Pagan stereotypes

Rating: 10/10 (30 November 2017)

Some feel that COCO honors pagan holdovers. The "genius" of Christianity of the Roman Catholic sort was to adapt what people had to teach a lesson. Look at the Chinese. Missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, saw ancestor worship as idolatry. Now they say it is merely remembering the past, learning the good from it and letting go of the failures. Christmas came from the Saturnalia. During that time, Romans were ordered to be cheerful and generous. On one of the days, servants and masters reversed roles, getting back to the golden age when men were one and in community. Besides who lets anyone freze or starve during the deadliest, darkest time of year. All Saints Day took over Samhain, the Druidic first day of winter when the boundaries between the worlds went down. Saints have always been those who are "with God", doing good, being human beings, mensches. Some are declared to be with God and "worthy of imitation". The idea of the soul is a pagan construct. The Hebrews believed that you did not worship God from the grave. But God is abstract, no dimension or measurement, Being itself, not a being among other beings. God is present where there is Truth, Justice, Charity. And the dead are still "with God" if they were with God in life. They are with God in memory. As the elder Muslim said in a Town Called Alice, "Who cares for women and children has God not far from him," when asked to help wandering mothers and their children in Japanese-occupied Malayia in 1942. All Saint and All Souls teach that: remember the good that your family did and follow it. They loved you. Love others. It is an ordinary concept for ordinary people. It is not some ritual performed at a High Mass in the Cathedral for the rich hacienda owners or the capitalist elite. It is Francis of Assisi, pedestrian, barefoot, not a priest, not in the hierarchy, looking for the man or woman who needs help or a helping hand, who works alongside the men and women in the fields or the factories, who dresses in overalls. So there. COCO has that kind of heart.