Hiding in Plain Sight

I snoop. Not only for my gift, but everyone’s. They’re wrapped under the tree, looking amazing and mysterious, and I can’t help but dive in.

My justification is that this is what God wants us to do – go searching for the gifts of love. I know, it’s a poor use of a profound metaphor, but stay with me.

The heart of spirituality is that God, the divine Consciousness, hides in everyone.[i] The realm we call heaven is the Reality through which we move and from which we arise.[ii] For Christians, we see the full embodiment of this in Jesus, one who maintained conscious connection to that realm, and who reminds us that we are never separate from Ultimate Love, as much as it feels we are.

Problem is, there’s too much wrapping. The gift is buried in the beautiful and broken aspects of our humanity, beneath the necessary illusions of ego and life’s undulations through the exquisite and the excruciating. Such is the human journey – God in disguise.

At Christmas, we celebrate God taking on this human form. The wrapping is swaddling clothes and the innocence of a child. But that event remains a fable until the divine birth continues in us. There’s the wonder – that we become the mystical body of Christ – collective containers of that same Consciousness.

This turns us into the gift. Ironically, this is a gift we resist. After all, its easier to say Jesus is the Child of God than that you are a direct manifestation of the same. It’s one thing to celebrate the incarnation at Christmas, and quite another to be the incarnation at Christmas.

Incarnating the Divine is all the more difficult if you feel God is a quaint mythology, or some abstract external hope, separate from the universe, intervening here and there as needed. Spirituality is pointless unless it has traction – changing how you experience your world. Which it can and always does, by changing you.

So, if you are up for it, here’s how to manifest that Divinity: remove the wrapping. Do this by letting go of what covers your light. How? Well, the old-fashioned way. Compassion, forgiveness, mercy, wisdom, authenticity, courage, selflessness, meditation, prayer… love. All these start (and end) with yourself.

This will change the quality of presence you have with yourself, and therefore the quality of your presence with others. You will be the present. And, if this is true for you, it must be true for everyone.

So go snooping. Look for the gift, for it is amazing and mysterious. It is more than you could ever imagine; the infinite Love wrapped up in you.

Dive in.

Question: How might you unwrap what covers your own joy and light?

[i] Meet Father Richard Rohr, a modern mystic speaking at Google on how he uncovers the divine within through his book, Divine Dance: The Trinity and your Transformation. Highly recommend his daily meditations.

[ii] Even more astonishing is what this implies and what quantum physics verifies – there is no universe apart from consciousness. Explore more in Biocentrism, by Dr. Robert Lanza.