Christmas Eve, and the sun is descending behind a bank of cloud over the Fens. The village shops are about to close. A few cars chase along the B roads, hoping to get home before dark; lights are coming on in all the farmhouses and cottages dotting the brown, ploughed fields.
Christmas Eve, and once again the world awaits a miraculous birth.
Christmas Eve, and the King's College Choir is getting ready to begin the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols that has been part of the English Christmas for decades.
For me, the sounds of the first carol, invariably "Once In Royals David's City", mingled with the scent of baking mince pies, heralds the real start of Christmas.
And for the last 25 years, the time I've been sober, Christmas has been a very happy, joyful, family festival, every moment of which I can recall with perfect clarity on Boxing Day morning!
Each Christmas in the Work brings with it the hope of a new birth for us, personally, as well as for the wide world and for everyone else on the Fourth Way. That new birth will, we all devoutly wish, bring new growth in Essence, new possibilities for the following year, that more and more we will live according to our deepest nature, our Real I, that particle of Conscious Humanity that longs to direct our lives according to the Will of the Absolute.
As we who are in recovery as well as in the Work know so well, it's all too simple to let the wish to Work become submerged in everyday worries and concerns.
Now, at this blessed, sacred festival of the Holy Birth, let us all draw sustenance from the memory of past Christmases in the Work, past Christmases in sobriety. Let us withdraw a while from the busy, fussy Personality I's, in ourselves and in others, and remember why we are really here on Earth, this planet that is very far down in the Ray of Creation.
We are here to transform, and to be transformed. To ascend the ladder that connects our earthly selves with the heavenly realm, to become a cell in the body of Conscious Humanity.
The Northern Hemisphere of this little planet now tilts towards the furthest reaches of outer space, beyond the edge of our galaxy, and brings us the chance to receive the highest levels of spiritual energy from those unimaginably far away stars.
Let us receive them in our Essence, and let Essence bring forth a new birth of understanding.
I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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