Article December 17, 1921 Issue

Christmas Eternally

ELSIE FARR

Christmas, rightly understood in its spiritual signification, is the demonstration of the vitality and power of the Christ, the divine idea. This Christ-idea, exemplified in the man Jesus, destroyed the darkness of mortal ignorance with the light of Truth, rebuked selfishness and sensuality, healed sickness and sin, made manifest Love in place of hate, and overcame death with the understanding and demonstration of what Life eternally is. Christendom in a halting way has tried to celebrate the advent of the Christ by setting aside one day of each year, which it designates as Christmas Day, as a holy day or holiday, and this day is rightly conceived of as a day of infinite rejoicing. But the human concept of rejoicing only counterfeits that enduring joy which comes from the conscious realization of the eternal substance of Spirit.

Mortals have always sought joy in the empty husks of materiality, only to find that this so-called joy was as transient and untrue as finity itself. Permanent joy is joy in the allness of Mind, rather than pleasure in the flesh,—not the indulgence of fleshly desires, but the complete subjection of matter to Mind. The peculiar thing is that whereas the Christ reveals man in God's own likeness, the destruction of materiality, and the supremacy of Spirit, Christmas Day has come to mean to large multitudes not so much a day of conscious realization of man's oneness with Spirit, as a day on which the passion for seeking pleasure in matter might be given free rein. It was the realization of the allness of Spirit and the utter nothingness of Spirit's unlikeness, matter, that enabled Jesus to demonstrate the living Christ in the destruction of sin, sickness, and death; and yet how often do mortals, with that persistent attempt to perpetuate the belief in the reality of matter, try to celebrate Christmas by seeking pleasure not in Spirit but in the flesh,—by acting, in other words, as though that were real which the Christ dispels, the suppositional opposite of Spirit.

So Christians may well pause to ask themselves what it is that they really commemorate in Christmas. Is it not the coming of the Christ to human thought, destroying all sense of materiality, the dawn of the saving truth to waiting hearts? In Luke's gospel the entire narrative of that first Christmastide in Nazareth is illumined by what Christian Science reveals of the allness of Mind. The "good tidings of great joy," the knowledge of the saving Christ, reached the watchful shepherds through that perfect spiritual intuition which in picturesque Bible language is named "the angel of the Lord." Thus the shepherds were guided to where the young child lay. And while the multitude wondered at the things that the shepherds told them, "Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." Quenching the human eagerness to proclaim aloud the new-found truth to impatient multitudes, it is well to withdraw from the belief of contending human emotions to the quiet sanctuary of Spirit, with renewed consecration to cherish the spiritual idea through the demonstration of the truth revealed. This is the only way to nurture the universal recognition of the Christ.

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