As Fools Do
The night air is bitter, clear and cold on your side of the mountain. No snow this December nor will there be. Only the disintegrating drifts of leaves that wash across the driveways and sidewalks. A last bath in the crackling memories of a dead spring past. The new life yet long months away and seemingly never to come.
We drink wine now as an entertainment but it was not always so. Once it was a sacrament and a pledge of good faith. There is something foolish and romantic yet in the bottle and cask, but so little. Still on this night, the air dark but promising a later rising light, it could be a sacrament of sorts, if you had something to hold sacred and true. Do you? What is true about this day?
Here is what’s said: that this is the birthday of your savior. But here’s what you know to be true: that this high holy day was the birthday of Roman gods and secret gods but not your own. This festival preempted long ago. And then preempted again by elves, confused by saints grown secular, and muddled now by retailers and manufacturers and other monsters of the new world. Should we call this a holiday if we cannot decide who it is holy to? Can we make a sacrament if nothing about it remains sacred? But we choose what we believe to be true.
The wine warms in the bottle that dangles from your fingers. You sit on the wall of fieldstone. Think of millennia past. When the stars above that you can barely see twinkling were not so vague and lost in the smog and streetlight haze. It is claimed that over the olive groves of the Mediterranean a comet or a star sang out light like a beacon. To point out the future of man. It’s a pretty thought. But can it be sacred even now?
The only thing you can be sure of really is that in the distant age a man was born who, whether you like it or not, had a hand in shaping your world. Has even now, twisted and distorted though it is, a high holy day set aside for his birth and for his death. And whether he did this as man or as god is not for reasonable men to say with surety. Reasonable men are never sure about fundamentally unreasonable things, like sacraments, like tonight.
Somehow you are sure. Somehow you are a fool. And a fool’s reason says: you could stay up all night and reason with yourself; you could stay up all night and drink all the wine, wondering where the sacred has gone; or you could drink to the moving air, drink to the revolving earth, drink to the strange myth that guides your life and sleep. For tomorrow, of course, everyone will tell you that you have something to be happy about: and how could you not? Whether today is any other day or is holy is a mystery, and of course, every mystery is a sacrament. Thus fools make holy what they can, and call all unknowns sacred.
So now you say the greeting of the cosmic fool to all, reasonable and unreasonable alike: Merry Christmas, and goodnight.
