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by John Horgan
Garrison, New York--I think I
finally understand the attraction of Christmas. Actually, my wife deserves
the credit. Three years ago she decided that our family should celebrate
winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, which falls a few days
before Christmas.
To be honest, I wasn't eager to
cram another event into our frantic holiday schedule. As a lapsed
Catholic, I had a knee-jerk aversion toward rituals and other trappings of
religion, whether Christianity or voodoo.
Nevertheless, an hour or so after
nightfall on Dec. 21, I dutifully pulled on my coat and boots and skidded
down our icy driveway and into a field bordering our property. Near a
clump of skeletal trees on the field's far side, I found a circle of
stones enclosing a heap of sticks, which my wife and kids had gathered
earlier that day. With the help of a chunk of artificial kindling, several
sheets of newspaper and a dozen matches, I got the sticks burning, just
before I spotted the candle lanterns of my wife and two children bobbing
toward me.
We were only out there half an
hour or so. The night was thumpingly cold, and smoke kept blowing in our
faces. My son and daughter were more interested in putting sticks into the
fire than in listening to their parents' makeshift creation stories about
the Man on the Moon and other celestial beings. My daughter, then four
years old, singed her hair, and the tip of her mitten melted. Glancing up
at the stars and full moon, I felt anew that ancient sense of wonder at
the improbability of life.
This was not exactly news to me.
As a science journalist, I knew that scientists don't have a clue how our
universe came into being, or why it took this particular form out of an
infinitude of possibilities, including nonexistence. Nor does anyone know
how inanimate matter on our little planet coalesced into living creatures,
let alone creatures that could invent reality TV. Science, you might say,
has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a
miracle.
It is one thing to know
intellectually that life is a miracle. It's quite another, however, to see
it. Saints and poets aside, most of us rarely do. The psychiatrist Arthur
Deikman blames our pinched perception on two innate tendencies, which he
calls instrumentality and automatization. Instrumentality is our
compulsion to view the world through the filter of our selfish interests.
Automatization is our propensity to learn tasks so thoroughly that we
perform them with little or no conscious thought.
No doubt these traits have helped
us survive. Automatization is a particularly attractive cognitive feature,
because it allows us to carry out more than one task at the same time; we
can fret over our plummeting 401(k)'s while driving our children to their
school Christmas concert. But instrumentality and automatization can also
cause us to sleepwalk through much of life.
Yet now and then, we do not see
the world as something to be manipulated for our ends. This recognition,
which Dr. Deikman calls deautomatization, is the goal of all contemplative
traditions. When an aspirant asked the 15th-century Zen master Ikkyu to
write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word:
"Attention." The dissatisfied aspirant asked, "Is that all?" This time,
Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention."
Spiritual practices such as
meditation, yoga and prayer can help us pay attention. So can art, poetry
and music.
And so can religious rituals.
This, I suspect, is why so many people who aren't otherwise religious
still celebrate holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah. We especially need
these rituals in this most benighted of seasons, when we are prone to
dwelling on life's darker aspects.
The bugbear haunting Christianity
and other faiths is the problem of evil. But sitting with my family in
that circle of stones on winter solstice helped me see that birth, beauty,
love and laughter also pose a problem. How could all this have come about?
It's a mystery, which no theory or theology can possibly dispel.
My family celebrates winter
solstice every year now, along with Christmas and New Year's. Even when
it's unseasonably mild, as it was four nights ago, I still look forward to
returning to the warmth of our home and flipping through an album of
photos from the year just past. Remember last winter when we visited
Grandpa in Colorado, and your brother learned to snowboard and your sister
got sick? Remember Harley the starling, who pestered the other birds in
the aviary so much last summer that Mommy brought him in the house, where
he drove Daddy crazy?
The kids may squabble over who
gets to turn the pages. I'll brood over a deadline, or plot how I'm going
to ditch the family tomorrow to play pond hockey. But for at least a
moment I'll pay attention and see. I won't know who or what to thank, but
I'll be grateful nonetheless.
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