Today is the last Holly Day and the beginning of a new year: Redemption.
We can be redeemed by good deeds, apologies, and other demonstrations of our virtue. It’s pretty easy in this digital age to have some lapse in our personal lives attract an out-of-proportion scorn that can make us doubt our own virtuousness and long for redemption.
This year, I have been taking Rey to a playgroup that meets in the basement of a Catholic church, another that meets in the auditorium of an evangelical church and to a storytime that meets in a meeting room in an Episcopal church. While I am very interested in religious experience and the spiritual dimensions of philosophy and psychology, as demonstrated by these Holly Days posts, I am not at all a religious person, so have this year spent much more time on consecrated ground than probably any other time in my life.
Last February, having arrived early for the group at St Margaret’s, Rey and I went exploring and discovered a Mass in progress in the chapel. So we sat down to enjoy it. It struck me as a sad affair, with a shitty PA echoing in a mostly empty room that made it impossible for me to understand the sermon of the heavily accented priest. The altar boys and girls, being in school, were replaced by retired parishioners: old men in street clothes who moved slowly and without any of the artistry I have seen some altar boys bring to the rites. I took a photo of the lovely chapel and posted it here, commenting on how anachronistic and pitiful it felt to me.
The run up to the local election here in Pearl River, “The Town of Friendly People” was anything but friendly, at least on the Pearl River Parents at Play page where I keep track of these various kids’ activities. Ultra orthodox Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn having been colonizing parts of Rockland County just adjacent to Pearl River (you may have heard the This American Life story about the East Ramapo School District) and between residual anti-semitism and more rational concerns about corruption, this issue became a flashpoint in the election, with some candidates relying almost exclusively on dog whistling about the “impending storm,” posting snapshots of men with yarmulkes and payot, and dire warnings about “the bloc”.
From the dawn of online discourse, I have felt that quenching flames was my moral duty (though these days I feel like a guy with a wet towel in the middle of a firestorm) so I would periodically chime into this debate to try plead for Christian charity and love hoping that some of the Irish Catholics, who seemed to be spitting the most flagrant ad hominem flames, might cool off. Of course they just came after me too, calling my evocation of WWJD hypocritical, and digging up and reposting my comment from months before about the pity I felt during that mass, enraging my Catholic neighbors. I backed away, their candidates won, oh well.
My immersion in this religious milieu, along with the Jewishness (albeit mostly just cultural) of my inlaws, is likely why most of my posts this year have been so focused on the religious underpinnings of Holly Days. And redemption, while it has important secular meaning to me, is something most folks relate to and seek in religion. Sadly the current culture of online shaming, snark, and virtue signalling hasn’t managed to evolve any sort of infrastructure of redemption. The cheapness of Christian redemption, that requires only a comment that one has taken Jesus into their heart, makes it pretty useless in any sort of social context (although the psychological power of that easy redemption is clearly Christianity’s hook). The hard work of mitzvah central to the Jewish idea of redemption, has been too often distilled only to an obligation to abide by the letter of obsolete legal standards, as has too much of Islamic thought. Still this all tells me that we have a powerful and universal desire to be good people, and more, being that none of us are perfectly pure, to be redeemed, healed and washed clean. This seemingly instinctual urge is the foundation of much of the hope I feel for our race.
As we start this new year after one has seen our divisions widen, as our desire to reach across that gulf has faded even as our solidarity on either side has strengthened, and as we stand together to condemn and move beyond some vile but thankfully obsolete norms, let’s try to find ways to redeem each other. Let’s stand close enough to hear the love a deplorable has for their kids, let’s climb down off our high horses and remember how vulnerable each of us is. Your profound desire to be redeemed and healed may depend on my forgiveness, on the way my love for you may allow you to feel more love for yourself and all our brothers and sisters.
HAPPY HOLLY DAYS & A PROSPEROUS 2018
HOLLY DAYS 