Light Lines
'Twas the Night Before Christmas
My Dad was going through some of his old slides and converting them to digital photos last week. He sent this to us and it made me laugh out loud. This one is of my mom, my brother and I in our housecoats in 1975 on Christmas morning.
I noticed a few things:
Mom must have budgeted for Christmas by saving a fair bit of money by cutting all of our bangs herself.
My Dad’s old Cannon camera was an eye taser in disguise. That old giant flash bulb left us all stunned for seconds afterwards in fact, it looks like my brother’s mouth is risky territory for any insect flying by.
And please don’t get your tinsel in a tangle, I think we probably all used it int he 70s, but did anyone ever really think that this ecological nightmare really looked like “icicles”? I can remember my mom politely pleading us to “spread them out more thinly” after we’d indelicately put a giant clump on one branch and we’d be pulling them out of our burnt orange shag rug for months afterwards.
I remember spending days looking through the Sears catalog “Wish Book” (while listening to Alvin & the Chipmunks “The Christmas Song” on repeat) circling doll houses, canopy beds, banana-seat bicycles and “go-go boots” that looked like Nancy Sinatra’s. Only to get with this slightly traumatic game of mild actual electrocution… (kidding, for some strange reason I clearly recall wanting it too:)
All kidding aside, there was no holiday season I loved more.
One of my other favourite things was to watch a Charlie Brown Christmas and I confess I’m still feel mesmerized by Linus’ description of the true meaning of Christmas:
It must be my Catholic school influence, but this time of year also makes me think of Mary. Now that I’m older and a mother of two grown boys, I see something in her that I never fully appreciated when I was younger…
Mary is the perfect symbol for advent.
In fact, everyone is focused on Jesus, but she’s the one that sets everything into motion and makes Christmas possible. Not just 2024 years ago, but today, women around the world will be up past midnight tonight labouring away to make the holiday extra special for their family, while someone else in a red suit and white beard is going to take all of the credit. Kidding, sort of:)
What I really mean by her being the perfect symbol is that Mary demonstrates how to be open, how to receive and be guided by the light, she doesn’t question what is being asked of her by God, and she trusts life.
I mean, we’re all so busy making future plans, honestly, how open would you be in the middle of crafting your 2024 business plan if you were asked by an angel named Gabriel to have a baby?
Me? A baby? Now?
Mary was shocked too.
“The Annunciation” must be one of the most commonly depicted scenes in the history of art. From paintings, to music, to poetry and narrative, the story of Gabriel’s message to Mary—infused with doubt and belief, joy and sorrow, fear and comfort—has proved to be remarkably generative for both the life of faith and the creative impulse. It is a story sharing space with both devastation and hope, and this means it is a story for all of us, whoever we are and wherever we are in life.
“What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago if I don’t also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture?”
Meister Eckhart
Last week we touched on the meaning of advent and the birth or arrival of the light which is the Latin translation for the word Adventus or Advent. I find it even more fascinating that the Greek word for advent is “Perusia”, which translates as “presence”. Looking through the mystical lens like we did last week, we can see that advent is not only about the four weeks leading up to Christmas day, it’s all year long in this very moment.
In fact, in a mystical way, Mary is us.
We are a play of light and hosts to the divine.
This time of year is when we are being asked to consider what wants to be born in us. Our work is to be re-born to our eternal self again and again.
To be IN the world, but remember we’re not of it. And we are encouraged to use our charisma or “gratuitous gift” to be fully human AND fully divine.
Charism is a biblical word to describe this gift of our presence. The word appears in the New Testament to describe your “favour” or special ability and it’s easy for us to think it’s about a life purpose, something we do or a job and a living.
Not exactly.
We have also missed the memo that our bodies are simply instruments for this light.
The fearful thinking of the world or ego has us more identified with preserving our temporary physical form and identifying more as our lampshades than the light. Christmas is about being plugged into the power source to emit our light and transform the darkness in our lives.
What does this light feel like in your ordinary life?
And how can you be a light in the world at this time?
By becoming less absorbed by the CONTENT of your life….and more fully present to the CONTEXT of our lives. Less about how we look and what we do for a living and more about plugging in to our source to shine a light on why we are even incarnating here in the first place.
“There is a light this world cannot give, but you can give it as it was given to you."
A Course in Miracles
Last week we touched on Charles’ Dickens book and holiday classic, “A Christmas Carol” and to me it’s one of the most powerful stories about this light and love that is available to us all. It demonstrates how at some point (usually through our darkest moments or life challenges) our ego finally takes a back seat and we allow our Soul to lead the way to reclaim our omniscience. Up until then we unknowingly resist life, we live unconsciously on autopilot and believe we ARE our unconscious patterns, habits and psychology.
For Scrooge, his darkness came in the form of three separate unprocessed traumas:
His mom died giving birth so he was an orphan.
His sister Fanny died.
His fiancé Belle left him.
He replaced his love of life with a love of money. He became a “grinder”…working all the time, chasing success and he became more and more selfish. More judgemental and miserly in his ways.
Until he experienced a miracle. A shift in perception.
He became enLIGHTened.
It was his old business partner Marley who had passed away 7 years earlier and had a view of a deeper Truth came back to help him see the bigger picture of his behaviour. It’s undeniable that many of us have experienced this kind of guidance from a friend or a family member who has passed, so much so in fact, I think it’s high time for us to normalize this kind of light communication and thin the veils once and for all.
For Mary it came from the angel Gabriel.
For the three wise men it was the bright morning star that newly appeared they followed in the East for more than 40 days was real. In fact, Harvard researchers and NASA explain the miraculous comet in 5 BC did occur in that area.
The good news is that our personal experience doesn’t require a belief system or for others to understand. So let’s stop telling those stories and trying to justify them to others that are just unable to ever understand with their intellect. It’s what Jesus meant when he pleaded for us to casting our pearls at swine. We can’t share our spiritual awakenings or experiences and be understood. They can’t possibly appreciate or understand it.
Matthew 7:6
“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.
Others may judge, but we know what we know.
No one else will get it even if they can prove it with science thousands of years later.
Can you imagine? How wise would you imagine others would think you are for taking a 40 day or longer walk with your 2 buddies carrying strange symbolic gifts for a baby that is going to be born? Oh and did you mention you were following a new bright star to find your way and being guided in your dreams to this apparent baby King that is going to help us save the world?
And while we’re on the subject of disbelief, let’s just all say it because we’ve all wondered it. I sure have… a virgin birth?
Reeeeeally? (said every skeptical ego ever).
Is this just a story? Maybe.
These things can’t be explained.
Or maybe they can, but not BY us. It seems to me that it’s all way above our clearance level. But we can suspend our disbelief and stop the doubting and judging and be open to having our own experience when it’s our time.
On the front door of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s home are the words “Biden or not biden, God is present” or a more modern translation would be….”Called upon or not, source is here now”.
I never understood why he loved it so much that it was even engraved on his tombstone, but now I do.
In the Bible and ACIM it says that Adam fell asleep, and no where does it say he wakes up. Adam is us. We are asleep to our true nature but help will come to us when we ask.
God can do for us what He can do THROUGH us.
We can receive a light line and ARE the light line for others.
It seems that there is a secret order in what may appear to us in the chaos of our lives. In fact, in all disorder there is a secret order. We can participate in this play of light by simply a change or shift in our consciousness.
Millions of people on earth do it every day. Buddhists in monasteries on mountaintops, Yogis in Ashrams, Jews in synagogues, Catholics in Mass, Protestants in pews, people walking in nature in silent contemplation, studying A Course In Miracles, meditating and people in hospitals with a life threatening illness and prisons all around the world when faced with a loss of freedom finally being open to learn about a higher power and the power of forgiveness.
In fact, we are set up to grow through the shadowy seasons in our lives the way a seed is cracked open in the darkness of the earth, most of which can’t be seen above ground until the growth process is well underway.
When we are unsure of our nexts steps, when we feel alone we can begin to shift inwards and we come to realize that we are never alone. The darkness is like a womb and once we stop resisting it, we can heal and something new can be born.
“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again”.
Simon & Garfunkel
We are met by the light when we become willing to listen to an intermediary of our own understanding. Our intuition, the Holy Spirit, angels, Kwan Yin, the Shekhinah, the Black Madonna, Mother Mary or “Sky Daddy”… it matters not. When we are being squeezed through a dark birth passage we can surrender our will to something bigger.
When we do, we simply don’t frighten ourselves with our thinking.
“The light shines on inside of the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.”
Gospel of John
Life happens for us. It seems like we only suffer when we resist, try to control others or experience our thoughts and perceptions ABOUT what is happening to us.
They scare us. We try to avoid them. To stay positive but they persist.
“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
Carl Jung
Joseph Campbell called it “supernatural aid”.
It’s not nor has it ever been about religion.
Jesus did not plan to come here and set up a religion, that was our doing.
The more I research the great prophets and spiritual leaders that have walked the earth the more I find it interesting that none of them were very orthodox or “old school” fundamentalists. Not Moses, nor Buddha. Definitely not Jesus. They were leaders but their work seemed to transcend conformity to what was generally or traditionally accepted as right or true.
Most of us know this on some level through Christianity, but did you know that Jesus was not an Orthodox Jew?
I didn’t. This is a secret that the Catholic and Christian Churches have tried to suppress for thousands of years. Jesus was Jewish, but he was part of a Kabbalistic order of Mystical Judaism called “the Essenes”.
These Mystical Jews were rejected by the Orthodoxy of the day the way they still are today by many more orthodox fundamentalists.
In the Gospel of Mark Jesus is called a “Nazarene”, but did you know that there was no place called Nazareth?
You may not hear this in any Christian church today and it came as a surprise to me.
The real Aramaic name of his town in the Qumran Valley is called Nazar.
Jesus was called a Nazarene because he was a Nazar Essene or an Essene from a place called Nazar. He was a part of a great Kabbalistic order. A God intoxicated Jewish Mystic who shared the Kabbalistic teachings with the Orthodox Jews who were so deeply controlled by the religious leaders of the day they had no awareness or understanding of their oneness with the Father.
It’s significant because Jesus was especially notorious for disturbing the status quo. He was a feminist, he was doing the widespread Essene practices of baptism with water, teaching spiritual principles through parables and the laying of hands to heal.
What Jesus was offering was a shift in consciousness for ALL of humanity.
He was offering a non-denominational invitation to become “one” with this Universal light or Christos.
To be anointed by LOVE.
Howard Thurman who was Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual teacher referred to Jesus as “the grand prototype”.
I love that.
Carl Jung called him the “Christ Archetype” and a “Divine Blueprint”.
Rumi, St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Clare, Meister Eckhart, Julien of Norwich, Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou where all mystics that understood that WE are the Christ. The second coming is US following the blueprint Jesus left us to actualize our highest human potential.
We are birthing this new light of awareness for mankind.
We can heal the future by stepping into the present in a NEW way and living this simple question:
“What can I give to the world?”
(Rather than the more common: “What can I get from the world?”)
It seems to be only when our ego choices FAIL us that we even become aware of it.
Or when are blessed with something we can’t control in our lives that this light of truth can be seen or experienced by us.
It’s like we’re being thrown a “light line” when we face our greatest life challenges then we learn how to throw them to others.
When our holy imagination is “online” we even feel COMPELLED to do something for the greater good in service to others. We end up unhappy when we don’t heed the call on our lives.
This reminds me of the TV show on CNN called “Heroes”. Before any of the highlighted heroes do something heroic, they suffer some kind of trauma.
Something new is born from their darkest time.
HERE is an example of a story I JUST love. When I watched it I was moved imagining what would happen if all of us did what we could, from where we are, with what we have to serve not only our own personal agendas, but the greater good.
This “light line” may feel a bit like a treasure box that is right in front of us but we can’t see what’s inside it. All we can do is to unlock it with our light. We have no guarantees nor an we see what will come from our efforts just like Mary.
There is a COSMIC SIZED LOVE available to all of us.
Love is not a feeling, an emotion or a thought about a special “other” person - that’s the ego’s concept of romantic love and that mostly ends in disaster.
We don’t seek for love and find it that way.
It’s not outside of us or in someone else. That IS the illusion of our perception. As much as our ego has us convinced, there is no “my person”, it’s in YOU.
“Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness and the loveless never find love. Only the loving find love and they never have to seek for it.”
D.H. Lawrence
Beyond our personal hardships, our basic shared human trauma is what psychologist Otto Rank called “Separation Syndrome”. Thomas Berry called it “radical discontinuity”, he described it as “the central pathology of the Human Race”.
Our own rational minds have taken us away from our True Selves but on the eve of Christmas, let’s all remember the TRUE meaning of Christmas for a renewal of life to happen on this beautiful planet.
Of course it’s about celebrating the birth and life of Jesus AND you may not here this in any churches today but maybe even more about us actually applying his teachings and doing what he was pleaded for us to see and understand.
To embody his profoundly wise teachings.
“It’s only love that is big enough to show us that humans and every other species belongs to this whole integral community.”
Thomas Berry
We are here to GIVE and RECEIVE light.
Both giving and receiving are one and the same.
To love one another.
That’s it.
When Jesus was asked which of the commandments of the Law were the greatest, do you know what he said?
“Love the Lord God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind.”
And the second was “Love your neighbours as yourself”.
Luke 10:27
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.”
Not because they are separate from you, just the opposite, because we’re all one in our divinity.
What we do to others, we do to ourselves.
This message is at the heart of every spiritual wisdom tradition on earth. All of them have some version of the Golden Rule said with slightly different wording but it’s made perfectly clear that there IS not difference between loving yourself and another.
Let’s stop complicating it with our politics.
We’re all the same.
It’s one highly intelligent love and we must include ourselves in this oneness.
The biggest block to our awareness of this love and unity is our deep historical western belief in “Original Sin”. What could easily be called THE most terrible human concept and superstition we’ve ever imagined.
It’s so hard wired into our sociology it doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not.
It’s our biggest problem. The concept of sin was not even biblical. It never even appeared until the 2nd century by Irenaeus and then was cemented in the 4th century by St. Augustine before it was picked up by the Protestant Reformers.
It runs so deep that most have no clue what it’s even like to be us without any judgement.
If we did we may get a glimpse of who we really are.
The problem with original sin is that we don’t feel loveable or enough as we are so we get to work. It’s our most basic fear running our lives. Freud called our ego our “sense of a separate self”.
But this cosmic love is EVERYWHERE.
It’s who we really are and today is the perfect day to remember it.
In European countries most people open their presents at midnight. In the West it’s usually Christmas morning but whenever you do it, please remember that the real gift you have to give this Christmas is your presence.
Your charisma.
You ARE the gift you give.
Blessings to you and your family.
With love,
Rev Nona
ps. From our family to yours…
