It's Christmas time again and my kids are running around the house like madmen singing, "Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg..."  Do I object to their changing some old, time-honored lyrics to fit their mood and culture?  Probably not.  Who cares, really?  But there is something else I have noticed, this year in particular, perhaps more than usual.  And I have to admit it bugs me.

I was just in India directing a Christmas television special which, among other things, explains to the Indian people the meaning of Christmas.  India is, of course, largely Hindu with a strong Muslim minority, leaving a balance of only about 3% Christian. 

After over 20 years of doing this program one of the things I decided to do this year was use fresh new Christmas images and by that I mean the whole megillah; prophets first hearing word that a virgin shall conceive a child, to be born in Bethlehem, to the Annunciation, followed by angels appearing to shepherds in their fields, Mary and Joseph and the Baby in a manger, and later on, Wise Men bringing gifts.

My Indian producer, after years of hearing me complain about our tired, old footage, finally agreed with me and planned the whole shooting match.  He cast actors, hired a Bollywood lighting crew, rented three camels, a herd of sheep, and built a village compete with manger.  I had everything.  A star was even constructed to appear in the Eastern sky, a little awkward at 6 feet with no way to suspend it. 

So, for a short but intense part of November, I was in 90-degree heat directing the entire Christmas story, soup to nuts.  And it was just before the last day of night shooting, when we were finally getting around doing the manger scene, that my producer told me over breakfast, "By the way, Michael, we don't have a baby Jesus."  My cameraman still likes to describe the look on my face as it took a moment for me to process this. 

"Well, then, it'll be just like an American Christmas...without Jesus." I eventually said. 

Now, why didn't we have a baby Jesus?  The producer tried to tell me as best he could that the Indian people do not like their babies to be seen by strangers.  He went on to explain that the suspicion, or concern, is that if a stranger looks upon your baby they could give it the "bad eye."  He was searching for the right words.  It took me a second to think about that and I said, "Do you mean the Evil Eye?"  He said yes.  "Even Christians are concerned with the evil eye?"  He nodded again.  I had to ask, thinking that perhaps we could at least get a baby from a Christian couple.  If we could find one with a baby.  

I'd only heard or read about the evil eye on a few occasions and apparently it's a big deal in some countries and in certain cultures.  I heard from my brother that in Turkey you can even buy jewelry to ward off the evil eye.  Anyway, I had to come up with a plan B fast and thought that I could use footage of a baby that I had shot years earlier and just insert it into the show.  

So, aside from not having the central character in the story, the very essence and meaning of Christmas, the shoot went well.  It went really well.  Evil eye or not.

Back stateside, while editing the show, I starting to get Christmas greetings from friends in every form: letters, cards, emails, Facebook messages.  And I began to notice something.  Perhaps it's been going on for years and I just hadn't noticed it.  But this year it jumped out at me a little more than usual.  And that is that certain people, not everyone but an alarming number, when they wrote about Christmas, instead of writing out the entire word, used an x and then a dash followed by "mas."  X-MAS.  An abbreviation for Christmas. 

Now I understand a lot of people use shorthand in their daily lives, like when they're jotting personal notes, memos and so forth.  I have a dear friend who while in med school came to incorporate every known abbreviation in her class notes, as evidenced when she wrote to me.  It was rare she spelled out any word over 4 letters.  Even her "with" was turned into w/.

And of course corporate America has to be relieved that they don't appear to be promoting any particular faith or creed when they abbreviate the holiday.  Heck, not just corporate America, the world.  One of my favorite duty free pit stops, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, this year imprinted one side of their ubiquitous yellow SEE BUY FLY shopping bags with, "Schiphol wishes you a Magic X-Mas." 

Then I noticed that the people with whom I was communicating, those whose writing I was reading, were also using other long words in their writing, and by long words I mean words with many letters, and when it came to those words they spelled them out in their entirety.  Yet when it came to this one word - Christmas - it's the only word they seemed to feel the need to abbreviate. 

I further observed, and this is again based on my limited experience and knowledge, is that many of those who were selectively using this abbreviation were themselves Christians.  They are Believers.  They are people who celebrate Jesus as the main focus in their lives as a matter of personal redemption. 

Do many people now simply prefer to use X-MAS instead of Christmas?  Are they just in the habit?  No harm, no foul?  Go with the flow?  I even had one well-intentioned person, a follower of Jesus, try to explain to me that the X actually means Jesus.  It's His cross, turned sideways.

Now I don't want to sit in judgment of my neighbor who has a sign in his front yard proclaiming, "Keep Christ in Christmas," and by writing this I may be doing the equivalent, but is this something that is standing out to only me?  And why exactly am I not comfortable with it?  Am I maybe just being overly paranoid about this?  Are those black helicopters I hear on the horizon?

Then I recalled another show I did a few years ago.  I was in Israel and was privileged to visit the ancient Herodian hilltop fortress of Masada.  Masada, of course, is the well-known 1st century stronghold where a group of stubborn Jews took their own lives instead of becoming captive to the advancing Roman, or, at the time, pagan army. 

Well, like any guy who loves stories of forts, armies, battles and sieges, I started reading everything I could on Masada.  Along the way I picked up an extremely comprehensive account of the first archaeological dig of Masada, right after it was, shall we say, rediscovered.  And something immediately caught my attention and it was the use of the initials B.C.E.  Of course, I didn't know what BCE meant.  I looked it up, and saw that it meant "Before (the) Common Era."  The initials were obviously being used as a substitute for BC, widely known and accepted as "Before Christ."

Having grown up with what's been used for centuries, BC that is, I became a little agitated.  Again, I don't see myself as a raging lunatic or religious fanatic or anything of the sort, but I just hate seeing history - the writing of history - changed to accommodate modern culture.  I certainly felt that this represented a full frontal attack not just on my beliefs, but on established history.  It was an attempt to secularize history. 

An attempt that worked, apparently.  Since that time in the early 90's I've read and heard that BCE can also stand for Before (the) Christian Era.  I personally think some apologists are a little too hard at work there.  I really believe that over time you'll find the definition of BCE settling into "Before (the) Common Era."  Call it a hunch.

And then it struck me.  The Essenes who held out at Masada chose to take their own lives instead of allowing themselves to be defeated by a pagan culture.  They sacrificed everything for what they believed in, instead of being compromised. 

Now jump ahead 2000 years to this "holiday season," where Christians are voluntarily taking Christ out of the word Christmas.

Which brings me back to India.  I shot my very first television special there some 21 years ago.  At the time (as with the present), my Indian producer really had some nerve to tell the Indian culture about Jesus Christ.  Millions.  On television!  And before we even broadcast the show it first had to face the scrutiny of Hindu censors, not known for their diversity.

And when I did that first show we engaged a well-known preacher, world renown, to give the Christmas message.  And being culturally sensitive he thought that he would soften it just a touch.  Make it acceptable to the Hindu audience.  Just, you know, nibble around the edges a bit.  Not really say what he really believed, but allude to it.  So his sermon went something like this: "What is it about a baby?  What is it about a baby being born?  A baby, of course, is innocent."  And he went on.

You can't win 'em all, I remember thinking in the editing room.

Our show was shipped off to the National Channel and they took a look at it and word came back that they loved it.  It was well done, they said.  High quality - we had flying angels - and everything was acceptable to them. 

But then they said something else. 

As one would expect, they particularly scrutinized our message, 5 minutes max of our 30 minute program, and had a question.  The Hindu government, the Hindu sensors - one in the same - got back to us and asked, "Hey, you guys, don't let us intrude into your world or anything, but if you really believe that God came down to earth in the form of a baby and you believe that He truly was God, and that's what your holiday is all about...why don't you just say so?  Why are you trying to hide it?"

I'll tell you how we're trying to hide it.  We're going to start by omitting the central character.  We're going to change the words.  Only slightly.  Jingle Bells, Batman smells... Everyone will still get the original meaning, won't they?  It's only an abbreviation, after all.  It still means the same thing.   Doesn't it?

We must be worried about the evil eye.

My Healing

I need to give a witness.  At least I think that's the expression.  And the purpose of a witness, I believe, is not strictly for the benefit of others.  It might also be for my own.

First, a correction.  This should more accurately be called "My Healings."  Plural.  Even multiple.  I have been healed many times. 

Now I know and you know what a healing is.  It is not getting a cut or a bruise or a bug bite and treating it and after a few days it's no longer there.  It's not getting an arm or a leg broken, setting it in a cast, and after a prescribed period of time and maybe a little rehab it works again.  I'm talking about a healing outside of yourself.  A healing that cannot be credited to anything you did on your own.  Something beyond your own power.

My first healing: 

Throughout my life I've enjoyed snow skiing.  To do this right I have periodically upgraded my ski equipment to the latest and the greatest.  One particular time, in high school, I got a set of poles by a major manufacturer that had leather straps.  These straps wrapped around your wrists and were there solely for the safety of others.  On that infrequent occasion when you decorated the hill with a wipe out, my favorite expression is "yard sale," these straps kept your poles from impaling anyone in the immediate vicinity.

Well, something happened to me that probably happened to many others and that is if you didn't wear the strap correctly and crashed in a particular way, the strap had a way of wrapping around your thumb like a tourniquet, making every attempt to pull it off.  This was not good.  But apparently it was something I was willing to put up with, at least at the time. 

So my ski seasons became, along with the joy experienced, times of injury for my right thumb and region around it.  The off-season became a time for it to heal.  Heal on its own. 

Then I moved West and started skiing bigger and better hills.  Mountains.  Places with names like Mammoth, Steamboat, Park City, Alta, Crested Butte.  And along with extreme skiing came extreme friends.  Heck, I was extreme.  And this all lead to faster and, by others definition, more dangerous skiing.  Throughout all this I kept upgrading my equipment, including poles, but the plastic wrist grips that came into vogue and replaced my old leather straps were too confining.  So even though the pole section of my garage grew in size and stature, I kept going back to my old poles; the ones with the leather straps.  Weird, but you stick with what works.

And sure enough, with each new ski season and each increasingly spectacular spill, my thumb soon became permanently damaged.  Shot.  There was even a season I almost made it though without re-injury and it still ached nevertheless.  I just didn't make it any worse - until the last day when a major biff virtually destroyed any remaining musculature and ligaments, or whatever medical terms are used for what makes a thumb a thumb.  From that point on for just about any reason and at any time pain would throb through my hand.  This was particularly aggravating as, among other things, I am a writer.  I need to use a keyboard of some sort.

Sometime in here I started going to what anyone could rightly call a "diverse" church in Hollywood.  Mostly white and almost a hundred years old, this church nevertheless welcomed people of all races, socio-economic levels, even orientations.  You know what I mean.  And the Gospel from the pulpit was pleasing, even edifying.  And I liked going there and even became a member. 

Then, I can't really tell you when, I met Gloria.  She invited me to her church, the West Angeles Church of God in Christ.  Not to join or anything, but to attend a Christmas concert or something similar.  It was South of the 10 Freeway, on Crenshaw.  (They have since grown even larger and moved a few blocks away)

I entered the doors of West Angeles to an entirely new experience.  The concert was great.  The people were great.  But the Spirit was greater.  It awakened something inside me.  And soon I was slipping away from my church and coming down to West Angeles, particularly during the summer months when my regular pastor was recharging his Calvinist battery in Scotland.  And yes, there were times, except for one poor hopelessly out-of-synch girl in the choir, where I was the only white person there, but I honestly have to say it didn't matter.  I was warmly received and loved. 

I don't want to make this about something that it isn't, but for the next few years I went down to West Angeles perhaps 5-6 times a year.  It would be fashionable to now say that Denzel goes there, as does Magic, as did attorney Johnny Cochran, but this was unknown to me at the time.  I also took friends.  I even took a former rabbinical student writing a film for me about urban LA, now a recipient of several Academy Awards, and was more entertained than anything else when the preacher, Bishop Charles Blake, yelled, "Now turn to your neighbor and say to them, JESUS IS THE ONLY WAY.  SAY IT!  JESUS IS THE ONLY WAY!"

After awhile I started calling my regular church kindling and West Angeles jet fuel.

And it was on one particular Sunday that something incredible happened.  I went down to West Angeles, to their last service of the day.  That, if you don't like long services, is a mistake.  Apparently it is a known fact that the first 4 services are limited by the need to clear the auditorium for the next service.  No matter what, you were there for an hour and a half max, then done.  Not so with the last service.  This service had no bookend, no time constraints, and I found that out the hard way.  I left something in a pew rack once and had to wait hours before that service got out. 

Anyway, there I was, at the last service.  By now my ski injury pain was something I just lived with, like I suppose is the case with many professional football players.  Add to this I also felt robbed, as a guest preacher took to the pulpit that day.  A broad shouldered man with an impeccably tailored suit.  He would be good, to be sure; otherwise they surely wouldn't have invited him.  But I knew he wouldn't set the place on Holy Spirit fire like Bishop Blake.

Nevertheless we at West Angeles gave him a warm welcome and as the service progressed he spoke mightily about God.  Many times.  He would speak, leave the podium, only to return minutes later with more of his message.  Then again.  And then again.  Well, like any race car driver, you eventually want to see the finish line.  And on this day it didn't seem to be in sight.  Mind you, by now we were way into the healthy portion of the second hour.   Finally he seemed to finish and sat down.  Yet I could see on his face that he was receiving another thought from God and was compelled to come back to the pulpit for yet another, perhaps final, time.

But this time he seemed confused.  This man of many confidences and assurances seemed to not be so sure of what he was about to say.  "There is someone out there who has a problem with their hand, or their wrist."  And he even held up his hand as if it were lame or something and looked out at us briefly.  "I need to tell you that by the will of God and healing power of the Holy Spirit you are healed."  It was not delivered with fiery oratory.  It was more a gentle afterthought.  With that he sat down and the service was brought to a conclusion. 

As I drove home I realized I no longer felt any pain or impairment in my thumb or to my hand whatsoever.  

My Second Healing:

They started when I was 18.  Headaches.  The sudden crushing impairment of a pain so powerful and devastating that it robbed me of any ability to focus on anything else but pure survival during its duration.  Later in life these headaches would be diagnosed as Cluster Headaches.  I think they were a gift from my mother.  She had them.  Two of my three brothers also have them. 

My headaches came every 13 months and lasted 5 weeks.  Actually, to call them headaches is not accurate.  It was one continuous headache for 5 weeks.  Only the strongest of painkillers could mute its effects and for the minimum duration of their efficacy.  For example, if a Darvon is supposed to last for 4 hours, with me it lasted for 3. Soon I learned to set an alarm to try to beat the wave of the drugs wearing off by taking more.  And if the alarm didn't wake me up, the headache would. 

I think I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing leading up to every blackout period of my life, but I cannot tell you too much about what happened during the headache, or "curse," as my brothers took to calling it.  Life changed completely when the pain reappeared.  One doctor, when writing a prescription for a selection of powerful painkillers, said, "Don't try to do anything on these.  Just check out."

I have never owned a gun.  To my knowledge none of my brothers have, either, and I know why.  When the pain digs in as deep as it does and is relentless and unending, you lose all rational thought.

Now back to me in Hollywood.  My business is known for and as, if nothing else, a harbor for self-absorption.  To escape this you have to find something to get outside of yourself.  To find some meaning.  To not suffocate.  At least I did.   I think this is why so many celebrities, not that I am one by any stretch, are involved in charitable work.  

I was new to the area and almost inadvertently found out from some people that you could serve the homeless if you wanted to at the Salvation Army on Hollywood Blvd.  I did so and started in the kitchen.  Not long after I became King of pots and pans.  Not much later the Army decided to pull away from the meal business in that location for whatever reason and my new friends said, "Let's try this at Hollywood Presbyterian Church."  The big red brick place on Gower near the 101.  "Hell, yes," I said, "I'm in." 

So for the next 3-4 years I did that once a week.  On Sundays.  There I became King of lemonade.  And immediately following the actual meal time some old ladies would portion off a room and pray for the homeless if they wanted it, before they went back out onto the streets.  And I got to know these old ladies.  What they lacked in social skills they made up in determination.  Old ladies, unphased, praying with heroin addicts, praying with people who hadn't bathed in weeks, praying with alcoholics who were already drunk at 2 in the afternoon.  

And at one particular feeding my headache came knocking again; an uninvited yet all too familiar guest demanding entrance.  I quickly calculated my personal timeline and yes, it had been 13 months.  Now, after years of enduring this, I was more than skilled in what I had to do next.  The first was that I had to leave while I could still drive.  Then get as many pain killers into my system as soon as possible. 

I went to get my coat and the main prayer lady, Judy, who made Edith Bunker look like a Rhodes scholar, said to me, "Michael, where are you going?"  I said, "Judy, I've got a headache and I'm going to be gone for about 5 weeks."  She looked at me incredulously and said, "We cannot have a servant of the Lord suffer a headache."  I didn't immediately think that mixing giant vats of lemonade made me a "servant of the Lord," nor did I want to take the time to explain to someone like Judy the nuances of an oncoming freight train cluster headache.  Yet there was something so pure about her intention, her determination and her simple faith, that I said what the heck. 

And as the dull growing pain in my left temple grew in intensity Judy and her crew sat me down in a chair and surrounded me and placed their aged hands about my shoulders and head and prayed up a storm.

I have not had another headache since that day when I was healed by a bunch of old ladies confidently summoning and calling down the healing power of God. 

When I began I said I have been healed many times.  These were just two of them.  I'm hoping there's at least one more.  I hope there's always one more.

Like I said, I just had to give a witness.