Holy Infant So Tender and Mild

Silent Night is one of the most beloved carols of the Christmas season. 

Silent night, holy night
 All is calm, all is bright
 Round yon virgin Mother and Child
 Holy infant so tender and mild
 Sleep in heavenly peace
 Sleep in heavenly peace

It seems to epitomize the essence of Christmas. This hymn conveys the silence, beauty and peace at the heart of Christmas. Christmas celebrates our intuitive awareness of our innate union with God, which I call unitive awareness or nondual awareness. This is represented in the Christ child. The harsh patriarchal judge that is the usual symbol for God gives way to God as an infant, so fender and mild. The Tao te Ching uses this image for the Tao, comparing the Tao to a newborn child. 

God as an infant holy, infant lowly as another Christmas carol says. In the Silent Night, holy night of Christmas, we know that we are one with God in heavenly peace. For a moment we remember that this is our natural state, the Reality that we were born into and born from. This is true of every one of us, not just the Babe of Bethlehem.

Transcript

Holy Infant So Tender and Mild

Silent Night is one of the most beloved carols of the Christmas season. For forty years of fulltime pastoral ministry, I ended every Christmas Eve service by having my congregations hold candles in a darkened sanctuary and sing,

Silent night, holy night
 All is calm, all is bright
 'Round yon virgin Mother and Child
 Holy infant so tender and mild
 Sleep in heavenly peace
 Sleep in heavenly peace

It seems to epitomize the essence of Christmas. This hymn conveys the silence, beauty and peace at the heart of Christmas. Christmas celebrates our intuitive awareness of our innate union with God, which I call unitive awareness or nondual awareness. This is represented in the Christ child. The harsh patriarchal judge that is the usual symbol for God gives way to God as an infant, so fender and mild. The Tao te Ching uses this image for the Tao, comparing the Tao to a newborn child. 

God as an infant holy, infant lowly as another Christmas carol says. In the Silent Night, holy night of Christmas, we know that we are one with God in heavenly peace. For a moment we remember that this is our natural state, the Reality that we were born into and born from. This is true of every one of us, not just the Babe of Bethlehem. Glories streamed from heaven afar when we were born. The heavenly hosts sang Alleluia when you were born. The birth of every child is the birth of the Christ child. In this child our salvation is born.

Every one of us were born into the Garden of Eden as a holy infant, perfect in every way. In Christianity there is a lot of talk about original sin, that we are natural born sinners, guilty at birth, condemned for something our primordial ancestors did, destined for damnation if not for the grace of God that saves some of us – if we were born into the right religion, believe the right doctrines, receive the right rituals and do the right things. This idea of original sin is one of the worst dogmas that the heart of man ever conceived. And I use the word man intentionally. I don’t think that any woman who ever held her newborn infant in her arms would ever come up with such a damnable doctrine. 

This doctrine is not found in the Bible. Neither ancient Hebrews nor modern Jews believe in it, even though Christians say it comes from their Scriptures. It was first developed in the 3rd century but did not become widespread in Christianity until the 4th century with the writings of Augustine. The truth, which everyone can see and experience for themselves, is just the opposite of original sin. It is original innocence. 

We are born in perfect union with God and the universe. It is only after birth that we begin to lose that pure consciousness. It happens slowly in the first couple of years of life as we become aware of ourselves as separate from other people and things. We become conscious of a body, and then slowly develop a sense of individual self. The ego comes into full bloom in what parents call the terrible twos.

As time moves one we craft an elaborate sense of individual existence with a complex psychological personality that we come to believe is who we really are. With this comes shame and guilt, which we see depicted in the Book of Genesis with the story of Adam and Eve eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and then covering themselves and hiding from God. That is a symbolic story of how every child develops a dualistic understanding of the world and themselves. With this dualistic knowledge we leave behind the Garden of Eden and wander in the wilderness east of Eden. We forget our original nature. We forget who and what we are. 

We are born in a state that is represented in the Bible as the Garden of Eden. We are born in paradise, the Kingdom of God, Nirvana, union with God, oneness. We are born in unitive awareness. Then we lose it. This is inevitable by the way. It is not sin and not a reason for guilt. It is human evolution and natural psychological development. It has to be this way. This is how we evolved as a species and how we adapted to the environment and how we survived and came to be the dominant species on this planet. So there is no need for guilt here.

But there is anxiety due to our feeling of being separated from the Divine, the natural world and the universe.  It is suffering. It is existential angst. It is insecurity. It is fear, including fear of Death. Fear of nonexistence. Fear of separation forever – which Christians call hell. Fear of suffering, which Christians also call hell. What is the source of the fear? It is the separate self – the ego - that fears, this separate self that our brains developed as we grew into adults. 

The spiritual quest is to undo that separate self and return to the garden. To recover the primordial awareness that we had at birth. To relive the oneness that we had before birth, before conception, before there was a body that we called ours or a brain that made that identification, before there was a self that saw itself as different from other selves and other things. It is to be born again, to become as a little child and enter the Kingdom of God. That is what the Zen koan is referring to when it speaks of seeing one’s original face or seeing our face before we were born and before our parents were born. 

In the spiritual search we perfect peace. We search for that silent night, holy night when all is calm, all is bright. We seek to sleep in heavenly peace. In fact sleep gives us a taste of this holy consciousness every night. There are said to be three states of consciousness. There is normal waking consciousness. There is dreaming sleep, when we are no longer aware of this physical world or this physical body, but we are still individual selves in a world of our imagination. (Which by the way is what the waking state really is also.) And thirdly there is deep dreamless sleep. In that deep sleep there is no self, no ego, no body, no world. But we are. 

No one of use would say when we wake up in the morning that we ceased to exist during deep dreamless sleep. We know we still were. We know we still are what we were in deep sleep. This is our true nature. We can sense that true nature, that state of non-self in dreamless sleep even in our waking state. To be aware of that deeper sense of being is what it means to be spiritually awake or enlightened or saved or liberated or any other word you want to use. This is silent night, holy night. But it is not darkness or death – all is calm all is bright. This is Life and Life Abundant. 

In all states of consciousness there is always present a deep sense of being – of I AM. Not I am something or someone, but simply I AM.  Originally there is only I AM. One without a second. This is Being  Itself or the Ground of Being. This is what we are before birth. This is what we are after death. This is what we are now. That is what Jesus meant when he said, “Before Abraham was I am.” 

So there is nothing to fear in death. Death is Silent night, Holy Night. That is why some people who are suffering greatly yearn for death. They know intuitively that death is a cessation of the pain and suffering – it is to sleep in heavenly peace. The good news is that we can experience this silent night, holy night, the cessation of suffering before death. There is an awareness that is cessation from suffering now. All we have to do is notice it as present now and abide in it. It is more accurate to say “abide as it” because it is us. We rest from the suffering of self and fall back into our True Nature that we are before birth and after death and now. That True Self is here now, for there is only here and now. Time is an illusion.

This spiritual reality is communicated in this lovely Christmas carol, Silent Night. In that carol we get a glimpse through music of this Silent Night which is nonduality. It is perfect silence, without the inner psychological noise that we torture ourselves with each day. It is holy night, in both senses of that word holy. The word holy means both sacred and whole, whole in the sense of oneness. All is calm all is bright. It is the security we can subconsciously remember we were as a holy infant, tender and mild held by our mother. That is why parental symbolism is so prominent in religion. And why maternal images persist, even in patriarchal religions. 

This carol brings us that back to that moment when we slept in heavenly peace. Glories stream from heaven afar; Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia! At that time you were sons and daughters of God, love’s pure light. The good news is you still are. Radiant beams from Thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace. hen we see our face in the face of the Christ child, then we see our true nature. That is what this beautiful tune and lyrics communicate. It communicates the Christ that is the true self of every person born into this world. To gaze into that face is eternal life. 

That is it for today. Have a blessed and holy Christmas.