Christmas Story — Fact or Truth?

What makes a person great? Success, yes; but also, character: truthful, kind, wise, creative, loyal and self-sacrificing. What makes a story great? Impressive facts help, yes but a deeply resonating truth and call to right action even more.

Down through the ages stories and images have conveyed deep spiritual truths that transcend the so-called “facts” of history. The story of the birth of Jesus is one such time-honored and deeply-cherished story even while scholars and scoffers alike continue to debate the facts surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ.

The interest of early Christians in the date of and the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ was slow to start. Was it in the Spring? The Winter? The first recorded celebration of Jesus’ birthday on December 25 was by the Emperor Constantine in 336 A.D. after establishing Christianity as the state religion. It wasn’t until the thirteen century that the first creche scene was reenacted and it was by St. Francis.

Saints like Padre Pio or Ramakrishna Paramhansa could go into an ecstatic state while performing a ritual like mass or puja, but was it the ritual or the devotee? Thousands of other priests and pujaris do the same but don’t have that experience! And yet the ecstatic state was triggered by the ritual!

In our left-brain intensive culture, we too easily confuse facts with truth just as we use the terms belief and faith interchangeably. Belief is but a hypothesis while faith is based on some level of realization of its truth. A great novel might describe fictional facts, but we are inspired if we recognize the deeper truth in its story as suggestive of the human condition. So, too, with other art forms such as music, sculpture, and painting.

Each object, each emotion and each appearance of anything is both unique in time and space and, at the same time, capable of pointing to a universal reality from which it emerged. As Yogananda wrote in “Autobiography of a Yogi,” “Thoughts are universally, not individually, rooted.” Each emotion, each person, each object stands for the whole.

In this way, our seemingly short and otherwise trivial lives (compared with the vast universe) can be experienced as reflections of the timeless and universal. It has been said that the significance of our lives exists only to the degree we connect with the timeless and the universal. Otherwise, all forms constantly appear and disappear seemingly devoid of meaning.

And so it is with the beautiful story of the birth of Jesus in the lowly manger, surrounded by farm animals, visited by lowly humble shepherds and honored by kings from the Orient. It is right and true to absorb into our hearts this story in its fullest expression. The story is inseparable from its meaning and significance, even without our words of explanation! In this instance, the question of “facts” is secondary. “Meaning” here, in this story, trumps “facts” yet facts, too, exist to convey meaning. Facts and the interpretation or meaning of those facts are inextricably linked, one to the other. Facts can be fictional or proven by objective evidence but either way to be meaningful they must resonate deeply with the shared human experience of life.

The important inspirations and spiritual experiences of our lives rest upon the interplay of experience with interpretation of the experience. Our openness and willingness to allow guidance to invade our day-to-day reality marks the courage of the disciple-devotee. Here the immortal words of Jesus: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God….and all these things will be added unto you” describe the life of faith.

Take, for example, Joseph, espoused husband of Mary. He balked when the angel revealed that Mary, his espoused, was pregnant. Who wouldn’t? It was a lot to accept in the first moments of its revelation!

His wife-to-be, Mary, hardly a teenage girl, was confronted by yet another angel informing her that the Holy Spirit would come upon her, and she would bear a son. Shocked and initially fear-filled, she naturally questions the angel “how is this possible?”

When an angel appeared to Zachariah to inform him that his aging wife would conceive, Zachariah immediately questioned it. For his stubbornness he was struck dumb until the child was born but nonetheless he accepted the message as “from above.”

Would the “appearance” of an angel include a “superconscious” dream? (A superconscious dream is one that carries a greater personal significance and not one of those nocturnal meaningless ones.)

Moses hesitated when God called him to lead the Israelites from Egypt. Not only did Moses simply not want to do this all-but-impossible task but he had several good reasons why he was not the best choice: he was wanted for murder by the Pharoah and was thus on the run; he had a serious speech defect; and, he had been raised in the Pharoah’s household where his (adopted) mother still resided.

On the eve of the great battle described in the epic, the Mahabharata, Arjuna, the greatest warrior and renowned disciple of Lord Krishna, got cold feet when he confronted his cousins, and their formidable forces arrayed against him and his brothers. Yet Krishna’s counsel in the Bhagavad Gita restored his faith in his dharma.

Even Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane the night before his arrest, prayed momentarily that “this cup passeth”

How often does our angel, our conscience, counsel us to take righteous action only to find that we, too, hesitate; we balk; we refuse? There are times when we are called to bear witness to something timeless and extraordinary: the presence of God, of Spirit, of Christ in time and space. Many are called but how many “follow me?”

Time to get up for morning meditation? “Aw, gee whiz, I’m SO tired!” Sunday morning, “Should I stay home and skip Service?” A friend makes a sarcastic remark? “Should I bite back?” Or: “I heard the news today, oh no!”

Do the humble shepherds of good habits who tend the sheep of our mundane daily tasks willingly say “Yes” to the angels of conscience who bid us stop and witness the infant Christ-peace in the cradle of our daily meditations?

Do we follow the noble kings from the “East” (our guru-preceptors) who bid us “travel far and endure the hardships” of self-control and self-discipline that we might earn their gifts of wisdom, devotion, and sacrifice? Here I think of the dedicated pilgrims throughout the centuries around the world who would walk on foot perhaps for one or two thousand miles to go to sacred places where God-realized souls have lived.

Do we have strength and courage to throw the moneychangers of material desires out of the temple of our meditation? Do we have the self-honesty to know that our generosity is motivated, in part, by the praise and acceptance of others? Is our striving for success to accumulate money or status or is it a creative, joyful and gratitude-inspired service to God and guru through others?

The story of Jesus’ birth tells us that the light of our soul can only be born in the stillness of ego-transcendence when our animal impulses are bowed in adoration, when the shepherds of daily duties willingly put aside their mundane tasks, and when our noble qualities from the East are offered at the feet of the soul’s guidance. Then the angels of our conscience can sing “Alleluia: Glory to God in the highest and goodwill to all.”

Our risen soul then can walk the earth of daily life healing the sick and infirm citizens of our karma. As the infant indwelling Christ/Krishna consciousness grows into adulthood our ego will at last, like Jesus and like grandsire Bhishma of the Mahabharata, offer itself upon the cross of final liberation to be resurrected into the eternal bliss of Self-realization.

Blessings to you!

Nayaswami Hrimananda — Ananda Washington (AnandaWA.org)