ut a familiar, with himself. Only
when the channel has been long cleared, when there has left it all
consciousness of striving, of self in any form, only when he finds
himself empty, ready, immaculate, will he have the divine adventure. For
it is then that in him the spirit of God will have its birth, then that
he will first understand his own nature ... the nature of being.

Then the turn of the year comes in, the year begins to mount. Birth is
in it, growth is in it, Spring is in it. Sometime, away back in
beginnings, they knew this. They knew that the time of the Winter
solstice is in some strange fashion the high moment of the year, as the
beginning of new activity in nature and in the gods. They solemnized the
return of the fiery sun wheel; they traced in those solstice days the
operations on earth of Odin and Berchta. They knew in themselves a thing
they could not name. And when the supreme experience took place in
Christ, they made the one experience typify the other, and became
conscious of the divine nature of this nativity. So, by the illuminati,
the prophets, the adepts, the time that followed was yearly set
aside--forty days of dwelling within the temple of self, forty days of
reverence for being, of consciousness of new birth. Then the emergence,
then the apotheosis of expression typifying and typified by Spring--the
time when bursting, pressing life almost breaks bounds, when birth and
the impulse to birth are in every form of life, without and within.
These festivals are not arbitrary in date. They grow out of the
universal experience.

Is it not then cause for stupefaction that this time of "divine
bestowal" should have become so physical a thing? From the ancient
perception, to have slipped into a sense of annual social comradeship
and good will and peace was natural and fine--to live in the little what
will some day be true in the large. But from this to have plunged down
into a time of frantic physical bestowals, of "present trading," of
lists of Grace and Margaret and Philip, of teeming shops with hunting
and hunted creatures within, of sacrificial trees and beasts, of a
sovereign sense of good for me and mine and a shameless show of Lord
and Lady Bountiful ... how can that have come about, how can the great
festival have been so dishonoured?

Not all dishonoured, for within it is its own vitality which nothing can
dishonour. Through all the curious variations which it receives at our
hands, somet