21 December

Christmas is of course a Christian festival. But do we even understand what that means any more? In reality we in the West are all Christians, in that the Church pretty much built our societies, over millennia. The modern test of ‘faith’, where you’re ‘religious’ if you believe in things like an afterlife, and God up in the sky, is a nonsense remnant of debates from the Enlightenment. The leftover fragments of a past cultural war. I am religious. But not at all in the way that word has come to be used, I’m not a church goer or adherent of any faith. Those again are historical remnants of past ways of being religious in the way I actually am religious. Church services were the rock concerts of their day, a way to cement and reinforce the Good Word through music and colour and awe. The much older process I’m talking about was quite simple. It was focused on one thing only, making *present* again, every day, the ideas and deeds that led to a a good life. To continuously create the desire to do good things, through persuasion and inspiration. That’s what churches were doing, in their earliest days. Taking the teachings of people like Jesus, and finding a way to sustain them, across thousands of years. Or as Bruno Latour said, in the most beautiful analogy possibly ever. To be religious is like being in love. We say ‘I love you’ every day to the people we love. Not because they’ve forgotten from yesterday, but because it re-makes that love anew, every day. Forget all the baggage of historical religion if it offends you. Instead focus on what it was actually about. The production of joy. Joy is not happiness, happiness is a cheap emotion. Joy links understanding to life. We’ve forgotten about joy, we have a lot to re-learn.