Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm: Fear or Fear Not? (4 of 5)

Empires Say, “Fear! But We’ll Protect You!”; Angels Say, “Fear Not!”

For this year’s season of Advent-Christmas, Lee Van Ham is presenting other ways to look at this special season, his comments rooted in the cosmological nature of the birth narratives told in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.

Joseph was in a fix. He’d been excited about his upcoming marriage to Mary, but she just told him she was pregnant. As Matthew tells the story, Joseph was a man who lived righteously—in a good way. If he made a big deal about how Mary says she got pregnant, he might save face in the community for himself, but Mary would then bear all the social disgrace. She could even be stoned. Even if she was allowed to live, she had no economic viability, being unmarried, pregnant, and a peasant teenager. Joseph couldn’t resolve his dilemma, caught in fears of violating either social expectations or his own sense of what was right. What to do?

Then one night an angel came to Joseph while he was in a dream-state and told him not to be afraid. He should go ahead and marry his love, Mary. This message from the cosmos’ angel trumped Joseph’s fears. So he did it. He joined Mary in daring to believe that, consistent with the cosmos, as delivered by the angel messenger, God was calling them to live a different paradigm from the one that had shaped them as well as the rest of the Galilean countryside.

Joseph and Mary continued in their lives with the interdependence and relationships that are part of cosmology. They broke through the norms of society and showed there was a right, caring, and truthful way to live that transcended the norms many persisted in saying were absolute. They were criticized throughout their lives, and their beloved child would always be considered a bastard-child by some. But their resolve to be a family was rooted in a different consciousness from their critics. In the consciousness of Joseph and Mary, the cosmos’ message of “fear not,” delivered by God’s angel, won out over the consciousness of fear.

What a contrast the angel’s words are to the endless messages of fear we hear daily throughout our modern culture. Governments tells us that the world is scary, filled with criminals, enemies, bullies, terrorists, and foreigners. Therefore we need to fund and train strong police and militaries. All the costs—taxes, human life, property damage, destruction of creation, repression of freedom—must be faithfully paid in the name of security. Beyond what is needed for essential security, fear-based justifications for excessively tough law enforcement, bloated military budgets, and excessive force are piled on.

Add in the economic fears currently everywhere. With real unemployment around 20 percent, millions are afraid of hunger and sickness. Many more fear being without work, and therefore continue in low-paying jobs or in work that goes against their values. Walking hand-in-hand with these fears is the fear of losing one’s home because payments of rents and mortgages can’t be met.

Then there’s advertising. In a whole different way, advertising is low-level fear-on-the-prowl. Constantly we read, see, and hear what we aren’t doing, but need to do, or what we don’t have, but need to have. The messages provoke anxiety, a sense of incompleteness, and for many, the fear of being left out of life’s best. None feeds on our fears and insecurities better than banks and big pharmaceutical companies. Banks promise security in their products even as they tell us we are insecure unless we have them. Pharmaceuticals tell us we’re right to fear disease, but that their product will knock it out. At Christmas, the non-stop glaze of advertising tells us how we can avoid the fear of not measuring up in relationships by buying gifts. As long as we consent to the advertisers way of thinking, our actions will be based on fear.

How much we need to hear the fear-not, good news words of angels! But we aren’t likely to see or hear angels while chained to world-views that must be rational, or which are confined to human civilization and culture. Angels do not speak the language of the powers that dominate history, neither in the Christmas story, nor today. Their language is framed by the powers of the cosmos. Accordingly, the likelihood that we will see and hear them increases when we become skeptical enough of the ways of culture and exclusive rational knowing that we look beyond those horizons. Irrational powers such as awe and wonder swirl in upon us when we become connected with cosmology.

Think again about what cosmology is. Cosmology tells the story of the cosmos, is larger than human history, and is part of our human experience both through scientific observation and through its power to awaken awe even when our rational egos don’t understand. It’s both scientific and mystical knowing. Mary and the shepherds see the angels through the mystical aspect of cosmology, not the scientific.

So Joseph’s and Mary’s encounters with angels connected them with the grand wishes of the cosmos even as it undermined the moral consciousness of the society of Nazareth regarding the norms of marriage. What was already conceived in the consciousness of the cosmos was connecting with her womb where conception was both a biological and spiritual mystery.

The cosmology of angels broke through the historical norms of the Jewish world. Joseph found truth in his heart that connected with the cosmos and its Creator, transcending his culture. Mary was saved economically and socially. Their bastard-child showed the illegitimacy of reigning religion, politics, and economics by living according to a consciousness enlightened by the cosmos and the Divine Presence everywhere, there and beyond, whom he called Abba, or Daddy. In all these ways the special family of Christmas shows us what it means to live a “fear-not” consciousness.

Authors Matthew and Luke showed their genius by presenting Joseph and Mary on the stage of cosmology, not just history. We do well to copy them. By rooting ourselves in a different way of thinking, and by living our lives by a different story, namely, the huge story of the cosmos, we become able to stare down empire’s and culture’s frightening intimidation. Anything less is not the Christmas story.

Comments

[Galen]

The return of the sun on the solstice tells me what it means to live a “fear-not” consciousness. Well, at least until the sun burns out. I think we're taught to be afraid of fearing not. Fear becomes the familiar and comforting feeling and we cannot feel true freedom and spirit as long as we cling to it. If we see the tightrope of fear we're walking on as an illusion and erase the tightrope, maybe we can free-fall to a grounded sense of liberation. LIGHT allows us to fear not. Just one small light reduces the anxiety of the unknown considerably. A whole bunch of small lights (as in souls) can ground us and make us safe and more creative and spontaneous.
Lee, you have always had a way with words and conveying complex ideas clearly and creatively. What a gift!