“Christmas time is here, by golly!
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly;
Brother, here we go again.”
(Tom Lehrer)
It often seems like the holidays become just another thing that must be multi-tasked and crossed off the never-ending to-do list. But no matter how you celebrate the start of “officiellement l’hiver”, I believe it’s important to take a moment to remember why we haul out the lights and eat and drink our Selves into a stupor of merriment.
There’s a silly joke about true friends being the ones who bail you out of jail, or sit beside you laughing about how much fun was had getting there. Though I understand and appreciate the humor and the sentiment behind it, such jesting at Christmas often sets off the echoes of a melancholy chord inside of me and I realize something.
Jail is not only a physical place, but it is also the chains we put around our hearts to shut out others. There is nothing worse than being exiled from the love of another person for it is a truth that the opposite of Love is not hate, but indifference. To be ignored, to be left alone, to be forgotten – this is perhaps our deepest fear.
Rudolph may have gone down in history, but it was because of his brightness that shone clearly through the winter’s darkness. Ok, so it was only his nose, but that shiny red nose is yet another small reminder that within ALL of us lie the seeds of the very same Light that was born in humble poverty yet grew to shine forth an eternal truth that has not dimmed even to this day. (Crooked politicians, lawyers, and most CEOs aside, of course.)
The message of this season has always been one of hope, and inherently contained within that hope is the wish for peace. The return of the Sun/Son, that which is crucial to our very survival, both physical and at the level of the heart, has always been a time of celebration. A time of recognition that when all is said and done, in the very deepest place inside every one of us we are all the same. No matter how you choose to see and express it, we are all Children of God and to return to the Light is to return to that innocence, that wonder, that joy of simply being.
“For unto us a child is born.” Each year the wheel turns, and as the world continues to lay in sin and with error pining it reaches these Halcyon days; in particular the one day awaited with a never-ending, collective thrill of hope for Him to appear.
Him.
A child. A child sleeping in the night.
From within our self-made jails, from within those chains of fear we hope.
From within our self-made jails, from within those chains of fear we pray.
But that child is you. That child is me. With breaking of each new and glorious dawn of every Christmas Day the birth we celebrate is our own, for hope and its inner core of peace is not something that lives outside of us, it is who we are.
My wish for each and every one of you is that not only today, but every single day, you find within you the Light of Love we now celebrate and that it shine from you onto others as brightly as the star that guided those three, oh-so-wise men to kneel at the feet of He who would manifest all our potentials in one single, short lifetime.
Each one of you is a gift. A beautiful gift of hope whom angels greet with anthem sweet, the babe, the Sun…the peace.
May you have a joyous, peace-filled holiday.
Leave a Reply