Christmas and the Deification of Meaning

We cannot author our fulfillment.

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord.

The Gospel of Matthew

Christmas has long since escaped Christianity as the sole claimant, while inconveniently tied to it. Yet as highlighted in a New York Times piece this week, even some churches are hardly bothering to claim it anymore. Since Christmas falls on a Sunday, with attendance destined to be low, many have chosen to save their culture war ammunition for other targets.

Every year, the cultural production around Christmas provides a strange intelligence report on the battleground of meaning. I don’t mean the meaning of Christmas, I mean the meaning of meaning. Few wring their stockings into a twist over the old “we’ve lost the meaning of Christmas” debate. Fox News moved on from The War on it ages ago, with most Christians hunkering into their pluralistic lane of whatever version of post-post-postmodernism this is, letting secular America have all the ennui it wants. Few clamor nowadays that others must “put Christ back in Christmas”—though there will always be a few cranks howling into a bomb cyclone.

It was never our job, anyway, to put Christ back in Christmas. It was always to discover how Christ came and where Christ is still coming. But when Christendom was not just nominally named but dominantly claimed in the United States, it was easier to pretend it was us who had kept him in Christmas.

But now, even to the fervent Christians privileged to still live in culturally Christian Southern cities and Midwest towns and along upstate New York state highways and in gated Texas communities and pockets of suburbs and exurbs, even for these devout the decidedly Christian meaning they bring to Christmas cannot help but grow feebler. Depending on your workplace or social environment, the negotiated space of secularity has become non-negotiable; decades of decorations were no match. Cold attendance statistics could not be warmed by Bake Sale hot chocolate, nor staved off by pompously circumstantial Christmas Eve worship services. Candle-lit “Silent Night”—just as the shepherds did, right?—could only give great memories to the kids and serve as the church’s meager sales pitch to the young adults, “Please, come back home, don’t you remember us? We’re the ones who’ve made all this meaning for you!” (Although I confess this seems to have worked on me, as I still glow with such memories and cherish singing this annually.)

But Millenials and subsequent generations have mostly not come back home to the church’s meaning. Every Christmas I was in self-exile from God, returning from California for the awkward reunions at my parent’s church that I once knew, my alternatives were not any more meaningful. However, at least the meaning was mine.

Because whether I made the meaning or religion was making the meaning, that’s all it was. “Meaning.” Our sacred cow and elusive whisp across barren fields.

Meaning Crisis, Meaning Worship

In December 2010, a legendary episode of the sitcom Community aired, “Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas.” Without spoilers, it’s a masterpiece in meta-commentary, focused on Abed’s pursuit of a meaningful Christmas. He and the cast journey through childhood memories and cultural memes in a claymation satire of secular Christmas specials. I will spare a full review, but it highlights the tension between a Christian belief that Christmas was “our own” and, well, everyone else who doesn’t know what to do with it. In the episode, we see that for some, Christmas means therapy, for others a capitalist and colonialist nightmare, for others an antiquated delusion hardly a step above Santa, for others the source of ancient family pain, for still others simply a target for existential snark. “This is what Christmas does to people. We put too much meaning into it, and it lets us down,” remarks one character. Essentially, to both the show and to our culture, the meaning of Christmas has, indeed, become “meaning” itself.

Community, S2E11, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”

While this results in an uplifting ending that is, dare I say, predictably Christmasy, its solutions to “choose your own meaning” ultimately fall short of satisfying our actual longing for meaning.

Like many of my arguments, my lifelong fandom of the jamband Phish complicates this. I fully know and love the paradox of meaningful absurdities. Like instrumental music and Zen art, many of my favorite Phish songs have no intentional meaning, yet their music has served as a tremendously important meaning vehicle since I was sixteen. While many of their songs do have legible lyrics, oftentimes their illegibility is a feature that affords the listener spaciousness without making any impositions. I can then read my life into music that’s big enough to hold it. Yes, the meaning of this music can be greatly enhanced by knowing the band’s history and the context in which these songs arose, which is perhaps why my fellow Phish fans love obsessing over making connections between setlists and learning band lore. But the meaning-making process feels mutual and participatory, perhaps in a way that religion sometimes does not.

Yet as much as the parking lot rats and I have tried, Phish does not make for a satisfying religion (and I’m sure the band prefers it that way). Why? Because for all talk of “community,” the values are too disparate among fans, our individual meanings too splintered, and when the tires have made contact with the road,¹ it's just a band of four post-psychedelic weirdos from Vermont. I love them and feel lucky every time I go to a show, but man cannot live by Phish alone—after all, in their paradoxical meaningless profundity, that's not what they're meant for.

Psychedelics and other Psychotechnologies

Beyond television and jambands, there have been more serious reckonings with secular emptiness. University of Toronto professor John Vervaeke has devised perhaps the most explicit and sweeping intellectual project. His 50-part “Awakening From the Meaning Crisis” series has amassed an intense following of new meaning-makers devising new worldviews. His stated goal is to create a “religion of no religion,” combining “psychotechnologies” comprising a variety of practices, techniques, and embodied rituals with new philosophical and theological options for the non-theist. One of these psychotechnologies is psychedelic drugs. Like his comparably far more famous and infamous University of Toronto colleague Jordan Peterson, who has quickly become the main right-wing psychedelic disseminator, Vervaeke is enthusiastic about the role of psychedelics in helping end this “meaning crisis.”

Having once shared this enthusiasm enough to pursue it as a career, I know it too well. I know the spiritual hopes and dreams placed in psychedelics are shared by many (if not the dominant majority) in the psychedelic research field. Scientists at Johns Hopkins believe in a psychedelic “meaning of meaning” so deeply that they argue that, even if non-psychoactive derivative compounds are discovered to effectively treat depression, it would be unethical not to default to riskier meaning-making hallucinogens.² Note that this is all hypothetical; non-hallucinogenic depression-relieving psychedelics do not exist. But I admit that this scientific fervency for dosing people rouses disturbance in me, as I sense there may be as strong a desire to baptize people into a psychedelic corner of a cultic milieu, which at a minimum raises more ethical issues than first glance. In fairness, they have argued if non-hallucinogenic drugs still prove efficacious in mental health treatments, such patients should be given a choice.

But they are still rather keen on suggesting high-suggestibility drugs to populations on the basis that they provide deep meaning, a passion strong enough to mount a formal academic argument. In further fairness, one reason these scientists—like Vervaeke and others—have so much hope in psychedelic meaning-making is because they have the receipts: “participants frequently rate their psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful of their entire lives, and they are sometimes compared to the birth of a first-born child or death of a parent.”³ While this is oft-touted as a self-evidently benevolent feature, I have come to wonder if it is a bug, especially in context with the many other risks of psychedelic usage. Should we be concerned that psychedelically-induced clinical experience simulates poignancy on par with becoming or losing a parent? The benefit, per the Hopkins crew, is “such experiences may serve as narrative ‘inflection points’ in one’s life that could provide an impetus for changing one’s identification with certain patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.” To many, the idea of non-hallucinogenic psychedelics is silly because this “salient” effect appears to be an obvious agent of action that leads to beneficial therapeutic outcomes. And a steelmanned take on this would argue that patients consider psychedelics only partially meaningful in and of themselves, and that the true power is how they impact the meaning they have made the rest of their lives. In some respects, this is the case with any conversion to a new spiritual worldview.

But the religious fervency of psychedelic medicalization suggests there is more to it. For those yearning for a secular spirituality, meaning-inducing compounds are a godsend in no need of a God. After all, Meaning is the god whose absence has spurned a Crisis.

And yet, while Christmas may have lost its Christianity, I cannot help but feel all these attempts to be the authors of our own meaning to be empty, empty, empty, hollow, hollow, hollow. Such is the dilemma in trying to solve our nihilism by our own hands. Can we actually solve our own meaning crisis?

In my many years of trying to find my life’s meaning in Authenticity, I found that no matter how authentic a personal expression, recursive meaning eats itself. Its origin is too obvious and lacking. When we try to be the authors of our fulfillment, we will always either disappoint ourselves or, worse, deify ourselves.

Secular Religions and the Deification of Meaning

Far from a recent development, meaning has become a growing object of secular worship over generations. Vervaeke is hardly alone in the quest to create new systematic post-secular metatheories to replace orthodox theologies; Ken Wilbur’s Integral theory is another, built on the work of Carl Jung and George Gurdjieff and countless others who have spawned loose schools of theology, with many Christians incorporating aspects into their own practice. These should not be taken as cynical endeavors against Christianity, but as sincere acts in the vacuum created by uninspired theology and decaying, imbalanced material conditions caused by crusted-over corporate Christendom.

Novel meaning-making systems are also no longer solely a project for the intelligentsia and the elite, if they ever were. If Marx named religion an opiate, a post-religious return to folk practices and spiritual-but-not-religious thinking has risen among the non-religious working class. This should not be dismissed or patronized. Creating meaning for one’s self is an act of resistance not only against organized religion but against capitalism’s devouring of local personality, and, indeed, “meaningful work.” If conservative cultural reactionaries can only describe an idol of Americana God and progressives hardly speak of God at all, to create one’s meaning is an act of Self-Reliance, a value that has leapt from its roots in 19th-century spiritually progressive Emersonian Unitarians into the loving arms of neoliberal atomization.

But Self-Reliance is not simply an ideological tool of economic elites reserved for the right. It underlies practically every new secular self-help religion. Perhaps this is because the biblical God who covenants not only with nations but with the individual believer who responds in faith—an unshakeable promise of divine love to anyone who cries to him—has departed from the imagination. Absent a belief in this personal promise from the Creator, the deification of meaning has forced the secular soul to try and fill God’s shoes. When I was playing around with Choosing My Own Religion throughout my twenties, God’s death was more than inert, God became a tool.

Alan Watts famously mused that self-improvement is an illusion, a rather Calvinist theological stance for a post-Christian thinker. Nevertheless, self-help has never had more cultural cache. I hardly need to list off the gurus; we all know them and countless social media copycats. And their psychological insights often have practical, helpful tips for emotional regulation. But as a spiritual system, when self-help religion is all about you…well, all it’s about is you. We cannot truly police ourselves, as Watts would note, but for a similar reason, we cannot truly endow ourselves with meaning.

And so economic injustices aside, the emptiness in a sold-out Christmas is not caused by capitalism per se. The problem is that we, even Christians, want to make ourselves the authors of Christmas and the authors of our own meaning. And so the actual error of taking Christ out of Christmas is that we’ve taken the initiative of God out of Christmas.

The failure of so many God is Dead solutions is to merely resurrect him into an idea destined for idolatry. But for Christians, God is not just the Creator of the world, but the Creator and organizer of meaning. To those reading who claim themselves Christians, hapless human screwups in our devotion to the divinity of Jesus, we must not be mistaken—the gospel recounting of Christmas tells us that we are not the authors of our fulfillment. God constantly enters into our world, and as the first two chapters in Matthew and Luke show, our relationship to God’s perpetual entrance into our lives is to actively receive and respond to Grace. We are to tend, behold, steward, midwife, and step into the bravery of mothers and fathers called to nurture God’s fulling action, yet not devising it. As the old creed goes, Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost, but born of Mary.

The Response Options to Grace

The mantra in both Luke and Matthew (especially Matthew) is that continuing action of God in the world is to fulfill it. In witnessing this action of God, we surrender our desire to be the Main Character. From the genealogy of Jesus to the intertwining of prophecy and Scripture, we are beholding the unfolding truth that beyond the nihilism of our cold, sheep-shit nights, the Creator of meaning is still creating our fulfillment for us, in us, and with us: Emmanuel.

In Christmas, we discover that we cannot solve the meaning crisis by trying to solve it. I do not believe one has to subscribe to a Christian Messiah to appreciate the distinction between our attempts to fulfill ourselves and the Spirit beckoning us into the signs all around us. The figures in Matthew and Luke’s Christmas stories had no such designs. They paid attention to the past to notice what was happening in the present. Like their ancestor Abraham learned to trust through the akedah of Isaac that the Lord would provide his need, they trusted and rejoiced that God has provided ultimate, transcendent meaning.

Can we?

And if we could, what would that leave for us to do?

Most of us are not going to have the benefit of Joseph in Matthew being told literally by an angel what to do. Should he get that much credit for being obedient? Likewise with Mary in Luke—it’s easy to let God provide salience when his messenger’s wings are flapping in your face.

But let us wonder, for a moment, if angel feathers were lying cast around our floor in 2022, that the Bethlehem star was shining every day, that God was pursuing us constantly, if subperceptually.

Perhaps, like Mary, we could begin sharing the glimpses of God we see with our loved ones (warning: you may burst into song). Perhaps like Joseph we could feel our way through our doubt and ignorance and try to do what is right.

Perhaps like the shepherds, we can trust divine guidance when we get it. Perhaps we can have others amazed by the regaling of our divine encounters. Perhaps we can give glory and praise that the orchestral majesty of life that we had been promised has appeared.

Perhaps even like the magi, who were in fact astrologers—truly the spiritual predecessors of Vervaeke—we could even have an elaborate map of the universe as a solution to our personal meaning crisis ready to go, so that we may rejoice in the discovery that the missing divine piece has come. Perhaps the imperfect yearning for meaning, which is a holy yearning to be saved from nihilism, is the condition which finally lets our curiosity turn into amazement, reverence, and awe upon witnessing the Author.

(Perhaps there is no need for me to be so harsh on such systems; perhaps I can remember my own, and perhaps I can witness this as a new edition of “preparing the way.”)

Perhaps all of us in our communities can let God shake our snowglobe. Perhaps we can collectively behold and nurture the truth of God with us.

Forcing Meaning: Getting in the Way

Lest I pretend there are only right ways to respond, Scripture also shows us the ways we impede God’s initiative. The scapegoat for our benefit is—of course—Herod.

In response to God’s authorship of meaning, Herod makes the classic mistake of sensing God’s action in the world and feeling his kingship threatened, the kingship which orders his little universe and imagines an interpretation of his ultimate power to be the Definitive Take on Everything. Matthew’s account shows a Herod whose power is built on sand, and who is not ready to let go of control. We all have a little Herod in us.

When we let our inner tyrant rule, we invert all responsive virtues. The natural fearful response to God is hardened, not dissipated. Instead of gathering together others to revere the uncontrollable Grace in our midst, we conspire in paranoia against it. The curiosity of the magi turns into our scheming psyop. We do not live or tell the truth, but cloak ourselves in secrecy and misdirection. Not only do we not behold the truth of God, we do everything in our pathetic power to suppress it. In Herod’s case, this leads to the impotent, irrational, brutal slaughter of every child under two years old.

Truly, the constant arrival of God is not an end to evil. And the evils in our midst also deserve a response.

Because to those who are powerful in their own minds, the arrival of good news does not always sound like good news. If only Herod knew that Christ was willing to die for him, he might have given up control. But in response to Love’s conception, Herod was ready to burn it all down so that his meaning would reign supreme.

Responding to Meaning: Getting out of the Way

So we have arrived at yet another paradox of Christianity in the meaning crisis. We are called to respond in joyful worship of the God whose train arrives at our platform every day. But when Christians try to be the controlling authors of meaning, we inflict our tyranny. Corporate Christendom, then, was always our collective Herod. We never could fight a War on Christmas without inherently losing it.

Christians must accept that to be unlike Herod, part of our job is to get out of the way of the divinity entering in our midst, and to better recognize it when it does—no matter if it “speaks Christian” or not.

I have failed at too many artforms and endeavors to count while living in Los Angeles a decade ago—standup, improv, podcasting, storytelling, writing screenplays. Likewise, I have subscribed and unsubscribed from too many ideologies and quit as many religions as I have joined. Many cliches about writing and art are still applicable here, such that good writing is more like channeling and recording than conscious creating. But the same is true at a metalevel—I did not fulfill my Los Angeles career aspirations until I accepted I had failed at them. I am approaching a similar place with my psychedelic endeavors. It is only when I stop being a Herod—deceptive, manipulative, probing, scheming, insistent upon the idea of the life I want to live—that I am able to surrender to the greater work of God in my midst.

I find what is true with good writing or career choices is true elsewhere. The best forms of compassion, the best friendship, the best charity, these all come when I just pay attention to where God is doing the work of fulfillment and align with it. It requires me to trust that God is active in my world, a shared world with all of you reading this.

Rather than forcing what I think completeness and fulfillment should be, I am better off when I pay attention to the patterns of fulfillment happening, noticing the drawing completion already underway. When I force the completion of events into my idea of what that completion should be, it never feels right. It is narrative-forcing.

One beauty of liturgy and calendars and traditions and rhythms is we didn’t author them. They just give us opportunities to respond.

We do not author Grace. But we can always respond to it.

Every day is a chance to respond to Grace, in Grace, with Grace. Which is also the call to respond to the evil in our midst. Because as fulfillment keeps going into the world, evil does not go anywhere. The work is still being done.

Sometimes a response to Grace is fighting against bullshit. Sometimes this response is pushing back on what is deeply, deeply wrong—sometimes those are the birth pangs of truth, justice, and love that need midwives. This True Justice is not human justice, and thus it is not ours to conceive, it is ours to help cooperatively steward, usher, and partner with the movement of God. It is to share what we see with vital urgency so that others may share in it, bringing us all one step closer in this lifetime towards a peaceful reconciliation that is not a Herodian false peace of decay, a fabricated unjust status quo, with all our vitality hollowed out for profit.

This holy work is the work of all who fight and pray, nurture and organize, write and witness. It is the work of the systematic theologians and post-theologians to sift through angels and demons, discerning our discovery until it weaves back into the narrative threads which were handed to us. It was the work of the gospel writers who midwived the story of Christmas: sharing the connections they saw so that we may see what they see. To weave all our stories into The Story, from insane confabulations into righteous collaboration, so that all may nurture the glory of the universe.

Closing Questions

What about you?

What is left unfulfilled in your life?

Can you trust God is showing up to fulfill it?

Where is God not going away? Where is the darkness, the ignored corner, the hidden part of your life you can’t imagine light would shine? What needs more attention? What needs surrender?

Where do you notice God trying to partner with you? Where do you notice God giving you glimpses? Where do you notice the shepherds in your life? The strange moments? The peculiar?

Will you welcome the Entrance? Can you trust it is on your side? I’m not asking if you can welcome Christianity into your life. I’m asking if you can recognize where God has already fulfilled you. Can you?

How I would have answered that question has changed every year. I understand my past differently each year, and I understand God’s story differently each year. The contents of the stories didn’t change. God just keeps coming in new ways, and showing me the old ways that weren’t his, but were the tyranny of my old meaning.

With Christmas comes the great loop, swoop, and pull of the Christian story. It teaches us there is a fine, fine subtlety between trying to respond to God to work with God and trying to be like God. Take heart—there is literally no human who has ever nailed this balance. The Herod of our authority remains dominant.

Can we repent of this Herod? Can you believe that even if you’re not the Main Character, you, yes you, are an indispensable part?

There is so much good news, and here is more: you can midwife God’s beauty. The Bible was written by human hands. Inspired by God, yes. But written by human hands, told to these hands by many more mouths, tracing the steps of tradition, connecting the dots, discovering the connections. noticing, making the connection, weaving, and witnessing where God has fulfilled and is fulfilling.

Our holy creative work is far more like discovery: discovering what God has done and is doing. And that is how our faith and hope point us toward what God will do.

Tend, listen, look.

Is that a star?

Coincidence? No. Emmanuel.

He is with us.

Do not be afraid. Meaning is here. You don’t have to conceive it. You get to behold it.

Photo by Sebastian Fröhlich on Unsplash

1. Phish, “Contact”

2. Yaden, David B. and Griffiths, Roland R. “The Subjective Effects of Psychedelics Are Necessary for Their Enduring Therapeutic Effects” ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science 2021 4 (2), 568-572. DOI: 10.1021/acsptsci.0c00194

3. Yaden and Griffiths, 569.