Christmas is the holiday that reminds us of the supreme importance of love between people.  It is a season in which we show our feelings in tangible ways, by exchanging gifts and expressing sentiments of affection.  One of the great truths at the core of Christmas and the symbolic point of all the literature, art and music is that there is a persistent need to love.  We need each other.  We need the love of other people to console us and nourish us, for without it we are nothing.  It is as though humankind were a huge picture puzzle - in which each person is incomplete and unfulfilled until interrelated to others.

I am sometimes prone to a somewhat gloomy and unflattering characterization of the human species.  But against all the reasons that can be given to show how cruel and violent is our species, how destructive we are and how much carnage we wreak; against all that, it is still so that there has always been more of love and affection than of hate.  If this were not so our species would not have survived.  Throughout history there has needed to be mutuality.  We could not have lasted through all the evil and senseless slaughter we have wreaked upon one another except by the harmony to which we are prone.  Simple self interest has shown people the need to work together, to help each other and sacrifice personal gain for the greater good.

Even my hero during my youth, Bertrand Russell, who was mostly a cynic about religion, wrote:

“Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.  Whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful and at best useless . . . the unmystical rationalistic view of life seems to omit all that is most important and most beautiful.”

Christmas reminds us of our mutual bonds.  We learn that the more interrelated a people become the happier the community. As we work, eat, share our grief, sing hymns, pray and meditate and generally strive together in the great cause of our religious faith, we find something good is added to our lives.

The circumstances of Jesus’ birth remind us of the importance of love.  It was the central message of his life.  He worked, taught, lived and died that we might learn more deeply the meaning of that small word love – that means so much.  Love is that doorway through which we pass from solitude to kinship with all humankind.  But the message is found in all religions.  From the sayings of the Buddha:  “Gifts are great, the founding of temples is meritorious, meditations and religious exercises pacify the heart, comprehension of the truth leads to nirvana: but greater than all is loving kindness.  As the light of the moon is sixteen times stronger that the light of all the stars, so is loving kindness sixteen times more efficacious in liberating the heart, the realization of love is more important than all other religious accomplishments taken together.”

At Christmas especially does the summons to love call us.  Let us open ourselves to it so that in part, through our fidelity to love, the world might move steadily forward toward the ancient good of which generation after generation has dreamed.

Merry Christmas – Love,

Gary