I
The Birth of Christ in the Human Soul
Basel 22nd December, 1918
Like two mighty pillars
of the spirit have the annual festivals of Christmas and Easter been
placed by the Christian world within the course of the year, itself
a symbol of the course of human life. On these spiritual pillars standing
before the human soul in its contemplation are inscribed the two great
mysteries of mankind's physical existence. We must regard them very
differently from the way we regard other events in the course of our
physical life.
It is true that a supersensible
element reaches into this physical life through our sense observation
and our intellectual judgments, through the content of our feeling and
will. In certain instances it proclaims itself clearly as supersensible
— when, for example, Christian feeling undertakes to symbolize
it in the festival of Pentecost. With Christmas and Easter, on the other
hand, we must look at two events in earthly life that in external appearance
would seem perhaps to be completely physical events; and yet, in contrast
to all other physical events, they do not — indeed, they cannot
by their very nature — present themselves as simply physical events.
We can observe human physical life as we observe nature, perceiving
with our senses the external manifestation of the spirit. But we can
never observe the two boundary events of human life, not even just their
physical occurrence, without confronting through physical perception
itself their tremendous riddle, their profound mystery. These are the
events of birth and death. In the life of Christ Jesus, and in our thoughts
of Christmas and Easter reminding us of it, these two events of man's
physical life stand before our soul, addressing the Christian heart.
As we contemplate these
two great mysteries in their relation to Christmas and Easter, we find
illuminating strength for our thinking, a powerful incentive for our
willing, and an uplifting of our whole being. They stand there, these
two pillars of the spirit, possessing an eternal value.
In the course of human evolution,
however, men's capacities have changed for approaching the sublime conceptions
of Christmas and Easter. During the early Christian centuries, when
the Event of Golgotha had penetrated and shocked many hearts, men gradually
found their way to the thought of a Savior dying on Golgotha. In the
Crucified One hanging on the Cross they found the idea of redemption.
And they gradually formed the powerful imagination of Christ dying on
the Cross. But in later times, especially since our modern age began,
Christian feeling has adjusted itself to the materialism rising in human
evolution and has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering
the world as the newborn Jesus.
One may certainly say that
a sensitive person will find European Christianity decidedly materialistic
from the way it has concentrated in recent centuries upon the Christmas
manger. The desire to fondle the infant Jesus — this is not meant
in a bad sense — has become trivial in the course of centuries.
And many songs about the Jesus Child that today are still considered
beautiful, or — as some people would say — charming, seem
to us not serious enough for these grave times.
But the conception of Christmas
and the conception of Easter are eternal pillars, eternal monuments
of the human heart. One can truly say that this age of new spiritual
revelations will cast new light upon Christmas, so that gradually it
will be experienced in a glorious, new form. It will be our task to
hear the call in present world events for a rejuvenation of many old
conceptions, the call for a new revelation of the spirit. It will be
our task to understand that a new meaning for Christmas is working its
way out of world events for the strengthening and uplifting of the human
soul.
The birth and death of a
human being, however intently we may observe and analyze them, manifest
themselves as events happening on the physical plane but in which a
spiritual element prevails. No one who reflects earnestly can possibly
deny that they give evidence in the way they occur that man is the citizen
of a spiritual world. No physical observation of birth and death will
ever find anything in what the senses can perceive and the intellect
grasp, other than events in which the spirit is directly manifested
in the physical. Only these two earthly events appear in this way to
the human heart.
For the event of birth,
the Christmas event, the human and Christian heart must develop an ever
deeper sense of mystery. One may say that men have seldom looked from
a high enough level upon the mysterious nature of birth. Seldom, indeed;
but then at such moments its tidings speak to the depths of the human
soul.
So it is, for instance,
with the images associated with that spiritual genius of fifteenth-century
Switzerland, Nikolaus von der Flüe.
[
Note 1 ]
It is related of him — and he himself told it — that
before his birth, before he breathed the outer air, he beheld the physical
form that he would have after birth and during the course of his life.
Also, he beheld before birth the ceremony of his own christening, with
the persons who were present and who were then around him in his early
childhood. With the exception of one elderly person whom he did not
recognize, he knew all these people because he had seen them before
he saw the light of the physical world.
However one may view this
story, one cannot but see that it points impressively to the mystery
of human birth, which is so magnificently symbolized for world history
by the Christmas imagery. The story of von der Flue suggests that there
is something connected with our entrance into physical life that only
by a very, very thin wall is hidden from our everyday view, a wall so
thin that it can be broken through when a karmic situation exists as
in the case of Nikolaus von der Flüe. Such moving allusions to
the mystery of birth and Christmas still meet us here and there. But
one must say that as yet mankind is hardly aware of the fact that birth
and death, the two boundary pillars standing there in the physical world,
reveal themselves even in their physical appearance as spiritual events
that could never occur in the ordinary course of nature, as events in
which, on the contrary, divine spiritual Powers actually intervene.
This is evident from the fact that both these boundary experiences still
remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.
The new revelation of the
Christ now moves us to contemplate the course of human life —
allow me to express it in the following way — as Christ wishes
us to contemplate it in the twentieth century. As we try today to grasp
the meaning of Christmas, let us recall a saying attributed to Christ
Jesus that points truly to the Christmas event: “Except ye become
as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Except ye become as little children”: this is certainly
not encouraging us to strip away all the mystery of the Christmas conception,
and to drag it down to the banality of “dear little Jesus,”
as many folk songs and other songs have done — the folk songs
less than the art songs — during the materialistic development
of Christianity. This very saying — “Except ye become as
little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven” —
impels us to look up to mighty impulses flowing through human evolution.
And in our own time, all that is happening in the world can surely be
no reason for lapsing into trivial ideas of Christmas, when the human
heart is filled with pain, when it must look back upon millions of human
beings who have met their death in these last years, must think of countless
human beings hungering for food. At this time surely nothing is fitting
but to contemplate the mighty thoughts in world history that have impelled
and inspired humanity. One can be brought to such thoughts by the saying,
“Except ye become as little children.” And one can supplement
it by these words: “Unless you live your life in the light of
this thought, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
When a human being enters
this world as a child, he has come directly from the spiritual world.
What happens in physical life, the procreation and growth of his physical
body, is only a covering for the event that cannot be described otherwise
than by saying: man's central being leaves the spiritual world. He is
born out of the spirit into the body. When the Rosicrucian says “Ex
Deo Nascimur,” he is speaking of the human being entering the
physical world. What first en-sheathes him, what makes him a complete
physical being here on earth: this is what is referred to by the words
“Ex Deo Nascimur.” If one would speak of the kernel of the
human being, his innermost core of being, one must say: he comes down
from the spirit into this physical world. Through what takes place in
the physical world — which he is able to observe from spiritual
regions before his conception and birth — he is clothed with a
physical body, in order that he may have experiences that are only possible
in such a body. But he has come, in his central core of being, out of
the spiritual world. And he reveals — to one who wants to see
things as they really are in this world, who is not blinded by materialistic
illusions — he reveals in his very first years by his very nature
that he has come out of the spirit. One's experiences with a child,
if one has insight, are of such a character that one feels in him the
after-effects of his recent life in the spiritual world.
This is the mystery that
is indicated by such stories as the one associated with Nikolaus von
der Flüe. A trivial view and one strongly influenced by materialistic
thinking asserts in its simplicity that a human being develops his ego
gradually in the course of his life from birth to death, that his ego
becomes more and more clearly manifest and more and more powerful. This
is a naive way of thinking! If one observes the true human ego that
comes from the spiritual world into its physical sheath through birth,
one speaks quite differently about the entire physical development of
the human being. For one knows that as the human being grows physically
in his physical body, actually his true ego slowly vanishes into the
body, becoming continually less and less manifest. One knows that what
develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only
a mirrored reflection of spiritual happenings, a dead reflection of
a higher life. One is expressing it properly if one says, the entire
fullness of a man's being gradually disappears into the body; it becomes
more and more invisible. He lives his life here on earth by gradually
losing himself in his body. At death he finds himself again in the spirit.
That is what one says who knows the facts. Someone ignorant of the facts
will declare that a child is incomplete, that his ego gradually develops
to greater and greater perfection, growing out of vague subconscious
levels of human existence. A knowledge of what the spiritual investigator
sees, causes one to speak differently about these things than is done
from today's sense-consciousness, enmeshed as it is in external illusions
and materialistic feelings.
Thus the human being enters
the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature while he is a child
is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to his spiritual
nature, which is entering into physical existence as if it were falling
asleep. This spiritual nature only seems so empty of content to us because
we cannot perceive it in ordinary life, just as we cannot perceive the
sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical
and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does
not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to accomplish
in regard to his physical body: that he shall bury himself in it more
and more deeply, in order to acquire faculties that can only be acquired
in this way. His soul and spirit being must lose themselves for a while
in physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual
origin, in order that we may grow strong in the thought that we have
journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world: it is for this
reason that the Christmas festival stands there like a mighty pillar
of light within the Christian world.
The Christmas imagination
must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity.
It will then become powerful again for humanity. Human beings will once
more be able to draw strength from it for their physical life; it will
remind them in the right way of their spiritual origin. Seldom in our
present time does it have so powerful an effect upon human hearts as
it will have in the future. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in
the very laws of spiritual existence, that what appears in the world
to help mankind forward does not appear at once in its ultimate form.
It appears first, as it were, tumultuously, as if it were launched prematurely
by unlawful spirits of world evolution. We only understand the historical
evolution of humanity properly when we realize that truths are not always
to be taken up as they first appear. The right moment must also be considered
for their entrance into evolution in their true light.
Among various thoughts that
have entered into the evolution of modern humanity — inspired,
certainly, by the Christ Impulse but appearing at first in premature
form — is that of human equality before God and the world, the
equality of all men. This is a profoundly Christian conception capable
of ever increasing in depth. But it should not have been presented to
human hearts in such vague form as it was given by the French Revolution
when it first appeared among mankind so tumultuously. We must realize
that human life is involved in a process of evolution from birth to
death, and that the chief impulses working upon it are distributed in
time. Think how it is with the human being as he enters sense-existence:
he is filled with the idea of the equality of human nature in all men.
We experience the child nature most intensely when we regard the child
as permeated through his whole being by this idea. Nothing that creates
inequality among men, nothing that organizes men so that they feel different
from other men: nothing of all this enters at first into the child's
nature. It is all imparted to him in the course of his physical life.
Inequality is created by men's physical existence. They come from the
spirit equal before God and the world and their fellowmen. This is proclaimed
by the mystery of the child.
This mystery is closely
related to our understanding of Christmas, which will be made more profound
by new Christian revelations. For these will have to do with the new
Trinity: the human being, representing all humanity; the forces of Ahriman;
and the forces of Lucifer. As one learns how man is placed in world
existence in a situation of balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, one
comes to understand the real significance of the human being in external
physical life.
Most of all, understanding
must come about, Christian understanding, for a certain aspect of human
life. Someday Christian thought will announce a fact that has already
been put forward by some minds since the middle of the nineteenth century
— may I say, in stammering accents, but quite distinctly. When
one has first grasped the fact that a child enters his earth life with
a consciousness of human equality, then one must go on to the fact that
as the child becomes a man, unequal powers develop in him — as
if from just the fact of being born — powers that are obviously
not of this earth. One is then confronting another great mystery of
human existence, one that is in direct contrast to the idea of equality.
To see into this mystery will help one to form a true picture of mankind
— something that already at this present moment in time has become
earnestly necessary for the future evolution of the human soul. One
faces the startling fact that human beings begin to differ from one
another while they are growing out of childhood, by reason of something
that obviously is born in them, something in their blood: that is, their
various gifts and capacities.
One meets the question of
gifts and capacities that create such inequality among men in connection
with the thought of Christmas. Future Christmas festivals will point
to the origin of this vast difference throughout the world in human
capacities, talents, even genius. A person will only attain balance
in his life when he has learnt to know the origin of certain capacities
that are distinguishing him from other men. The light of Christmas,
of the Christmas candles, must provide an explanation for evolving humanity.
It must answer the question: Do individuals suffer injustice between
birth and death from the way the universe is ordered? What is the truth
about capacities and talents?
Dear friends, many things
will be seen in a different light when mankind has become permeated
by the new Christian feeling. Particularly, it will be understood why
an esoteric knowledge of the Old Testament included special insight
into the nature of prophecy. Who were those prophets who appear in the
Old Testament? They were individuals who had been sanctified by Jahve
and authorized by Him to use special spiritual gifts that reached far
beyond those of ordinary men. Jahve had first to sanctify those capacities
that are born to men through the blood. We know that Jahve influences
human beings in the time between their falling asleep and waking; He
does not work in their conscious life. Every true believer of the Old
Testament said in his heart: The capacities and talents that differentiate
men, rising to the level of genius in the case of a prophet, are indeed
born with the individual. But they are not used by him beneficently
unless he sinks in sleep into the realm where Jahve guides his soul
impulses. Jahve, active from the spiritual world, transforms his talents;
otherwise they would only be physical, only part of his bodily organism.
We point here to the deep
mystery of an Old Testament conception. But this must die away, including
the belief in the nature of a prophet. New conceptions must enter the
evolution of world history for the salvation of mankind. The talent
that the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve during unconscious
sleep must now in this modern age be sanctified by the human being himself
when he is awake and in a state of clear consciousness. But he can only
do this if he knows that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even
genius, are luciferic endowments, that they work luciferically in the
world unless they are permeated and sanctified by all that enters the
world as the Christ Impulse. One touches upon a tremendously important
mystery in the evolution of modern humanity if one grasps this central
fact of the new Christmas thoughts. The Christ must be so felt, so understood
that a human being can now stand before Him as a New Testament believer
and say: In spite of my childhood sense of equality, I have been endowed
with various capacities and gifts. But they can only contribute to the
salvation of mankind if I dedicate them to the service of Christ Jesus,
if I permeate my whole nature with the Christ, so that they may be freed
from the grasp of Lucifer.
A heart permeated by the
Christ tears away from Lucifer what otherwise works luciferically in
human physical existence. This must be the powerful thought that will
pervade the future evolution of the human soul. It is the new Christmas
thought, the new annunciation of Christ's activity in our souls, transforming
the luciferic influence. Lucifer's power in us is not due to our having
come out of the spiritual world, but to the fact that we are clothed
by a physical body permeated by blood. We have our talents through heredity.
Our individual capacities come to us through the luciferic stream of
heredity. They must be mastered and put to use during physical life
not through inspirations we receive from Jahve during sleep, but through
the Christ Impulse that we can feel working within us in our fully conscious
life.
“Oh, Christian,”
says the new Christianity, “turn your thoughts to Christmas! lay
upon the Christmas altar all the differentiation you have received through
your blood! sanctify your capacities, gifts, genius as you behold them
illuminated by the light coming from the Christmas tree!”
The new revelation of the
spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dull and unheeding
as it addresses us in this extremely serious time. If we remain receptive,
then we will find the power that mankind must find for the great tasks
that will confront us in this very age. We must experience the meaning
of Christmas in all its gravity. Today we must realize in clear waking
consciousness what the Christ was really saying when He spoke those
words, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the
Kingdom of Heaven.” The sense of equality that is natural to a
child is not — if we regard him properly — proved false
by these words. For the Child Whose birth we commemorate on Christmas
Eve reveals ever new thoughts to mankind in the course of our evolution.
He now proclaims that we must place all the distinguishing capacities
we possess within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child. All
that our different talents achieve must be brought to the altar of this
Child.
Perhaps, stirred by the
earnestness of this Christmas thought, you will now ask, “How
am I to experience the Christ Impulse in my own soul?” This question
is often a burden in men's hearts.
Dear friends, what we may
call the Christ Impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment,
suddenly and tempestuously. It has taken root differently at different
periods of evolution. In our present time a human being must take up
in full, clear waking consciousness the cosmic truths that have been
imparted stammeringly by our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.
As these truths are made known and as he comes to understand them, they
will awaken in him the assurance that a new revelation, the new Christ
Impulse for this age, has been brought to him. He will perceive the
new Impulse if only he is attentive.
Try — in a truly lively
way such as is appropriate for this age — to take into yourselves
the spiritual thoughts of the cosmic Powers; try to take them up not
merely as a teaching, or a theory, but so that they move your souls
to their very depths and warm them, illuminate them, permeate them,
so that you carry the thoughts living within you! Try to feel them so
intensely that they seem to enter your soul by way of your body and
change the body itself. Try to strip away from them all abstractions,
all theory. Try to realize that they are true nourishment for the soul;
they are not just thoughts, they are spiritual life coming from the
spiritual world.
Enter into the most intimate
inner union with these truths and you will observe three things. First
you will observe that gradually — however they may be expressed
— they eradicate from your soul something that usually appears
so obviously in human beings in this age of the consciousness soul:
self-seeking. When you begin to notice that they kill egotism and disarm
self-seeking, then you will have perceived the Christ-permeated character
of the thoughts of our anthroposophical spiritual science.
Secondly, observe the moment
that untruthfulness approaches you, untruthfulness in any form, either
when you yourself are tempted to be careless about the truth or when
the falseness approaches you from the outside. If at such a moment you
can also observe that immediately there is an impulse moving within
you, warning you, pointing to the truth, admonishing you and impelling
you to hold fast to the truth, wanting to prevent falsehood from entering
your life — in contrast to ordinary present-day life, so much
inclined to sham — then you are again experiencing the living
Christ Impulse. No one will find it easy to lie, or to be casual about
sham and pretence, in the presence of the spiritual thoughts of anthroposophy.
A sign pointing the way to a sense for truth—apart from all other
aspects of understanding: this you will find in the thoughts of the
new revelation of the Christ. When you have reached the point where
you do not seek a merely theoretical understanding of spiritual science,
as is sought for any other science, but where the thoughts so penetrate
you that you say to yourself, “Now that these thoughts are united
with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing
me, directing me toward the truth”: then you will have found the
second aspect of the Christ Impulse.
In the third place, when
you feel that something streams from these thoughts even down into your
body, but especially into your soul, working to overcome illness, making
you healthy and strong, when you sense the rejuvenating, invigorating
power of these thoughts, the adversaries of illness: then you will have
experienced the third aspect of the Christ Impulse. This is the goal
toward which mankind strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit:
to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome egotism and the falseness
of life, to overcome self-seeking through love, the sham of life through
truth, illness through health-giving thoughts that put us into immediate
accord with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the
harmonies of the universe.
Not all these things can
be attained at the present time, for man carries an ancient heritage
around with him! There is a foolish lack of understanding, for instance,
when such a backstairs politician as Christian Science twists into a
caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Even though,
due to our ancient heritage, our thinking is not yet sufficiently powerful
to accomplish what we long to accomplish — perhaps from a selfish
motive — nevertheless thought does possess healing power. But
in regard to such things people's ideas are always distorted. Someone
who understands may tell you that certain thoughts give you health,
and then he is suddenly stricken with this or that illness. It is indeed
due to that ancient heritage that we cannot today be relieved of all
illness merely by the power of our thought. But are you able to say
what illness you would have had if you had not possessed these thoughts?
Can you say that you could have passed your life in your present state
of health if you had not had these thoughts? Can you prove that a person
who has interested himself in our spiritual science and then has died
at forty-five years of age, would without these thoughts not have died
at age forty-two or age forty? People think the wrong way around! They
concern themselves with what their karma cannot bestow upon them and
pay no attention to what their karma does bestow upon them. If —
in spite of every contradiction in the external world — you will
watch and observe through the power of inner trust that you have gained
from an intimate acquaintance with the thoughts of spiritual science,
you will perceive the healing power that is penetrating even your physical
body, the health-giving, freshening, rejuvenating force that is the
third element which Christ the Healer brings with His continuous revelations
to the human soul.
We wanted to enter more
deeply into the thought of Christmas which is so closely related to
the mystery of human birth. We wanted to bring in brief outline what
is revealed to us today from the spirit as a continuation of the thought
of Christmas. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our
lives. We can feel that it places us, no matter what happens, in the
midst of the impulses of cosmic evolution. We can feel ourselves united
with those divine impulses; we can understand them and draw power for
our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought.
Humanity is evolving — it would be wrong to deny it. Our only
right course is to go forward with this evolution.
And Christ has declared:
“I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” This
is not just a phrase, it is truth. Christ has not only revealed Himself
in the Gospels; Christ is with us; He reveals Himself continually. We
must have ears to hear what He is ever newly revealing in this modern
age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations;
but strength will be ours if we have such faith.
Strength will indeed come
to us if we accept the new revelations, even if they speak to us from
life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. We journey
as individual souls through repeated earth-lives during which our destiny
comes to fulfillment. Even this thought, which enables us to sense the
spiritual working behind external physical life, even this we can only
accept if we take into ourselves in a truly Christian sense the revelations
that follow one another. The Christian in this age, the true Christian,
when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin
to work with the strengthening thoughts that can now come to him from
the new cosmic revelations, bringing power to his will and illumination
to his thinking. And his feeling should support the power and light
of his thought in the course of the Christian year, to help him approach
that other thought that points to the mystery of death: the Easter thought,
which brings the final experience of human earthly existence before
our souls as a spiritual experience. We will feel the Christ more and
more livingly as we are able to place our own existence in the right
relation to His life. The Rosicrucian of the Middle Ages, uniting his
thought with Christianity, declared: Ex Deo Nascimur; in Christo Morimur;
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus. Out of the Divine we have been born,
if we think of ourselves as human beings here on earth. In Christ we
die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This all pertains
to our life, our individual human life. If we look away from our own
life to the life of Christ, then we see our life as mirrored reflection.
Out of the Divine we are born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit
we shall be awakened again. This saying is true of the Christ living
in our midst as our first-born Brother. We can so affirm it that we
feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and reflected in
our human nature. Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as it stands
in the Gospel of Luke, represented by the symbol of the descending dove
— out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died;
in the Divine will He rise again.
We can only perceive eternal
truths in the right way if we see them in their contemporary reflection—not
in a single, absolute, abstract form — and if we feel ourselves
not as abstract humanity but as live, individual human beings whose
duty is to think and act in harmony with the time in which we live.
Then we will try to understand the Christ, who is with us “always,
even to the end of the world,” to understand Him in His contemporary
language as He teaches and enlightens and empowers us through the thought
of Christmas. We will want to take the Christ into ourselves in His
new language. We must become intimately related to Him. Then we will
be able to fulfill in ourselves His true mission on this earth and beyond
death. In each epoch human beings must take the Christ into themselves
in their own way. This has been people's feeling when they have beheld
in the right way the two great pillars of the spirit, Christmas and
Easter.
That profound German mystic, Angelus Silesius,
[
Note 2 ]
expressed it in this way:
“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”
And, contemplating Easter,
he wrote:
“The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.”
Truly, the Christ must live
within us. We are not human beings in some abstract sense, we are human
beings of a definite epoch, and the Christ must be born within us in
our epoch in accordance with His words. We must endeavor to bring the
Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination.
As He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind
throughout all ages, even to the end of earthly time, so He wills now
to be born in our souls. If we try to experience the birth of Christ
within us in this epoch, as it becomes a light and a power in our soul
— the eternal Light and eternal Power entering into time —
then we perceive in the right way the historical birth of Christ in
Bethlehem and its image in our own souls.
“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born And
not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”
As He creates the impulse
in our hearts today to contemplate His birth — His birth in the
course of human events, His birth in our individual souls — so
we deepen the thought of Christmas within us. And so let us look toward
that “night of consecration” (Weihenacht), which
we should feel is bringing a new strength and a new illumination to
mankind, to help them to endure the many evils and sorrows they have
had to suffer and will still have to suffer.
“My Kingdom,”
Christ said, “is not of this world.” It is a saying that
challenges us, if we regard His birth in the right way, to find in our
own souls the path to His Kingdom where He will give us strength and
light for our darkness and helplessness, through the impulses coming
from the world of which He Himself spoke, which His appearance at Christmas
will always proclaim. “My Kingdom is not of this world.”
But He has brought His Kingdom into this world, so that we may always
find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope bestowed upon us in all
the circumstances of life, if only we will come to Him, taking His words
to heart, words such as these:
“Except ye become
as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
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