The Message of Christmas

 On the assumption that there are readers of this blog who weren't reading it 6 years ago I am going to re-post a slightly edited piece I wrote for Christmas in 2015. The world seemed dark enough then but who knew what lay in store? And yet that points to the essential meaning of Christmas and is why, I suspect, it is timed around the winter solstice when the days in the Northern hemisphere start to get longer. It is the birth of light in darkness. This is something to think about today as the darkness spreads. What we should always remember, though, is that one little spark of light renders the darkness null and void, revealing its emptiness. Christ was the Light of the World and Christmas reminds us of that. However, each one of us in our own little but important way can also be a light shining in the darkness, especially in this day and age.

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It has become almost a tradition to complain of the commercialisation of Christmas, and I am not going to do that here. After all, what’s the point? We have gone so far down that particular road there can be no turning back. But Christmas has not only been commercialised. It has been thoroughly trivialised too with every year bringing a further reduction of the sense of what its meaning really is, to the extent that the Christian aspect is now almost an embarrassment. We are happy to talk about a generalised peace and goodwill to all men but only in a rather bland, humanist context. Reindeer and elves? Fine. The birth of Jesus? Not so good. It might be divisive. Even many religious leaders appear to have succumbed to this watering down of the Christmas message, so much are they a product of their times, seemingly unable to stand back from the relentless flow of materialistic assumptions which increasingly frame all our discourse, our language and what passes for our philosophy.

So here I would like to consider what the true meaning of Christmas is, and I will start off by saying that it has nothing to do with peace and goodwill. This may be a part of it but it is by no means central. Nor, for that matter, is love, another word that has been hijacked by people whose understanding of it seems to be limited to a general sense of benevolent tolerance. But love is not merely well-meaning egalitarianism. It is a spiritual quality that can only be correctly understood in a spiritual context. To be sure, the materialist can come up with an imitation of love but an imitation is what it will be since real love derives from the soul. If the soul is denied then so is love, and all you are left with is a copy or reflection on a lower level, void of any real substance.

What then is Christmas about if not peace and goodwill? The answer to that is to be found in the image of the star shining in the winter night over Bethlehem, an image that is plainly symbolic (though not only symbolic), and speaks of something that combines a wonderful simplicity with great profundity. And what it tells us is that the message of Christmas is redemption from darkness. For Christmas is about the entry of supernatural light into the spiritual darkness of this world, and its core message is that those who recognise and follow this light can be saved from the darkness that constantly threatens to engulf us, a darkness so pervasive that it is not even recognised as such by many of us. Indeed, so much have true values been inverted, that sometimes it is even mistaken for light.

So, the true message of Christmas has to do with the salvation of the soul. The rest, peace, goodwill and so on, is peripheral to that central point. Now this means three things. First of all, it means we have a soul. An immortal part of us that is not derived from or determined by the body, or even the mind as normally considered, and which will survive death. Secondly, that soul requires salvation. It is not in a good state at the moment. It certainly needs to get somewhere other than where it currently is. And thirdly, salvation is possible. The light exists but we must acknowledge and accept this light. We must recognise it and allow it to illumine us for, though it may be supremely powerful, it is not coercive and will only come when invited. The most powerful thing in the universe enters this world as a weak, defenceless baby. What a teaching there is in that.

There are those who would like to rebrand Christmas as a pagan winter festival, a sort of eat, drink and be merry Saturnalia. And there is nothing wrong with that unless you think this is all there is to it. Being merry is an excellent thing, and eating and drinking are rather good too. But tomorrow we die. What happens then? The entry of the light of Christ into this world tells us what may happen if we accept that light into our heart. This does not simply mean acknowledging with our mind that Christ is the Lord or something of that nature. That is a purely external thing. There is a big difference between Christ as a person out there, and the light that he embodied. I am not saying the two are separate but the one informs the other not vice versa. It is this light that you must accept and strive to be illumined by if you would embrace the true spirit of Christmas. For Christ does not want your mind, he wants your heart. It is his dearest wish that we break out of our self-inflicted prisons (our egos, if you like) and join him in his heavenly kingdom. This will eventually require death and resurrection but to begin with the entrance to Christ's kingdom is through the heart, and Christmas is the key that will unlock the door.

It is often said that all religions are one on the level of mystical experience and only separated by their dogmas and doctrines which are ultimately outer things. That may be so but it does not mean that all religions are equally true. There is a fundamental impasse, for example, between Buddhism and Christianity in terms of how they view the Creator God, never mind the centrality of Christ in the scheme of things. There can be no doubt that the Christian view is the more correct one and comes from a higher revelation. Besides which, mystical experience is all very well but it really only points to the unity of consciousness on a supra-formal level, and entry into this state is not the primary goal of the spiritual life or we would never have needed to be born in a material world with a body. 

What then is the goal of the spiritual life? It is to learn to love God as he loves us. How do you do that? By opening up your heart. And what's the best way to open up your heart? It is by allowing Christ to be born there, first as a baby but that baby will grow and eventually become a man but a man who is also a Son of God. That's the message of Christmas.