High Hopes

The sound of Christmas carols sung in God’s Own Country triggers memories of our meeting with Santa Claus in his village at the Arctic Circle some years ago. We had traveled overnight through real reindeer country to Rovaneimi, to meet Saint Nick and his elves.

Having been conditioned by childhood images of Santa created by the school of Thomas Nast, one was hoping to meet a merry old man of Falstaffian size! The real-life one turned out to be a young man of athletic build! But what seemed important was the intangible idea of Santa rather than his stolid presence!

Dutch immigrants originally took the idea of ‘St A Claus’ to the American colonies from their own legend Sinterklass. The rest of his paraphernalia was invented much later. Nevertheless, as an American mother said in a letter to her daughter struggling to make sense of Santa, "(He) is bigger than any person and his work has gone one longer than any of us have ever lived. What he does is simple, but powerful. He teaches children to have belief in something they can’t see or touch."

This capacity to believe is not as trivial as it may seem. It involves what Sant Sai (Baba) calls Shraddha (faith). We need to rely on this capacity to believe throughout our lives. As the American Mom told her kid, she would need to believe in herself, in her friends and in things like love, "that great power that lights your life from inside out, even during its darkest, coldest moments". Merry Christmas!