The Holy Nights- 25th December 2002

THROUGH Christ we return to Our Father in very significant ways, ways which distinctly bring very special gifts to all of us over the Christmas period especially.

For fourteen days in total globally, there are forces of incarnation amassing and coercing, which are not available generally throughout the rest of the year by the same quality or character.

Also, cosmically, heavenly, we have an undispersed ratio of spiritual substance to that ennui (that penetrates the lower spheres), which dives within the earthly realms, substantiates and saturates newly and anew with the greater Holy Spirit. 

Manifestation is the theme currently - manifestation of the highest spiritual Material and Potential: of Him. This is the time for the Host to host, and the great playfulness to begin! Let visions find their way into reality, let former words and thoughts become actualities; not only with mere change, nor newness or difference, but rather with a forming, structuring, a making real of that which has been spiritually hitherto only dreamed of.

When our beloved Christ pushed His Way into the Earthly domain and saturated its sphere with His Presence and His Intention through His Incarnation, He was ever present with the greatest of deliberance during the time even at the Holy Birth. The first impulse within the world, you see, was introduced through that very period.

Often folk speak about Christ's last three years, leaving the orientation of those earlier to be more or less mysteries of a vaguer importance. It could be said, that as each moment of His Life accelerated into the next, there became a definite momentum and the world did change a little more, and what was affected during and towards the closure gathered weight upon weight unto the finale as was known.

Yet also we know that there was a beginning point for which all this was to be possible - a beginning to this process, to this event, to this God clothing Himself in all that matters and was matter. There was an initial surge, a change and an address, which first worked its way through the form of infantitude. This worked through unconsciousness firstly - that slumbering of egoic activity as the baby, the baby whose consciousness was naturally more coherent with Father God for most of the day. 

Paradoxically we look to Christ to celebrate our knowledge of ourselves and therefore also of others. We think of Him Loving the individual and being capable of incorporating all differences, to the profound extent which finds them loving more and not less. Through Him we may find both the 'I' and the 'am'. Yet the reality of this is also that we achieve all that we can through our Father firstly, and there is a soporific quality to great knowledge when it is experienced by us. (Babies are very wise indeed and you can see how they sleep!)

Sleep brings us much, much more than rest. Sleep brings us life - all kinds of life, all kinds of spiritual gifting. When we sleep we pass through many layerings of place and time, but inevitably also at the closest yet fartherest edge, we return to our Father. We go to God and we bring back our life and those forces which comprise our life, into the morning, into our wakefulness.

On these nights following on from the twenty-fifth of December we bring back something a little different for two weeks! This is the time when the night meets the day. This is the time when not only are we given the day's quota, but this special substance brought back could extend on throughout the rest of the year. Parcels of prior plans are bundled back into the arms of the hopeful man and delivered with him in new beginnings now made possible. This is a time for realizing. Our etheric garden is replenished, our wellsprings of Grace become continent once more. Happiness returns to a deflated globe deplete of direction - not exactly renewed, not reborn either, but born anew - not repeating the repetitive, not even resurrecting all that has gone before, but investing new life in new projects that have come from the best gleanings of what went prior.

In many respects life itself dies all the time. At Eastertide we look to resurrection and redemption and give thanks that the darkest aspects can be permeated by such a strong love as is His. The influences which speak to our innermost natures during the Crucifixion period denote agonies of experience known before His Coming and also of those following after as well. For all the greatness of the story there is every inch a sadness, and inwardly we all resonate some pain, laboring with the entire globe many battles which may come and go.

This is not the time for that! Christmas time heals over the spiritual stigmata. Not by just a folk tale, but by a secret whispered into the ear each night… The angels draw near and love us all as dearly as any child… and the Heavens bless us with their cooperation asking 'What is it that you want Father God to bring you? ', 'What would you have growing beneath the Tree of Life this year?'

What of our Father God Himself? He knows our heart, of course, He has always known. Remarkably He understands every desire there is. Whilst we do not have to even make them consciously recognized, He has already set a place in our futures for their revealing. Yet this asking can be different too. It can lead on to the formation of happenings which would not have occurred if had not formerly been asked for.

This is a private consultation of which intimately, much is left between each and Him. The only wishes we are not permitted are those which involve the lives of others who do not also wish in same accordance exactly. You cannot therefore wish for something which involves another person that invites a coercion against their wish and want. You cannot ask seriously for others to favor you when in truth they do not, love you, if they love not, or even, for example commit to Christ, when they do not. Wishes for others are better spent in such generalities as they are likely to wish for themselves - yet we can effectively help others and the world by wishing ourselves to be more useful, more proficient in assisting the intimations of the ever prompting Divine!

Ennui is lethargic, almost static activity, deplete of its former self. It exists as a phenomenon whereby people, ideas, projects, lives etc. inevitably experience a 'staleness' one often hears people complain of. Much discontent is experienced in this suppressive experience - life without life (almost). Folk are familiar with the phrase 'the power has gone out of it', and yes, the color washes away somewhat and yet this state often perseveres (and fights to survive) as is.

There are traditions which are suffering ennui and should long have relinquished themselves to the spirit of Christmas - concepts choking the world's great freeways of logic, outdated and outworn fellowships now bereft of the original spirit of humanity that first enlivened them; plays that have played too long, with one too many an ovation - there are crusty creatures which really beg to evolve, and jokes which lost their humorous context a long time ago. Over this time we can meet with our own ennui and commission it to its final rest. Give over what is of death to death, and begin again!

Of the twelve days we find a compound effect.

• The first night is of Father God

We go to Him and experience only Him. This is where we may come back with only an unconscious experience of Him and not of ourselves. This is His day. Every night we sleep we go to Him and replenish ourselves etherically. The pear tree examples this etheric life. He is at the apex of all life. We return with the blessings of this meeting. Before entering into sleep on this night we can hold before us the picture of the golden pear tree and its etheric splendor; knowing that when we arise to once again feel the senses within our bodies, to infill the limbs and circulate warmly we have been to paradise and eaten His fruit that sustains us throughout all of the worlds.

• The second night becomes the meeting of two

On the second night we go to Him with the inner experience of the night before, before our soulic nature, becoming evident also to the ego. Just as the song 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' goes on to repeat itself and recap the earlier days within the current day, so our experience gathers over the twelve nights (during the global fourteen). Our experience shifts now from being unconscious to recollective and from that into further knowledge. In this we experience Christ also, whose presence becomes apparent through this self-conscious reflection.

He is apparent to us in all meetings. In this power of two we find a unity of self and Father, Father God and Christ. There is a peace experienced in this unity (two turtle doves). Our meditation on this night is of marvelous meetings - of conjunctures. Of meetings that will come to us also in the year ahead. May we be aware of not only the Great One's Presence, but of our being with them and our being together.

• On the third night comes the Holy Spirit

On the third night we return with our experience now of the Holy Trinity in action - as it works within our own personal creation - as the Holy Spirit inspires and divines the fresh life destined to be manifest.

Without the Holy Spirit we would be continually given over to ennui, and though nights one and two carry a certain measure of peace in the experience, this same peace now becomes also a supportive strength, enabling us to travel further upon the vitality of this mighty moving Spirit now known. (Three french hens - the Trinity.)

So we have had our being sustained etherically, and then we have had our consciousness enlivened by our Christ as He examines all about us, and now through Him we can see also our Father's Divine Will as it motivates our life, the etheric life and all other life besides. Our chief concern on this night to contemplate is our own will and drive and fervor in the world. We may anticipate a sense of personal motivation becoming clarified within us. And wake to feel the spirit within us!

• The fourth night is the four angels of the four quarters of space

On the fourth night we give and are given 'space' to make ready our incoming actualities. The gift of the four is precisely this. Four angels govern and qualify and characterize the four quarters of all cosmic space and its infilling virtue. On this journey heavenward we are gathering up our provisions, and our first provision for that in our life to enter in anew, is the space to be present that it can. This is now the perfect night before retiring into slumber, to contemplate possibilities, to hang out our empty stocking as it were to be infilled! (Four calling birds. [Originally 'colley' birds - blackbirds, black as coll/coal.])

• The fifth night the world becomes palpable

On this night we have experienced the four previous nights and what their gifts might mean to us, and now the space which is filled becomes apparent. Our consciousness here moves to a firmer and more concrete perception of what is around us. This can be not only in the physical world that we are more 'connected' or 'grounded', but in our thinking processes as well.

The rings denote containment. Earthly material comprises a living spiritual substance (a cohabitation of being and virtue) which is contained and set within perimeters of patterned consistency. Although physical matter deteriorates, it does not dissolve or respond in ways that other realms experience. It is stubbornly fixed and the 'five golden rings' give us five golden globes of existence we have worked our way through. Our contemplation before retiring on this night is to be equipped to experience that which is before us as it is - the reality we have to work with now. By identifying this reality we become mature and strong enough to therefore enhance it further during the following periods.

•  On the sixth night we review our past accomplishments

The number six is the one number which is before that of seven, which is the number of a set fulfilled (and therefore ended). It is this time and this period that we can look to what are the merits of our own lives, what good we have invested and upheld, and cherish these talents and times. If we go to the heavens with thanksgiving they are cued into knowing then what it is we would like more of to come. It is imperative that we find the time to have gratitude for that which we love and appreciate within our past lives and to sustain it into our futures by that very thanksgiving.

On this night we can summarize as best we can before sleep, all that which we have felt as divine kindness working with us, through us or to us in our experience. Our six geese a'laying give us golden eggs to begin the next set! They are heavenly creatures of fertile work.

• On the seventh night we watch the past set forth from us

This, as was said before, is the period of a completion, of a closure, for which we will bring the former nights and days into the experience and then draw to an end. The swans (in this swansong) will set off as this perfect set, and into this compilation now fulfilled we have experienced what has passed up until now in the experience of our Father, and then by the power of the Two, and then through the motivation, and then to ask for more space within, and then to realize it for what it was, and then to give thanks for the goodness there - to come to now. On this night we say goodbye to these beloved swans as they swim away. Our contemplation is just to watch them go and set our eyes upon a differing horizon.

•  On the eighth night the bounty is plentiful

Here lives the truth that as the udder empties it infills again! We have begun on the first impulse of the new set - and our meditation to take with us on this evening is of believing and experiencing the sustaining power of all that is Divine. We have given up what we have had of ourselves in setting the completed past to the past, and are given the faith now that new life will come to us. Here is the beginning of that new life with fresh nourishment abounding. 

•  On the ninth night we come to find cohesion

New patterns will emerge, new laws, new formations of character and future. This 'dance' of the nine is ongoing and within its own terms quite magically repetitive. We can rest on a form (albeit a new form) of substantiality now becoming apparent to us. This of course has taken over from the old. This is part of the set to which we now work with, rather than repeating the old laws and dance, formerly experienced.

On this night we can pray and be mindful of our own inner monarchy and for what we might choose within that monarchy as tenant and denizen. We set the rhythm and the pattern of the workings of our own lives, this is the very period of intuiting what it is we require here - to go faster or slower? More particular or not? As much as we are given the power to set patterns, to work on this dance, we are also on this night given a review to the past dances of our behavior spiritually and mentally that were incorporated and used in our past just gone.

•  On the tenth night we identify with Our Father

This is a night of our being little gods and comprehensively experiencing the wholeness of our own domain. We have come through the ninth period to find that the working whole is doing well and we have mastery with our imagination, with our concepts, with our being, with our egos, over its entirety.

On this night we also can identify with those other men and women who have come to the same, and are lords of their own province, whose development has brought them now 'leaping' through to this stage.

• On the eleventh night we come to exhibit great creation!

This night is the very cry and movement of the sympathetic divinities working through us. Now, after having been prepared, we can give out into the world fine and wonderful creations. The spiritual worlds can sing through us by whatever means we have chosen.

On this night our meditation to take with us into the pastures of deep sleep, is of ourselves bringing back into the world such heavenly inspirations that would manifest through our being and give meaning to that which meets with us and who we truly are.

• On the twelfth night we set it down and make it real

The percussive movement of the drum, by its repetitiveness and its sound, brings the intended spiritual into the physical and makes it real. On the previous night we gathered our gifts and gave them out in the form of song. This is not exactly a permeation of the physical when compared to the drum. It is no less important either. In point of fact it is a little alike to someone praying for someone who is ill (and this we could call piping the spiritual inspiration) or administering an exact remedy or food (and this would be drumming for example).

If we deliver a wonderful inspiration or truth, if we share a thought or intuitively are guided to act, this would be spiritually playing the pipes. On the other hand if we bring something into actuality by example proving a spiritual worth, being dynamic to a visible reality that is further now within the world at large, then we have drummed, so to speak, and made it real.

On this night there is a certain intent required to accompany this power of this drumming. We require the preparation of the nights before to help guide and clarify what it is that we would choose to find so important that we would have it made real through us, to incarnate through us.

These are the twelve nights of The Incarnation.

May your gifts be generous! Happy Xmas to all! HO HO HO!

P.S. The imagery of the chimney here is also quite good, as the fires are not traveling up during this time - the gifts are coming through and down from above. One must not light the fires in the very place you expect Santa to enter through! This is surely good advice!