear. I know full well that the mature Christian understanding of heaven is of unimaginably joyful wonder in the presence of the God for whom we have yearned in every yen, want and lust; and hell as the prison of one's own unfulfilled obsessive anxieties.

Until recently, I always despised the twangy, syrupy sound and simplistic lyrics of country music. I still dislike the sneaky conservative and low-church evangelical agenda of some singers. I cannot be proud of where I was born, since I had nothing to do with that; and heaven deliver us from "bahble"-based values, such as hypocrisy, self-righteousness and hateful looking down on others.

In recent times, however, rediscovering God as wonderful beyond imagination, creed or philosophical system, I find the old theological categories I discarded years ago useless. I'm not convinced by Christian moral theology, much less its teleology's heaven.

Moore provides a more palatable image when he sings of packing up the kids and driving to heaven for a day to introduce them to their grandpa. (I once woke up with precisely that thought.)

He touches markers familiar to Baby Boomers: Vietnam and those who died too young. He also evokes the intimacies of Everyman, imagining meeting with his deceased bird dog Bo (a bow to the President Obama's daughters?) to go "huntin' one more time."

It's a heaven so close you can go there for the day and drive back. A heaven I could believe in, with healing and recovery and laugh and love. Amen.