One of the Advent messages brought by my pastor at the tiny United Methodist Church where I'm a member and have attended frequently for 30 years was a standard Orthodox sermon built around the popular theme of putting "Christ" back into "Christmas". It was a nice message and I enjoyed it, particularly the part where Pastor Peggy, an exceedingly competent and sincere Orthodox minister, took on the practice of substituting "X" for "Christ" in the word Christmas.
As I sat there taking in Peggy's fine Advent sermon, I was looking forward to reminding her after the service that an "X" is one of the symbols early Christians used to represent Christ. Therefore, of course, the word "Xmas" literally represents "Christmas" making it unnecessary to rail against the former as an offense to the Spirit of the season. To Pastor Peggy's credit, however, she explained at a later point in her homily that even though an "X" is, in fact, an ancient symbol for "Christ", that most contemporary users of the term aren't reflecting upon the Christolic Symbology of the letter "X" as a representation of "Christ" when they jot down Xmas in place of Christmas in a likely attempt to further secularize the meaning of Christmas.
OK, fair enough, I thought and I shared a laugh with her after the service that I was gonna get on her about the "X" until she adeptly preempted my protest.
I'm writing this post after Christmas dinner as I sit on the couch in my wife's mother's basement with my wife and two children. We are in the midst of a Christmas Movie Marathon. For whatever reason, I started thinking about the business of how the use of "X" for Christ fits so well for those of us who approach our Christ with a Gnostic Spirit of Gnot-Gnowing. As an interesting alternative to the common Orthodox concerns about substituting an "X" for "Christ" in "Christmas", I'm thinking how the letter "X" in its form of the variable in an equation actually perfectly represents Christ -- especially at Christmas.
The story of the literal Christ of literalistic believers, ironically, can easily be proven to be a more derivative and unoriginal story than that of the "X" of history we intentionally unorthodox seekers find buried in the shallow grave of the Orthodox Christmas. The Orthodox Christ was literally born of a Virgin on December 25th in identical fashion to Mythra, which stole the same story from the ancient Egyptian God, Horace.
So, it is the Orthodox Christ of the traditional Christmas story that is an inappropriate substitution for the "X" of "Xmas" instead of the other way around!
The Orthodox Christ was nothing new, but the Gnostic Christ presents the same "X" variable to human beings today that it presented to the people of ancient Palestine some 2,000 years ago. Like our world today, we sense that we are or could be something more than we are and that maybe there's something missing from human heart which manifests itself in the problems of human history -- some unknown variable that might solve the problem and give us all the answers.
In the Gnostic approach, the metaphorical Logos gives birth to the Transformative Constant -- the Baby X -- in the empty manger of the Unknown Variable. The existing paradigm of "God", which persists even to this day even among a majority of the world's "Christians", was God which men used in various fashion to grant for themselves the throne of political power. A King decides to commit genocide against a neighboring Kingdom for political reason and the story is told as the dictate of a sovereign God who demands that men and women seek His will through Kings, Priests and carefully crafted scriptures which serve more to enslave than to liberate.
Christ does not represent this well-understood and popular notion of God the Father. Christ, the X of Christmas, represents a wholly Alien God -- a complete Unknown Variable.
"I will give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart."
~Attributed to Yeshua in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas
Before it had been taught to extract an "eye for an eye" and a "tooth for tooth" but Yeshua, the Son of the Unknown Father, says to "turn the other cheek" and to give a person a coat if that person steals your shirt. Yet, we explain these hard sayings away as we regress back into the known and comforting God of exact rules perfectly fitting for human institutions. We forget about the X altogether and we claim again, as always, that what is known to man -- continuous war, economic exploitation, hunger and poverty -- are the necessary condition of humanity. The call of Christ to embrace an entirely Alien God, but loving God who asks us to practice humility, generosity and forgiveness in the place of arrogance, irrational selfishness and retribution.
The Alien God replaces the illusion of knowing with the truth of not-knowing as represented by the mystery of the Eternal Christ, which is the metaphorical "X" inside both the individual conscience and the collective unconscious. The literal Christ of Christmas happens once in history as a physical date of birth. The metaphorical X of Xmas happens each and every time Light and Love are given the space to birth forgiveness and redemption within the hearts of humankind.
So, as the literals, the fundamentalists and the Orthodox lament the promotion of Xmas while arguing that the literal Christ has been lost to secularization, there are some who passionately embrace the X of Xmas as the perfect symbology of the Eternal Christ who calls us into direct communion with the Alien God, whom we believe is the Father whom Yeshua and others discovered with nothing more complicated than an open heart and a mind which seeks only the Truth.
The Gospel of Truth, part of the collection called "The Gnostic Gospels" lost for 15 centuries until discovered at Nag Hammadi, speaks of this "incomprehensible" Christ -- this X of Xmas in the following verse:
In their heart, the living book of the Living was manifest, the book which was written in the thought and in the mind of the Father and, from before the foundation of the All, is in that incomprehensible part of him."
When we engage that "incomprehensible part of him", we have found the X of Xmas which is always seeking a place to born within us.
Merry Xmas!
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