You Won't say Merry Christmas? You are the devil, he hollered as he stalked me down the street.

.

Okay, I needed to pull myself out of this Christmas funk, the sun was out, my legs didn't hurt as much as usual, a walk around the block would lift my spirits, I thought.

But I did not get half a block away when a guy calls out “Merry Christmas” from across the street and I respond with a wave and as much of a smile as I can muster.

“What's the matter with you,” he says, “you can’t say merry Christmas?”

I don't want to but I answer, “I'm not having a merry Christmas this year.”

At once he becomes menacing and crosses the street, calling out, “You are the devil.”  Then he follows me as I'm hobbling on my cane, shouting “Devil! Devil!” 

He mangles Scripture.  “You’ll find out when you die,” he shouts coming up behind me.  “You will be damned for eternity.”

I turn and say sounding like I'm from Brooklyn, “I'm damned because I don't want to say Merry Christmas?”

He has the eyes of a maniac, dirt on his face from sleeping on the ground, carries a ragged backpack. He says, “If you do not take Jesus as your lord and savior, you are damned for eternity,” and gets closer to me. 

I tried, I really tried to just keep walking as there are homeless mental patients who go to a clinic in this neighborhood and sleep in nearby bushes, and I didn't know what this guy was capable of doing.  So I turned, and took off my sunglasses and he saw the fright mask my face is this morning after all last night’s crying.  I'm ashamed to admit it but I started hollering too, as it had been a very tense Christmas and now it was all going to come out.  In a voice that exploded from deep within, I said, “Hey, Jesus was born in the springtime, you idiot.  This is all a marketing scheme between Popes and merchants that's been going on for two thousand years." 

I walk off.  He keeps shouting just behind me, “You are the Devil.  Devil.  Devil.” He’d shout so loud it drowned out anything I said. 

And he was getting closer.

My voice changes and comes out like The Sea Witch in Little Mermaid.  

“Did Christ tell you to follow a sick old lady down the street hollering and judging? You brainless idiot,” my voice so strong and powerful it propelled him backwards, like I had an internal megaphone.  My sudden transition startled him, and he stopped, looked at me like maybe I really was the devil and scampered off in the other direction while I kept shouting, "Brainless babbling idiot!  Brainless babbling Idiot!"

In years of singing on stages, I never projected like this, where I was so loud my warbling echoed off the walls of the nearby Catholic Church.  I was so enraged my shouts had a guttural, Janis Joplin as an opera soprano quality.

Apparently the fright mask face I'm wearing this morning after last night’s tear fest kept me safe through this encounter.  I probably really did look like the devil now to him.  And after he got out of earshot, I still kept hollering because it gave me a very satisfied feeling.  I was SO LOUD.  Even if he didn't hear me, everyone else in that part of town did.  

Probably even the people in the nearby Catholic Church.

I felt for a moment empowered. Especially since I got him to back off with the sheer volume of my voice.

The Sea Witch Within Me Roared.  Keep reading after this cartoon:

But now I'm back in my room, and inevitably convinced I'm better off just hiding in here.  There’s something about me.  I bring out rage in people that they probably really have for someone else, but somehow I appear in front of them as a convenient repository for all the anger they carry.  It's even happened to me at bus stops, someone will turn on me and suddenly become full of, I don't know, maybe the devil, who knows.  And start hollering at me, out of the blue.  It's happened so many times that I've come to accept it as just something that happens.  It might be because I look and sound upper middle class because I was upper middle class until 1997 when I got robbed of $420K, so now I'm down and out of place in the poor part of town and people hear my voice or see my demeanor which says upper middle class and they get hostile.  I really don't know how to explain it but it's been going on for decades.  I get stopped and hollered at my total strangers, it's part of who I am.  It has a lot to do with why I hide and isolate so much, it avoids these scary encounters.

Well I'm tired of being in that position.  I'm tired of being yelled at.  

***************

The Lord did not send his only begotten son in order to assure high year end retail sales profits.  

********************************

One of the sweet ladies here in my senior complex could see how I was shaking this morning and said, “here you need  this.” a little yellow pill, called Klonopin.

I took the tranquilizer and now I'm full of Christmas cheer, may even start calling old friends from way back to wish them … something.  Not merry Christmas.  But all of a sudden I'm full of a synthetic happiness a lot like my neighbors doing the holiday, and it sure does beat the retch I’ve been feeling like for two-three weeks.

Dare I say it? The lord provides.  It also says in Matthew 6, in the Sermon on the Mount,  that you should keep your prayer private and not take to the streets babbling meaningless repeated phrases.  Here are the verses:

Matthew 6

Amplified Bible (AMP)

6 Take care not to do your good deeds publicly orbefore men, in order to be seen by them; otherwise you will have no reward [^[a]reserved for and awaiting you] with and from your Father Who is in heaven.

² Thus, whenever you give to the poor, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites in the synagogues and in the streets like to do, that they may be ^[b]recognized and honored and praised by men. Truly I tell you, they have their reward ^[c]in full already.

³ But when you give to charity, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,

⁴ So that your deeds of charity may be in secret; and your Father Who sees in secret will reward youopenly.

⁵ Also when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward ^[d]in full already.

⁶ But when you pray, go into your [most] private room, and, closing the door, pray to your Father, Who is in secret; and your Father, Who sees in secret, will reward you in the open.

⁷ And when you pray, do not heap up phrases (multiply words, repeating the same ones over and over) as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their much speaking.

⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

⁹ Pray, therefore, like this: Our Father Who is in heaven, hallowed (kept holy) be Your name.

And so on. A lot of what these fundamentalists are doing is the opposite of what Jesus himself said in the Sermon on the Mount.  But to them I'm a heathen because I don't want to babble on the street repeating meaningless phrases.

I often wonder how we've let the truth about Jesus be so corrupted and outright contradicted in the Christianity of capitalism and Ayn Rand style self sufficiency, the theology that permeates this country and threatens to become our official religion.  By the way, Ayn Rand was an atheist, much more heathen than I ever was.

That these people who mutate Christ’s words to suit their own agendas are able to pull this fraud over on the American people is a source of anger and alarm for me.  Christ was born in the spring in Nazareth, and there were no trees around there, so he was more likely a mason than a carpenter.  He would have had dark skin and he was a Jew.  You can’t tell a fundamentalist any of those facts.  They will shun you.

The Lord did not send his only begotten son in order to assure high year end retail sales profits.  I don't think there is any Christ left in Christmas anymore at all, so actually I am probably a more devout Christian than most fundies, I just don’t go to church, as who can find a church that has not been corrupted by the babblers anymore?  I'm trying to live by what Christ said, not because he was the son of God but because his message could save the world, if people really practiced it. 

So I'm a heathen in the eyes of my mouth-foaming fundamentalist U.S. version of Taliban neighbors. 

The error they make is that because I don't think Jesus would even like what Christmas has become in the United States, that I must not even be Christian, when actually it is because I believe so fervently in what Christ said that I choose not to participate .  I think Jesus would think Christmas in America is an aberration and if he came to Earth today, he’d go into Walmart and throw out the merchants who are selling flashing lighted nativity scenes the same way he went into the temples in Jerusalem to throw out the money changers.

The Sermon on the Mount coincides with my belief, not the practices of street corner preachers hollering about hell and damnation based on the only book they ever read, the Bible, and then only the NIV translation.  Whoever says I'm not Christian has not been paying attention.  I just don't want to take part in the aberration that has become Christian fundamentalism and what that's done to Christmas.  I heard last week that in Sarah Palin’s book about the War on Christmas she actually says the commercialization of Christmas is wonderful because it introduces more people to Jesus.  Yes, it introduces them to the Jesus who came to Earth to increase yearend retail sales profits.

People who holler at you for not saying Merry Christmas are at least hypocrites, and could even be the new American Taliban. 

I think one way to get them off my case is to claim to be Jewish, although then they’d be trying to save my soul.  Another way to get them off my case would be to claim I'm a Muslim but then they’d stand their ground and shoot me. 

As Jesus said to do in the Sermon on the Mount, I keep my prayer private.  I know I'm not a heathen, I know I live my life in a godly way and stay as much as possible in a constant state of prayer.  I just don't boast about it, as it says right in Matthew Six, in the Sermon on the Mount, “Keep your prayer private, don't be boastful.” 

In fact, I think my private reverence is why I've been protected during this whole pedophile priest thing.  It's why the motto at City of Angels Blog is “The City of Angels Is Everywhere.” 

Because I bet God does not like the pedophile priests and he helps clergy abuse survivors as we uncover the crimes of Catholic Church Hierarchy. I know advocates such as John Brown in Australia approach this whole thing as atheists, but I say, even the spirits of the wind and sky, the pagan gods, all of them are angry at the Catholic pedophile priests.  If anything, I've had a long and lasting private relationship with God through this whole ordeal of discovering these crimes and writing about them, in fact going back to the days Father Horne was diddling me when I was five years old, I believe I've had a personal angel or two helping me.  Because once that priest got to me the way he did, God knew I’d get in trouble later as a result. So he dispatched angels down to protect me.  That's how I got away from the guys who kidnapped me in 1966 in Paris and were going to sell me to the white slave trade.  That's how I lived through the gang bang by nine drunk Indians on Mount Shasta in 1970 who left me for dead, but I lived.  That's how I came back to life after the attempted murder on me at age six, right around the time of the Catholic priest raping me, when I would not stop babbling.

After that encounter this morning, I wanted to go back out looking for that madmen who had stalked me.  I wanted to tell him how wrong he was about me, that I pray all the time.  I wanted to remind him that in Hebrews it says that judgment is the work of the Lord, not us. I wanted to tell him I believe in private prayer as it says to do in Matthew 6.

But instead I took the benzodiazapen pill that my dear neighbor gave me and, now I'm all bliss and about to go through my phone contacts and start calling old friends to wish them.. happy … something,  

Happy christmahonzaquanzica

-By Kay Ebeling

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