I offer up whatever merit accumulated here  to be dedicated to all for the sake of all sentient beings.  My family celebrates Christmas, but certainly not for the reason that this is the time when Christ the Savior was born.  The manger scene is certainly beautiful, but the spirit of giving and generosity is what is emphasized here, and I appreciate that my altar stands ready and waiting for me to continue that particular practice.

Sometimes, it’s OK that other well-meaning folks are confused when I light my candles and incese, fill my water bowls, put some fruit up on the altar, and do a series of prostrations while singing mantras……..it certainly LOOKS like I’m worshipping that Buddha figure up on the center top of the altar.  However, I am not.  I’m practicing.  And that’s all this is, really.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, practice, practice.

We continue to practice generosity by giving offerings up – and not things that we could do without, but our favorite foods and scents and sights.  We continue to practice acknowledgement of our own impact on the environment and on each other by contemplating on our karma.  And we continue to practice selflessness by dedicating all our luxuries, our fortunes, and our health, to others.  

Daily practice of this generosity in the mind and on our altar, we will be better prepared to give to others away from the altar – where our attachments and our delusions can blind us so easily.  We can be better prepared to give our time, our money, our clothes, our food, and even our very lives for the benefit of others.  THIS is why I do my prostrations, why I give offerings, why I chant my mantras.  It’s a discipline that works.

I remember a Christian pastor that once told me something very enlightening………he once said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Practice makes permanent.”

Now, despite my immediate conceptual argument against the very word “permanence,”  I saw that he was on to something.  Practice makes permanent in the sense that it causes a thought, manner of speech, and/or action habitual and eventually effortless.  It becomes our character, and one could say – our destiny.

So, I write this on Christmas Eve, when I’m preparing a holiday feast for family and friends, and I wish all who grace their fabulous presence here my best health and good fortunes.   I place my offering today on the altar with the thought:

I am but a simple whore.  May you be happy.  Happy Holidays!