The little drummer girl

My father and his brother used to drink whiskey and smoke those cheap little cigars on occasion. Uncle John always saved his cigar bands until he had enough to cash in on a catalog gift. One Christmas season he proudly gifted us a white pleather book that bore gold edged leaves and very large gold letters that spelled

HOLY

BIBLE.

Once this gift was given to our family, my dad and my uncle would sit reading through the big white book. They came to the realization that our church was not on the same page as so many things that they were reading. This actualization set our family on a journey to fulfill the longing for truth that was kindled in my dad, by this large fake-skinned book.

More than four decades have passed and my own reincarnations have taken me from a belief in bible thumping theologies, to an atheism born from desperation, to a realization that if god is love, then he/she/it/them/US must learn to love based on faith, not fear that is labeled faith. If god is truly love then god would not want us to obey him, but rather wait, longingly, for us to understand love and come to it naturally and by choice.  How could anything else be love?

So many of the stories that we are given via religious instructions are exactly that-stories. Vehicles to make a point or draw a picture that results in our little noggins lighting up. We fail when we believe these stories to be the truth and believe that our faiths are to be based on their specifics. The fact that so many people don't realize the inaccuracies of the hole-y bible due to translation errors or blatant manipulative deletions which suited the churches, saddens me. The fact that people don't even want to know that the myth of Jesus coming to earth to save the world, and being born of a virgin, is just a copycat of  the tale of Mithra, the Persian deity that preceded Jesus by a few hundred years, puzzles me. We celebrate the birth of Jesus on a day that wasn't even his birthday. We skew his words and hang our morals and blind faith on these rusted nails which crucify his true messages- to be compassionate  and to love one another as if we were god (for we are god). The very metaphor of the holy trinity tells me that I am the wisdom, the yearning and the essence of god. This is what I believe Jesus told us, and more poignantly, what my gut nugget tells me is the truth. 

I have marched with the masses to the beat of "faith"-sanctioned laws, but now (drum roll, please...) I dance, skip and jump because I am free to be love. There is no way to save yourself by spouting prescriptive prayers or rhetoric, or to "come" because they told me.

Keeping Christ in Christmas pales for me, in exchange of a more enriched plan to keep his true teachings in every season, day, minute and second of my life.

rum pum pum hum bug...