The Magic of the Holidays
The holidays are filled with moments in time recalled in tranquility. Such wonder and grace are not usually allotted to us over the course of the year. We tend to focus much of our time and energy to simply making a living and finding times of joy to spend our time through recreation, family, and friends. When we enter into the Holiday season of the year, there is something about the season of fall and winter that naturally turns our attention inward. We become reflective and embrace experiences of living within our heart. Experiences pondered in the heart create an atmosphere, a notion, a feeling, a spirit. This enables us to remain open to what is to come. Anticipation of the Holiday Season brings with it an opportunity for us to open our heart into what is to come. This opening of our heart allows us to feel genuine feelings of joy and of sorrow. Our past losses remind us how lonely we can be in the future without those we have loved and those who have loved us. The anticipation of such pain, often is, self inflicted. A deeper look at our lives reveals something much different. For as we age, we come to realize through our memories the greater force in our lives bringing all life into being and those we come into contact with called relationships. This greater force in our lives is Our Creator. The Gifts we receive during the Holiday Season come in many packages. Sometimes our packages are stuffed in gift wrappings given to us by those we love and those who love us. Some gifts come in a moment spent with our friends, our parents, our children and our grandchildren. When you peal off the layers that exist in a single moment with those you love during the Holidays, you will find there in the core of that experience the spirit of your heart infusing within that moment unconditional love. Authentic Love does not try to change one’s life. Authentic Love embraces life as it is. This kind of trust requires us to find our strength, our hope, and our love in the heart of God. The Magic of the Holiday Season transcends any of the 72 names for God found throughout the various religions in the world. For Our Creator infuses within us all this gift of unconditional love. This means to change nothing – absolutely nothing. When you came into this world, you knew how to love unconditionally as an infant. Everyone was drawn to you because you knew how to embrace the world as it was in that moment. You were not attempting to draw in the past or force a future that cannot exist. You simply loved everyone that was in your life and in that moment.“A little child shall lead them.” Could it be that the secret to living through the Holiday Season is still found in a little infant? On Christmas Day or any Holiday designated to be Sacred, a child awakens to an opportunity of living fully in the moment. The anticipation of the day, the gifts received with love, and the spirit of what brings the heart alive infuses tremendous love throughout the room for those this child is around. As adults, we feel their joy and long to have some of that in ourselves. Perhaps, there is a place inside us that remembers such joy. Behind all the losses in our lives is a grand revelation. Life reveals to us in our darkest hours that even death itself “cannot” and “will not” end the relationships we have. Through unconditional love, we find the magic of the Holiday Season bringing to us an extraordinary gift. The acceptance of life as it is in the present. Such a “present” when opened creates a gift that is met with Eternal Love. And, “the greatest of these is Love.” Chaplain Sam Oliver, author of, “What the Dying Teach Us: Lessons on Living” and Hospice Care Center Chaplain for the Inpatient Unit in Akron, Ohio.
About the Author
Sam Oliver worked with the dying for over 15 years. During that time, he wrote 4 books on grief. Website URL; http://www.soulandspirit.org
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