Tag Archives: spirituality

Fractured Holidays

It’s been a weird holiday season.

As some of you know, in May I moved out of our family house and my soon to be ex and I have been splitting custody of my son 50/50. The divorce is in progress, a constant source of joy in my life, as you can imagine. Nonetheless, things are largely amiable between my soon to be ex (soon2bX? Maybe I can get that bit of 733t speak going), and my son has adjusted wonderfully.

So this is the first holiday season of our fractured family life. We spent the first several months of the year in mediation working out in tedious detail an agreement that the soon2bX has largely torn, shredded, and shat upon, but in that agreement we’d planned for my son to be here, at my new place, for Christmas this year.

As we got closer to the season, we realized that, if we stayed with our usual schedule, she’d have him for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, though I’d have him for the other five days of the week. I suggested we just do the holiday as a family this year (we did that for Thanksgiving, and it went well), and I’d just come to the house on Christmas Day.

So that’s what we did. I told my son to call me when he got up, and I’d head right over, because I didn’t want to miss anything. He called at 1:50 am. I headed right over, because I’m game and, as I said, I didn’t want to miss anything.

As you can imagine, it made for a very long day. Naps were taken by the older two of our trio. But we had a great time, because we always functioned very well as a family, even though my romantic relationship with my wife was as vibrant as that between two corpses. Who never knew each other. Buried in different cemeteries. In different nations. On different planets. Ah, good times.

Now, the fracturing of the holidays gets even more granular, as it’s New Year’s Eve, and within the hour I’m due at the house for dinner…then we’re all coming back here to my apartment to hang out, play Little Big Planet, watch something maybe, listen to tunes, and welcome the blessed year when we get rid of the worst damn president this country has ever had. It’ll be a good time.

But still, there’s some psycho-spiritual whiplash, all the jumping back and forth, and the times my son isn’t around are shadowy. I feel even more mortal than usual, and I feel pretty damn mortal as a general rule.

But hey, I’ll be seeing him in about forty minutes, and my year will begin in his presence. And that should chase some shadows away.

Happy New Year.

Santa Claus Is Coming…

santa1
There’s a very special Christmas story I would like to share with you, but it’s a story some of you should probably stay very far away from. It’s called Santa Steps Out, and was written by a gifted fellow named Robert Devereaux. Here’s the Amazon.com review:

In the opening lines of Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-ups, we learn that God the Father had to “cut His vacation short” and is in a “towering rage” about it. It appears that while the archangel Michael was running things, the world got pretty screwed up. “Michael…you know that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are never to cross paths. It’s one of our Father’s most solemn injunctions.” Ah, that Tooth Fairy. She’s also got her hooks into the Easter Bunny.

Robert Devereaux is a master of vivid scene setting, especially gory scenes and sex scenes. There is a lot of sex in this book–mostly happy, lubricious sex that is sometimes downright amazing. Prepare for a strange and stimulating ride when you hop in the sleigh with Santa and witness all his adventures. Prepare to see childhood figures–figures known principally for delivering gifts in the night–in a whole new light. Devereaux is exuberantly polytheistic and well-grounded in Greek mythology, so along with the horror and humping, you’ll be entertained by some notions about where all these immortals may have come from in the first place.

I’ll leave it up to you whether you can take, and even enjoy, what this story has to offer. Me? Well, this is my own short review of the book from way back in 2000, when I gave it as a Christmas gift to a bunch of people:

I Want To See This In Claymation

This book IS over the top, and will easily offend those who offend easily. That’s fine. But the pleasures of this book don’t stop at its provocative nature. It’s also a genuinely creative, nigh brilliant, meditation on human sexual/romantic relationships, through a lens of cunning myth and trounced commercial archetypes. At the heart of the book, even at its most horrifying, is a nearly spiritual regard for the place of the carnal in our lives, and the spiritual enrichment that comes from the joys of the flesh…however you might find those joys.I highly recommend this. It’ll crack you up, it’ll keep your attention, and it might even stir your mind.

The book is unfortunately out of print, but easy enough to find used online. It deserves to become a holiday tradition. UPDATE: as of  Dec 2010, the book is available in Kindle format from Amazon at this link.

Visiting the Gods in Lilburn, GA

My son’s Sunday school class, at the local Unitarian-Universalist Church, is learning about other world religions this year, and visiting various places of worship. My son is an avowed atheist, as I was at his age (I ultimately became very spiritual in a non-church, agnostic, rationalistic sort of way), but his mother makes him go on the weekends he spends with her.

Yesterday, though, the group was going out to visit the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (temple), the largest Hindu temple outside of India, which is in, of all places, Lilburn, GA, not what you’d generally consider a main center of culture of any kind, except maybe the sort you get at Walmart. I’ve been wanting to see this place since it was built, and have a huge respect for the Hindu faith, so even though it was my weekend with Nathaniel, I accepted his mother’s invitation for us all to go see.

The place is simply astonishing. Continue reading →