My brother, who is wiser than me, has always said that the best kind of story to tell at Christmas is a ghost story. I suppose Charles Dickens knew this, too, as he gave us the urtext. And there is something decidedly spooky about Christmas, in spite of all efforts to ghostbust it with Mariah Carey and plastic trees. Christmas is haunted by the sense of something immanent but unmanifested. In the air but tauntingly out of reach, like a wonderful dream that slips from memory on waking, or the firefly that evades your cupped hands on a midsummer night. A promise made but never kept.
This was the promise of a better world.
I’m going to tell you a ghost story. But wait…
“Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy.” That was the angel’s hallelujah. And then, the best, the passage about the multitude of the heavenly host singing Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men. The choristers were the shimmering stars, each one an individual voice, all pulsing as one perfect chord.
“Yeah, right,” says the Grinch. “How’s that goodwill thing going for ya?” Tell it to the children in Gaza, or to the families of the women gang-raped and mutilated at the Nova music festival. Talk about a bait and switch. The Ghost of Christmas Past rolls out a bloody canvas stretching from the mindless brutality of the Dark and Middle Ages to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The Ghost of Christmas Present gifts us with Darfur, Nagorna-Karabakh, and October 7. And the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come forecasts World War III and the coming of an AI demigod, if we’re lucky.
True, true. It all seems to make a mockery of Jesus’s vows that “the last shall be the first” and that “the kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” not to say the overreach of Christendom. But allow yourself to imagine that he knew something we didn’t and still don’t know, or rather, that he saw something we don’t. Something happening right under our noses. Bats and carrier pigeons can see things unseen, in their own way. This would just be a higher-dimensional version. Like Carlos Castaneda looking sidelong to see the ancestral spirits. When Jesus told Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world, we assume he meant that it was “up there,” in some Olympian realm beyond the stars, reachable only through the death that wasn’t really dying, or maybe if you were Moses and Elijah or Enoch. But what if his message to his disciples that the kingdom of heaven was at hand didn’t mean “mark your calendars” or “pack your bags.” What if at hand meant something more like within your grasp, if only you were able to see the world he saw? What if Jesus’s most revolutionary act was to call for a shift in perspective? A new way of seeing.
There’s more than a hint of this in the “non-canonical” Gospel of Saint Thomas, written on papyrus in the first centuries of the common era and found in an earthenware jar in Egypt in 1945. It is non-canonical because the Church fathers decided it didn’t belong alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the others, which is halfway to heretical, and probably why it was hidden in the first place. What was ‘problematic’--to borrow a contemporary catchword--about the Gospel of St. Thomas was that it put bold words in the mouth of Jesus that didn’t jibe with official Church doctrine, such as the notion that “the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”
(1) His disciples said to him: “The kingdom — on what day will it come?”
(2) “It will not come by watching (and waiting for) it.
(3) They will not say: ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’
(4) Rather, the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”
To put twenty-one centuries of theology into a very tiny nutshell, this conflicted with the mythos of Judgement Day and precepts like salvation through the Church and its priests—not to mention original sin—and to be very postmodern about it, threatened to upend the prevailing power dynamic. If heaven is here and now and not there and then, concepts like sin and damnation have a whole different and non-chronological meaning, and there is no need for an authoritarian structure like the Church.
(51)
(1) His disciples said to him: “When will the resurrection of the dead take place, and when will the new world come?” (2) He said to them: “That (resurrection) which you are awaiting has (already) come, but you do not recognize it.”
The incurious soul, scrolling this on TikTok, will say, “Cool. That means I’m already saved and can do whatever I want, including fucking over as many people as I feel like fucking over.” No, things are never that simple, especially not with Jesus, who voiced as many paradoxes as any Zen master. Part of learning to see that invisible world was to live as if it was already here, and that meant living in accord with its own moral precepts, the most important of which was, of course, the Golden Rule. Why would you want to steal food from a baby’s mouth if the thing you hungered for was already yours? This kind of “as above, so below” thinking is also present in Buddhism, if not throughout all deep Asian spiritual practice. To sin is to act in such a way that you are blinded to the sight of that new world, as if suddenly going from color to monochrome, crashing from some ecstatic high, or being dropped from the stars to the gutter. What greater ‘punishment’ than to be deprived of that sublime sight once you’ve had it?
(80) Jesus says:
(1) “Whoever has come to know the world has found the (dead) body.
(2) But whoever has found the (dead) body, of him the world is not worthy.”
Or:
(21) Jesus says:
“Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”
The “dead body” is existence stripped of awareness, which is, I suppose, another way of saying, with Socrates, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” And once we become aware of the corpse and its dreadful stink, we’ve already escaped it. It is not worthy of us. We have been, in a word, resurrected.
What does the Kingdom look like? Well, I’ve only had glimpses, and many of these second-hand. But I have a hunch that when we peer through the incandescent pine boughs at the world made by Christmas, and feel that shiver of recognition that some one, some thing else is in the room with us; when we feel that wistfulness that makes some of us sad in a very deep way at this time of year, especially when we fail to accept the gifts it offers while knowing they are ours for the taking. When we glimpse the possibility of communion: with our loved ones, ourselves, and whatever it is that’s in the room with us, we are getting faint glimmerings of what was meant by these words:
(50) Jesus says:
(1) “If they say to you: ‘Where do you come from?’ (then) say to them: ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being of its own accord…”
“Where the light came into being of its own accord.” That sounds an awful lot like the beginning of the universe. And possibly also a really nice place.
But I promised you a ghost story, so let me close with a short one.
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Bob drove home with the turkey resting like a sleeping child on the passenger seat beside him. It had come fresh from the farm, plucked, gutted and dressed, and though this gave him some pause, the fact of its recent slaughter also gave it a special weight beyond its eighteen pounds. He was, like the hunters of old, bringing his kill home to his family, and there was righteousness in this. He could already smell it roasting, and in this there was not just pleasure, but the good feeling that comes from providing.
It was Christmas Eve, and he’d deliberately waited till now to pick up the bird because he wanted to enter his house like Bob Cratchit after Scrooge’s epiphany, triumphantly crying. “God bless us, every one.” His anticipation was so great that he missed the fact that the stars had shifted position in the northern sky, and that the little strip mall that had, for as long as he’d lived in this town, been crowned at this time of year with an enormous neon MERRY CHRISTMAS was as dark as a country lane.
When he entered the house with the turkey in his arms, his wife looked up from her jigsaw puzzle, first with bemusement, then, seeing the blood dripping from the plastic wrapping, with alarm, and said, “Did you kill a child?” Bob, moving not a foot from where he stood at the threshold, blinked. She was wearing something midway between a kimono and a hajib, and her hair was severely tied back. He scanned the parlor and asked, “Where are the children?” “At work, of course,” she answered. “Where else would they be?” “Homework?” She narrowed her eyes. “At the plant. They don’t stop until seven.” Now he was certain that something was very much amiss, with his wife, who seemed to be not at all herself, and maybe with more than that. Then realizing that the house was entirely devoid of Christmas decorations, a soft panic seized his throat and began to move down into his lungs.
What happened to the Christmas tree?
She followed his survey of the premises with growing bewilderment.
Are you all right, Mr. Davis?
Indeed, his name was Mr. Robert Davis, but she had only addressed him so twice in the course of their acquaintance, once when, as a stranger, she’d handed him his airline ticket over the check-in counter, and once, in teasing jest, on their wedding night. Now, finally, he set the turkey down.
What day is this? he asked.
December the Twenty-Fourth.
And what holiday do we celebrate tomorrow?
She stood, smoothed the skirts of her gown, and said, There are no state holidays until the Imperium on March 1, and then only if the magistrate declares it has been earned. You know this, Mr. Davis.
The experience of the uncanny—the unheimlich—is talked and written of, but few of us have really known it, because in order to know it, we must feel either a profound sense of displacement or the certainty that what we are looking at is not what we see. The first impulse will be that something has gone wrong with the world, and the second that something has gone wrong with us. And we will be dizzy, as if the ground had shifted, which, for Bob, it most definitely had. He stumbled as he picked up the turkey and carried it to the kitchen counter. Then he collapsed onto the sofa. This was his house but not, his wife but not, his life but another’s. And there would be no Christmas this year.
Bob was not a metaphysician, nor had he ever partaken of hallucinogenic drugs. He couldn’t say to himself, “I am being shown something. Some counterfactual reality that I’m supposed to learn from.” He couldn’t look at his discomfitingly altered wife and think, “this is like a dream.” Few of us could have in his condition, because he wasn’t simply being shown a counterfactual reality: he was already halfway living it. While he had his wits, he tried to make sense of it as some elaborate April Fool’s joke, staged at the wrong time of year by his wife and children, but what prankster would go so far?
The doorbell rang and his wife went dutifully to answer. Three small children, underdressed in the bitter cold, stood with hands out, one of them, who had a harelip, singing feebly. Bob’s pulse sped as he staggered up from the sofa, saying, I’ll get them some food, honey, because he knew she kept extra on-hand. Any hungry stranger knocking at the door on Christmas Eve was the Christ child, or so their great-grandmothers had taught them and they still taught their children.
She slammed the door, shook the imagined filth from her hands, and said I thought the trucks had gotten the last of them. Guiding him back to the sofa, she said, We received notice from the magistrate today. They drew your number. You’re to participate in the next thinning. An encampment on the edge of Fredo’s Wood. Five-hundred of these parasites. I think they have in mind to irradiate them this time. Less mess. You’ll get a stipend, like last time, and it will pay the tax the magistrate has decreed.
When next Bob rose from the couch, he rose in this tripped-into new Reich, his memory of the old world draining like blood into soil. By the next morning, after an uncommonly deep sleep, it was the only world he knew. He did not know of the things that weren’t, which included many small acts of kindness and a large number of the laws that had governed the other world, among them the U.S. Constitution and the International Code of Human Rights, as well as a very great amount of art and literature. Existence was quite functional here, and few asked for more, except on the decreed Imperiums, when for a day people were permitted to engage in all sorts of mayhem and debauchery. He didn’t know it, of course, but he’d slipped into a closed spacetime loop somewhere between the turkey farm and home, and this was his life if things had gone differently two millennia or so back.
And yet, there were long nights in the blue haze of midwinter, after the children had returned from the plant and his wife had gone to bed, when he sat quietly, restlessly poking at the coals in the wood burning stove, and felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck rise in concert and the sure knowledge that someone else was beside him, that something else was afoot in the deep, silent snows outside. And on these nights he would sometimes hear voices on the air, and his eyes would moisten, as if a gray cloud of burning frankincense had stung them into recall. But there was nothing to recall, because it has always been as it was, right? Mercy might be something occasionally and abstractly granted by magistrates, but it had never entered the world in flesh as a deliverer, had it? Then it came again, the flush of heat on his cold skin, the tuneful clink of sheep’s bells in the broad valley, the shudder of air. And for the length of a photoflash, he saw his house as it had been, with lights aglow and turkey roasting, and the Angels of the Heavenly Host singing Hallelujah.
When it was gone, only the haunting remained.
Using the Gospel of Thomas was enlightened and enlightening !
The 'Christmas spirit', and all it entails, stem from the nature of life as unveiled by your pick of Jesus' very powerful words. Great work and insight, thank you !!
Amazing! You are a stellar « teller of stories »