Christmas Day 2001 |
"In him was life and the life was the light of men and the light shineth in the darkness." St John I,4.
Coming here today has involved most of us in hectic preparation. Spiritual preparation, also, is necessary if the Christchild is to be born in us and not just on the Christmas Cards cluttered with holly and robins. The heart of this festival is that we should be the birthplace of the holy child as well as hearing the story of that birth far away and long ago.
What sort of spiritual preparation is necessary? It is very simple to begin - first of all we must wake up to where we are. In waking and being aware of where we find ourselves this Christmas, I have found some suggestive signs.
Earlier this month a work exhibited at Tate Britain won the ?20,000 Turner Prize. 'Work 227; the lights going on and off' was produced by Martin Creed. There is a white gallery with a handful of light bulbs flickering on and off. It is the most minimal work ever to win the Turner prize.
It is not my intention to line up with disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. The Tate Communications Curator recalled that "Creed has said that we live in a world full of objects. He wants to make art that does not contribute to that clutter." I can understand that and so the light goes on and off in an empty room. It helps us to understand where we are - close to running out of anything to celebrate in a glare that is next door to darkness.
The choice of the artistic establishment helps us to understand where we are and so does the decoration of the meditation room which is located close to the heart of the German Parliament. I was shown round on a visit to Berlin last month. Six panels decorate the walls and their meaning was carefully explained. In the first place there is a panel of earth colour and protuberant flints. Then in the second, human beings appear, depicted as white painted nails. The white painted nails are organised in religious symbols like the cross in the third panel. Then in the fourth the nails cover the entire surface. By the fifth there has been some check and the nails are in retreat as the earth and flints advance. In the final panel the nails have disappeared but traces of them can be seen embedded in the flints as part of the fossil record. Is it a warning or a statement of human despair?
I have also been struck by the immense enthusiasm expressed by sophisticated City workers this year for Harry Potter, the film, and The Lord of the Rings.
Asking gently about the reasons for this adult passion I have been told again and again that people experience a sense of absence in their lives, the absence of depth and mystery.
So these are some symptoms which help us to understand where we are, trapped on the surface of things at a point where meaning seems to be exhausted. It is a place where we do not seem to have the resources within ourselves to do much more than flick from channel to channel watching the Christmas repeats or turn the light on and off.
The reason for this is that we are suffering from spiritual malnutrition. We are attempting to live as if the most real thing in the world was the shell of the personality we have constructed for ourselves as life has gone on. All human beings emerge from an experience of oneness with the source of life but very early on set to work unconsciously building a personality shell for protection and so that we can negotiate with the world around us. Gradually the experience of oneness with the wellspring of life is lost and we come to operate more and more from what we have constructed, from the shell, the false self. This is true for all human beings [with the sole exception of Jesus Christ] but the estrangement from the source of life, Being itself, is particularly marked in the culture we have developed. We have inherited a way of thinking designed as Descartes, the French philosopher admitted, to set human thought apart from the wellspring of life and to make "man master and possessor of the earth".
Dominance has come to replace connectedness in our dealings with one another and with the good earth itself. Alas, since our true life flows from the source of Being, [as Psalm 100 says, "it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves"] the effect of operating from the shell of our personality is, in the end, exhaustion and a sense of absence. This we try to fill with hectic over activity.
This is the great spiritual question, reconnecting ourselves as we are now with the source of true life and vitality. St John says - "In him was life and the life was the light of men and the light shineth in the darkness."
The God who revealed himself as "I am", the name he disclosed to Moses, true Being, does not come or communicate as a Dominator with an iron law. Laws are necessary in this fallen world but they can react with our personality building to produce an even more brittle way of being in the world. Being, the Source of Life, the Great I Am, Almighty God, comes in the person of a defenceless and vulnerable child to invite us into connectedness. There is no threat in this child so defences, even of rough shepherds, the cowboys of the ancient world, fall. There is infinite living wisdom in this child so the most learned, the Eastern sages, fall to their knees.
Those who are bound up with the personality they have so painfully constructed are either contemptuous of Christmas and the Babe of Bethlehem or like King Herod seek to destroy the child, nowadays chiefly by ridicule and banal blasphemies. As ever, "The world was made by him and the world knew him not."
"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become children of God." If you are prepared to receive then there is a gift here for you. God has opened a way to reconnect with life in all its fulness and delight. Those who were able to receive him that first Christmas are still among us. Contemplative mother Mary; the baffled but loyal father Joseph; the shepherds who while everyone else was asleep had such difficult and dangerous lives that they were watching by night; the magi, experimental philosophers from the east, who were genuine searchers and did not spare themselves as they made their hard journey. Do we identify with any of these? Do we at least experience a real absence in a life lived on the surface? Then we may be close to the real miracle of Christmas that the Christchild is born in us.
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father."
