A gift unbidden

The most beautiful gift I received this holiday season was not intended as a Christmas present. Like all great gifts, it came unbidden. And unlike the gifts given out of duty, as so many are during Christmas, this treasure did not cost the giver any money, but it is priceless to me and I already count it among my most cherished possessions.

I received the gift at the Upper Delaware Writers Collective meeting at the beginning of this month. As we gathered, shed our coats and greeted each other around the table, one of the members handed each of us a tiny, white, paperback booklet along with some web pages she had printed out about the book’s author.

In 1953, Mildred Norman Ryder became the first woman to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. After she completed that journey, she set out on another, longer, and more profound one. Following a spiritual awakening, she shed her worldly identity, called herself Peace Pilgrim, and began a 28-year-long pilgrimage which ended with her death in 1981.

She wrote: “I have walked 25,000 miles as a penniless pilgrim. I own only what I wear and what I carry in my small pockets.… With me I always carry my peace message: This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love. There is nothing new about this message except the practice of it.”

This gift, entitled Steps Toward Inner Peace: Harmonious Principles for Human Living, and compiled from Peace Pilgrim’s talks, personal letters and interviews, keeps her message alive and is sent free to any who asks (www.peacepilgrim.net).

I found an irony in reading this inspirational woman’s simple message during the holiday season. Her words emphasize how far we have strayed from what matters. Peace Pilgrim wrote, “unnecessary possessions are unnecessary burdens.”

A study of the historical development of the holiday reveals that in the 1930s, the powerful forces of advertising transformed Christmas from a religious celebration into a time of extravagant and excessive spending. The “Saint” in Saint Nicholas disappeared and the commercial icon Santa Claus emerged to sell everything from televisions to toothpaste.

It isn’t surprising that many Americans feel the unnecessary burden Peace Pilgrim refers to. December is a wearisome month, fraught with too many trips to the mall, too little time to do too much, and nothing to show for all the frenzy except a nagging feeling that we really can’t wait until it’s all over in January when we’ll have to face the enormous bills that must be paid.

A few Americans, myself among them, have given up this consumerism. Our Christmas begins the day after Thanksgiving with Buy Nothing Day. I forsake the malls and all the “getting and spending,” to quote William Wordsworth. I try all year long to remember that material possessions do not measure happiness or success. I aspire to the kind of life Peace Pilgrim embodied, nurturing compassion, love, gratitude within my soul, and then hopefully passing those things on to the people who enter my sphere.

So much has already been written about the true meaning of Christmas, but this year, those messages take on an even sharper relief. Our leaders are talking war. Our sons are about to be called to battle to lose their lives. Our media discount our enemy, as if their deaths by our destructive hands do not matter. Neither the man whose birth we celebrate nor Peace Pilgrim, who manifested his message, could sanction any of it.

I want to remember these words, written in the little book which has graced my life: “All of us can work for peace. We work right where we are, right within ourselves, because the more peace we have within ourselves, because the more peace we have within our lives, the more we can reflect into the outer situation.”

It’s a kind of prayer. It goes well with the holiday season.

Marcia Nehemiah, Associate Editor