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COMMENTARY & REVIEW 

The Flame Still Burning

At Christmas, the tale of an ancient journey to follow a star gets told and retold. Caryl Emra Farkas, reading it to her daughter, discovers fresh light.

MY FAMILY has always enjoyed reading Christmas stories together. One of our favorites is The Stone-a children's book, retelling a tale Marco Polo brought back from Persia about 700 years ago. It's an old story, but the subject is older still-the universality of God's love and humanity's continuing ability to know it.

The legend tells about three wise men who follow a star to find a king. When they arrive at the place where the star stops, the youngest and most impetuous, Jasper, rushes in first with his gift. He finds not a child, as expected, but a young man just like himself. Next, middle-aged, conservative Melchior goes in and finds neither a child nor a young man, but a man like himself. Finally, the elder Balthasar goes in and encounters an old man. Back outside, they discuss the mystery.

Then they go in again-together. Now they are met by a child who gives them a gift. During the first visit, each one had seen only what he personally understood about identity. But the gift the child gives them profoundly changes that understanding. At first the gift appears to be a worthless stone. Yet when Jasper throws it down a well, a bright flame shoots out. Then Balthasar recognizes that the gift is from God. It is His tangible and practical love, and the new king has come to show humanity their true nature as God's beloved children. Balthasar urges everyone in the caravan traveling with them to take the flame to every corner of the earth.

When I first read this story to my four-year-old daughter, she asked, "Is it still burning?"

"Of course," I told her. "Not as fire in an ancient lamp, but as God's love, which lasts forever and is always with us."

"Is it with everyone?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. I found her questions were especially compelling that year. So much had seemed to conspire to put out the flame-even in everyday events. A friend writing a December newsletter for his interfaith group gave up trying to find an inspiring closing to the report, because he was afraid that his words might seem sectarian. Other friends and family members felt stressed about trying to keep up with the gifts and parties, the rush and demands.

"Is the flame still burning?" "Is it with everyone?" I took those questions with me daily and prayed for answers. In the Bible, St. Paul writes, "If ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."2 That meant to me that I had a right to see God's presence and love-not merely as a nice thought, but as a living reality. It's God's promise, His gift. I began to find Christmas in places I hadn't expected: in small kindnesses in the midst of seeming busyness, in acts of love among family members, in the quietness of a winter night when I went walking with our dog. The "flame" of love grew in my heart until I started to see that it was a defining light, showing everything-each individual, all nature-as held in God's immense goodness. And the more aware of it I became, the more I saw His love around me.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "As a material, theoretical life-basis is found to be a misapprehension of existence, the spiritual and divine Principle of man dawns upon human thought, and leads it to 'where the young child was,'-even to the birth of a new-old idea, to the spiritual sense of being and of what Life includes."3 "Divine Principle" is Love, which we can never lose. Even in what seem to be the unfavorable conditions of a material world, God's love is right there. Every time we base our actions on eternal Love, we see proofs that love is natural to everyone.

Christmas tidings of God's love for His children reach out to humanity with the revolutionary good news of our spiritual identity. God's gift, His love, meets us where we are, as we are. Our willingness to put aside limited conceptions of ourselves and each other makes it possible for us to become participants in the Christmas story. It brings us into a much larger understanding of ourselves and our connectedness with others. As my family discovered that year, we, too, can be wise men and women, feeling the transforming power of Love and gladly sharing it.

1 Dianne Hofmeyr, The Stone: A Persian Legend of the Magi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

2 Gal. 3:29.

3 Science and Health, p. 191.

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