Every Christmas season, the Christian Church celebrates the mystery of God’s incarnation. The primary focus of this incarnation is the historical birth of Jesus, the Christ, how it happened, what happened, who was there when it happened, and why it happened. For those of us who are Christian, this is a familiar story involving virgin Mary and Joseph, social stigmatism, a long pilgrimage to Bethlehem, overcrowded inns, a manger, lowly shepherds and foreign magi. But in recent years, I have come to realize that there are two births of Christ that we celebrate each Christmas season. The first birth is obvious: the birth of the historical baby Jesus in Bethlehem who grew up to be Jesus the Christ. The second birth is more mysterious but just as important, maybe even more so for this birth of Christ happens within us. It is this birth of the mystical Christ that actually begins our spiritual transformation process within each one of us. Let me describe how this second birth of Christ happens. I first became aware of this second birth of Christ from some Christmas carols that are sung each year in Church. Many of these Christmas carols help us remember the events around the birth of Jesus and what Jesus meant for human history. But a few of these carols point to an experience of the Christ beyond that history, an experience that we can experience now. For example, lets look at the popular song, "Joy to the World". Here are the words for the first verse. “Joy to the world, the Lord has come. Let earth receive her king, Let every heart prepare him room, and heav’n and nature sing.” What do we mean when we sing, “The Lord has come”. Did this coming happen 2000 years ago or can it happen now or do these words point to both meanings? What does it mean for every heart to prepare him room? Is this song talking about the hearts of people in Jesus’ time or is it talking about the hearts of people who now are singing this song? And who is this person people are to prepare room for in their hearts, the historical Jesus who walked on earth 2000 years ago or is there a “King” that people can experience in their hearts now? Many Christmas carols have this double meaning around the birth of Christ, both the historical Jesus who was born long time ago but also the experience of the mystical Christ being born and experienced now in our life. Two separate births: the historical birth of Jesus, the mystical birth of the Christ. Two separate births but very much connected. I am very suspicious that this double connection is why Advent and Christmas is so meaningful to many Christians. For those of us who identify as followers of Christ, this should not surprise us for Jesus, when he walked on earth, did teach about a second birth. Do you remember the conversation that Jesus had with Nicodemus, a religious teacher of his time? This conversation is recorded in the Gospel of John. There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a Jewish leader. He came to Jesus at night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these miraculous signs that you do unless God is with him." Jesus answered, "I assure you, unless someone is born anew, it's not possible to see God's kingdom." Nicodemus asked, "How is it possible for an adult to be born? It's impossible to enter the mother's womb for a second time and be born, isn't it?" Jesus answered, "I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it's not possible to enter God's kingdom. Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. Don't be surprised that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.' (John 3: 1-7) What did Jesus (or the gospel writer of John) mean when he said by this second birth that happens when we become born of water and the Spirit? To explain this second birth, let me provide a simple picture of the human soul that I have been playing with in my pastoral counselling training to help my students understand how spiritual transformation works. Here is a picture of a baby. The oval you see represents the baby’s soul. Psychology teaches us that a child in its first months of life lives in a merged state with mother, father, and every aspect of life. There is no sense of me and mother or me and dad or me and cat or me and teddy bear or me and bottle. The child experiences everything as one or part of itself. Throughout its childhood years, a child has many experiences within its holding environment. Many of these experiences are positive but many also are experienced as negative. Every child has two core needs: mirroring and validation. When a child is mirrored by their loved ones, their experiences are mirrored back to them, that is, reflected accurately back to them. Validation takes mirroring one step further. Not only do loved ones need to mirror back their child’s experiences, they also need to validate them by holding all of their child’s experiences in a non-judgemental way. When these core needs are met, a child often feels loved and valued and the spiritual qualities like love, strength, joy, truth, compassion, grace, resilience and others often develop in healthy ways. Furthermore, within a healthy holding environment, a child also develops not only a fairly accurate understanding of themselves but also a reasonably accurate picture of how the world, God, and others work or function. What I have just described is not a normal family environment for these core needs are rarely met perfectly, even though parents try. Due to imperfect parents and caregivers, and/or due to a child’s immature mind, children experience many moments of suffering and pain in their childhood. To cope with these moments of suffering, we develop coping strategies, relationship patterns, habits, filters and beliefs that shape how we see ourselves, how we experience others, the world, and God. All of these strategies, patterns, habits, filters, beliefs, unresolved memories and experiences become structures in our soul due to repetitive use and become part of what many spiritual directors call our egoic personality. By the time we enter our teen years, we have a well developed egoic personality. The other part of the soul that is important to understand is the “witnessing I” or the “inner observer”. This is the part of soul that allows us to be self aware, to be aware of all of our experiences. When our “witnessing I” is located outside our egoic personality in our spacious soul, we experience self awareness. If we allow this awareness of spaciousness to deepen, we become aware of the presence of God and whatever aspects of God’s spirit that are active in that moment. When we are present to someone suffering, we will experience God’s compassion arising in our soul in response to them. When we are present to a beautiful sunset, we will experience God’s spirit of beauty, awe, and joy. When we are in this place of deep awareness, we notice the different aspects of God’s spirit in our soul responding to our life experience. However, if our “witnessing I” becomes attached to a part of our egoic personality, we lose our self awareness by becoming lost in our experience…. whether it be lost in our thoughts, or lost in our emotions, or lost in our doing and busyness. or lost in our relationships, or lost in a movie. We become lost in whatever our witnessing I is attached to. When we are lost, we have little to no self awareness, certainly no deep self awareness and thus have little sense of the sacred or God’s presence. This lostness is a common experience. In fact, I would say that this is the normal human experience, what is ordinary human consciousness. The Bible uses many metaphors for this lostness like asleep, blindness, paralysis, sickness, leprosy (lost of feeling), oppression, deadness, trapped or dead to sin, or a slave to the Law. While many Jesus stories are interpreted in terms of physical healing in the Bible, they can also be interpreted metaphorically or spiritually. When you spend most, if not all your life, living from your egoic personality, how would this filter affect how you see yourself, others, the world, or God? You would experience everything in life through the fallen filters of your egoic personality which would re-enforce exactly what your egoic personality believes deeply to be true. Your fallen egoic personality would determine your self image, your identity, your sense of who you believe you are. You would say to yourself, “This is who I am.” You would conclude, “This is my personality. This is how God made me.” This, I have come to believe, is the fallen human condition that most people accept today as the normal human condition, the way humans are. This misconception is very common in our time. It was also true in Jesus’ time. Even Nicodemus, a religious leader, believed this common misconception. Nicodemus asked, “how is it possible for someone to born again? Jesus’ responded, "I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it's not possible to enter God's kingdom. Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh,” that is, whatever is arises from the fallen personality is fallen. And , “whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit.” I remember that September night in 1983 when I found myself praying to God asking for God to forgive me for my past mistakes. I was also asking God to prove to me that God was real. Then, I could very much relate to this experience of being lost at many different levels. My “witnessing I” was very much lost in my thoughts and experiences. I had lots of beliefs and theology about God, but they didn’t help me much any more. I wanted more…needed more. I wanted to experience the presence of God and see God’s spirit at work within my life. I wanted God to clean my slate and soul so that I could start my life over again. Something happened that night, nothing profound except I was very aware of my tears, a sign God’s compassion. I slept well that night. When I got up the next morning, I started looking for ways that God might have answered my prayer. To my surprise, I started seeing God-connections or God-incidents in many places in my life. I found myself experiencing my life differently, with more awareness that was deeper than before. I still found myself lost many times in my experience but now my “witnessing I” was no longer attached all the time to my egoic personality. No longer was God just a belief. I was now developing a relationship with a God that was experiential to me, personal. I had experienced a new birth, a spiritual birth this time, just as Jesus described. This has been my life journey ever since then, allowing the spiritual part of myself to develop. This meant eventually taking my spiritual development just as seriously as I looked after my physical health. Back then, I would not have seen this spiritual birth experience as the birth of the mystical Christ within me, like I do today. I saw it more like a Christian conversion that was often highlighted and seen as the core of the evangelical Christian tradition. It was not until I discovered the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology, 13 years ago that I begin to unpack that experience differently. Within the Diamond Approach, a core step in spiritual development is the emergence of what it calls Personal Essence. Most people begin their spiritual journey by experiencing God’s spirit or the qualities of Essence as outside themselves, transcendent to them. That is, they experience the aspects of God’s spirit as very separate to themselves, not within them but outside of them. But as one keeps developing spiritually, a shift occurs, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, many times a combination of both. As this shift happens, we start noticing that God’s spirit or these essential qualities are actually arising within our soul rather than outside us. Furthermore, we begin to notice that though the experience is arising within us, we notice that we are not the source of these essential qualities or fruits of God’s Spirit. (Apostle Paul listed the fruits of God’s Holy Spirit as love, peace, joy, kindness, caring, goodness, patience, faithfulness gentleness and self control (Galatians 5:22-23). The Diamond Approach highlights many others like compassion, strength, power, value, truth, etc.) While we cannot create these spiritual energies, we can nurture these experiences by joining or aligning ourselves with them, that is, allow them to manifest and grow within us. Or we can shut them down or repress them just like we often do with many of our negative emotional experience. When this shift fully occurs, we experience God not only as transcendent. We now notice that the Spirit of God lives within us, and is growing within us. This is the experinece of the indwelling or mystical Christ that Apostle Paul claims can live within people. The character traits of Christ and the spiritual fruits are two different ways of describing the same spiritual dynamic. Within the Diamond Approach, this shift is described as the emergence of the Personal Essence, an experience of Essence that we feel as personal and part of us. So when we have a spiritual rebirth experience, this rebirth involves the birth of the mystical Christ or the Personal Essence within our soul. All of the seeds of God’s Holy Spirit begin to sprout in our soul. We start to see signs of more compassion, strength, truth, joy, love, and grace naturally emerging in our lives. We begin to experience and develop the character traits of Christ within our personality. As we nurture these traits of Christ in our life, they naturally appear more and more often, not because we should act in this way, but because we allow the indwelling mystical Christ to live more often in us. This is what the Christmas carols are getting at when we sing “ Let every heart prepare him room” or “The Savior comes” or “Come, thou long expected Jesus! Born to reign in us forever.” These songs are referring to the birth of the mystical Christ in our soul. Realizing that I am actually celebrating two births at Christmas time, the birth of the historical Jesus 2000 years ago and the birth of the mystical Christ during my life time, I hear the Christmas carols and the Christmas story very differently now. Even the story of the angel visitation to Mary, I hear differently. Yes, I remember how the angel explained to Mary how she could become pregnant with the Christ-child, even though she was a virgin. Yes, I remember how the Holy Spirit will make this mysterious pregnancy happen. Yes, I remember how in the end Mary accepted the angel’s words and said, “I am the Lord's servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.” But I also begin to imagine hearing this story in terms of my own Christ rebirth story…some 35 years ago. I hear it something like this : When the angel came to me, it said, "Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you!" I am confused by these words. “Me, favoured one?” That can’t be true. I wondered what kind of greeting this might be. The angel said, "Don't be afraid. God is honoring you. Look! Within you, the indwelling Christ will be born. This Christ child will become great and powerful inside you and guide you in all the ways of God’s kingdom, a kingdom that is without end.” Then I said to the angel, "How will this happen for I am an unholy person. I have made many mistakes. There is no part of me that is pure, virgin, free from the contamination of sin. The angel replied, "You are wrong. There is a part of you that is virgin, as innocent, pure, open, and sensitive as you were the day you were born. The Holy Spirit will come over you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the Christ child who is to be born within you will be holy. This Christ will be called God's Anointed one. Nothing is impossible for God." Then I said, "“I am the Lord's servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.” . Questions to Ponder:
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