My Holly Days agenda has always been both secular and spiritual. I believe that the key challenge of the modern age is fundamentally spiritual. Evidence of an innate cognitive bias for religiosity is now ubiquitous, as laid out in Shermer’s Believing Brain, and seems clearly an important factor in the doctrinaire zeal among the tribes of both the left and right.
The modeling of the universe, once the province of religion, superceded by science, has made the very idea of sacredness largely obsolete. The relentless process of the scientific iteration in our modern modeling of the universe, with Aristotle supplanted by Copernicus, supplanted by Newton, supplanted by Einstein… has made it clear that the ultimate truth that prophets and clerics have always used to inspire fealty to their grand social projects, cannot be true. This has murdered the gods, whose authority and care has so commonly been fundamental to the way folks have built meaning. Nothing can be sacred in this process of scientific iteration, everything must be questioned if our grand project of pulling back the veil of ignorance is to continue. Yet without His Love, or The Rules or… how can we now find meaning that does not freeze us in failing and obsolete tribal ritual and orthodoxy?
For me, my lifelong effort to understand and solve these puzzles settled in a fairly simple trinity of spiritual values when I was young: Truth, Love, & Courage. It has managed to endure, probably somewhat on faith, although never because I hold it as sacred. It is instead a spiritual hypothesis that I have neither disproven nor disavowed through all these decades. Though to be fair, Truth has wavered a bit as I have grown older and understood the psychological value many folks find in denial.
Holly Days is a mash-up of existing holiday traditions, which themselves are also not sacred, but their meaning is durable and anchored in the simple act of communal repetition. They could be anything, but they are what they are, and so we choose to respect them for their enduring history. The first trinity of our Holly Days ritual is anchored by the Solstice, the second by Christmas/Yule and the fourth by New Years/Days of Awe. To get to the unification of these within the 12-days trope, we needed an anchor for these three days, which have no other traditions already connected to them, and so we chose Truth, Love, and Courage.
I’ve expounded on these many times over the years here, but will lay out here my reasoning for their elevation to primacy among all the various values we might embrace.
TRUTH
Truth, which I think of in terms of process and not as a revealed state, is first among values because it is what is needed for self-correction. Truth-seeking seems to be why we have minds and selves in the first place, with the whole evolution of senses and minds serving the single and obvious function of aligning a being’s behavior with objective reality.
LOVE
Love is second among my values because it is the foundation of all social constructs, at least the positive ones. Our individual lives, as Lewis Thomas so aptly described them, are really the lives of single cells in the global super-organism that is Life on Earth. Our individual fates are clearly joined, but this is perhaps too abstract to really hold sway in the intense moments of interaction we have with our fellow cells. I think it is mostly only Love that binds us into this collective being in what must be a collective effort if we are to survive.
COURAGE
Courage is third among my values because it is the most fundamental stance we must muster within ourselves to proceed forward. Our senses lead us to desire, so we are drawn easily to so many important values like beauty, justice, joy or peace. It is the things that can better us, but from which we recoil, that prove the biggest obstacles to our progress, and Courage is the key to overcoming them.
HOLLY DAYS 