40 Days in the Wilderness

Being the Christmas period, and following exactly forty days in Atyrau, Kazakhstan, on a 6 week contract with the British Council, I can see the connections with JC's own self-imposed quarantine in the desert of Judaea.

Coming to Atyrau, a sort of frontier oil town on the northern edge of the Caspian Sea, is in many ways like coming to a wilderness. Indeed, as our very own Manshuk (Project Manageress) told me this afternoon in response to how degraded the environment here has become because of the oilers, this place is virtually 'a desert'.  Forty days is also a curious period of time. To be sure, this is the twelfth time I have worked (teaching English as a foreign language) and lived abroad (and the 11th country), and it is the shortest contract I have ever had (due apparently to visa limitations and not to my troublesome nature in stirring up the locals). Last year, I noticed when I was working in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (more oilers; in my teachings I try to undo what they have done), that it took about five weeks for me to acclimatise to the way of living, to the shipping container accommodations, and to the moronic attitudes of my overseers. After this period, I considered myself 'settled in', but the first five weeks were, as I noted at the time in my journal, a trial by fire.

The five, six, week period is significant for the sort of thorough detoxification that it imparts upon the bodymind. A detox not precisely of drugs, but rather of the narcotic nature of society. The city is perhaps the most powerful drug known to man. The western city even more so. It is no coincidence that this period, known as a quarantine (from the Italian quaranta meaning forty), is the number of days Jesus spends in the desert fasting. The fasting though it may have included food, was primarily of a social and conventional nature, that is, fasting, as he remarks in the Gospel of Thomas, from the world of men and their distractions, not in the half-hearted Thoreauvian attempt (where Thoreau had daily contact with people and the town) but in a full immersion in the self, in solitude, space and, above all, silence. This exploration of the self, above all else, is the wilderness and the quarantine that Jesus sought out. Whether or not he actually went into the desert is neither here nor there. What is 'here and there' is the inner wilderness that he immersed himself in.

There, he was tempted by none other than the devil, but woe to those again who take this at face value. The temptations are the cracks which appear every now and then and which cause him to wonder what on earth he is doing. I believe everyone has these moments of self-doubt where we look at ourselves in the existential glass and ask: What the hell am I doing here? Whether you are referring to an actual place or the mind that you have come to embody is six and half a dozen.

According to the gospels of Matthew, Mark & Luke, there were three of these moments, which sounds about right for a forty day period. Each time he was preyed upon by this self-doubt, he saw that the city and its comforts, his family and familiarity, were only a short distance away. Should he cut and run? Or should he see it through? Of course, it was a no brainer, and of course, unlike Adam, JC made the right decision.

The reason why I mention this is that, now, approaching Christmas as we are, the run-up known as Advent should be something like this quarantine insofar as it is a fasting or antidote to the orgy of excess that has literally consumed this Christian festival. Instead, however, Advent has become a sort of warning siren that resounds to all to stock up, over-consume, and horde, in the run-up to the feast. The commodification of Christmas has led to it being called 'the civil religion of captalism' and is at complete odds with what it perhaps should be. Donald Heinz in his article Christmas and the Clash of Civilizations writes of the hypocrisy that lies just beneath the surface of Christmas. He writes too of the complete turnaround of what this festival actually embodies:

Christmas magnifies a clash of civilizations between Christianity and consumer capitalism - each making religious claims about the meaning of life and each creating an ethos that models how we are to live. A festival of consumption, especially without regard for the poor, is a blatant competitor to biblical religion. But many churches scarcely notice this because they are invested in a worldview that contradicts the Christian one. In the new and better Christmas, the Incarnation is reversed. Human attention turns to all the materials that claim to be good instead of the Good that claims to be material [...] In the jostling of holy day and holiday, the Incarnation is just another ornament... Christmas as holy day is a discontinued line.

In other words, Christ and the Church have become big business. It's as if our eyes, and our very being, has been veiled with the invisible prism of consumerism. Capitalism has, like the virus that it is, infected us at the deepest level. 'Consumerism is what we look through,' Heinz notes, 'the spectacles we cannot take off'.

'How complicit is the Church, and are individual Christians, in the unmooring of Christmas from its anchorage in sacred texts and history?' He asks.

And all because we have lost touch with the wilderness, physical and metaphorical. If we might venture 'into the desert within' more often, as we should do, perhaps at least twice a year (as the festivals of Advent and Lent suggest), we might reconnect with the precious cargo that is ourselves. Instead, we are duped and seduced by the treasures outwith us. And there continues the fall.

Mathew's greatest advice was to 'be alert for you don't know what day your Lord is coming'. It was a direct reference to the great self and its 'cargo precious'. In other words, if we pay attention to our self, pay attention to what we are doing and why we are doing it, 'your Lord' will eventually arise from beneath the nonsense and all the fruitloop philosophies that Satan (aggressive capitalism) has manufactured.

As Heinz concludes, rather succinctly:

'Getting Christmas right means getting ourselves right...'

A Kazakh fisherman 'walking on water' in the middle of the great Ural River, the dividing line between Europe and Asia (hence we can surmise that he is in a sort of nomad's land which is neither Europe nor Asia).