Holy Child.

You forget the profane conditions and the habituations and the narrowings of ordinary life. The low but solid standards of ordinary self and society are transcended and one enters for a while into a much larger universe, a larger, truer ecology of being.

In the taking and the telling of the story, you leave behind your usual time and are symbolically and psychologically projected into Great Time, into a paradoxical moment that cannot be measured because it has no duration. A breach in time occurs and a breach in the surrounding world. The inner psyche opens up and a passage to who and what you really are is revealed.

The Christian story of the birth of the Holy Child is an extraordinarily powerful rite of passage. Its power in part is in the death of the old sun, the old time, the old way of being, and the birth of a new sun, a new time, a new way of being.

It tells of the coming of a wondrous child out of the darkness of the age and the womb and his entry into an illuminated life of Great Time. Once this occurs, the world turns a corner. Everything is changed, different, re-sourced. In participating in the story of the Holy Child, you may even feel born within yourself options, possibilities, opportunities, both remarkable and renewing. Thus the enormous power of this story, for what can be more powerful and more evocative than the child? Here is a potency deeper than all our fears, more basic than all our everyday conditionings. It’s stronger than our ego constructs, a flowing cornucopia of that which never was but is always happening.

This story wells up from the depth sources in Reality itself, and perhaps more than any therapy, can cut through the cul-de-sacs of ordinary life. Next to this, the demeanings of December – the alcoholic jollies, the incongruous street Santas, the rankest commercial hype – become but the Satyricon of the season, schlock revels to be observed – and enjoyed – but not minded.