I love Christmas and celebrate both the holiday and the holy day.

The Holiday

The holiday is both a source of cultural delight and pain.  The bespangled pine trees, holiday cards and greetings, the lights strung in store windows and across streets and byways, the gifts, the food, the cookies and candy, the carols—all add to the holiday’s festive flare.  Belonging, and not belonging, also add to the holiday, generating great joy and great heartbreak.  ’Tis the season we all know well.

The Holy Day

The holy day is less understood.  To me, it’s not only the birth of Jesus, the god-man-savior as traditional Christianity would have it.  It is the birth of consciousness, which is the spark of the divine which resides at the core of all of us.  We are all potentially, like Jesus, true god, true human.

This is the great mystery:  at the core of all of us is a seed of the true self—a spark of the divine.  The origin of this wonder is a mystery—the mystery that some of us celebrate at Christmas.

This mystery cannot be understood intellectually.  But it can be experienced intuitively.  When we quiet our thoughts, and listen to more refined levels of reality, we realize that the mystery of life is not outside of us to worship—but within us to honor.

That’s why I love Christmas.  In the midst of an unconscious world—consciousness is born.  In the midst of our darkest hour—light is born within us.