Isaiah 9:6 Meaning For a Child Is Born to Us

Something is born in you that the mind did not create. It arrives the way a child arrives, without effort, without your thinking it into being, and yet it carries the whole weight of your life upon its shoulder. This is awakened consciousness, the deep I Am beneath your name and your story.

Call it Wonderful, call it Counsellor, call it the Prince of Peace. These are not names for someone far away. They point to the stillness within you that governs without struggle. When you stop running your life from the anxious mind and let that presence lead, peace is no longer something you chase. It becomes the ground you stand on.

The child and the son name two separate events, not one. The child is the witness of a man's own birth, the self brought forth out of his own skull, that bony chamber becoming the tomb from which the risen one steps. The son is the witness of his Fatherhood, the same power grown into the one who begets. Every title belongs to human imagination, the wonderful counselor and mighty God awake at last in a person.

So a man is born once from within his own head, and then he becomes the Father who gave that life. The skull is where it happens. Nothing arrives from the sky. The image formed inside gives birth to the glorified self, and that self stands up as the everlasting Father in him.

A new self is born within, and authority passes to it, resting on the shoulder where strength is borne. The titles are not many beings but facets of one presence waking in a person: wonder at the source of things, counsel that guides from within, the might that governs the lower nature, the fathering principle that endures, and the peace that reconciles the warring parts.

The government carried on the shoulder is the rule the inner self assumes over the body once it comes into being. What religion sets far off as a coming king is the ordering power that rises in the crown and takes charge of the whole.

Child: the new self born within, small at first, that grows to rule the body. Shoulder: the bearing-place of strength where the new self takes up its government. Prince of Peace: the facet of the inner presence that reconciles the warring parts into one.

When an old story speaks of a child who is also the everlasting father, mighty yet newly born, it is not describing an ordinary infant. It reaches for the mind's oldest picture of something whole being born in a person. The contradictions are the point, since only a symbol can hold opposites together.

Such a figure rises from the deep layer we all share, below our private memories. When it takes the center of a person, the warring parts stop fighting and fall into order. That settling of the inner struggle is the peace the old words promise.