Exhortation 12-27-09

Exhortation
Post Christmas Blues are a common Phenomena in our day. People get through to Christmas and then colapse at about 10am, only getting up to suffer through Christmas Dinner, then the next day wake up depressed and can barely drag themselves down to the coffee pot to drink away their sorrows.
To a person in this kind of situation, when you mention celebrating the twelve days of Christmas, the immediate response is to run away. I can't barely manage a single day of Christmas, why would I possibly want twelve. But the reason is that we are out of celebration shape. We have adopted an old pagan notion of celebration that sees life as a series of tensions and releases. Life builds up, tension builds up, stress and conflict builds up, and holidays act as a sort of release. The pressures and stress that are repressed throughout our normal life need an outlet in order to keep us from blowing a gasket (like a steam engine without a release valve).
This definition of humanity was shared by Nietzsche, Freud, Karl Marx, and many other modern intellectuals. The problem is, it just isn't true. This is not the way people are made and it is destructive. The idea is that the best way to build a house is to make sure that you blow it up regularly. It is through Chaos that we find order. Only Chaos can restore order. That is false. It should be obvious, but it isn't. In fact, the entire modern project, built on the guise of evolutionary nonsense and stupidity, is trying to build through destruction. If we can just produce the Chaos, the order will form.
But the Christian understanding of holidays is that holidays are placed as memorials of the the great acts of God to rebuild over against the Chaos. It is because God fought back the chaos that an ordered calendar, with times set aside for a rhythm ordinary times, preparations, and feasts, is meant to build us up and train us in the art of living in the world full of wonder that God made, rather than the boring fantasy world of the materialists and secularists.

This reminds us how often we have turned towards chaos for salvation rather than towards Jesus,