Step by Step You Unfold

It's December 24th, and Jesus is everywhere. In Christmas carols, in candlelight services, in the story told and retold about the child born in Bethlehem. So perhaps this is the right moment to see him through the eyes of the Yogis.

They tell the story of Jesus's absent years. Those formative decades between childhood and his return to public ministry that appear nowhere in the gospels. And rather than treating these years as empty, the Yogi treats them as essential.

After the early signs of unusual depth, Jesus disappears from the world’s notice. He lives quietly and obscurely. He works. He serves. He shares the ordinary conditions of human life. He watches people closely. Their suffering, their confusion, their longing for God. He does not yet speak as a teacher, because the time has not come. The work being done is not outward. It is inward.

In his book Mystic Christianity, Yogi Ramacharaka is careful to dismantle the idea of sudden spiritual greatness. The Master, he insists, does not erupt fully formed onto the world stage.