One Christmas Story

Once upon a time, there was a world and every child was recognized as a Child of God.  Each child grew up knowing she or he was daughter or son of the Divine.  In this world, there was no religion, no political party, no tribe, no warfare. It was world free of ignorance and aggression, a world that knew all beings, all life, all in the great cosmic embrace was and always has been and will ever be, Basic Goodness.  It was not a mystery.  It was a given.  It was the World of Love.

The children came into the world and a star was always lit in the sky for each and every one of their births.  It was always Christmas, every day in all the people’s hearts in this world.

Families were made up of caring people, sometimes a man and a wife, sometimes a wife and a wife, sometimes a husband and a husband.  Some families had just a mom or just a dad.  Children wore the faces of all the lands.  Faces were all different shades and blends of colors ranging from off-white to very dark brown.  All the eyes of the children were stunningly beautiful.  Almond, round, oval, crescent-shaped.  Each child knew in their hearts that they mattered and they all had a reason for being in this world which would become clearer as they grew up and engaged in their sweet and wonderful world.

All children played from the time they could walk.  Schooling was a community activity, with all adults finding time and instinct for teaching the children something that resonated in their own good hearts.  There was a place for the artists, musicians, carpenters, scientists, mathematicians, chefs, filmmakers, writers, builders, toymakers, doctors, nurses, for all the disciplines to impact their world.  Everyone invested in society.

When each child was born, a great celebration was made, and those closest to the child along with the elders in that family and community entered the silence to receive a name for that child, that reflected that child’s sacred place in the web of life.  The deep and abiding silence would offer a name befitting that child’s innate set of gifts for the world.

This is the way our very world began.  See we live in the World of Love.  The earth was created through an infinite number of interactions and purposeful intentions of a supremely compassionate cosmos whose only wish was happiness and goodness for the soul, divided now into so many so-called individual spirit bodies.  Today, the illusion of separation has become apparent to so many human beings on earth that its power to divide us is greatly diminished.  This is good.  It is time.

The fog that has separated humans from each other, from sentient beings everywhere is burning away as the Great Eastern Sun lights brightly our minds, the one mind of love that binds us, all of us. 

Still, we have preferences and make choices based on these preferences.  Our preferences derive from what we choose to accept and what we choose to reject.  The World of Love is also a planet of choice; we get to be here and make many choices, what to eat, who to love and marry, to have children or not, where to live, which work we will engage in, whether to create, contemplate, or withdraw into our cocoon of the closed mind of habit.  Choices are founded on one of two energies, the creative energy of love or the destructive energy of fear.

Love knows that all beings wish is for happiness and to be free from suffering.  Love knows that the natural cycle of life will bring suffering via a perceived separation when someone gets sick and dies.  In the world based on love, the beings know that loved ones will die and yet they never are trapped in a state of doubtlessness or confusion of whether they will be united with their loved ones again.  They realize that just because their loved one is no longer in a physical form, they still are with them energetically.  It is not mystical, it is truth.

However, when fear creeps in, it creates confusion in people’s minds.  People begin to doubt themselves, their realities, their purposes, their basic goodness.  They begin to operate from a place of uncertainty and became ignorant of their own innate place in the world, in the web of being in the universe.  Ignorance is a fog of uncertainty.  In ignorance, we play out our illusions, we may become aggressive and overly passionate.  We may withdraw and lose touch with our own minds and hearts and one another.  We begin to feel pain and suffering more than necessary.  We begin to wallow in this lack of clarity.  We begin to hurt ourselves and each other.  In our ignorance, we feel there is a “me” to protect.  We create divisions and boundaries; we make claims on our world, and began to label black and white, good and bad, mine and yours. 

The children born to a world of fear and confusion come into the world in cold and sterile way, no longer cradled by the community.  They are immediately separated from their moms, their dads, their family, the warmth of their community.  They are sent to schools and separated from the container that had once encouraged their stepping into their place in the mandala of life.  In their ignorance they become jealous and protective of their turf. Aggression is experienced and people use forceful means to stake out their territory.

Yet, the abiding light and warmth of the Great Eastern Sun shines despite a distorted mentality that preferrs to close off to the world, to the heart of the world and glorious awakened feeling of the Sun in the vast sky above.

Still, a feeling of connection resides in the hearts of the children on earth despite an illusion of separation.  On one fateful day, a very confused mind who had spent his time blasting imaginary beings with electronically constructed guns, which are a product of the fearful and ignorant mind, decided to take his jumbled mind and wreak destruction in the real world, on real humans, in our World of Love.

In his total hopelessness, he killed his own mom, an utterly unimaginable act in the World of Love.  He then sunk lower into the depths of barbarism and confusion and took the lives of twenty-six more innocent lives, young ones with so much future ahead and their teachers and guardians in a rampage of unspeakable and utter disconnection.  He was killing himself over and over and then he cowardly ended his own life. 

At this moment in the story it is time to feel.  Breathe and feel.  Be with what is at the moment in your heart. 

Is there perhaps a way to reflect the love in our hearts and remember the spirit of goodness of these children, of their teachers?  To place the fear we feel into the arms of love?

The World of Love, in the One Christmas Story, is here as a bright, warm, tender, guiding light for a world of fear.  We have a choice.  The One Christmas Story is a choice.  Jesus, a warm innocent swaddled babe of basic goodness held in the tender embrace of his mom and dad and the creatures in the vessel of the loving stable where we was birthed, offers to us, sometimes confused ourselves, definitely and desperately saddened and crushed by one human’s actions of madness, with the moms and dads and families and the community of Newtown’s heart of suffering, a choice.  The choice is either the World of Love or a world of fear and ignorance and confusion.

In the World of Love, we hold the families of all the loved ones who perished on that fateful December morn.  We love you.  We will protect you.  We will be here for you.  We vow to bring the World of Love more fully into being.  We will awaken to what is real. 

We all vow to look into the mirror and see a child of love and honor that being of basic goodness.  We acknowledge our own basic decency and think and act in a way each and every day to honor the goodness that joins us all in a worldly embrace.  We will each sit quietly and remember in silence each day to feel the goodness and the joy that comes from our unity and extend compassion to our fellow human beings.  We will be a beacon of basic goodness so no child of the world of love ever feels such desperation in a heart that has turned off and wishes only to harm and kill. 

May these confused minds awaken, may the suffering that was created turn to love, may the fog of ignorance remember that we are all Children of God, and of Love, and of Basic Goodness.

May we all notice and pay attention and see each other in our world.