A Christmas Meditation

 The older I get the more obvious it becomes that Jesus Christ really is the Way, the Truth and the Life.* When I was younger I felt this but was under the fashionable impression (or illusion) that all religions said more or less the same thing and were just different ways of bringing man to God if one practiced them seriously enough. I still do think that God and the messengers he sends work through many outlets but in all others he is to a greater or lesser extent hidden. Only in Jesus Christ is he revealed. Jesus is the light shining directly except that it is in a human form. In all other spiritual approaches the light is behind a veil of some sort and obscured in some way.

The Incarnation gave everything in the world that could receive it an irradiation of light from above, a spiritual boost.  Thus, beyond the obvious impact of Christianity, the light of Christ operating from the spiritual world and filtering down through the mental to the material affected all genuine forms of spirituality and revitalised them to the degree that they were open to that light. It is no accident that the Mahayana form of Buddhism with the Bodhisattva figure postdates Christ, and even Hinduism acquired extra spiritual force from Christ's arrival in this world and the spiritual power he released. This statement would be rejected by Hindus and Buddhists but I make it because it seems to me to be the simple truth. It doesn't diminish other religions to say that they stand in the shadow of Christ. They remain what they are which are vehicles given by God, or those that act on his behalf (since God delegates), to helps souls in this world become better aware of their source, but in them all there is still a shadow over the fullness of truth. That shadow was dispersed by Christ. Other religions are effective in their own way but they are incomplete. Only in Christ is the truth made complete.

Apart from the figure of Christ, in which all spiritual truth is embodied and through which it stands revealed more clearly than anywhere else, and his gift of salvation to those who incline their hearts to him (not simply believe, as James 2 says, even the demons believe), there are two principal teachings in Christianity which take it further than any other form of religion. These have to do with the reality of the individual and the fact that God is Love. They are obviously connected. You might say that other religions include these but they don't in the same fully comprehensive way. Regarding love, Buddhism has its impersonal compassion but that is a mild thing compared to love especially in the context of the denial of the reality of the person. Even Hindu bhakti is not the same as agape in that it is an emotional or devotional thing, and love in the Christian sense is not an emotion but an act or condition of being.

My assertion that Christianity contains more of spiritual truth than any other religion might be dismissed as a simple product of the fact that I was born in a world formed and influenced by Christianity, and a Muslim might say the same about Islam, were it not for the fact that any unbiased mind should be able to see that in Christ there is a quality of goodness and purity and sheer holiness just not present elsewhere, not in any other prophet, saint, sage or even god. The light he brought illumined the whole world and spread even where his teachings were not outwardly known. It radiated out on a subtle or immaterial level to be picked up by those sensitive enough to respond to it and then interpreted according to their understanding. It is also, as he himself said, through him, and only through him, that all men now reach God even if they do so through another religion than Christianity which can happen if they pick up the spirit of Christ as it has infiltrated, if I can use that word, into that particular religion. Clearly, the spirit of Christ is more present and more discernible in Christianity though it can be veiled there as well, especially nowadays when all institutions  have fallen away from their core mission and been assimilated into the secular humanism of the materialistic and atheistic System.

The truth of Christ is also why Christmas is important. The first Christmas was the time when the light of God entered the world. That this light was for the whole world is demonstrated by the visit of the three Magi from the East, representing the pinnacle of previous spiritual knowledge, who came to pay their respects to the infant Jesus as the saviour of the world. They were not Jews but they came because they knew that the light embodied in this baby was universal. It repaired the damage done in the past and offered to all men the chance to free themselves from the bondage of matter not by effectively abandoning the relative world of individual beings, of love and beauty and goodness, all of which can only exist in a world of multiplicity and form, for the absolute of pure spirit as taught by the Buddha, but by reconciling spirit and matter, the One and the Many, through the holy mystery of love. This did not require rejecting suffering as the Buddha had done by rejecting the self that suffered, but fully accepting suffering and offering it up as a sacrifice to God. In this way the fallen self was redeemed and made holy instead of being jettisoned as a burden on existence. Thus was the purpose of creation fulfilled rather than being negated.

So, Christmas marks the time when God's reason for creating man is revealed and its fulfilment made possible. And the holy purity of the new born baby reminds us that Christianity goes beyond other spiritual approaches in that it alone fully validates the person, the person that other religions reject as the source of ignorance and a blot on the pure whiteness of naked existence. In Buddhism the person is a barrier to enlightenment and in Islam it exists but as little more than a slave which must submit and obey. Of course, even in Christianity the separate self must be given up, but what is given up is the false self, the self that by the barriers of its self-centredness blocks out God. The true God-given individuality remains and is then revealed as a shining being of light, a unique son of God born of the holy marriage between Spirit and Matter. And the possibility that we can become this being of light is what Christmas is all about.

* This is a slightly revised version of a piece I wrote 7 years ago. Now, of course, I am even older than I was then and the first sentence is even more the case than it was then.