Art, Meaning, Green Living & Health

On the Eve of the Great Awakening: A Christmas Lesson

Susan Pitcairn, 12-25,-22

Christmas this year has felt especially poignant to me.  Whenever hearing  the more sacred music of Christmas, I often felt close to crying.

What is it, I ask within, that prompts this?

Perhaps in part it is the knowing that, with advancing age, any Christmas could be my last. But, others I’ve spoken with feel a kind of poignancy as well. It  feels bigger, more at a collective level. 

Collectively, there is a poignancy about the memories of Christmases past, shared with now-departed or distant family and friends: the colors, sights,  sounds, smells of festive times full of bright lights, spiced cider, bountiful feasts, laughter, church services, songs around the piano, the fun of opening gifts. There has always been the reality of constant change,  the comings and goings of people, events, places and things, but for many, Covid restrictions and differences as well as other realities have also shifted who we spend Christmas with.

For Richard and I it’s often now with a group of friends who share a passion to witness and assist the Great Awakening now underway on Earth. We will probably not leave our estates to each other, we are not that kind of family, but we are family nevertheless, and our connections are  soulful, inquisitive, honest, open and loving, in a more universal way. 

With the years, we also have reduced gift giving at Christmas in order to make more space for the meaning‑—a meaning  we seek to make a part of daily life. We decorate more simply as well, retaining a few special decorations made or gifted by family or friends. The newest addition is a hand-painted miniature nativity, a spontaneous gift yesterday from the generous owner of a wonderful local family-owned restaurant.

But beyond these kinds of shifts in how we celebrate the holidays, this poignancy at this year’s Christmas has taken me by surprise. What is it ? What is it that is so heart-wrenching about the sacred music, especially, songs like Silent Night that embody the deeper spirit of Christmas.? 

It feels like a collective nostalgia, a sense of loss for an earlier time, an earlier state of mind we took so for granted. A time not so long ago when most of us had a more childlike trust in the stability and basic trustworthiness  our culture: our families, our schools, our government, our culture, our religions, our history, our science, our systems of law and, in short, our world.  
So much of that has been taken from us by the events of the past few years, especially since the arising of the tumultuous times and tyrannies we’ve all weathered since March 2020.

It is a time of shift and re-evaluation of what’s true. And that has also caused me to re-examine my relationship with the Christian and other traditions in which I and most of my generation were raised. My own parents said next to nothing about God but took us to a liberal Christian church fairly often, where we were told it was OK to question even whether Jesus had actually lived, focusing instead upon the essence of his teachings of love and kindness and devotion to the Father, the ultimate creative power of the Universe.

I felt graced to be, as we all are, an inheritors of several hundred years of the Age of Enlightenment, in which we all became, as a society, more free to question, to explore, to inquire, and to experiment. In that process, together we have all learned to question  and protest against the authority of religions and governments and seen their dark side in the form of the Crusades, the Inquisition, colonial conquests, Naziism, Communism and so much more. 

And as we saw some of these dark histories, many drifted away from organized religion. Many found churches to be fairly shallow with songs and sermons reminding us to be good, or else they were too controlling and strict, threatening us with hellfire and damnation. When we left home, we became free to explore, and often we looked especially to the gurus and teachings of the East, the timeless teachings of Buddha and the Vedas.  The word Enlightenment took on new meaning, as we searched for some mysterious and profound experience of cosmic union with the divine and hopefully a complete transcendence of the ego mind and its preoccupations with a small self.

But now, after some sixty years of these explorations, I look around me and I see who is doing the heavy lifting today, the heavy lifting of exposing the growing corruption and failure of our leaders, our schools, our media and our corporations,  as all seem bent on top down rule and a trashing of the precious Constitutional values we so long took for granted.  Is it the New Agers? The Buddhists? The yogis?  The vegans?  I think not. 

The heavy lifting, it seems, is being done by Christians as well as others of faith.  Many believe we are in End Times, seeing current events as the prophecies of Revelations unfolding and  pointing out dark and even demonic signs that are difficult to unsee. Many are walking their talk,  bravely speaking truth to power , doing their best to save humanity from its own willful ignorance and preference to bury its collective head in the sand. And many of us we who strayed a bit from structures but not from the core teachings of the faiths we were raised in  find ourselves in full appreciation and accord.

I do not regret my explorations, not, I think do most of my fellow explorers, but it is good to once again find ,  common ground and to appreciate more deeply just how much Christian teachings are, at their core, a teaching of love and kindness, no lesser than and perhaps even greater than many of the teachings of the East, of the New Age and of metaphysics. The core teaching of Christianity and related traditions such as Judaism is truly the Golden Rule. To do unto others as one would have done unto oneself is not simply a matter of  reasoned civility but the natural expression of the enlightened state of consciousness that Jesus expressed, the kingdom of heaven within of which He spoke, which he said was to be found within each of us as well.

That awareness was and forever remains a state of complete and utter unity with the great mystery of the divine Source, that which we may call God, tainted as the word became, with images of judgement and damnation, captured as it was by religious leaders and authorities more entranced with the love of power than the power of love.

And so here we are, it’s Christmas again. And this time I find myself somehow falling on my knees,  bowing humbly to true and divine meaning of the season beneath the human imperfections of Christianity the religion as well as the commercialization of the holidays. And I see and appreciate ,more deeply than before, its compelling beauty.

And I see as well that what keeps me and I think all of us from humble surrender to the Divine, is simply pride, taught us by our competitive society, our approach to education and  our shared narrative about who we are: just small little beings at effect of a mechanistic universe. Our faith has been too much in our little selves, our conditioned selves, in all that we think we know, in the ego mind. 

Meanwhile, all along, we have been repeatedly invited by Jesus and other great teachers, as well as by the promptings of our hearts, to put our faith instead, in an immeasurably greater power.

Though we call it God and many other names, that divine Source power is ultimately an eternal mystery. It is the force behind all life, behind this vast universe. Though we may never know in its entirety, we can feel it, nevertheless, as a still small voice and we may immerse ourselves at any time in its ever-enveloping stream of Infinite Love.

And I return this Christmas to the timeless words of the disciple Paul:

“And though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned but have not love, it profits me nothing.  

 Love suffers long and is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not vaunt or puff itself up.

 It does not behave unseemly or seek its own, is not easily provoked and thinks no evil. 

Love does not rejoice in inequity, but in the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails, but where there be prophecies, they will fail. 

Where there be tongues, they will cease. 

Where there be knowledge, it will vanish away. 

For we know in part and we prophesy in part. 

But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away...

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three…

But the greatest of these is love.”

Love alone can heal the divisions and challenges of this shifting world, where the threats and the darkness can seem overwhelming to many with eyes to see.  And yet, when we look deeper inside, nearly all of us believe strongly that “we can trust the plan,” because ultimately it is  God’s plan. And we all agreed to come here at this time to play a part, as the veils are drawn back and as we awaken to who and what we are as the children, truly, of God, made in the same image and capable of incredible goodness. 

And as co-creators with God, what if that plan is to imagine and to bring into being a golden age for our kind? What could happen if more and more of us were to envision, intend and take steps to create a Christ consciousness world in which every human organization, from family, to school, to business, to nation is run not for the love of power but by the power of love, as a harmonious team of enlightened children of God, consciously collaborating  daily in prayerful intention to create what is for everyone’s highest good and the greatest glorification of the divine. 

What would such a world be like? Let us find out. And,  God more than willing, let us create it.