Have Yourself a Merry Twoist Christmas

Let’s try to imagine a merry Oneist Christmas. A radical feminist some years ago already proposed the music, a revamped Christmas carol she called, “Joy from the world”! From this perspective, the shepherds, having seen an out-of-body vision of their glorious higher selves, came to the stable to worship the god within [within themselves, not the God within the stable!]. Mary and Joseph, having exercised their pro-choice right to not abort, celebrated the fruit of their pre-marital affair, and together with the animals, worship the Great Spirit within nature for the sexual liberation that delivered them from the chains of endless monogamy. The angry Herod who butchered the babies around Bethlehem joyfully joined the opposites of good and evil in his subconscious and attained a higher point of human maturity beyond the reaches of neurosis-producing guilt. All came together around the manger for a celebratory non-dual group meditation on their higher consciousness, chanting numerous stanzas of “Om,” contemplating their eventual absorption into the nirvana of nothingness. And Hallmark would go nuts trying to capture the scene for its pagan customers, since, in a Oneist world, nothing supernatural actually happened, or can happen, so the whole idea of special cards would eventually become a commercial disaster!

Thank God for the Twoist Christmas, a unique historical event, distinct from every other event, where God, the totally transcendent Creator, intervened in history to alter human destiny from top to bottom.  Here is indescribable mystery. The Creator and the creature united, without confusion, in the same person, to bring about the project of human and cosmic redemption. Only God could have invented the miracle of Christmas

Long before, in the unity of the divine trinity, God devised the project of a material creation that flowed out of pure kindness, not necessity, bestowing on the cosmos the gift of existence, without adding one speck to his own glory. As the crown, he created man, male and female, two distinct personal beings, to bear the very image of the personal Creator among the millions of galaxies, that surrounded them. According to the inscrutable wisdom of the Creator, the whole project demanded the faithful obedience of these two human creatures. Little wonder the Psalmist exclaims, “What is man that you are mindful of him” (Ps 8:6). This great God above the heavens deigns to work with seemingly insignificant human elements. This is the essence our glory, not that we are divine but that we, as creatures, are of crucial significance in God’s plan.

When Adam and Eve failed by refusing to trust their future to the word of their Maker, the rightful Twoist structure of God and the creation became a cosmic war, between the forces of evil and the promised seed of the woman. Through further insignificant elements–the individual Abraham, the tiny nation of Israel, the 300 under Gideon, and finally though this newly-born baby in a food trough in around 2BC, God was working his plan of redemption, though in seemingly unimpressive ways. Since the project had gone south, through the failure of human beings at a significant moment in history, there was no “joy from the world,” only the funeral dirge of human failure. In all honesty, we need help from the outside, from the divine Other, from the new Adam who paid the price of human sin by bearing its punishment on a small hill outside Jerusalem.

Walking by that scene of human cruelty, you would never have really known what was actually taking place. Via divine revelation, the apostle John saw the cosmic implications of Christmas and its fulfillment at Calvary:

And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And…behold, a great red dragon, …[who] stood before the woman about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne. (Rev 12:1-5).

With apocalyptic language, John describes the titanic moral conflict between Satan, “the great red dragon,” and the male child, Jesus, very God and very man, who, beginning at Christmas, finally conquered Satan and is seated on the throne, and assures us the final victory.

Certainly, Hallmark cards cannot do justice to this event either, but it does, in part, explain their commercial success. The Creator did something unimaginable, which is why we sing Gloria in excelsis Deo, celebrating in Twoist voice, that the “highest” has brought “Joy to the world.”