Put the Christ back in Christmas.
What is the meaning of Christ?
Do you know?
It comes from the Proto-Indo-European word Ghrei.
Which means to rub.
For many centuries now it has carried the connotation of anointment, which is to rub with fragrant oil.
An ancient practice most likely enjoyed for its sensual benefits to both skin and nose before it took on a ceremonial character as a means to impart the anointed with divine energy to accomplish a divine purpose.
So Jesus Christ literally means:
God Will Save Us By Rubbing Us With Scented Oil
Which makes sense if you think about it.
What is oil?
Like water it is essential to life.
In fact the cell membrane, the wall that separated the first living cells from the ocean water around them, creating a room for them to make their own magnificent kind of order, was and still is made of oil.
Like water oil can flow. But more smoothly. Noiselessly. Without crashing or splashing. It slides with the subtle perfection of a snake soundlessly gliding over the ground.
And unlike water oil can catch fire and burn. When oil burns it releases the energy from the literal sunlight that it subtly carries in the fine pleats of its chemical bonds.
To be anointed with oil is to be covered and separated off from the rest of the world, to become a room to manifest a particular, finely constituted, individual human spirit.
We have discovered in the West, owing a great debt to Christianity for our discovery, that this individuation of finely constituted human souls is the salvation of our kind.
"The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You."
Oil also spoke to ancient people of the fat of animal sacrifices, one of the most ancient of dreams which revealed to our fortunate and wise ancestors that they could do better in life by giving up the animal to the sky.
That is by transcending the limitations of the short-sighted natures they owed to their origins in the animal kingdom.
And taking a wider view of the world, imagining what's beyond the horizon, and peering deep into the future— and reckoning with it in advance.
Rubbing on oil is the dream of becoming human and civilized.
The oil of this Christian ceremony is also fragrant, which makes the one who receives it like a flower, or perhaps reminds them that they are like a flower.
That they grow from a seed. That they blossom. That they whither and return to the ground. This is our Great Tragedy, and our Great Longing to Transcend.
