Christmas tides

On this morning before Christmas, I'm on my balcony looking out across the Gulf of Mexico. Staring at the blue horizon, squinting and thinking.  Thinking how the cadence of our lives seems to move like the ebb and flow of this majestic turquoise tide.

And about poppies.

Watching whirlwinds of sand on the beach, they look like mini-tornadoes trying to escape the grasp of the bleached white shore, which is clogged with New York tourists and annoying seagulls.

The towers of determined sand spin and twist, longing to escape back into the silence and infinity of the blue green waters. Among the unseen and the magical.

Shallow and glittering and peaceful, the Tiffany waters move enticingly closer - then dance away as the moon and heavens chase each other across the skies.

Away from the beach, the city is alive with people preparing for the holidays. Like marching ants and swarming bees, it is a pheromonic-like procession.  A directed, animated process of observations - learned in dining rooms, Sunday schools and churches. Reinforced in social engineering and in religious education and doctrine. Confirmed as conveyances of happiness and, sadly, meaning.

No one would argue that traditions don't provide a sense of greater belonging and purpose - regardless of one's social, economic, racial, or intellectual status. They help transcend our production-line of existence and cement our collective and individual religious values. They're important to goodness and community.

But aren't they really just an anesthetic? A numbing to the realization that perhaps we're just another grain of sand on the beach?

For if our souls do truly have a purpose - and I believe they do - a meaningful existence transcends these merely mechanical observances. Of course, religious constructs are important elements of how we interact with our God.

But we can't ignore our soul's real purpose. How can we escape the billions of other grains of sand that make up this beach if we don't create a whirlwind? How can we fling ourselves into the turquoise waters?

I believe the Dali Lama has a soul that is connected to other higher souls over the infinity of time and the universe. People all over the world, whether they are Buddhist or not - also believe. Someday, perhaps quantum theory will begin to explain it - if it's comprehensible at all while in this existence.

The purpose of the soul is not love. It is not about being an expert at following tradition or being a good keeper of religious conformity. Grains of sand know, maddeningly, how to fit nicely next to each other.

It is about seeking justice. The meaningful work of the soul is to make a difference in achieving justice.  Seeking justice for equality and freedom and human rights. Justice that each soul that arrives in this time and space has an opportunity to make a difference. That our souls aren't sold into a slaver's chains in Charleston or slaughtered in a French field. That entire generations aren't eliminated in Polish and German camps. That babies can't be poisoned by toxic chemicals.

Souls like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou.

And Martin Luther King, who once wrote, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

And from army surgeon John McRae. During the warm days of May in 1915, in France, he was near the Ypres-Yser canal. As he watched a fellow soldier die, he composed a poem, heartfelt and poignant, about wasted lives and its profound sadness. Its simple lines are as compelling as the most righteous defenders of justice our world has known:





















Today, in the moat at the Tower of London, individual poppies commemorate the nearly 900,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen who died in that war, one of history’s bloodiest conflicts. It is visited by many millions of people each year.  John McRae's simple but powerful words echo across space and time. A poetic treatise that suffering so many souls is a greater loss than any land, any conflict.

Poppies of justice. Like grains of sand on the beach, swirling and coalescing into something forceful.

It is this noble effort of the soul that Robert F. Kennedy described when he wrote:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” 

And so this morning, looking out across the water, I'm thinking about poppies and poems and justice. And why Christmas is really, in many ways, about the birth of Justice.