O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light.
The hopes and fears of the years
Are met in thee tonight.

This is the first verse of a hymn we fondly sing on Christmas Eve as we celebrate and dramatise that great cosmic as well as mystical event that we call Christmas. It describes very beautifully and poetically the condition of unregenerate man. It equally beautifully describes the cosmos in its midnight hour before the creative Word went forth and Light was born.

The description fits both man and cosmos because man, the little town of Bethlehem, is a microcosm, a small universe, a reproduction in miniature of the macrocosm, the Great Universe; so what is true of the universe is true of man. The creative and evolutionary processes, which go on in the universe, go on in a similar manner in man.

Of the universe in its midnight hour before the down of creative Day, it is said in Genesis I, 1-2 "And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters". As yet God has not "spoken" the Word, and Light has yet to dawn. In the stanzas of Dzyan, quoted in The Secret Doctrine by H.P. Blavatsky, the condition is described as follows:

"Darkness alone filled the boundless all, for Father, Mother and Son [The Trinity] were once more one, and the Son had not awakened for the new wheel [cycle] and his pilgrimage thereon."

So is the little Bethlehem of man at this hour.

But the "Darkness" was not bereft of God. The Spirit of God, the Great Breath, was moving upon the face of the waters in the Great Deep. As the Stanzas of Dzyan put it, "Life pulsated unconscious in universal space". And St. John says (John 1:5): "The Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." Motion was there, but was not conscious of itself.

So it is with man, the little town of Bethlehem, in his unregenerate condition, before the mystic birth of Christ in him. The seed of Christ is in him from the very beginning, but it has not yet germinated.

"Bethlehem" means the house of God, and man, earthly man, is a house of God. St. Paul told the Corinthians, "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" (I Cor 3:16) Christ Himself, speaking of His body, said He would destroy this temple, and in three days he would raise it up (Jn 2:19). So we are Bethlehems, houses of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in us: we have inherent in us "the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (Jn. 1:9). St. Paul speaks of that inherent Divinity in us as the mystery of "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27).

But while we have this inherent Divinity in us as an inalienable heritage from the Father and the surety of our glory in the future, for along time we are unconscious of this fact. The hymn writer assures us that in the "dark streets shineth the everlasting Light", the one true Light that emanated from God the Father in the beginning.

How can the everlasting Light be shinning in the streets of our Bethelehems and yet there be darkness? But so it was with the cosmos before the Creative Day, and so it is with unregenerate man: It is not that the Light is not there; it is only that it has not become manifest objectively and so is invisible, unrevealed; it is light potential.

How long shall this condition last? Prophet Micah answers (5:3) "until the time that she which travailed has brought forth". St. Paul called the Galatians (4:19): "My children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you." The baby Christ has to be "formed" in us. This "formation" happens on the interior, invisibly, silently. The hymn writer says, "No ear may hear his coming." And the Lord Christ said (Lk. 17:20): "The kingdom of God does not come with observation." But the individual may experience it as an onset, an inflow, of an overwhelmingly delicate sensitivity, demanding absolute purity, utter humility, total dissolution of the personal self, and an expansion of the heart increasingly to encompass one's fellow men, all creatures, all Nature. It is a demand very hard indeed to answer to. But if we keep the vision before us, once we have been granted it, if we set our faces resolutely to go to Jerusalem, symbolically to walk up north the five miles from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, the Holy City, in spite of the certain knowledge that death and crucifixion of the personality are awaiting us there, then we are on the way, the Way of Holiness, leading from Christmas through the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Cross and the Dying, the Resurrection to the Ascension.

Meanwhile in our unregenerate condition the Spirit of God still moves over the face of the waters in the chambers of our hearts. Meanwhile the silent stars go by above our deep and dreamless sleep, and the Shepherds of souls, the Elder Brethren -Guides of humanity-, "watch their flocks by night". A leavening process is continuously going on within the "three measures of meal" which constitute our threefold personality, the outward man - our mental, emotional and physical nature. And this will go on "till the whole is leavened." Then Christ will be "born of Mary".