Unto Us is Born a Child
Christmas 2024
There was a grail in the castle that could heal the King,
but the king had no access to the grail.
For the king to be healed, an innocent would have to come, enter the court, be present in the court of the king.
It may be part of the story then, that the capacity for our healing is possible only in the presence of our child, that is, our innocence.
As much as the child knows how to heal the wound, it seems as well, it is only the child who can see the wound, knows that we are wounded. The Masculine in us lacks the capacity to judge what would heal; even know we need healing. The Feminine -as represented by the grail carried by the grail-maiden, or whatever it is that would make us whole and heal us – requires an innocent to come, to be present to our conscious self, mediate to us our healing.
Jean Shinoda Bolen. Myths, Dreams, and the Journey to Wholeness. WorldSpirit radio, heard on CIUT & CKWR FM
***
And you will find a newborn, in a barn, wrapped in cloths, lying in a feed trough.
The Christmas story, Christian New Testament, Luke 2:12
***
My happiest Christmas moment came in an hour on the 27th of December, at the end of the day. We had come through Christmas as usual. In the past, I would have returned home the day after Christmas, but this year I felt I should stay another day. My sister stayed as well. She left on the 1:30 commuter train. I planned to catch the 4:30, but then decided to wait an hour. In that hour I sat on the couch. The sun was coming through the lower half of the windows, illuminating the furnishings with a rich, warm glow. My mother joined me on the sofa with an eggnog. She began to talk through details in preparation for her trip the next week to visit her brother in Florida. She recounted her itinerary before the trip she’d had in a previous year.
She remembered how she and my sister had packed their things and then took me out to dinner for my birthday. She said, “We even had Dad settled in Walwell” (a retirement home where he stayed while they were away). She surprised herself mentioning his name. It choked her up for a moment. I watched her gaze fix onto her cherished willow-pattern bowls on top of the china cabinet. In a moment of flight, fending off tears, she had reached out to her treasured heirlooms. She held on to them as thoughts of her husband overcame her.
The bowls had been in her family for generations. They had been held and admired for the whole lifetimes of many virtuous women. The bowls had survived them all: her great-grandmother, her grandmother, her favourite aunts, her own mother; memory of her family, the strong women, survives in the bowls’ blue glaze. In the cool light of a late winter afternoon, she realizes, maybe for the first time, that her husband is now a memory, too.
My mother, who had taught me little in her life, said little to me of life, nor gave much thought to my life, in that few minutes taught me all I needed to know. I saw a woman who loved a man. I saw her heart open for a moment. I saw through her looking-glass. I saw a love that meant more than anything else to her. Her long hours and long years caring for him: his cruel words; the suffering he caused; all amounted to nothing, absolutely nothing in the felt presence of her love for him. I do not understand love.
The whole world looks different to me after witnessing my mother’s open heart. Everything takes on a new light, a new dimension, a new perspective. Love is a bright light, a sharp-edged sword. Everything in me is diminished by the sweep of this terrible swift sword. The whole world is upside down.
Beholding love brought me to my knees.
It seems to me such love is sacrificial. I reflect that I have not the courage or strength to love my father that way. I would see my mother’s love as a mark of sainthood. But I am wrong. Love is not a sacrifice. Love is love. There is no greater gift than to be in love.
She wore a black dress. She was sitting on a chair, one of the chairs in a circle of thirty chairs in the room. She had been the first person to arrive. I was the second. I sat on a chair opposite her on the circle. It was the first day of a summer semester course. We said hello. Weeks later for us, nothing could be said… but good-bye.
The innocence that is you, born by the maiden, heals the wound.
I saw her by the front door, facing the coat rack. She had on her blue, wool coat. She was adjusting the red felt hat which she had made herself, wafts of her fine blond hair, now white, protruding from under the hat. Love is like none other. She looked so beautiful to me. Never more beautiful. I turned away, and looked back. She wasn’t there.
As exuberant as love can be, it can ask a lot of one. It can leave one crushed and cursed, gashed and bleeding by the roadside, yet to have felt love and been broken by love is far better than never to have known of love. It would have been far worse to go through life believing that anything else could be of more virtue than the sharp, knife-edge of love.
It is far better, I have come to learn, to witness the truth and be diminished by it, than never to have known the truth.
***
An innocent must come to the court of the King.
***
I have witnessed people in hospital, on their death beds. Stood with family around the bed of one now dead. On the tables, near their beds, I would see photos and cards of loved ones. I have to say, I have never seen certificates of accomplishment, markers of success, accounts of possessions.
In a place of one’s last breath, when life is done and gone, one sees what the innocent sees: sees what would heal the wound.
***
Philip Shepherd (adapted):
The innocent is self-knowledge, but self-knowledge is easily confused with knowledge of self, an objective knowing rather than an experience.
Reflecting on ‘who we are’, we might mention our values, our political leanings, our place of birth, our religious upbringing or lack of it, our ethics, our ancestry, our hobbies and a host of other associated facts, a bit like reciting a grocery list. It aggregates knowledge of self around identity, an objective knowledge that is self, thinking that sufficient, missing out on self-knowledge which is a surrendering to being, being our own self.
‘Knowing’ in terms of an objective list of qualities does provide a map for orienting oneself to the world, and predicting it, and perhaps even exerting control over it. The energy one devotes to mapping out ‘who you know yourself to be and want to be’ – objective knowledge – constitutes a means by which one can hold onto the day to day.
The mistake is where making a map for life replaces being present oneself to life lived.
You can know your values, your relationships, your affiliations; you can know your history, chronological and psychological; you can know your opinions, your goals and the people around you who affirm you. By this, you establish the structure of ‘who you know yourself to be and want to be’ and are secure within that, defend it to the end, like a King defends an empire. It turns out, one is so defended one cannot be present to what matters, finds oneself unable to surrender to life, to the innocence that is life, fragile, tender, soft.
Interestingly, all the traits associated with objective knowledge -acquisition, possession, accumulation, grasping and control – are preoccupations of the mythic tyrant. The King. The tyrant uses objective knowledge to empower himself, not others.
The tyrant’s attention is self-focussed. His refrain is in one form or the other ‘Me, me, me.’ Seeking assurance and control, the tyrant retreats from the subtle currents of the mindful world, loses sight of the world calling out, a world found in noticing the sunlight, feeling in a held moment the warmth of a breeze on one’s skin, delighting in the wet of the rain, the call of a loon; to be present and hear the cry of life: come live life; live, let your spirit live in you.
Instead, the tyrant traps his anxious questions in a frenzy of self-focused, self-conscious musings: ‘How am I doing? What is happening around me? How can I capitalize on it to secure my status or improve my personal advantage? How can I avoid failure?’
In contrast, attention to self-knowledge brings to one a felt experience of kinship with the world. This self-knowledge is achieved in surrender to the world without self-consciousness, and is the defining characteristic of the mythic hero. There can be no hero’s journey for those deaf to the world calling out to them. An innocent must be present.
Despite his relentless focus on himself, the wound of the tyrant is, ironically, lack of self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge is the innocent – quiet, still- listening for what the world in its wisdom might reveal. Trusting the unknown. Surrendering to the inscrutable. I am not in control. I am not the wise one. Wisdom is held in the bosom of innocence.
It is the innocent that knows the wound. The innocent that heals the wound. Not I, myself. No, not I.
Adapted, Philip Shepherd. Radical Wholeness:
The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being.
***
Here am I, broken, wounded, lying inside the outer gate of the great ramparts, in darkness and damp; wars and rumours of bloody chaotic wars; putrid smells of decay and dying; mass killings; nature ravaged. Here am I, shivering on a cold, greasy stone slab inside the temple wall. I realize how better, how much better that I lie here, weak, as a child, broken, wounded by love, opened up by love, having been given to see that love is love, and no other. It is what it is.
I recognized I am inside the gate of the outer courtyard of the great temple called The Meaning of Life. Through many portals and courtyards, one after the other, disappearing into the great distance, I have a glimpse of what is. As if from my deathbed I now see. There appears to be a magnificent inner sanctum. I imagine a sanctum of pure cut diamond walls. Billowing from the walls tapestries of pure silk. The inner chamber would be wild with the swirling of millions of seraphim, those wild, ferocious, sword-wielding divines, breathing fire, flying about the great throne, protecting the true one sitting on the throne. Light emanating from the throne would be blinding. Within would be heard a mad, thunderous uproar, cacophonous screaming and shrieking, ceaseless shouting of joy, endless cries of ecstatic delight. The inner sanctum, the holy grail.
How better for me here than outside of the wall, confident, all-knowing, full of myself, bathed in the glow of being the centre of all things, seeking all attention for myself, pursuing my goal to make it big, have everything for myself, every indulgence, the applause and admiration of others. As if I might command the earth and be its judge. The King. As if it is I who makes the sea roar and the winds wail. Me. How better that I know different. As if from my death bed, to see how life is, not just simply how it appears. The innocent, the truth, to see what it means to live life. The innocent, to heal the wound.
And the child came to reveal a truth:
‘It’s not about you,’ says the innocent,
(the one come to heal the wound)
‘not about what you have, who you think you are, your great ambitions.
Surrender to love,’ says the innocent. ‘Look to the other. Attend yourself to the world.’
***
Follow your heart’s desire, so long as you live.
Put myrrh on your head, clothe yourself in fine linens, and anoint yourself with the marvels of life.
Increase yet more the delights of your heart, and let not your heart grow faint. Follow your inner desire and do good to others and yourself.
Do what you must upon the earth and vex not your heart; continue until that day of lamentations comes to you: for He with the Quiet Heart, Great Osiris, hears not lamentations; cries deliver no one from the underworld.
Spend the day happily and weary not thereof!
Lo, none can take one’s goods with one.
Lo, none that has departed can come again.
Userhet, royal scribe to Amonhotep II