Happy Birthday, Guru Jesus

It’s my first holiday season in New England in more than 40 years. As I look out at the white landscape, I’m reflecting on two things, including how in Los Angeles the season never quite felt jolly enough in 70-degree sunshine. Most of all, I am reflecting on how I came to love Christmas in the first place.

Growing up in an ethnically-mixed Brooklyn neighborhood, long before gentrification was a word, Christmas meant pretty lights in shop windows and presents for me under the trees in certain living rooms.

The name of the person responsible for the holiday meant one of three things. To my Christian classmates and friends, of course, Jesus was the only begotten son of God, Savior of all Mankind, a concept I could never quite comprehend. Among the Jews, he was either a laudable ethical teacher; a nice Jewish boy who met with a tragic fate; a creature of mythology, like Apollo or Zeus; or the idol of fanatics who perpetrated horrors in his name. In my atheistic home, where religion was considered the opium of the people, Jesus was a proponent of the “Golden Rule” and was mainly the reason we got time off from work and school.

My first brush with a church at Christmas time came in my senior year of high school, the result of a crush on a Catholic classmate. I saw that she knew my friend Bobby, so I dropped a hint. Bobby, whose last name was very Irish, told me the girl attended his church and invited me to join his family for dinner and services on Christmas Eve.

Unfortunately, Bobby’s father happily poured booze for his underage son and guest, and by the time we got to church, Bobby and I were beyond tipsy. This made the unfolding spectacle seem amusing, and evidently, the object of my desire saw us grinning and stifling giggles. When, on the way out, I got up the nerve to say hello to her, she glared with contempt and accused me of mocking her religion.

I got over the crush and the trauma but had no more use for churches or Christmas until the late 1960s, when I was introduced to a different Jesus, by way of India.

Like many of my contemporaries, my hot pursuit of truth and personal fulfillment led me to the spiritual teachings of the East. I read the sacred texts of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as modern interpreters such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Joseph Campbell. I tracked down a yoga class—not easy to do back then, believe it or not—and learned to meditate.

Throughout my explorations, Jesus cropped up surprisingly often, always with deep respect, especially in Paramahansa Yogananda’s seminal memoir, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” in which the rabbi of Nazareth is treated with such reverence that I thought I must be missing something.

But after I opened the New Testament for the first time it blew my mind. My spiritual reference point was more Hindu than Judeo-Christian, the Gospels read more like the Upanishads than the church-y dogma I expected to find.

The main character was a master teacher, a guru who not only prodded his disciples to better behavior but pointed to the same kind of spiritual experience the yogis described. When he tells the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount to “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret,” I saw a guru directing his devotees to meditate.

This was a Jesus I could live with: exalted, but without the grandiose triumphalism that insists he is the one and only savior of humankind and relegates non-believers to either irrelevance or damnation. He was held up as a sadhguru (true teacher) and a Jivamukti (enlightened being) of the highest order, like other venerated sages. Some afforded him the status of avatar, placing him on the same level as Krishna and Rama. In keeping with Hinduism’s pluralistic tradition, Jesus’s teachings were treated as one of many pathways to the unified consciousness that is yoga’s true aim.

I subsequently learned that this perspective has been filtering into America’s bloodstream ever since Henry David Thoreau equated Jesus with Buddha and called himself a yogi in “Walden.” It’s enabled a great many angry or alienated Christians to reconcile with their religious heritage on terms they could live with. Many have been encouraged by Indian gurus to see Jesus as their ishta devata (preferred form of God). Similarly, many Jews who studied Hinduism and Buddhism have come to see Jesus as a mystical rabbi whose legacy was sadly corrupted.

The image of Jesus as a guru may not sit well with clerics for whom Christ can only be the one true messiah and the hinge of human history. But they ought to be glad that millions of people who might otherwise view this season as merely a respite from work, or as nothing but humbug, will instead celebrate the birthday of a great holy man.

Which is how I’ve been celebrating it for the past 50 years as a massive, soul-elevating birthday party. I came to love Christmas music, and I’ve listened to it and sung it loudly in churches of many denominations on Christmas Eve, blessedly sober and unencumbered by teenage crushes. I’ll do it again this year in the Berkshires, where the air is as chilly as it ought to be this time of year, and the small-town lights and Currier & Ives tableaus warm the heart. Fingers crossed that the landscape will still be white.