Book Review: The Spider Who Saved Christmas, By Raymond Arroyo
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I seem to need a little Christmas right now. Maybe it's only the melancholy doom of age, that more Christmases are behind me than before me?
My rush to merriment is not even for the usual reasons people binge on a good thing, but rather, I long to witness the kindness that magically appears particularly at this time of year. Everyone seems a little more patient, a little happier, and a little more hopeful.
Still, I notice an effort to erase the religious reason behind the holiday more so now than ever before. I think it's caused by a resentment of a dominate Christian society born after the winning of World War II by mostly a wave of young, strong, Catholic men.
The WWII soldiers' advent included a fast of every sort: food, cold, and cruelty of unimaginable scale. There was then a joy even in a sacrifice that gave a life for a life. Maybe because the world really went to hell and all their hope was in found in Jesus' resurrection?
Not that there aren't tears today. We live an interior hellfire of doubt never before seen since the first Christmas. So very few of us can accept the penance of the Christ Child because we are attracted to what this world has to offer us instead of what God does.
Yet modern humankind no longer has a heartbeat. Rather, our hearts have been pierced by a lance of material matters where there is no room for Christ because we are so very happy in our present state of moral confusion.
Today we seem to be in a spiritual cold war. We suffer in countless ways the war-torn twentieth century could never fathom. Seeing war, they knew God. The little candle of another earthly Christmas would someday reveal the everlasting sun only God could create--a fusion of oneness and blinding in goodness. We can't even imagine that God today, nor do we try.
Even with today's vast material wealth in the West, we are morally anemic-- although like a drunk at an open bar wedding, we think we are the luckiest man alive.
We can't accept the Christ Child. He is too foreign to us in a scientific, spiritually dumbed-down world. We don't find anything God offers us appealing anymore.
But at this time of year I hope the old songs of a wartime Christmas, when snow and mistletoe and being transported to the past good times of home if only in our dreams might reawaken the comatose spiritual souls of modern peoples.
It's like the LED lights on my new Christmas tree, energy efficient, pre-lit for ease of use, and changeable from color to white lights depending on my mood, but utterly unappealing because there is an unnatural harsh tone to the lighting. If someone would have thought it through, they would have seen the lack of subtle beauty of anything built for only for efficiency.
I miss the days of the candle, which changes with the burning wick. Each moment of that burn reveals a hidden movement of fire touching wax. I would take a thousand candles of dim light to all the floodlights of the cruel modern world. We have learned to operate, and yet we fail to heal.
This split personality of man without God fractures into a vast array of cults, and nobody senses we have poisoned ourselves to hate what would truly make us whole. It is the Child that once slept in a manger, the Bread that came down from heaven to heal us of our sins. But without the knowledge that we have sinned, there will never be a star to guide us to the only sacrifice mankind has ever needed. In the rejection of God by the twenty-first century men and women comes the rejection of us by God.
Someday when our last Christmas has passed, we'll exit this earth. Being remade back to dust is what we expect. Many have no idea that everything Jesus spoke about is true, including that we live on after this present life, and this fact is not dependent on our opinion.
As we watch a secular world drunk with its own religious skepticism, we must become the self--sacrificing spiritual soldier, willing to lay ourselves on the firing line, taking on that risk to bring back God to the dying world which doesn't even know how thirsty it has become.
A long time ago I thought I was a writer. Because my parents were practical, I went into teaching. About ten years ago, I began to write again.
I hold a B.S. degree in Elementary Education from Penn State University (University Park). I enjoy gardening, reading, Pittsburgh sports, and cooking, but not in that order. My regular job is being a wife and mother.
