Indian Summer?

It's a stunning Sunday in September; it's 15 degrees C and people are wearing their T-shirts and shades; hairdressers drive with their tops down; everywhere the signs of a beautiful extended end to summer; and the shops are full of advent calendars.
There's something fundamentally unnerving about seeing Christmas paraphernalia being peddled just one week into the new school term. It's bad enough that, just as the holidays started, retailers were proclaiming "Back to school" with such glee. And then, when DIY shopping during a wet August Bank Holiday, the cashier said woefully, "Well, it's Christmas next".

This commercialised push from one season to the next means that we run the risk of losing the enjoyment of them. If we now spend four months thinking about Christmas shopping, when the day comes we will be tired and bored of it. And this is a shame because Christmas is ace.

Even in my atheist days, I saw something wonderful in the celebrations of December 25th. I saw its pagan roots (something which I now discover may have been invented by the Victorians), its history as a glowing light in the middle of darkest winter, its promise of escapism, its emphasis on giving. I loved all this. But I loved it in December, not in the tail end of summer.

And since then I have found God: he was sitting in my kitchen cupboard trying to do a sudoku. I couldn't help him with it. My sense of the divine has become almost electric - a whoozy joyful nausea, tasting of metal, like sticking your tongue on the contacts of a 9V battery. The Tao shows us the yin and yang of life, and this cycle fits beatifully with the pagan ideas of the death and birth of every year, reflected so poetically in the story of the birth of Christ. From the darkest places can come the brightest light. And, after all, light and darkness exist because of each other.

And atop all this spirituality, there is family. There's nothing like sharing Christmas morning with loved ones. Sharing gifts and, later, the family feast. The wine, the silly hats, the games, the snoozing in an armchair.
Even the cheap chocolates that one gets in the advent calendars have their place in the festivities.

But when Christmas becomes just another DFS sale, another Tesco branded tin of life stuff, it all seems so bland. It's Christmas in sanitised form, marketed by men more interested in profit margins than in celebrations.

I love Christmas. I love winter, but I love my autmns too: the shifting hues of the trees, the changing quality of the sky, the rising of Orion. The chance to enjoy other customs and traditions. But now, in a world where "season" is a commercial opportunity, and bananas are on sale throughout the year, we become immune to these natural cycles and "autumn" is meaningless outside of the school calendar. And because we have no reason to stockpile our foods, to make our jams and chutneys, to pickle our apricots (is that what one does with them?), we have no idea of planning for the future. And so we have rising debts - why save for the future when you can have it now? We have the elastic band of credit stretched to snapping point.
So let's not blame the greedy bankers for the recession - blame the shops for selling advent calendars in September.

Swimming with the Tao - the way of water

I am a lapsed atheist. I used to think that religious people were somehow weak, cowardly or naive. I imagined that I had no need of a religious component in my life; that I was above that and that I was far too modern, far too rational for such childish hogwash.
But even in my darkest, most arrogant years of atheism, there was a doubt in my mind. Why did I ponder God for so much of my time? Clearly, I was agnostic.
I knew that my love of astronomy was more than just a scientific interest. Looking up, looking out, I was aware that I was part of something beyond my comprehension. I love the knowledge that I am made of the same stuff as everything else. I see a kind of romance in the idea that all we are is the product of cosmic explosions: a star whose life came to a violent end, but whose death gave rise to our own sun and everything that spins around it.
So, for a while, I wanted to be pagan. But there are negative connotations with that label, brought about by Wicca - a nonsense religion closer to Catholicism than Wiccans or Catholics would like to admit.
My personal theology is certainly pantheist. Interestingly, in his The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins dismisses pantheism as "sexed-up atheism". This is a rather whimsical argument designed to avoid the fact that Einstein, one of the dead scientists that Dawkins calls as witness, was clearly a pantheist.
And then I found Unitarianism. And I still consider myself a non-paying member of the global UU (Unitarian Universalist) community. The nearest Unitarian congregation, however, was still too distant for regular attendance, and my visits waned.

But then I stumbled across Taoism. I forget how. It doesn't really matter. I felt an immediate sense of, I dunno, belonging. Its basic tenets so completely matched my own theology that it seemed uncanny.
The Tao Te Ching is one of the most beautiful, and profound, things I have ever read. Full of oxymoronic poetry, it is a guide to life and leadership. And then I read Pure by Barefoot Doctor. And now I cannot get enough.

What is particularly interesting is that through the lens of Taosim, Christianity makes a kind of sense. "I am the Way" presents an interesting perspective. Now I want to be a part of my local church community, at the heart of this wonderful village in which I have lived for 7 years now. The only problem is, of course, that my local church is Anglican. But that's for another post, another time.

For now it's enough to say that I am a pagnostic Taoist Unitarian Universalist.