Oh, we know the sweet fair picture! We know how it is done, only too often, this recreation business. Come now, who is it that is recreated? Which element, which party, which guild or stratum of society in that curious pathocratical republic, that kingless, impolitic, mob-swayed kingdom called the human personality, rises like a giant refreshed from the somnolent, torpid nebulosity wherewith the liver, poor drudge on strike, has its revenge on its tyrant? How much of Christmas good will, Christmas merriment and cheer, will be carried forward? What new light will shine on our workaday activities?
You pass through a treasure-house, from which you may take what you will, and the more you take, the better. But you "take no thought for the morrow"—with a vengeance! you pay no heed to the rich and beautiful things; you allow yourself to be beguiled, from entrance to exit of it, by that most wily esurient companion Appetite, that should be slave and porter but has tricked himself into the position of master and guide. We do go in there, indeed; we do see the treasures; it is proven for us that they exist, and undoubtedly we are the better for that. But we might go forth enriched for the whole year; and—we don't. Christmas, that might be perennial, hardly lasts for a whole day.
Why should not such a birthday be kept in a fitting manner? Is there nothing within ourselves that corresponds to the Hero of the day—no sunbright redeeming principle? Indeed there is; and it is the service of that that pays (to put it vulgarly); for that is the soul, whose mere garments are brain and body and appetites; indeed, whose mere hopples and handcuffs they are. No joy is acceptable, or without its sickening foul aftertaste, unless countersigned by It; that feast is poisonous of which It does not partake. To carry through the day the jolly atmosphere of good will and good service, of stepping outside selfhood; to keep one's insolent servant, appetite, cowed and right down in its place, finding pleasure in the things that belong to ourselves, not to it—that would be to celebrate Christmas rationally. When we do so, we do not find that the Christmas spirit wanes with the waning of the holidays.
I wish the whole world could have just a glimpse of the Lomaland Christmas, which is such a rational one, permeated with sunlight "both within and without." Then it would be more generally understood, how that the day may be, and ought to be, the feast-day of Human Brotherhood, the annual reconsecration of the celebrants to all things bright and beautiful, and cheerful and excellent, and happy and thoroughly practical and of good report. By heaven, the influence of these Theosophical Christmases will make its mark on the world yet!
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
ROTHENBURG: A VIEW OF THE MEDIEVAL TOWN
