To the Editor:

Dennis Sullivan's Dec. 22 Christmas meditation was for me a bewildering jumble of reflections, prescriptions, and assertions. I was dismayed by what he had to say as he spelled out his conception of what a "true" Christmas is.

Mr. Sullivan's story of Jesus Christ begins with a female (?) angel telling Mary, "Lady, you will give birth to a revolutionary, don't worry, it'll be OK, it'll be a new way of doing business...". Presumably, Mr. Sullivan is using poetic license and his subjective intuition to advance his preferred view of Jesus as a revolutionary. Yet, this is "fake news," which he says he strongly derides in others.

His strangely distorted biblical paraphrase falsifies the historical record in Luke 1 where the angel Gabriel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.” Mary asked the angel, "But how can this happen? I am a virgin."  

The angel replied, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God."

"The Son of God" is the biblically historic description of Jesus, not that of being a "revolutionary," particularly when we come to understand the kind of revolutionary Mr. Sullivan actually prefers to celebrate at Christmas.

First, thinking of revolutionaries with poetic consciousness (as Mr. Sullivan characterizes Jesus), recall the iconic modern poetic revolutionary Che Guevara, an atheist, Marxist-Leninist  whose life was not one of non-violence as was that of Jesus. Quite the contrary.

There are many definitions of what is revolutionary in our time, so this plastic word lacks precision. Jesus was not the militant sort of political revolutionary all too willing to put opponents to death, such as Muhammad, Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao,  Castro, et al.

Nor was he akin to the  philosophical, ground-breaking revolutionary architects of the modern age such as Machiavelli, Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Dewey, Sartre, Keynes, Kinsey, Foucault, Alinsky, et al., their secularist antichristos teachings have next to nothing in common with those of Jesus.

 It is unclear what "well of silence" Mr. Sullivan refers to when he says "silence" speaks truth to him about who Jesus was at his core and what that implies for how Christmas should be celebrated.

We all choose among intuition, fact, logic, and/or revelation as presuppositions in our pursuit of truth. Mr. Sullivan obviously privileges personal intuition.

I see no reason to infer that the revolutionary poet he sees in Jesus is the messiah foretold by Isaiah, "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."

Mr. Sullivan mentions only Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker as someone embodying the sort of revolutionary that he regards so highly.

While one should commend Day's concern and care for the poor and needy, her views were a compatible precursor of the neo-Marxist Liberation Theology of Latin America currently influencing Pope Francis and its variant Black Liberation Theology as propagated by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor in Chicago.

As  Dr. Carol Byrne observes, "The Catholic Worker founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin's goal was a Communist society that would abolish the system of wage-labor and free enterprise and produce a classless society characterized by shared ownership of goods and communal child rearing."

Mr. Sullivan is concerned about "fake news" and yet he writes that Jesus, "...when put under the gun by questioning authorities, quipped back: 'You guys have no idea what Truth is.’ The actual wording is: quid est veritas."

In fact, this is not what is recorded in the gospel of John 18, "Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jew: but now is my kingdom not from hence.’ ‘Then you are a king?’ Pilate said. ‘You say that I am a king,’ Jesus answered. ‘For this reason I was born and have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to My voice.’ ‘What is truth (quid est veritas),’ Pilate asked.”

Jesus was saying he is the Truth and knows the Truth and Pilate, being a philosophical relativist asks "What is truth?" as do all relativists in our day. So Mr. Sullivan has reversed the speakers in what is actually recorded, attempting to make his point unhindered by the historical record, which, by his own definition, is an act of "selling out."

Now the Christmas Holy Day (holiday) has become for many, probably the majority, more about horizontal relationships and things than about vertical spiritual ones, ever more pronounced today in our PostModern, PostChristian, relativistic, secular era.

The history of Western culture is in the main a history of a Christian culture followed by secularization, increasing in extent and intensity. Mr. Sullivan reduces Christianity to his non-creedal personal intuitions about social justice and service to society, which are among the outworkings, not the essence, of Christianity in its foundations and history.

I will close by looking at his conclusions in which he and his fellow believers in contemplative, intuitive silence begin singing, in despair, a song of Merry Christmas in which they lay an outline of their mutual creed.

—1. No one will be happy until the needs of every human being are met;

— 2.They oppose the 1 percent who keep their foot directly on the throat of humankind so that meeting the needs of all is mocked from behind a golden plate of caviar;

— 3. The true Christmas is making people happy, as in each person having the same income, regardless of anything, and receiving the same care for body and mind as the richest among us — cradle-to-grave security.

How this vision is to be birthed in spite of the existing rich, the marketplace, the State, and institutionalized religion that he deplores is left unsaid. Does he see it being done with or without revolutionary violence?

This radical egalitarianism socialism is a dream vision akin to those of many utopian idealists over the centuries and will come into being as the citizenry surrenders its liberties — voluntarily or by force — in exchange for a government regulated security, where in the name of humanity a small technocratic planning ruling elite directs and the subject masses are directed.

Socialism is not a solution to poverty. In the 20th Century, Godless totalitarian governments driven by socialist ideals ruthlessly terminated more than100 million human lives around the world — a fact still ignored by elitists, educators, politicians, and poets who, while professing concern for the downtrodden, nonetheless eagerly advance the deadly agenda under varying guises.

Yes, differing versions of such ideological idols have been postulated and attempted over and over, but happiness has not been the long-term result for the masses (think Venezuela today), though the ruling elites at the top in these attempts always make out well regardless of what they label their publicly expressed worldview and its purported concerns for humanity.

Truly, realizing Mr. Sullivan's poetic vision is, as he admits, a “mission impossible.” He is spinning out hoped-for realities that do not exist, never did, and never will. In a relativistic world the only reigning moral absolute ultimately becomes “Might makes Right,” not material equality for all.

This certainly is not a vision shared by Jesus, though the apostle John in his Book of Revelation foretells a future world state with some similarly negative features.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Victor Porlier

East Berne