Those who try to escape from this situation by treating the good things of God as if they were evils are only confirming themselves in a terrible illusion. They are like Adam blaming Eve and Eve blaming the serpent in Eden. 'Woman has tempted me. Wine has tempted me. Food has tempted me. Woman is pernicious, wine is poison, food is death. I must hate and revile them. By hating them I will please God...' These are the thoughts and attitudes of a baby, of a savage and of an idolater who seeks by magic incantations and spells to protect his egotistic self and placate the insatiable little god in his own heart. To take such an idol for God is the worst kind of self-deception. It turns a man into a fanatic, no longer capable of sustained contact with the truth, no longer capable of genuine love. In trying to believe in their ego as something 'holy' these fanatics look upon everything else as unholy...
Some men seem to think that a saint cannot possibly take a natural interest in anything created. They imagine that any form of spontaneity or enjoyment is a sinful gratification of 'fallen nature'. That to be 'supernatural' means obstructing all spontaneity with cliche's and arbitrary references to God. The purpose of these cliche's is, so to speak, to hold everything at arms length, to frustrate spontaneous reactions, to exorcise feelings of guilt. Or perhaps to cultivate such feelings! One wonders sometimes if such morality is not after all a love of guilt! They suppose that a life of a saint can never be anything but a perpetual dual with guilt...
A saint is capable of loving created things and enjoying the use of them and dealing with them in a perfectly simple, natural manner, making no formal references to God, drawing no attention to his own piety, and acting without any artificial rigidity at all. His gentleness and his sweetness are not pressed through the pores by the crushing restraint of a spiritual straight-jacket. They come from his direct docility to the light of truth and to the will of God. Hence a saint is capable of talking about the world without any explicit reference to God, in such a way that his statement gives greater glory to God and arouses a greater love of God then the observations of someone less holy, who has to strain himself to make an arbitrary connection between creatures and God through the medium of hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think that there is something the matter with religion. The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good, while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy, or else they don't bother about the question one way or the other, because they are only interested in themselves...
To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of 'nothing' is hell!"
-Thomas Merton (Ironically, a brilliantly insightful and very wise Catholic Monk!)
And this bastardization of Christianity (and Christmas) seems to have become just one result. And also (among other things) what is contemporarily (and politically) now known as 'Christian Nationalism'. And a great example as to why I strongly believe in The Separation of Church and State myself, as being wisely stated as a Civil Protection in The First Amendment of The Constitution, in relation to the dangers that otherwise could be the result, one way or the other (as we are now seeing) that seemed to be well known by the Founders of this Country, just from history itself...
