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Merry Christmas

 


Christmas  Love 2020


Love. We're all here, at this perceived threshold of Eden, learning about love. 


Love’s Beginning: 

Initially we fall in love with a projected self-image of perfection and the projected self-image of perfection in the other. But that's not really love, that's Narcissus adoring his reflection on the lake's surface. Real love continually expands to include the messy, awkward, unpredictable, unresolved, lived experience of individuation within systems of disrupted belonging. 


Love’s Ripening:  

Our cultural preoccupation with the earliest stage of love is a kind of disconnection. It's visible in our branded self image on Instagram and how we are encouraged to shut down emotionally. It's visible in our schools and prison systems, in our corporate capitalism and politics, in how we treat those in need and how we deify beauty and youth. And unfortunately this superficiality of love can be most visible during the holiday season, where, not surprisingly, gifts wrapped in commercial trappings form the bulk of our holiday cheer. But here, during the darkest time of the year, the miracle of light and the symbolic birth of Christ is celebrated and all too often people/we offer gifts to everyone except the Christ. (Here I am not talking about Christ as a person but Christ as the light of life living consciously.) 


A gift offered to Christ is a hand extended in welcome, kindness in action, compassion, a spacious loving embrace that keeps on expanding its radiance beyond appearances.  Love forces us to grow.


That's love in maturation.


Love’s Fruit:

As humans we have an opportunity to develop through the stages of love. Real maturity is not a byproduct of physical growth but courageous unfolding. We, as a people, are a bit stunted in our development, still grasping for a picture perfect kind of love, dysfunctional and superficial, limited and limiting. 


But the holiday season offers a captivating image of a light birthed in a manger of forgetfulness, bright enough to inspire the world to love. I am heartened by the Christ metaphor across the seasons.  It reminds me that growing and maturing will require each of us to give birth to the Christ (the light of life loving/living consciously) knowing that love may travel from manger to cross to cave to light and back again. I believe it’s our calling to mature in love, to flex our capacity to see the light within ourselves, others, trees, Trump and the whole grand kerfuffle.  


In so doing we offer our gift of love, adoration and welcome to LIFE as life. 


Christmas:

So yes we exchange gifts, but if we look and feel just beneath the surface, we are likely to see a great deal of LOVE. Why? Because giving is the fracture through which the light shines through. Open the cupboard and share what you have. Whether it results in a Maccabean miracle of light, wise men traveling atop camels bearing frankincense and myrrh, a stranger's smile, a handmade gift from a loved one or a baby swaddled in a manger.  Just give.


Everything is whispering, "I see your beauty. It is fearsome to be a human and to love through this messy, vulnerable, mysterious experience of life. You are not alone. I am with you and I will be with you unto the end, hand-in-hand we mature as love."


Merry Christmas to you, to all that is messy and unresolved, unknown and vulnerable.  May your season by bright.



All Love,

Angelina

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