Christmas Is Very Different This Year, and That May Be Just What We Need.
We’re living through the Second Coming, but it’s not what you think.
Have you noticed how a lot of old Christmas songs just seem to ring hollow this year? No matter what station I tune to, I am struck by lyrics in almost every song that feel like a slap in the face. In “Do You See What I See,” when the wise men intone, “A child, a child, shivers in the cold, we will bring him silver and gold,” I want to shout, “Silver and gold?? How about some fricking food and blankets? Why is it so goddamn hard to just give people what they need, Congress?” Not that silver and gold hurt, mind you, but $600 per family is just insulting. Okay, rant off — others here have that niche cornered.
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” might be the worst, with its cheery insistence that “through the years we all will be together” and “from now on our troubles will be miles away.” Nope, probably not, until God only knows when. At this point, even the summer feels optimistic for any kind of return to “normal” life in the US, when we can gather with loved ones like we did in the Before Times. That is, if “normal” even exists anymore, which I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.
But as many others have observed, that may be a good thing, because what this year has accomplished in a spectacular way is to show us, beyond the shadow of a doubt, just how shitty “normal” already was for the majority of Americans as a result of the systems of oppression this country was founded on and their relentless perpetuation by a deeply entrenched corporatocracy. Now the millions of us who were already living on the edge are growing ever more desperate, and there is quite simply no end in sight.
We’re used to Christmas being a warm and fuzzy holiday, a time when we let ourselves feel more love and express more generosity than we might the rest of the year. Jesus certainly spends a lot of time in the Bible talking about Love, but what we’re living through this Christmas season represents another, equally important side of who he is: the radical revolutionary.
We Are Living Through A Collective Awakening
This will, of course, be a revolution of Love. But no matter how much we may wish it otherwise, it will not to be only sweetness and light. In fact, the word “apocalypse” is an apt descriptor, since its root means “to take the lid off.” On the cusp of the Age of Aquarius, as we commemorate the birth of Christ and the winter solstice, we are seeing our collective spiritual intentions finally come to fruition after more than forty years of buildup. The lid is finally being ripped off our society, to reveal the rot within.
Anyone who has lived through a sustained spiritual awakening will tell you that at its core, the process consists of casting off illusions. We must release the false ideas we have of what life is, of who we ourselves are, in favor of awareness itself as our identity. Even when we know that liberation awaits us on the other side, this letting-go process can be painful, as the ego fights like hell to preserve itself (spoiler alert: it was never real in the first place).
I had a visceral experience of this recently in my work with an awakened teacher, whose transmission of divine light brought me to a new threshold of awakening. This was what I had wanted more than anything since I began my spiritual path almost twenty years ago — to know my Self beyond my ego’s limitations — yet now that it was within arm’s reach, I felt scared! When I told my teacher this, she said that fear is the ego’s natural response to the spirit’s impending choice to “sacrifice” identification with illusions in favor of realization as the Self. It is, in essence, the choice to give up our limited self-definitions in recognition that we are, in fact, all of it. We are giving up nothing to gain everything, yet to the ego this feels like an unbearable sacrifice.
Just stop for a moment and consider how antithetical this truth — that we already are everything we could ever need — is to the kind of capitalist, highly stratified consumerist society that America has become. The whole idea of consumerism is predicated on brainwashing citizens into believing that they are inherently deficient, and must buy ever more “things” in an attempt to fill that void, when nothing could be further from the truth. When enough of us realize the truth of who we are, in an awakening that has gained tremendous momentum this year, the world will change to reflect our experience of unity. When this happens — and it is already happening — competition and judgment become impossible, and the changes that we have fought decades for can happen almost overnight.
What If the Second Coming Is Us?
What if Jesus was not the one and only Son of God, but came to teach us that we are all children of the Divine, capable of the same miraculous powers he displayed, if only we would claim them? What if when he said, you will do greater works than these when you follow me, he didn’t mean when we made him a God, but when we sincerely attempt to follow his teachings? That each and every one of us, far from being inherently sinful, is whole, complete, and forever sinless in the eyes of God?
Contrast the kind of society that this would produce with the one we are living in now, and it’s clear that despite our nation’s Judeo-Christian origins, we are no closer to following Jesus’s teachings today than the citizens of Roman Judea were two thousand years ago. (I say “Jesus’s teachings” very deliberately; I don’t believe he meant to found a new religion so much as teach spiritual truths to those who, as he was fond of saying, had ears to hear. He advocated understanding between faiths, not the elevation of one above another.)
In this context, there is no question in my mind that what we are witnessing in America right now is an awakening. The question is not if, but when, the systems and ideologies that got us to this point will give way to a new world order. It remains to be seen whether we will let go of our cherished illusions in time to avoid the worst-case scenarios, or whether we’ll continue to cling to them until we’re all the way over the cliff. I still have hope, but these days I confess it’s shrinking rapidly. Still, I have seen miracles happen before my eyes many times, so I know beyond a doubt that with God, all things truly are possible.
It’s the ‘with God’ part that the human species has struggled with since its infancy, but there’s nothing like a mega-crisis to light a fire under us. You’ve likely heard of individuals (Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharishi being two good examples) who awakened after an intense internal crisis. Well, the US and Western society as a whole is going through a similar process now, at a collective scale. The challenge is to trust that what awaits us on the other side is not death, but a glorious rebirth.
The good news is that there are a number of things that can help make this kind of apocalyptic awakening more graceful. The bad news is that for most Americans, these things are foreign concepts in practice, if not in spirit. Yet to anyone who considers themselves a follower of Christ, the qualities I speak of should not be unfamiliar. They are compassion, empathy, forgiveness, humility, and above all, a commitment to the truth.
I want to expand briefly on humility as I am speaking of it here. I do not mean it as the kind of self-effacement that most people define it as. I mean humility as the recognition of our equality in God, as neither more, nor less than Divine. None of us could exist without every other soul on this planet, for our lives are woven together like a beautiful tapestry made of many tiny threads, each of which is essential to the whole. This kind of humility represents liberation from the inferiority / superiority complex that causes so much suffering in today’s world. It is the end of one life being worth more or less than any other, a principle Jesus insisted on when he said, “as you do unto the least of my brethren, you do unto me.” Now as then, the powers that be are very invested in keeping this idea at bay.
We must realize that Jesus didn’t teach morality so much as he taught the basic spiritual laws of the Universe — that is, the laws of Oneness. What if the truest translation of the Golden Rule were not “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but “As you do unto others, you do to yourself”? The former is a moralistic injunction with no consequences for disobeying it other than social disapproval, which has become less powerful over time. The latter is a simple statement of fact: your choices have consequences, because in truth, there is no separation. In the East, they call this karma, and the gist is that if you don’t want to experience something yourself, don’t do it to other people, because what you do to them you do to yourself, even if you don’t recognize it at the time. By the same token, we recognize that we must support others if we wish to receive support ourselves. This isn’t something we ‘should do’ because a moral authoritay says so; it’s simply how the universe works, as spiritual adepts have shared through the ages. This isn’t “communism,” it’s unity consciousness, and early Christ movements lived it as part of their efforts to follow Jesus.
Just imagine for a minute if everyone was raised with the understanding that not only do you do to yourself what you do unto others, but your judgments of others simply reflect those you have already made against yourself? In other words, people commit evil deeds not because they are inherently bad, but because they believe that they are. The former perception leads to judgment, the latter to compassion. Which do you think Jesus was trying to teach?
If we consider that Jesus lived and taught from unity consciousness, it becomes obvious that this is a point he was desperately trying to get across to those who followed him. Yet, with the exception of a generous handful of saints and mystics, Western civilization has barely progressed at all, in terms of spiritual understanding, since Jesus’s time. However, in recent years that has begun to change, and what we are seeing now is the unfolding of a process that we have been preparing for for generations at a spiritual level.
After I had wallowed in the 2020 holiday blues for a couple of weeks, it dawned on me that perhaps our current predicament is simply what we need to propel us into the New World that our spirits long to create. As the awakened ones often say, “How do you know this is the experience you need? Because it is the one you are having right now.” This Christmas season we celebrate not the birth of love and peace so much as the birth of truth, without which the other two will forever remain out of reach. That warm fuzzy Christmas spirit has been replaced by the fierce love of truth that Jesus was famous for. This fierce grace has come not to punish us, but to lovingly guide us through this portal of transformation. What better way to honor the great teacher whose birth we celebrate today, than by embracing truth in love, no matter what the “cost”?
May we find the courage to awaken to the Love we are this Christmas, not just for a day, but forever. Nothing less is required to save our world.
in peace,
Natalie
