As a child, my hands held each day like a ball; my holiest secret the dark halls of night. Is this so any more? The child's eyes are still there but they see different things now. The kingdoms of fantasy have not disappeared - but they take a different form. This fact is very difficult to isolate and understand, because childhood itself disappears and becomes a foreign land. But the eyes of the child are still the truest - within the whole human being. The earnestness with which a child plays, the complete acceptance of the world he or she creates - its inner consistency - contain everything we need to make ourselves into proper citizens of the universe. And here I'm trying to reach out to something an adult can hardly understand - to confess that I'm a child of the world who needs to 'play' with truth and with the elements of life in order to reintegrate myself into existence.
But everything I want to say is evaporating before me, as ideas will do. It's dying into adulthood, losing the power of true conception. I want to reach out to that child, but he says, 'I have played truly - what will you do?' And I search frantically for my inner relationship to truth, to trust, to real reality - the one which hides behind our make-believe false reality and which is like a ball in the hands. And all the while I know I must be an adult who is a child - who can answer the question, 'What will you do?' The Christmas story is like this of course - to be able to look into that child's eyes. Do we expect that he will only look into ours?
But before I dissolve into sentimentality I must make another assertion: I believe with every fibre of my being that that child can be reborn in us. I believe he will bring with him the proper relationship to truth and reality. But he needs the older friend to say, 'Yes, I can help you, I can teach you - I will sacrifice everything I want for myself in order to do that. That is what I will do.' Then you will see a smile on the face of that child broad enough to light up the whole world.
Jay
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