Emergence of a "Higher Power"
I’ve often wondered how northern European traditions of Christmas go over in the southern hemisphere. The most direct experience I’ve had comes from living in Hawaii where images of Santa on a surfboard (with his reindeer !) were very common.
In either case we are making a transition, reaching the culmination of one phase of the yearly cycle, and at this end we celebrate rebirth or, in the story of the Christ child, the birth of something divine that we are able to recognize as beyond our normal ken.
Learning to depend upon that which is divine, learning to recognize its presence as being your Being, can be a lifelong adventure. Layers upon layers of surrender are involved.
Our pathway on this journey is very simply laid out by facing the things that make trouble in our lives - issues or people we don’t like; experiences we keep having that are unpleasant, and so on. Each and every one of these has a gift when we learn to surrender our conditional way of seeing, perhaps a way of demanding that life conform to what we want. We learn, instead, to depend upon that in us which is divine - that in us which is celebrated in every sacred carol of the season.
It can seem, sometimes, like a journey into darkness - only because we have not found out how to see through, see beyond, the limitations life so often presents. We talk a lot about the “hall of mirrors” that a genuine School can provide. One of the best reminders I got from my teacher along the way was a short note tagged on to the end of a longer letter about Prosperos business : “You always seem to look into the dark part of the mirror.”
It’s true that the mirror will show you your flaws, shortcomings, and bad moods, but that’s not all. The mirror will also show you enlightened individuals, astonishing breakthroughs, and your own innate wholeness, if you care to seek it out. It may even show you how to fulfill your deepest desires in contributing to something that draws us all upward.
At this time of year we recognize an image of the Innate Self blazing through the culture. The new-born Christ awareness we celebrate these coming days is our own opening from an identity of separation, perhaps isolation, into a recognition of the All presence of dynamic wholeness.
Say to yourself, many times a day :
Oh, Christ ! Thou Son of God
My own eternal Self
Life Thou Thy life in me
Do Thou Thy will in me
Be Thou made flesh in me
I have no will but Thine
I have no Self but Thee !
It will always shift your state of consciousness toward freedom.