And so it is in the very truest and most literal sense a newborn Christ that we hail at each approaching Yule-feast, and Christmas is the most vital annual event for all humanity whether we realize it or not. It is not merely a commemoration of the birth of our beloved Elder Brother, Jesus, but the advent of the rejuvenating love life of our Heavenly Father, sent by Him to redeem the world from the wintry death grip. Without this new infusion of divine life and energy we should soon perish physically, and our orderly progress would be frustrated so far as our present lines of development are concerned. This is a point we should endeavor to realize thoroughly in order that we may learn to appreciate Christmas as keenly as we should.
We may learn a lesson in this respect as in many others from our children or from reminiscences of our own childhood. How keen were our anticipations of the approaching feast! How eagerly we waited for the hour when we should receive the gifts which we knew would be forthcoming from Santa Claus, the mysterious universal benefactor who brought the toys for the coming year! How would we have felt had our parents given us the dismembered dolls and broken drums of yesteryear? It would surely have been felt as an overwhelming misfortune and would have left a deep sense of broken trust which even time would have found it difficult to heal; yet it would have been as nothing compared with the cosmic calamity that would befall mankind if our Heavenly Father should fail to provide the newborn Christ for our cosmic Christmas gift.
The Christ of last year cannot save us from physical famine any more than last year’s rain can drench the soil again and swell the millions of seeds that slumber in the earth awaiting the germinal activities of the Father’s life to begin their growth; the Christ of last year cannot kindle anew in our hearts the spiritual aspirations which urge us onward in the Quest any more than last summer’s heat can warm us now. The Christ of last year gave us His love and His life to the last breath without stint or measure; when He was born into the earth last Christmas, he endued with life the sleeping seeds which have grown and gratefully filled our granaries with the bread of physical life; He lavished the love given Him by the Father upon us, and when He had wholly spent His life, He died at Eastertide to rise again to the Father, as the river by evaporation rises to the sky.
But endlessly wells the divine love; as a father pities his children, so does our Heavenly Father pity us, for He knows our physical and spiritual frailty and dependence. Therefore we are now confidently awaiting the mystic birth of the Christ of another year, laden with new life and love sent by the Father to preserve us from the physical and spiritual famine which would ensue were it not for this annual love offering.
Younger souls usually find it difficult to disabuse their minds of the personality of God, of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, and some can only love Jesus, the man. They forget Christ, the Great Spirit, who ushered in a new era in which the nations established under the regime of Jehovah will be broken to pieces that the sublime structure of Universal Brotherhood may be built upon their ruins. In time all the world will realize that “God is spirit, to be worshiped in spirit and in truth.” It is well to love Jesus and to imitate him; we know of no nobler ideal and none more worthy. Could a nobler one have been found, Jesus would not have been chosen as a vehicle of that Great One, the Christ, in whom dwelt the Godhead. We shall therefore do well to follow “in His steps.”
At the same time we shall exalt God in our own consciousness by taking the word of the Bible that He is spirit, and that we cannot make any likeness which will portray Him for He is like nothing in heaven or on earth. We can see the physical vehicles of Jehovah circling as satellites around the various planets; we can also see the sun, which is the visible vehicle of the Christ; but the Invisible Sun, which is the vehicle of the Father and the source of all, appears to the greatest of human seers only as a higher octave of the photosphere of the sun, a ring of violet-blue luminosity behind the sun. But we do not need to see; we can feel His love, and that feeling is never so great as at Christmas time when He is giving us the greatest of all gifts, the Christ of the new year.
[Chapter XXIII]
Why I am a Rosicrucian
Not infrequently we find that some one takes the platform to explain why he is a Baptist, Methodist, or Christian Scientist, and what his particular faith may be. We have often been asked by our students for something which would help make plain to their associates why they had embraced the teachings of the Elder Brothers given through the Rosicrucian Fellowship, in preference to the faith which they had left. We will, therefore, endeavor to give a succinct resume of reasons which appeal to us as sufficient, but students will doubtless find many other reasons equally good or better, which they may add verbally to what is here said.
It should be made clear in the very beginning that students in the Rosicrucian Fellowship do not call themselves Rosicrucians. That title applies alone to the Elder Brothers, who are the hierophants of the Western Wisdom Teaching. They are as far beyond the greatest living saint in spiritual development as that saint is above the lowest fetish worshiper.