"Shepherd's Pipe Carol" and My Journey to Bethlehem

 In yesterday’s (12/20/20) posting, I said that I hoped to explore how tonight’s “Christmas Star” might lead us all to Bethlehem: “each in our own way; each in our own time; each with our own story.” Early this morning, I began today’s post. When I found myself writing the 4,798^th word, I realized that my thoughts were too many for my usual 600-word post. That many words suggested that, at another time, I might describe in a memoir my journey into the spirituality that has evolved within me over a period of eighty-four years. For now, I’ll simply summarize.

 

In 1969, I found a book, in a Minneapolis bookstore, that contained letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke to a young poet. One piece of advice he gave resonated with the Dee Ready who’d left the convent three years before and was searching for she didn’t know what. Rilke wrote:

 

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

 

And the point is to live everything. 

 

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

 

At that time, questions abounded within the dark labyrinth that was myself: Would I always be a misfit? Would I ever be loveable? Would I ever stop judging people? Was there some good I could do to justify my existence? Would I forever be needy? Was this loneliness peculiar to me or were others lonely too? And, one last question, the presence of which became like the breath I breathe, “What is the best way to love?”  

 

I began to wend my way through life. I had been raised a Roman Catholic, but as the years passed so, too, did my need for a belief in the Trinity, in the divinity of Jesus, in a personal God. Reflection on my own experience of life led me to let go of that which no longer spoke to me. Or nourished my spirit.

 

Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to live into answers. It was the beloved myth of the Christmas story that finally brought me to the spirituality that informs my life today. The “Shepherd’s Pipe Carol” by John Rutter is the Christmas carol that announced—like the dawning of a great light—the answer to my lifelong search. If you have time, please click below and listen to it.

 

Note that the carol is about a question. The shepherd boy is already “living” his way into an answer as he hurries to Bethlehem to see a baby nestled against his mother’s breast. Gathered there he will find shepherds—cold, hungry, homeless—and magi—educated, world travelers, wealthy—as well as the innkeeper and the animals who inhabit his stable.

 

The baby in that life-giving myth grew into a man. He, too, must have had questions, heartwishes. He, too, must have lived into answers. From my reading of the Christian gospels, I came to understand that he grew into a truth that envelopes us all: All that matters is inclusive love—love especially and always for the poor, the outcast, the “lowly. Moreover, if we are to give love, then we must include ourselves in the great Oneness—inclusivity—that binds us together, for time and for eternity.  

 

Love then became the theme of that man’s life. A theme born of his experience in a small Roman province called “Palestine.”

 

And that, my dear friends, became the answer to my questions also. Bethlehem for me is the answer to my deepest heartwish and my lifelong question: “How do we love best?”

 

The answer is there in the stable of each of our hearts: We love best by loving inclusively, by seeing ourselves as part of the Whole—each of us essential unto the other.

 

So simple and yet perhaps the hardest part of living: to live into the Oneness that awaits our questions. To live into the Oneness illustrated by those gathered in that stable.

 

We all have a lifelong heartwish or question; we are all on a journey to live into the answer. For me that journey, that question, that answer is the substance that is the myth of the Christmas story repeated throughout the ages. It is a necessary myth that assures me that if I am to find myself, I must live in the Holy Oneness of All Creation—all humanity and all creatures that inhabit the planet—donkeys, cows, sheep, and, oh, yes, cats! And dogs!

 

Well, I’ve now written not 600, but 827 words—a rather lengthy summary. It’s time to leave you in your own Bethlehem stable with your own questions that have become the heartwishes of your life. 

 

Peace, Merry Christmas, and Joyful Journey.