To miscast my younger self as a dim light would be to err in believing that the light doesn’t shed any of itself. Less than dim, I was dumb. I remember when I discovered there was no Santa; I should remember. It wasn’t too long ago. I was terribly old, maybe 14. And the thing was, I had known that there was no Easter Bunny: a bunny that brought big baskets of goodies? With no opposable thumbs, with no magical helpers, and without a fantastic mode of transportation? Rather improbable.
Anyway, my fourteenth Christmas Eve, my family and I got home from my grandmother’s, after an extended Christmas celebration. The house’s halls were decked, a log burning in the fireplace; it was the most peaceable time of the year.
The evening was getting late, and my parents had put my three year old sister to bed. “About time to go to bed,” I thought dimly. “Hate to have Ole Saint Nick to run behind on my account.”
My parents, though never cruel, might have thought I was on to the ruse, or maybe they merely forgot the foundation upon which rested my sense of reality. Either way, they ripped open the curtains on the Santa illusion, shattering my world.
Putting together my sister’s dollhouse, as my young adult tears ran through peach fuzz, I realized that I had been conscripted into the Elfish Order as one of Santa Claus’s coolies. What a drag it is getting old.
Modern Christmas is really two holidays in one: the biggest secular celebration, with that big, fat, red fraud, and the most important commemoration in Christianity, the birth of Christ. For the young Mark Wright, the two had been inseparably real: Christ was sent by God the Father to be born of a virgin, died for our sins, thus causing an obese elderly man to eternally give gifts to every child in the world. Dim.
Well, then, if Claus isn’t true, what makes Christ real? I was knocked on my intellectual butt, which, though not far, forced me to find a way that I could stand in the stead of reason.
One doesn’t tread the trail to blasphemy without reservations, but I found an intellectual solace knowing that I definitely didn’t believe in any of the other religions; in this way, aren’t all believers atheists?
It was Thomas Jefferson who said, “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.” Should I find myself a total atheist, it will be the fruits of my convictions, congruency of my conscience.