 Dear Friends,
In addition to her usual article, Diana Cooper has written a special message for you all this Christmas. In it, she writes that Christmas is a time of cosmic change when special energies are available to people everywhere, and asks that we tune into the great light pouring down to help us if we can find the time.
An inner need
I’m glad she mentioned that, because it’s a need I’ve felt for many years – to be inwardly still enough at the Winter Solstice to receive the blessings of love and light which are offered to us so potently at that time. What has mostly happened, though, is that, like most people I suppose, especially mothers, I’ve been swept away by the huge momentum of social obligations, elaborate cooking and overindulging that are part of our Christmas tradition, and the only time I’ve had to be still is when I’m in bed, asleep.
Last Christmas, though, Geoff and I promised ourselves that this year would be different. So we’re looking forward to simple sights and sounds – candlelight, the clock ticking, the fire crackling – and simple foods, and in between, lots of silence in which to simply absorb and be grateful for the loving energies that we know surround us so intensely, and to help send these gifts out to others.
The blessing of the divine Sun
For whether you call it Christmas or Yule, and whether you celebrate it on the 21st or the 25th of December, the inner meaning is the same: the Earth, our mother, has reached her point of maximum stillness and sensory activity is reduced to a minimum. We, her children, are asked to follow her patiently repeated example, and enter the stillness too, so that, like her, we can receive the greatest gift – the blessing of the hidden, divine Sun, which is at its brightest and closest when the outer Sun is furthest away.
Ocean of loving-kindness
So the still point of the Winter Solstice is a wonderful opportunity to become aware of this divine blessing, which in fact is always seeking to pour itself upon us, but which is so often shut out by our internal chatter and external busy-ness. By letting ourselves feel and know the infinite ocean of blessing in which we live, move and have our being – even if it is only for a few moments each day – we are planting a seed which has the potential to grow in a quite miraculous way.
For this is what happens: by cultivating a vivid sense of the infinitely beneficent and loving energies that surround us, and doing our best to harmonise our life and being with those loving energies, we are gradually transforming our subtle bodies, and even our physical body (read The Genie in Your Genes if you don’t believe me!). We are imbuing our bodies – both subtle and physical – with the ‘gold that does not tarnish’ – the gold of the alchemists. We are developing ‘eyes that can see’, and ‘ears that can hear’, to coin a biblical phrase. We are developing a sense that we can take with us beyond the veil of death, by the light of which we can see our way to the heart of the All. And by the light of which others, too, can be helped to find their way.
The new I
This is how the the Christ Child is born and matures in us: the new I, the being who sees light so clearly, and knows love so nearly, that – deep down – he/she can no longer be thrown off course by anything, least of all death.
So, dear friends, our wish for you this Christmas is that you may find and multiply this gift of gold from the spiritual Sun.
With much love, Ann, Geoff and the Cygnus Team
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