Christ and the Spirit of Christmas
by Paul Hourihan

Although Christ is the topic, Subjectivity is our theme—how we are always coming back to ourselves in all our actions, dreams, reveries, lifetimes. At Christmas we contemplate Christ and end up by contemplating ourselves.

Thou Art That. This aphorism represents the core of the Vedanta philosophy: Thou art the Being in all beings, the Soul in all souls. Every heart beating is your own heart… therefore Love your neighbor as yourself. The same Divine encloses both of you. The heart of God is yours. The heart of Christ is yours, and not in a figurative sense, but in an actual sense. He belongs to us. He is us.

His life is the life of the Soul incarnate. It is the Soul’s drama being enacted in the story of his life. His life is the soul's journey to self-realization, self-conquest, and world-conquest. It is the career of the soul unfolding its natural sovereignty over nature, over men, over time, over all things. He is the Way-Shower.

Christmas is the mystical event. It's the birth of more than a man: a Divine Principle embodied in the birth of Jesus Christ; born into matter, into darkness—that is, into this life and hence, not wanted here, forced to be born furtively and then compelled to flee for its life.

In Christ we see the highest image of what we actually are. He has been called the Savior, but each of us, as well, may be one—prophets, all—on a smaller scale than his, but in principle with no essential difference. He only does on a vast scale what we as spiritual seekers are doing on the stage of our individual lives, burdened as we are with so many conflicts, trials, sufferings, and miseries.

With little difficulty we can relate to the events of Christ's life by exercising the intuitive power of empathy, which the soul projects effortlessly upon all manifestations that mirror back to it some secret of its own nature.

In many of Christ's famous utterances we recognize the voice of the Soul—our soul, as well as his— speaking. “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life... I am the Resurrection and the Life.” In these and in similar statements it is the Soul speaking. After his resurrection Mary Magdalene exclaimed, “He is risen!” That is to say, the Soul is risen out of the death of the body, and death of the body consciousness. Hence, the “glad tidings of great joy” are that the soul is immortal, that the fetters of mortality are broken once and for all. It is not the body that ascends; it is the soul. The physical body is not resurrected; rather, the body is the tomb out of which the soul is resurrected. 

Christ appearing first to Mary Magdalene is appropriate, for woman in particular symbolizes the soul in human life, and to her, man must pay homage because of her divine function and nature.

Christ's full perfection, we realize, will come only on the cross. We see in him the same conflicts and hesitations we all have known and in his final victory over all doubt and weakness, we have the assurance that we, too, one day may experience a similar conquest. We, too, one day may be able to say, after our own great struggles and after many a Gethsemane, “It is finished” —the end of the long journey we have taken from outer darkness to the inward illumination of our souls. As he succeeded, we can to, and must.

The hero that was in Christ is in us, the God that was in him is in us to, and it is the same God. His greatness is innate in us as well. We must accustom ourselves to thinking like heroes, to being heroes. The idealistic life, the mystical path, is for heroes and heroes only. Know ye not that ye are Gods, children of the most high.

If we are patient, strong, persevering and keep returning to the battle, eventually we shall break through into the same freedom that Christ experienced.

But what of the commercialization of Christmas? It advances the theme of Christmas for those who have lost or haven’t found the spiritual life directly. By the element of the commercial, people who are ordinarily immune to the Christmas spirit are caught up in it by buying gifts for others, spending money on others, as they never would ordinarily! And so they feel the results of this good behavior in the strange karma that affects and uplifts and briefly transforms everyone at Christmas. In a sense we may see the commercialization as a cosmic necessity, mandated by the Lord as perhaps the only way for those individuals who have no belief or faith to be reminded, indirectly at least, of Christ's life and meaning.
 

Suggested Readings:
Ramakrishna and Christ, The Supermystics by Paul Hourihan, Vedantic Shores Press, 2002
Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta by Swami Prabhavananda, Vedanta Press, Reprint 1991.

See also What is Vedanta? and Words of Wisdom: Mysticism
 

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