by E.S. John, Australia

"The Orthodox liturgy on Christmas is usually conducted in the silence of night and is designed in such a way as to attract anyone to it. It often creates in the minds of the faithful an inexplicable experience of the coming down of heaven to earth."

If Christmas caroling once had inexplicable experience of the coming down of Heaven on earth, it has now been apparently reversed to the ascension of hell on earth because it is a money-collecting techniques used by irreligious and agnostic population of the entire global mass that carol under the influence of liquor and other hard drugs. If the Bride has any defilement, the Groom won’t take her into the bridal chamber. The bridal chamber is the paradise that was evicted by throwing out Eve and Adam in the beginning of history. If eating the forbidden fruit was the defilement there, there are many more defilements that have infected the Bride now, though she should have been ‘holy, catholic, apostolic and one’.

The religious Caroling was spiritual once before, but is prone to many atheistic, agnostic and commercial interests now. Making Christmas lamps by ourselves and conveying Christmas messages had meaningful religious values, but today it is run on pure business advantages and pagan elements. When Christmas is celebrated as the birth of Santa Clause and drunken Christmas announcements by irreligious clubs, local and regional celebrations of extravagances on a commercial agenda, the name of God is polluted and denigrated everywhere. It sounds like the Roman census that brought thousands of people into the Jerusalem City that had no place for Jesus to hide His head except in the manger or together with the starving animals that were squeezed into for want of spaces.

Today’s Christmas celebration of extravaganzas that included Christmas trees which hides costly gifts, mass manufactured Christmas trees and stars hanging everywhere under the limelight of electrical gymnastics, fireworks etc are nothing but the portrayal of our trading profligacy. Caroling has become a pagan ritual of money collection and consuming bottles of liquor that sends many on the other side of the grave untimely and miserably. Such celebrations are the fierce iron nails that are struck into the body of Christ.

Caroling with self-made lamps and conveying messages to the spiritually slumbered and waiting for a spiritually awakening good news resemble the angels’ messages received to the shepherds who minded the lambs for sacrifice for the Jerusalem Temple and the wise men who traversed the east for presenting the centuries –old gifts preserved and handed down by Adam through the ages for the Eternal Lamb who provide us eternal salvation. All these spiritual treasures are vandalized by religious and atheistic acrobatics that enjoy the lust of their flesh and collect money in the name of the Lord. Many such ritual and conventional traditions have lost their spiritual values that the church needs to be resuscitated by curtailing all the pagan celebrations that cost money for the poor and hard-working members of the church.

The conversion of the fasting season of Christmas as a feasting melee of self-righteousness and extravaganza is a sign of the Lamb’s imminent coming. This celebration syndrome that sends Jesus into exile, like the Jerusalem City of His birth, brings punishments and wrath at the judgement time.