Christmas As a Universal Celebration of a Mystical Trailblazer

As a Christmas present to each of you, I offer this hour-long, utterly exhilarating and empowering conversation that Carolyn Baker and I had with Paul Levy. Paul is a genius and his books Quantum Revelation and Dispelling Wetiko are two of the most important contributions to humanity of the last thirty years. I hope you will take fire from the extraordinary perspectives his wisdom opens to all of us and use the joy he shares to deepen your own commitment to trust the divine field and its birthing power.

Everything that I’m about to say about Christmas is for everyone, whatever their religion or lack of it, because I describe it as a universal celebration (which I will unpack). Those of you who may have been wounded by your experience of Christianity are invited to step beyond your wounds to the real glorious meaning of what Christmas is and rediscover a Jesus that your heart may always have yearned for but failed to find in the patriarchal fantasies of the Boys Club.

Christmas is a universal celebration! It’s a wonderful, glowing, supremely happy celebration for all! I beg you all not to approach this Christmas in anything like a conventional way, but to embrace it as a marvelous opportunity to celebrate the return of the light and to invoke the birth of your own embodied, divine human child, the next level of our human evolutionary destiny.

For thirty years now I have celebrated Christmas in two related ways.

The first is as the birth of Jesus my heart’s beloved, the most sublime rebel of love and the pioneer of the great birth of an embodied divine humanity that is now struggling to flame out in our boiling chaos. For me Jesus is not a unique son of God and not the founder of a religion but a mystical trailblazer of astounding courage and universal importance.

What Jesus came to give us was not a religion—certainly not one focused on adoration of him—but a path to becoming as he was, one with the divine in heart, mind, soul and body. This vision of him makes him important for every human being and it’s been one of the great joys of my life to have had wonderful discussions about Jesus with Hindu sages, the Dalai Lama, Sufi sheikhs and Kabbalists, all of whom recognize him as a being of unique splendor and overwhelming creative and active love.

So on Christmas I thank Jesus for all that he offered the whole of humanity and still offers and for the amazing sign of the resurrection that for me seeds the possibility in all human beings of birthing a new body, matter irradiated by light.

The second way I celebrate Christmas is by plunging deeply into the message of the greatest Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius, both of whom proclaimed that the real path of Jesus meant the birth of the living Christ consciousness in each of us, the birth of our matchless, empowered, radiant, humble divine child.

Lived in this way, I have found that Christmas is a time to recommit myself to the birth of the divine in all of me and I spend deep time throughout the day honoring what progress I have made in the birth, thanks to the grace of the divine and offering up the shadows and resistances to the birth that remain in me.

I have found that celebrating Christmas in these two ways galvanizes my hope and renews my life commitment to sacred activism and revitalizes the vision that I have celebrated in my recent work of the transfiguration process that mutates the human into the divine human. These twin celebrations for me take place beyond religion and are not stained by the multiple betrayals by the different churches of Jesus’s universal radical vision and life.

I dream of a world in which all human beings can find the Jesus that I have found, beloved Brother, beloved Beloved, supreme Teacher, supreme Friend, constant Inner Companion on the journey to my own Christ-ing.

I would be honored if these two celebrations became part of your reveling in the mystical mystery for all humanity—the celebration of Jesus’s birth. It is especially important that at the end of this frankly dreadful, exhausting year that we remember our true destiny as revealed by its greatest pioneer, our destiny to be born on earth in time in a body in our full human divinity.

I have found that such passionate remembrance fuels me for all the ordeals and savage zigzags and depressions of any real path. God knows this year we have all been flayed alive by pain and chaos. Christmas offers us all a profound moment to remember that we always have in Jesus and the other great prophets of humanity companions that wish us supremely well, whose mystical grace is pouring out towards us if only we can open enough to receive it.

For me Jesus is also the supreme sacred activist. He was not simply enlightened; he enacted his enlightenment in a way that fearlessly spoke truth to power and risked his comfort and security on every level, finally bringing him to the agony of the cross and the miracle of the resurrection that emerged from it.

We all know that the structures of our culture are rotten. We all know that the elites are drunk on conscienceless power. We all know that the very existence of humanity is now menaced by economic chaos and climate collapse.

We also all know that the only way through is an inspired revolution of divine love and wisdom in action on a global scale by people who are as brave as Jesus was and as committed to giving and risking everything for the birth of a new humanity.

So on Christmas ask yourself these two questions:

Do I love humanity enough?

Am I really doing enough to respond to the horrifying conditions that billions live in—to the genocide of the animals, to the wanton destruction of nature, to the death of honor and truth in our public and private lives?

If you are really honest, your answer to both questions will be no. And if you are truly passionate about the future, you will turn to grace and beg grace to fill you with Jesus’s burning compassion and Jesus’s astounding courage, so that you can rise up out of the chains of doubt and addiction to comfort and narcissism and terror at being excluded to serve humanity in its darkest trial.

Let me end by saying that it is essential to enjoy Christmas too as a time of gathering together—even on Zoom—as a time of reaching out to friends you love, as a time of relishing food and drink with those in your immediate family.

Be aware as you enjoy this most festive feasts of everything that the divine continues to give you, of all the ways divine wisdom has led you this year, of all the ways, too, that you have begun to rise to the challenge of restoring democracy with joy and compassion for all.

May your Christmas be a mystical and earthly feast of great renewing splendor.

All my love,

Andrew