Christmas Day

“It is in the simplicity of your ordinary walk that you have to find the secret, which is hidden from so many, of something great and new: love.”

Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás (1902 – 1975)

“Lord, may we all love Your creation-
All the earth and every grain of sand in it.
May we love every leaf, every ray of Your light.
For we acknowledge to You that all life is
Like an ocean, all is flowing and blending
And that to withhold any measure of
Love from anything in Your universe
Is to withhold the same measure from You.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, novelist (1821 – 1881)

“Is there anything that can take from you the hope of being someday in the God you are helping to create in each attentive act of love?

Please celebrate this Christmas with the earnest faith that He may need this very anguish of yours in order to begin. These very days that are such a trial for you may well be the time when everything in you is working at Him, as once you so urgently did as a child. Be patient and without resentment, and know that the least we can do is make His Becoming no more difficult than Earth makes it for spring when it wants to arrive. Be comforted and be glad.”

From Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Rome, 23 December 1903

“If you want to love, take the time to listen to your heart. In most ancient and wise cultures it is a regular practice for people to talk to their heart. There are rituals, stories, and meditative skills in every spiritual tradition that awaken the voice of the heart. To live wisely, this practice is essential, because our heart is the source of our connection to and intimacy with all of life. And life is love. This mysterious quality of love is all around us, as real as gravity… Yet how often we forget about love.”

Jack Kornfield

Winter Solstice

“As the nights grow longer and all of nature seems to sleep, the rebirth of the sun draws near. The Winter Solstice, in the northern hemisphere at least, is a time of crackling fires, faery lights in the trees and deep, silent rest. Now is our chance to look within and enjoy spiritual hibernation, peace and renewal. The seeds of our future, resting in the rich earth, need this period of stillness, as do we.

This modern holiday season can also be a hectic time, when the stresses and strains of life keep us locked away from nature and more natural ways of being. The Winter Solstice, when the world appears to stand still, can serve as a moment out of time, an opportunity to reconnect with our own souls once again. As we mark the descent of the seasonal wheel and the height of the year’s darkness, we realize that the light and warmth of the sun will soon be returned to us…

If we now go within, into the deep caves of our own psyches, our instinct to seek quiet and warmth can lead to our regeneration, allowing us to enter the new year with renewed vigour and enthusiasm.”

From The Magical Year by Danu Forest

International Human Solidarity Day

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitariness and pride of power and with its pleas for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offence, shock the world far more than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945), executed by the Nazis for his stance against them, quoted in Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox

“”People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it.”
George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

Our long-standing beliefs – whether they be about the scientific nature of reality and temporal time or about our spirituality – have a tendency to become hidebound and static, comfortable and unchallenging. When we encounter situations and things that push at the boundaries of our comfortable enclave of belief, we have two options: we can totally ignore the challenge, safe in the belief that we are right, or we can enter into a temporary suspension of disbelief while we entertain the possibility that things are other than we have believed them to be. The suspension of disbelief is something that happens every time we attend a play or a movie: we lose all sense of separation between audience and performer as we see the story unfold before us, as we become immersed in events and protagonists. At the end of a moving performance, movie, or novel, we leave the world of that story and return to our own reality again.

The strongest challenges to belief are the things that we experience: experience is a great changer and shaper of belief because it gives us pragmatic knowledge that offers tangible and physical proof, even though its workings are often mysterious to us – we know what we experienced even though it may be “unbelievable.” This tells us that our perceptions are informing and changing belief. Sometimes the facts that we experience in our very body are so overwhelming that we have to enter into a suspension of disbelief, behaving “as it” they were true in order to accommodate the experience.

What is challenging your beliefs right now? Analyze the challenge using both sets of senses – physical and spiritual – to understand the experience.”

From The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlin Matthews

Image: Illustration from George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, 1920 edition, by Jessie Wilcox Smith

“The Beloved is in me, and the Beloved is in you,
As life is hidden in every seed.
So rubble your pride, my friend,
And look for Him within you.
When I sit in the heart of His world
A million suns blaze with light,
A burning blue sea spreads across the sky,
Life’s turmoil falls quiet,
All the stains of suffering wash away.
Listen to the unstruck bells and drums!
Love is here; plunge into its rapture!
Rains pour down without water;
Rivers are streams of light.
How could I ever express
How blessed I feel
To revel in such vast ecstasy
In my own body?
This is the music
Of soul and soul meeting.
Of the forgetting of all grief.
This is the music
That transcends all coming and going.”

Kabir, 15th century India

“Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers – plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun’s warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life’s stir and push – for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature’s pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.”

Lorraine Anderson, nature writer

“He to whom time is the same as eternity, and eternity the same as time, is free of all adversity.”

Jakob Boehme (1575 – 1624)

Image: Eternity by Shirley Jones