Religious Experience

In daily existence it is relatively easy to keep spiritual matters an individual, inner experiece and interact easily with people of all kinds of spiritual views with little conflict, even without considering that the person you are interacting with could have a fundamental spiritual argument with you. But I always find at this time of year, that this so personal aspect of our lives is suddenly on the table for discussion, dissection and disagreement, which kind of kills the "holiday spirit". What I am realizing is that a large majority of the people I know have been wounded, usually in their formative years, by having someone, or quite a few someones, tell them that some part of their experience of being a human being was wrong. To protect this inner wound from further infection they push away with great strength anything that resembles that wounding experience.
I had kind of an opposite experience from so many people who were wounded by traditional religion. I was wounded by intellectualism. When I was small my family attended a congregation of Unitarian Universalists. They were all fine people. No one was unkind to me. I was never forced to do anything awful. But as a group these people were looking for quantifiable answers, a "reasonable" explanation for spiritual tradition. My experience as a human being is that there is much that cannot be seen that is very real, and that the miraculous requires no explanation. All this was supported and confirmed in my education. But at "church" they were ripping away the curtain, trying to reveal the puppeteer, when all I wanted was to enjoy the puppet show! It was only very recently that I realized that the people in my life who can't stand Christmas Carols about Jesus, who wouldn't sit through a midnight mass if you paid them, are reacting to a feeling just like the car-sickness I got every Sunday as a child. They are protecting their inner sanctuary from which someone in their past tried to remove something sacred to them. The anger or sadness that I feel when someone turns away from my joyful singing, is the same anger they fell toward my song. How on earth do you celebrate the holidays with all that going on? My family has found a few activities that make the holiday meaningful and that we can all enjoy; watching Its a Wonderful Life on the big screen at the Colonial, singing to Edie and David's cows on Christmas Eve, and when all else fails, there's food. I have yet to meet the person who doesn't feel just a little bit better about life and the world after a big fancy dinner!