I’M DREAMING OF A WET CHRISTMAS: The last time I went to Mass on Christmas, I was good and drunk. It was Midnight Mass at the Old Mission and the year was 1989. With me at the time was my brother Josh; he was drunk too. He had just gotten his PhD in philosophy. To celebrate, we’d just gone to the movie Road House, where the main character, played to perfection by the pulchritudinous Patrick Swayze, was a badass bar-house bouncer with a philosophy degree. Somewhere along the way, alcohol was bound to get involved.
I’m not sure we learned anything about the birth of the baby Jesus. But we were reminded how delicious repressed laughter can be. Except for us, it wasn’t repressed at all. There is another word for it. Obnoxious. And we were especially so.
Either way, the Mission was packed. I seem to remember there being an overflow room. I seem to also remember being struck by a woman in tight, shiny, black leather pants. The air itself seemed to sweat.
At some point, the priest got around to his sermon; he took the opportunity to inveigh against what he called “Christmas Catholics.” My brother and I doubled over. We were weeping. Couldn’t this guy read a room? Everyone there was a Christmas Catholic. The angrier he got, the funnier we found it. Yes, he was right. But just because something is true is hardly reason enough to say it.
Back then, I still had a bone to pick with the church. Nine years of Catholic school might do that. Somewhere along the way, I became fixated on the idea of religion as an instrument of social control.
Today, I might ask my younger self, “And that’s a bad thing because …?”
I guess the answer will always depend upon who is being controlled, at what expense, and for whose benefit.
Back then, we had a Polish Pope for whom the dictatorship of the proletariat had been the ideological fig leaf for his country’s imperial subjugation by what our country’s 40th president, Ronald Reagan — and also a former part-time Santa Barbara resident — termed “The Evil Empire.” Those, no doubt, were more innocent times. Today, by contrast, President Number 45 and 47 is all but giving the reincarnation of that Evil Empire a blank check.
But I digress.
Little surprise that the Pope back then was so hostile to anything smacking of “Liberation Theology” in Central America, where the United States was happily funding every tin-horn dictator and death-squad comandante fluent in the bloody rhetoric of anti-communism.
Even so and even then, things weren’t quite that simple. I, of all people, should have appreciated that. When I worked as a tenant union organizer in a previous incarnation — at which I was utterly abysmal, by the way — the Catholic Church paid my salary. In fact, the Catholic Church was at that time — and probably still today — one of the largest single donors to nonprofit organizations in the country engaged in grassroots social-justice organizing. It runs an outfit called the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which is funded by all the money collected in American Catholic churches on one Sunday of the year. This year, I think it gave away close to $12 million. Not a lot these days, admittedly, but still not nothing either.
This inconvenient fact has conveniently escaped the notice of all those right-tilting people who have turned their hatred for George Soros — and all the social-justice crusaders trying to get the poor a seat at the table — into a drinking game.
I know no one needs a political disquisition right now. But did you know that St. Nicholas of Myra — the third-century Turkish guy after whom Santa Claus was named — was a rich guy who secretly gave away his money to the poor? We are told he snuck into the homes of three girls facing lives of prostitution and dropped off the gold needed for dowries so they could get married instead. And perhaps most grisly, St. Nicholas saved three young boys whose bodies had been chopped up by evil innkeepers and stashed away in their respective salt cellars to be served to unsuspected travelers for supper. Somehow — miraculously, you might say — St. Nicholas brought them back to life.
If you ever wondered why Christmas is celebrated December 25, you should. To the extent there’s any evidence, Jesus was likely born sometime in March, April, or May. There’s no evidence to suggest December 25. Typically, in December in that part of the world, it was too cold for the shepherds to have been out in the fields, like the Bible says they were. The idea of Christmas falling on December 25 wouldn’t surface until hundreds of years after Jesus’s death. One theory holds that the early Christians strategically fused the birth of Christ’s celebration onto a popular pagan festival known as Saturnalia that happened to fall on that same day. Smart branding. During Saturnalia, Romans dispensed of their togas and wore brightly colored clothes instead. They draped green boughs everywhere, gave each other gifts. Oh, and the other things? During Saturnalia, slaves would no longer serve their masters; their masters would serve the slaves. Everyone was equal, excepting women, of course.
Maybe I’ll hit this year’s Midnight Mass. This time, I’ll try not to be so obnoxious.
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