Vicky of our innocence

She was not that innocent but she was wide awake. Vicky asked her two sons, one in Australia and another in Florida, to come home. Two weeks later, 70ish, she concluded her earthly journey. She was intentional in the significance of closure and the symbology of completion.

I never really met Vicky but I’ve crossed paths with her four sons and daughter(s). Her former husband is a good friend whose personal journey itself and the way he lives his ethnic identity is a wonder of major proportions.

But I remember Vicky today being Innocents’ Day in the Christian liturgical calendar. In the nativity account in the Gospel according to Matthew, King Herod felt betrayed by the three kings who first sought his assistance but did not bother to bid him adieu so he ordered the blanket massacre of all the boys under 2. This was used in the narrative to fulfill a passage out of Jeremiah of the Old Testament, but veracity and authority of Scripture is not our search. The human rather than the literal historicity of the story is our concern.

It was our pleasure dealing with high school minds two weeks before Christmas, and in the discourse on self-image that we dealt with in civics and U.S. history, language arts and reading, it was inevitable that we touched on the historical symbols of religion that retained faithfulness to the authentic and the real.

We touched on the great unifying symbol of the Hindu Om that insists on the unity of all things, never mind that the 330 million personae of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva seem to defy congruence. Then we touched on the reality of two opposite forces like the yin-yang continually seeking the point of balance instead of cancelling each other out. Sinosphere is blessed with this perspective, much to the consternation of Europe that wants to finish off a conflict when one is defeated, even unto death.

Closer to home, the word YHWH means “the way life is” and any attempt to live before an imagined reality is quickly burst as an illusion, a mirage in the desert. Only the real counts. The true wailers on the wall of Jerusalem are not those who long for a King of David to save them from their predicament but for a Messiah that allows them the integrity of their tears when life in the desert becomes unbearable.

The Christian insight is the propensity to keep building illusions, creating “castles in the sky,” quite literally bringing the Rah of the sun pyramids of Egypt into the transcendent heaven of Mt. Olympus of Zeus, a place we can go to after enduring the vale of tears that earthly life provides. 

The Christ-word is toward the truth and the nativity story tells of how the three kings did not trust Herod and returned to their homes without pandering to a lie. To “die to our illusion is to gain real life” was the Christ-word witness of the ekklesia, the “household of the Way Life Is” that got ritualized in the celebration at Christmas time. There is no escape, “even unto death,” and to demythologize such endearing terms like “incarnate, crucified and resurrected” is to take down Christo Rei from heavenly glory surrounded by the winged angelic voices and deal with what is real. 

To be incarnate is to understand one’s self as unique, one of a kind, unrepeatable of which “there has not been one like me before and there will never be another one like me ever again”—not an object of profound theology as it is an item of common sense. If out of the 200 million sperms my dad unleashed to fertilize my mom’s egg and I was the one that made it, it is from awesome and incredible odds. Of the sperms that swarm around the egg, the first arrivals do not necessary get into the ovum. The egg chooses and I was chosen to be the one to merge with an ovum to create an embryo; I see myself as a chosen one!

What is true of me is true of everyone else. We are the winners in the great lottery of existence, and free to decide how to live our finitude.

With the human propensity to build delusions, castles in the sky, I die to my illusions; a dying sometimes not out of choice but forced by life’s reality itself, just the way it is. Shelving the drama of Golgotha, each human, to be ordinary, is crucified to delusions, and awakened to the coda that to “die is to live.” The crucifixion becomes a part of my incarnation, and results in an incredible new affirmation: I can live! Resurrection is the fancy word given.

The 18th was carnival day and Christmas pageantry at the high school where I taught. Students sold water balloons for the high energy “fights.” With the screams in the courtyard, the “innocent” students were hardly that.

There will always be those who will try to erase this “innocence” to wallow in what should be, ought to be and imagined to be. To be or not to be, that is the question is Hamlet’s soliloquy. 

A colleague found out a truth of being just the way one is; found it difficult to digest. Vicky of our innocence is Visitacion by baptism. Consider yourself visited. Just be!