Christmas letter 2010

Dec. 23, 2010

Dear family and friends,

In an elementary school Christmas pageant long ago I played one of the Magi bearing gifts for the infant Jesus. I sang: "Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume/Breathes a life of gathering gloom/Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying/Sealed in the stone-cold tomb."

The Christ child and other spiritual avatars had work to do.

In June our dog Hank died after 15 years with us. Hank was our protector, even when we didn't need protecting. We miss him the way you miss an old friend whose spirit seems still to be in the world, just no longer recognizable.

Hank's sister Lucy remains with us. Her arthritic rear left leg hardly moves, so each night as she slowly climbs the stairs to sleep beside our bed I walk behind and lift her rump to help. I would carry her, but our veterinarian says she needs the exercise.

A few months ago, two Jack Russell terriers joined the household. DC enjoys the way Buster and his son Dizzy tear around the house, and she continues to bring them stuffed animals they immediately eviscerate. Lately she has begun giving them golf balls to chew on because they're harder to chew. Unfortunately, they're the perfect size to roll under the couch, prompting Buster to bark at us until we retrieve his ball.

I made a pilgrimage to California this year. At a workshop on meditation and spirituality in Santa Rosa, the teacher said the consciousness within each of us is the same consciousness outside us. The separation between us and others and between us and the outside world is an illusion, she says, and enlightenment is that realization.

DC and I spent a steamy week in unseasonably hot Copenhagen with our friends Frank and Robyn and Don and Claudia. The city is an extraordinary amalgamation of antiquities and legends and modern progressivism. But our memories of Copenhagen mostly are of Frank's friends, people he grew up with as a boy and is still close to. That's the way Denmark is, he says. People are friends for life. To be born in the same time in the same place means something to us humans. That kinship points to the greater possibilities.

When the Christ consciousness was born into the world a few thousand years ago, humanity was foundering, and it still is.

The commandment to love your neighbor as yourself appeared throughout the Bible, phrased in many different ways. We think we get the part about loving your neighbor, while admitting we're not very good at it. But we fail because we don't get the part about loving yourself.

The two are inseparable because they are the same. One does not exist without the other.

Rumi was a Sufi poet and mystic who addressed God as Beloved and saw the Beloved everywhere he looked and in everyone he knew. Rumi says: "Beyond this world and life we know/there is Someone watching over us/To know Him is not in our power/But once in a glimpse I saw that we are His shadow/and our shadow is the world."

If the world is our shadow, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. And changing ourselves begins with embracing our own Belovedness.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.