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LETTER XLVIII
INVISIBLE GIFTS AT YULETIDE
It is not yet too late to wish you a
merry Christmas.
How do I know that it is Christmas day? Because I have been
looking in at houses which I used to frequent, and have seen trees laden with
tinsel and gifts. Dou you wonder that I could see them? If so, you forget that
we light our own place. When we know how to look, we can see behind the veil.
This is my first Christmas day on this side. I cannot send
you a material gift which you could wear or hang up in your room; but I can send
you the good wishes of the season.
The mothers who have left young children behind them in the
world know well when Christmas is approaching. Sometimes they bring invisible
gifts, which they have fashioned by their power of imagination and love out of
the tenuous matter of this world. A certain grandmother all last evening,
Christmas Eve, was scattering flowers around her dear ones. Their fragrance must
have penetrated the atmosphere of the earth.
Did you ever smell suddenly a sweet perfume which you could not account for? If
so, perhaps someone who loved you was scattering invisible flowers. Love is
stronger than death.
Another whom you know will go out before long. Strengthen her
with your faith.
The practice of keeping Christmas is a good one, if you do
not forget the real meaning of the day. To some it means the birth into the
world of the spirit of humility and love; but while love and humility had
visited the world before the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, yet never before
nor since have they come with greater power than they came to Judaea. Whether
the stable in Bethlehem was a physical reality or a symbol, makes no difference.
I have been to the heavens of Christ, and know their beauty.
"In My Father's house are many mansions."
A traveller like me who wishes to go to some particular
heaven must first feel in himself what those souls feel who enjoy that heaven;
then he can enter and commune with them. He could never go as a mere sight-seer.
That is why, as a rule, I have avoided the hells; but the heavens I often visit.
And I have been in purgatory, the purgatory of the Roman Catholics. Do not scoff
at those who have masses said for the repose of the souls of the departed. The
souls are often conscious of such thoughtfulness. They hear the music, and they
may smell the incense; most of all, they feel the power of the thought directed
to them. Purgatory is real, in the sense of being a real experience. If you want
to call it a dream, you may; but dreams are sometimes terribly real.
Even those who do not believe in purgatory sometimes wander
awhile in sadness, until they have adjusted themselves to the new conditions
under which they live. Should one tell them that they were in purgatory, they
might deny the existence of such a state; but they would readily admit their
discomfort.
The surest way to escape that painful period of transition is
to go into the hereafter with a full faith in immortality, a full faith in the
power of the soul to create its own conditions.
Last night, after visiting various places upon the earth, I
went to one of the highest Christian heavens. Perhaps I could not have gone so
easily at any other time; for my heart was full of love for all men and my mind
was full of the Christ idea. Often have I
seen Him who is called the Saviour of men, and last night I saw Him in all His
beauty. He, too, came down to the world for a time.
I wonder if I can make you understand? The love of Christ is
always present in the world, because there are always hearts that keep it
alight. If the idea of Christ as a redeemer should ever grow faint in the world,
He would probably go back there and relight the flame in human hearts; but
whatever the writers of statistics may say, that idea was never more real than
at present. It may have been more talked about.
The world is not in so bad a way as some people think. Be not
surprised if there should be a strong renaissance of the spiritual idea. All
things have their rhythms.
Last night I stood in a great church where hundreds of
Christians knelt in adoration of Jesus. I have stood in churches on Christmas
Eve when on earth as a man among men; but I saw things last night which I had
never seen before. Surely where two or three are gathered together in the name
of any prophet, there he is in the midst of them, if not always in his spiritual
body, at least in the fragrance of his sympathy.
The angels in the Christian heavens know when Christmas is being celebrated on
earth.
Jesus of Nazareth is a reality. As a spiritual body, as Jesus
who dwelt in Galilee, He exists in space and time; as the Christ, the paradigm
of the spiritual man, He exists in the hearts of all men and women who awaken
that idea in themselves. He is a light which is reflected in many pools.
I wrote the other day about Adepts and Masters. Jesus is a
type of the greatest Master. He is revered in all the heavens. He grasped the
Law and dared to live it, to exemplify it. And when He said, "The Father and I
are one," He pointed the way by which other men may realise mastership in
themselves.
Humanity on its long road has evolved many Masters. Who then
shall dare to question that humanity has justified itself? If one demands to
know what purpose there is in life, tell him that it is this very evolution of
the Master out of the man. Eternity is long. The goal is ahead for each unit of
sufficient strength, and those who cannot lead can serve.
This thought came home to me with special force last night. I am not so bold as
to say that every unit in the great mass is strong enough, has energy enough, to
evolve individual mastership; but there is no unit so weak that it may not have
some part, however small, in the great work of evolving Masters out of men. It
is sweet to serve. They too have their reward.
The great mistake made by most minds in wrestling with the
problem of evolution is in not grasping the fact that eternity is eternity, that
to be immortal is to have no beginning or end. There is time enough in which to
develop, if not in this life cycle, then in another which will follow; for
rhythm is sure.
If I could only make you grasp the idea of immortality as I
see it! I did not fully understand it until I came out here and began to pick up
the threads of my own past. My reason told me that I was immortal, but I did not
know what immortality meant. I wonder if you do?
I know an angel who has done more, perhaps, than many
prophets have done to keep that idea alight in the world. Until I met the one
whom we know as the Beautiful Being I had not revelled in the triumph of
immortality. There is one who plays with immortality as a child plays with
marbles. When the Beautiful Being says,
"I am," you know that you are, too. When the Beautiful Being says, "I pluck the
centuries as a child pulls the petals of a daisy, and I throw away the
seed-bearing heart to grow more century-bearing daisies," you feel––but words
are weak to express what the Beautiful Being's joy in endless life can make one
feel.
You forget the thing of flesh and bones which you used to
call yourself when the sliver of conscious immortality exults in its own
existence.
When the Beautiful Being takes you for a walk in what it
calls the "clover meadows of the sky," you are quite sure that you are one of
the co-heirs of the whole eternal estate.
The Beautiful Being knows well the Christ of the Christians.
I think the Beautiful Being knows all the great Masters, embodied or
disembodied. They all taught immortality in some form or other, if only in
essence.
The Beautiful Being went with me last night to the highest
heaven of the Christians. Should I tell you all that I saw, you might be in too
great a hurry to go out there and view it for yourself, and you must not leave
the earth for a long time yet. You must realise immortality while still in the
flesh, and make others realise it. I have
told you about the minor heavens, where merely good people go; but the
passionately devout lovers of God reach heights of contemplation and ecstasy
which the words of the world's languages were not designed to describe. With the
Beautiful Being at my side I felt those ecstasies last night, while you were
locked in sleep.
Where shall I be next Christmas Eve? I shall be somewhere in
the universe; for we could not get out of the universe if we should try. The
universe could not get on without us; it would be incomplete. Take that thought
with you into the happy New Year.
LETTER XLIX
LETTER XLVII |
