The sun rises on a new day, new year, new age, new born. It supersedes the old, the outworn, the declining, wasting, passing, dying or dead. The moon wanes and dies, and is reborn three days later.

Patterns we do well to accord with, attune ourselves to.

In fact, patterns such as these are and ever shall be one of the principal building blocks of organized religions—the ultimate consolation in our misguided ego-bound “I am unique and apart as wonderful me” understanding of life.

The deeper understanding: “I am ONE with Life and will pass just as all living beings pass; but in my passing Life is ever born anew.”

Christmas is part of yet another take on the timeless tale.

Ancient rites celebrating death and rebirth, the ever-flowing out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new date back tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of years in their proto-lythic forms. Up through ages of cultures they’ve been transmitted and served ever to harmonize humankind with its destiny.

Stories ever enacted, retold according to circumstance.

Jesus Christ as both Man and God?

Sure, why not?

As God he is one more in the-ever recurring line of Death and Rebirth examples.

As man? It’s pretty clear a man named Joshua or something to that effect lived and died two thousand odd years ago. He said and taught wonderful things, which understandably drew the ire of the societal powers that be and even earned himself crucifixion at the hands of the governing Romans.

But here’s where it gets interesting: what happened at that point is unclear and will never be known. Some opine he wasn’t up on the cross long enough, crucifixion actually being an agonizingly brutal form of corporal punishment lasting days. However that may be, after a few short hours the man in question was deemed deceased and lowered for burial.

Was he dead? And did he rise?

No matter!

What does matter and continues to do so even today was that the man and the events of his life were shoe-horned by very wise people into the ever-recurring ancient pattern of death and resurrection. And the pattern once more worked its ineffable magic, even to the point of establishing a world religion.

However, what had been understood as mythical, as sort of shamanic play at the psycho-spiritual level of our beings, was henceforth to be taken as literal.

And that whole “atoning for the sins of the world” take on the timeless pattern? An inflexion catering to the conditions of the day. Rome was on its five century long decline and fall. It was brutal and corrupt, “sinful” in the parlance of the day. Christianity served as consolation to millions of members of a dying civilization.

Oh, and one last thing, which has only been fully grasped by a handful of souls up to now.

What served and blossomed within a dying Roman world no longer fully served a burgeoning Germanic North European one where nature was not deemed corrupt and sinful but revered as rich and holy. That is, the old world pattern forcefully fastened onto the young Germanic soul did not fit and serve properly.

It chafed and continues to chafe today.

Merry Christmas….

Life is ALL there is!