We could call today the last day of the year, for tomorrow morning a new impulse in the cycle of the year begins: the first day of Advent. As the season changes we can prepare ourselves in the face of all the events and happenings that are in many ways over whelming our souls, to find what soul gesture we can bring in a new way towardsAdvent, Christmas and Epiphany this year. Just as the Sun moves through the sky from dawn to dusk and we feel the certainty of its return tomorrow after the evening and night, we can feel the certainty of the sun’s harmony – the swing between the seasons, and the Sun’s apparent movement north and south around the Earth – we can feel in the contemplation of this certainty deep peace. We can feel that the Sun has attained in the Solar system, in the Cosmos, a peaceful, harmonious, quiet nature in its rhythms and its movement through the skies.

This is not yet quite our state as the human beings who populate this planet we live upon, but it is certainly an aspiration somewhere in every human heart. We hear from the altar in our prayer for Advent that the starting place for our journey as a human being is the hoping human heart. And what do we hope for?  We all hope, and hopefully work towards – peace and harmony.

How long, we might enquire, till it manifests amongst human community? Well, as long as it takes, is the answer. What I mean with that is we do need to find a long breath in being able to allow the human being to become the Light of hope and the Light of peace and harmony within the world.

The theme of “The Birth of the Light,” might seem like a strange theme at first because the Light of the Sun was born billions of years ago. But regardless of if one believes in The Big Bang theory or the linear progression of the Solar System that happened even beforeThe Big Bang, we know that at some point Light became part of the manifested world around us.  As the planets and the chaos of the Cosmos started to settle down, we can see our Solar System managed to find within its evolution a quiet rhythm of peace and harmony.

When people first turned to the Spiritual World, the people of the Earth looked out into the Cosmos, – into the stars, into the light, into the harmony of the animals, and the plants and the stones and the order of the world – they felt that all was one. They felt that the Divine creative worlds were imbued in unity with the oneness of creation. This experience was known in the Vedic tradition as the Brahman. To experience the unity of the weaving of the Spiritual-World and the unity and harmony of peace with each other was an external experience which we did not experience within ourselves at first, and we aspired to join our breath, our spirit with that of the Brahman.

As time progressed, another experience started to appear under the guidance of the Persian culture. And humanity started to experience that there wasn’t just the unity of Light. As the harmony of the Sun started to settle down people began to experience duality – light and darkness, male and female, day and night, good and evil. A Cosmos that appears to have two halves appeared to our senses andZarathustra then appeared on the scene and gave us the teaching of the Duality of Ahura Mazdah and Ahriman in battle with each other, creating the experience of chaos within the world. The Unity, the single Unity of experience disappeared into the chaos of Duality. And so the third impulse was required that came under the great tutelage of the Egyptian culture, under the great leadership of Hermes Trismegistus and the Trinity of Deity of the world around us appeared. Amongst the Mithras cultures and many cultures around the world we felt that the Duality required a guide which would lead us back to the Unity.

The great guide of Trinitarian experiences, found an expression in many world cultures. In the Egyptian culture under the name ofOsiris and Isis and the son Horus of which Christianity in our pictures of Mary and the child Jesus reflect many of the ancient wisdoms of the Egyptian culture and the Trinitarian gesture of overcoming the chaos of life by finding a third balancing principle that would lead us and guide us.

These were all still experiences of the Light birthing itself out of the great womb of the worlds in the world around us. The manifestation of life and of creature and of animals and plants, eventually took this great form of the great teachings of Hermes Trismegistus and theMithraic culture, where we could feel that there was a path under the guidance of the Sun Heroes – the great people who had evolved themselves to become the teachers and the guides of humanity. In many cultures around the world we find stories and mythologies of the Sun Heroes who have guided humanity to start bringing the order into the Duality of the Cosmos that we had found ourselves within. However, something changed. A new gesture, where we could say a fourth aspect of the Being of Light is needed to appear in order that we as human beings could begin to experience that The Birth of the Light is now dependent upon the attributes of the human heart.

This has always been known as the indwelling of the Divine-Spirit within the human being.  Whether we go to the healing traditions or the images of Wisdom Woman incarnating into the Shekinah of the temple of the heart, or The  Prologue of the Gospel of John we have found in many cultures that it was always the intention of the Light to be the Spirit-Self of the human heart. This is a long process though, and at the turning point of time, when these Sun Heroes were leading humanity, it was required for us to become our own spiritSun Heroes. Each one of us within our personality could take within us the Light itself. This is the call of one of the core messages of the story of The Christ Jesus and under the guidance and that assistance of the great Sophianic Mother – Mary. That the Sun, the Spirit-Sun itself took up residence within a human being known asJesus of Nazareth  and something new came about altogether –  that within a personality on the Earth the Divine-Creative-Life and Lightcould now further express itself through the human heart.

If an impulse in human evolution is to become common faculty, common soul creativity of every human being on the Earth, someone has to start the impulse; and great Sun Heroes, great Bodhisattvasaround the world have time and again started something new. We have heard of a few already – Hermes, Zarathustra, Moses, Abraham, and then we can also come to Buddha who started the path of compassion in the Eight Fold Path. He did it once, but all of us eventually over thousands of years will learn to live the Eight Fold Path. And so too the incarnation of the Divine-Spiritual-Light into the human being has given The Birth of the Light a new impulse for the human heart to become the womb of the Light within the personality of each human individual.

But we should not think that with that impulse everything is complete. It would be far too ‘old Christianity’ to rely on the promise of salvation in the Bible story. It is an active process of incarnation, of indwelling in the temple of the human being. This process of the Light coming out of the Unity, expressing itself from the chaos of the Duality, and under the guidance of the Sun Heroes finding a guidance towards this fourth step of the Light been carried out of the Spiritual worlds into the human heart of every human personality, now takes a fifth step in our times.

It is a rather strange place where we find this next step of expression of the Divine-Creative-Light. At first we might think that the further expression of the Light would be through peace and harmony, or that it would be through love, or that it would be in community; but the place where the Light has found residence is within the human ability to have an intellectual rational life.

How much in the last few hundred years has been born out of the creativity of the striving of the Light within the intellect. This does not mean hardened abstract, disconnected and uncompassionate thinking. This spirit filled intellectuality is the creative ability for a human being to ponder, to cogitate, to think through an idea and bring it out of their souls into manifestation in the world.

This is the same process with which the world manifested out of the spiritual world in the first place. The emanation of the Life and the Light into the complexity of the creative world was an idea in the spiritual world and through Divine Consciousness found its way through evolution into this beautiful wisdom filled world that we find ourselves in.

One of the inner calls, and the real mission of evolution, is for each of us to become a Divine-Creative-Being by birthing through the Light that what is within our hearts.  Harnessing the ability to use our intellectual thought life to manifest new creations in the world, new art, new machines that can help and promote the well being of the Mother Earth upon which we find ourselves to be custodians.

How shall this take place where in a few hundred years this ability has seemingly done a lot more damage than good? Maybe we focus on the negative too much, for a lot of good things have come of our ability to be creative out of consciousness and the light within our thoughts and our hearts. However, it seems that there is a Duality emerging again where this creativity is used for destruction and the harm and abuse of creation and of life itself. So this process is now in a very delicate place where we are challenged to be able to take responsibility for.

Again, we have guidance. We have guidance in the same form as the emergence of the Sun out of chaos into being a peaceful resounding star of our solar system. So too within the realm of the human being we find that the masters, the great initiators of cultures, who have through the ages had the wisdom and the foresight to know that from the human heart will stream peace and harmony, created festivals within the cycle of the year through which we can order our participation in the world. In the rhythm of the year human beings gather together at particular times to focus upon the energies of the stars, of the Sun and the energies of the earth.  Our hearts can settle into the content of a festival and find a peaceful radiance into the world.

The time of the December Solstice is one such time where we no longer just celebrate the turning of the Light of the year, but we gather in communities and celebrate the streaming of Light from communities around the world creating harmony and peace. As this stream of Light, Love and Harmony grows, we will start to find that the wisdom printed into many cultures and religions will flow into one stream – a streaming of the Unity of Light will start to bring about an impulse of wanting to be peaceful and harmonious with each other.

This is the inner hope of the Christmas Festival. It is not necessarily about all the things that we put around it, in our sense of economic rush at this time of the year, but we can stop for a moment and add our beating heart. We can focus within our heart and within our minds and behold them as a candle lighting up. We can join with each other in a Circle of Light and allow that to radiate into the world – not just for light – but that this light now has an inner gesture to be the stream of peace, the stream of harmony, the stream of compassion, the stream of hope.  We can inspire the world around us.

So may this Christmas, in these world events where we stand on the brink of a third world war, inspire us to ensure that our hearts are vibrant with The Birthing Light. That we may become the womb and the midwives of peace in the world!