I do not choose to celebrate Christmas, but as an American
it’s hard not to. Christmas is now as
much a secular holiday as a Christian one.
Like many other Spiritual Naturalists, I was brought up
Christian but grew to find Christianity both spiritually unsatisfying and
intellectually unpalatable. Among the
many things I found objectionable was its personifications of natural law. Around the same time, I discovered the
Eastern religions, and in them, particularly Taoism, I found a spiritual
philosophy both deeply satisfying to my soul and not in conflict with my
reasoning mind (ignoring some of the peripheral bits).
I don’t celebrate Christmas, yet I must admit that the
season still has a certain hold over me. I have good childhood memories of
Christmas and I applaud the sentiments of good will and peace towards all
expressed at this time. Also, the winter
solstice seems a proper time to celebrate the season’s turning from maximum
darkness to increasing light. And, I rather
like the central image of the Christian holiday, the birth of Christ.
Away in a Manger
The central image of Christmas, the incarnation of God
into the history of the world, is the epitome of personalizing. That the being responsible for the creations
of the “firmament of heaven” is also the babe in the manger is crazy, but an
appealing kind of crazy if one reads it mythically rather than literally.
As a myth, I think most Taoists can find something
pleasing about the central Christmas image.
The idealization of the baby speaks to an idea easy for Taoist to relate
to. The first lines of chapter 55 of the Tao
Te Ching are translated by Stephen Mitchell as “He who is in harmony with
the Tao, is like a newborn child.” The
first part of chapter 76 is translated by Ellen Chen as:
“At birth, a person is soft and
yielding, at death hard an unyielding.
All beings, grass and trees,
when alive, are soft and bending,
When dead they are dry and
brittle.
Therefore the hard and
unyielding are companions of death,
The soft and yielding are
companions of life.”
The babe in a manger is an apt symbol of the Taoist ideal
of living in a humble, open, flexible and yielding manner.
A Child Is Born
Unto Mary
The divine child is born of Mary, and the simple logic of
this statement means that Mary is the Mother of God. Taoism avoids personifications of the divine,
but in the instances where personalizing language are used, the Tao is
presented as feminine. In the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching we are told that the “Tao
is the mother of all things” and this idea is repeated in chapters 25 and
52. Chapter 51 tells us that Tao gives
birth to Te, which gives shape to the
world. In chapter 6, Tao is
characterized as the Valley Spirit and the Dark Mare and in several chapters it
is associated with water and darkness, both qualities of “yin,” the feminine
principle, in Taoist symbology.
Like Taoism, the image of the birth of Jesus is suffused
with a feminine and earthy quality, something rarely encountered in other
aspects of the religions of the Levant. The
benign presence of animals in this scene adds to its earthiness. The quality of yin is more to be found in the
Christmas scene than just about anywhere else in the Bible.
Silent Night
Although perhaps a little more of a reach, the divine
birth is also an apt symbol of what is perhaps the most central concept of
Taoist ethics, wu-wei,
non-doing. Perhaps no idea of Taoism is more
alien to the West than the idea that a minimization of action can be the best
way to accomplish one’s ends. The
development of a child inside its mother provides a wonderful example of the
principle. It requires no special
“doing” on the part of the mother.
Nature takes care of the baby’s development and the changes necessary in
the mother’s body to give birth and to provide the child nourishment. The Tao can be characterized as a kind of “intelligence”
within Nature that enables it to self-organize into things as marvelously complex
as a human life. The divine child born
beneath the stars is an apt symbol of the ease and naturalness with which the
Tao accomplishes its ends.
In the Beginning
Was the Logos
One reason Taoism avoids personifications of the divine
is that one cannot personalize the Tao for the same reason that one cannot
speak the Tao, the Tao is unknowable and unspeakable. It is the mystery of being. But one can, I think, personalize Te, which is the second most central
concept in Taoism. In fact, the relation
of Tao and Te might well be
personalized in the idea of God and God’s son.
Tao is the un-manifested source of creation; Te is the manifested creative process. But much like the mystery of the trinity, Tao
and Te are different principles and
yet also the same.
Te is the
principle that brings regularity and shape to the world. It is something like the Greek idea of logos.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus is called the Logos. This is often translated as “the word,” but
it can also be translated as the source of regularities in the world – the way
it is used as a root in such words as “biology” and “psychology.” In this sense, we might translate Te as Logos. In chapter 51 of the Tao Te Ching we are told that Tao gives
birth to Te. The birth in Bethlehem is an apt personification
of this statement.
Peace on Earth,
In its institutional forms, Christianity is about as
different from Taoism as you can get.
Yet, I think that the message of the historical Jesus has many Taoist
characteristics.
Jesus said, “And which of you by being anxious can add
one cubit unto the measure of his life?
And why are ye anxious concerning raiment. Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” This passage from
Matthew, except for its reference to Solomon, would not seem out of place in
the Tao Te Ching. The Christian idea of giving oneself over to
the divine will, that which the lilies do naturally, is the same basic idea as
the return to the Tao, though clothed in different raiment.
Again, Jesus said, “But I tell you, love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in
heaven.” The sentiment here would also
be much applauded by a Taoist, though I think a Taoist might interpret it a
little differently than is typically done by a Christian. A Christian might applaud the strength of
virtue it takes to show love to a person considered an enemy.
The Taoist, on the other hand, would recognize that it is
only attachment to our own field of action that makes us consider anyone an
enemy. The enemy is one who threatens that to which we are attached: no
attachment, no enemy. So the Taoist
might say. “Love your enemies and pray for them that you might learn the nature
of your attachment that has made of you an enemy-creating fool.” Considering that it is actually impossible to
love your enemies – you can only truly love by overcoming enmity itself, which
is to say by ceasing to find in the other any reason for enmity – the Taoist
interpretation might actually be closer than the traditional Christian
interpretation to what Jesus was trying to get at here.
While many of the sayings attributed to Jesus are in accord
with Taoism, many are not. While the
image of divine birth may harmonize with Taoist sentiment, the images of God
triumphant – God as king or emperor – do not.
And the passage from chapter 76 that I quoted above, that “the soft and
yielding are companions of life,” is given a particular poignancy when we contemplate
that other central image of Christianity, the hard and unyielding cross.
God Will Towards
All
For a Christian, the later events of the story of Jesus
are key to the redemption of humanity.
The Taoist believes the world, and humanity as part of the world, is
what it is and has no need of redemption. I agree here with Taoism. But I live in a country dominated by
Christians, I am part of an extended family even more dominated by
Christians. Although I see it from a
rather foreign point of view, at least I can share with Christians the sense of
beauty and meaningfulness in the Christmas story and its central image of the
divine incarnated in the world.
In the spirit of the season, I hope for each Christian,
and every other kind of person in the world, that the peace that goes by many
names – God, Tao, Nature, Allah, Brahma, and others – will settle deep into
their soul and guide them forward in the increasing light.