Deep Christmas and the Second Coming

After each Christmas and each Christmas season, the fortunate who aren’t in the middle of a crisis have enough energy to feel a let down. There is in fact an actual spirit of joy and peace and merriment that pervades this season, it is not fake or forced, and when it goes you feel blah.

“Well, just keep Christmas in your heart all year round.”  You can say it, but you can’t do it.

But that doesn’t mean you need to despair.

In the Book of Mormon Lehi has a dream where he wanders in a dark, dreary wilderness until he finally comes to a tree that is full of light and delicious white fruit.  He eats and is filled with joy.  There are others in the dream.  Some come and stay at the tree with him.  Some come, eat, but then wander out again into the dark wilderness and are lost.  The only difference between the two groups of people is that those who stay are the people who keep eating the fruit.  Those who get lost are the ones who only eat once.  Lehi’s Dream is only averted to once or twice in the later sections of the Book of Mormon but the message of the dream can be found on nearly every page.  Spiritual experiences are not one and done.  They do not last.  You must come back to them over and over.

In Lehi’s dream the fruit is more or less explicitly Christmas–Jesus Christ being born into the world.  At least, when the heavenly messenger who interprets the dream is asked to explain the tree and the fruit, he shows a vision of Mary and her child.  It sounds sentimental to say that one message of the Book of Mormon is that we have to keep coming back to Christmas, but that is one message.

Christmas gets deeper, and that is because each year the joy and peace and celebration partakes a little of all the celebrations that have come before.

That has been a hopeful message for me this year.  Someone very close to us has become deeply ill in a way that promises to make her suffer for a long time, maybe even the rest of her life, and it is painful to watch her struggle in pain.  The thought of future Christmases has given some comfort, and thinking of that  has put me in a frame of mind to really understand  the nature of the Second Coming, something I hadn’t grasped as fully before.

I grew up thinking of the Second Coming as a horror and a thing to fear.  Now I think it may be something like Christmas.  Signs in the skies, angels singing, peace and innocence restored to the earth, great merriment, light in the darkness, darkness made into celebration and joy.   The judgment and throwing down of wicked things that come with it is in a way incidental.

There will be a Last Christmas and it will never end.