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Dear friends,
Consider the great vastness of the universe: the spiritual beings in the depths of space, expressing themselves through the great multitude of lights in the star-spangled sky. Consider our own solar system, where planets dance around the great sun. Consider the earth, our home, and how the life on the earth swells and subsides in accordance with her yearly journey around the sun.
Since the beginning of earth time, human beings have marked the seasons of the year with song, dance and ritual. The seasons each have their own power, their own gesture. Indeed, the seasons seem to show the very soul of the earth as she reveals herself in light and darkness, softness and brittleness.
We experience the intimate dance of the sun and the earth as the inescapable backdrop of our lives. In response, druids and wisdom-keepers, priestesses and priests, have taught humanity to seek the blessings of the harmony between sun and earth in ancient seasonal ceremonies, marking the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes.
Since the birth of Jesus on earth, the Christian festivals have also been placed on this cross of the year. It can be a source of deep nourishment to uncover the deep meanings behind these mysteries.
And if the seasons are the soul of the earth, what is her spirit?
Esoteric Christianity reveals that the spirit of the earth is the spirit of the Sun-God Himself, come to earth so that it can in time become a new sun, a source of light for the new round of Creation.
What, then, is Christmas? In the season of mid-winter, the earth wraps herself in blankets of sleep. Leaves fall from the trees and cover her over, until the snows of winter lay themselves down. The sky bends low to the earth as the sun winds its winter course over the northern hemisphere, and the days are dark and nights are long. Plants concentrate their forces in root and seed, and animals head south or hibernate in holes and caves.
The natural world becomes still.
The name of this season is Advent, the time to celebrate what is coming near: ad-venire. Advent is the season of anticipation, of expectation. The season of Advent is the beginning of the new spiritual year for the earth, and begins with the four weeks before Christmas. In these weeks, we humans have too much to do: the world becomes loud and demanding with commercials and consumerism.
Yet in the silence of nature, another sacred year is being born. The world begins to listen with spiritual ears to the approach of the Spirit-Sun, who is reborn on earth every year. And over the course of four weeks, the kingdoms of nature will celebrate Christmas, one by one.
It is the mineral kingdom that first hears the promise. The spiritual beings that carry the consciousness of the minerals exist far above the earth. From lofty heights, they sense that the spirit light of the sun is beginning to contract and descend to the earth far below. The minerals hear this, and rejoice in the silence.
In the second week of Advent, it will be the heavenly spirits who hold the wisdom of the plants who hear the promise of Christmas, and the seeds implanted in the earth ring in response.
In the third week, the spirits of the animals, closer to the earth than the spirits of rocks and plants, sense the coming promise, and the animals kingdom is also blessed.
And in the fourth week, we humans beings, in whom matter and spirit are woven into a unity of self-consciousness, sense that the purpose and promise of our earth existence is drawing physically near.
Thus, in the deep darkness of a winter night, in the dark of the cave where the child is born, the mystery of birth will be celebrated. Christmas is the season to celebrate the birth of light in the darkness, the birth of spirit being in the darkness of matter.
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