Dear Friend,
We’re sending this issue of Clarity Magazine as our Christmas card to you with loving thoughts that you have a blessed holiday season. It’s been a joyful and inspiring year of sharing with you through letters and phone calls, through e-mails and our website, and through satsangs and events all over the world.
At the end of his Autobiography, ParamhansaYogananda says, “Lord, Thou hast given this monk a large family.” We deeply appreciate our friendship and unity in God that bring us closer to oneness with that Friend of all friends.
The theme of this issue is “The Christmas Mystery,” the title of a beautiful song written by Swami Kriyananda and included with words and music later in these pages. The last verse says,
Could it be that in that little One
Spirit’s Universal Love did Shine?
If it’s true, He lives in you and me
Whom Men call the Son of Mary.
The great saviors of mankind have repeatedly come to earth demonstrating the nature of this universal love and helping us express it more perfectly. Once when Swami Kriyananda was with Yogananda, he mentally prayed to him, “Teach me to love you as you love me.” Intuitively perceiving Kriyananda’s thoughts, Yogananda turned to him and lovingly asked, “How can the little cup hold the whole ocean?”
Yogananda was telling Swamiji that we must expand our consciousness and our capacity to love if we want to express the ocean of divine love.
This holy season can provide us with a powerful impetus to expand our capacity to experience and express this universal love. In a Christmas talk given in 1932, Yogananda said, “Meditate on the statement, ‘My Christ-Peace has descended upon every member of my family, upon my country, and upon my world.’ Behold Christ-Peace descending upon your body, upon your possessions, and extending to your neighbors, to all countries, and onto the united altar of all hearts and all creatures. Let Christ-Bliss extend from your body to all lands—to America, Asia, South America, Europe, Australia, to the solar system, to the island universes, and to all beings.”
“Meditate upon the following: ‘My Christ-Peace is descending upon every living thing, upon every living star, upon every speck of matter and space.’ Celebrate Christmas upon the altar of the vast inner silence, and upon the sanctuary of every desire, every living thing in the world, and the Cosmos. Then will you know Christ as the Divine King ruling in your own heart and in the heart of all finite creation.”
Our wish for each of you this Christmas is that the Divine Light guide you forward like the three Wise Men of old until you find the universal love of Christ dwelling forever within you.
In God, Christ, and Guru,
Jyotish and Devi
