26.02.06
Christmas - Part II (Nov 28, 1997)
Posted in Transcripts at 3:02 pm by miracles 
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Notes from talk given by Linda and James Hale Nov 28, 1997
Contents
- The birth of Self
- Confusion of Sacrifice with Love
- Christmas — a time to question
- Christmas and the body
- The idea of Christ
- Christmas, the gift of choosing again.
- The True Gift: The Gift of Union.
The quotations from the Course are given in the second edition format. We have presented only the first few words of the relevant quotes and request that you look them up to read them in full as we do consider them very important.
This is the season when you would celebrate my birth into the world. Yet you know not how to do it. Let the Holy Spirit teach you, and let me celebrate your birth through Him. The only gift I can accept of you is the gift I gave to you. Release me as I choose your own release. The time of Christ we celebrate together, for it has no meaning if we are apart. T-15.X.1:5-10
Thus we are told that rather than celebrate the birth of Jesus we are to celebrate the birth of our Self. We are being led inextricably back to the fundamental process of the Course, namely, awaken to the truth of who you are, accept the Atonement for yourself. The method being used, the same method Jesus uses throughout the Course, is to look at the barriers we have placed in the way. To see them for what they are, shabby constructs erected for the sole purpose of hiding from us our Truth. At Christmas we are traditionally being presented with a barrier in that we are to celebrate the birth of one who is fundamentally different from us. Even in celebrating the birth at all are we accepting the “truth” of our condition. In celebrating the birth of one so divine as Jesus, we are also establishing our utter distance from God and our wretchedness before Him. We are accepting a place in the scheme of things that is firmly on the lower echelons. We are also accepting the elevation of “…him who would be only brother to the world.”[C-5.5:7] to someone or thing that is fundamentally different to us on an ontological level. It is this false image of him that Jesus is asking us to release him from, and in so doing, release ourselves from our own false image.
Confusion of Sacrifice with Love
And yet our relationship to Jesus is only a reflection of the relationship we have with all our brothers. The distance we seek to keep between us is but a measure of the fear we have made real, the one substitution of the belief in sacrifice to usurp the surety of Love. This single confusion is so ingrained in the very fabric of our apparent being that we are told:
Your confusion of sacrifice and love is so profound that you cannot conceive of love … T-15.X.5:8-10
We have placed limits on all that we perceive, all that we experience, all that we hope for. Our intoxication with the physical over the ethereal is so complete that the concept of giving to receive is paradoxical at best, suicidal at worst. For that is the bottom line with which the ego continues to lay claim to our allegiance. We are told that to let it go would be our death. Something the ego promises as well, only later. As we mentioned in Part I of this talk, the ego made time to keep us focused on the past so that we remain fearful of the future and thus hide the present in clouds of unknowing. We say unknowing for it is only in the present that we can know.
Christmas — a time to question
Christmas offers us such a time. But it is a time of faith, for no amount of argument will convince us of what we do not want to see. Jesus is asking us to take a leap of faith, to question, if only for an instant, our worship of fear. To question our very belief in the Father for we have made of Him that which He is not.
How fearful, then, has God become to you, and how great a sacrifice do…T-15.X.7:1-3
In our delusions we have cast God as the villain, the ego as our saviour. “Love” and safety can come only by bargain and subterfuge. We are so afraid of our one mistake, our belief that love demands sacrifice that we project it out onto our Father and thus onto all our brothers. Too afraid to see that it is only we who demand it we throw the problem away from the solution, burying it in the myriad of forms and relationships the ego tantalises us, offering us the stage to play victim and victimiser as we wish. In this way we think we can compromise with truth and save our self. Jesus tells us however that we are truly deluded in this for there can be no compromise, no bargain.
You will not succeed in being partial hostage to the ego, for it keeps no bargains…T-15.X.9
By believing in the power of sacrifice and that the demand for it comes from outside, from our brothers, from Jesus and from God, we continue to look in the only place where there is no solution to our dilemma, outside. That is why it is only in our recognition that we made sacrifice that we can finally let it go. All our triumphs and tribulations, comings and goings, “joinings” and partings, are simply our attempts to avoid this single recognition.
Christ is the extension of God. In our willingness to awaken to the child of Christ within us we play host to Him who would ask of us nothing. Rather than make demands He offers us release from the chains we have laid upon ourselves. He offers to take from us all that we think would harm us. He offers us release from the delusion of who we think we are.
As we have already mentioned, traditionally Christmas is the celebration of the birth of a body. A human body, albeit of divine origin. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…” [John 1:14] A statement that not only differentiates us from the Father but establishes the reality of the body. A body, not made by us, but by the Father Himself. Or so we are supposed to believe. We are told in the workbook:
The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built, to separate parts of his Self from other parts…W-pII.5.1
It is this belief in the safety offered by the body that our confusion of love and sacrifice seems solid. For while we believe we are a body we believe ourselves to be alone and separate. Moreover we believe that the body can offer us some relief.
Power, fame, money, physical pleasure; who is the “hero” to whom all these things belong…M-13.2:6-9
Therefore in our confusion over what we really are, we believe that to give up the things of the body is indeed a sacrifice. Our learning has not yet reached the stage in which we can recognise that the world is nothing and has nothing to give. That in giving it up, we give up nothing to reclaim our inheritance as an irreplacible part of everything. Deep down inside, we know this. We sense the real sacrifice that we have made, and it is the pain of this awareness compels us to avoid that very recognition.
Given that we believe our wholeness has been sacrificed we believe we are justified in sacrificing others. In our seeking of love or completion we instead:
…seek for sacrifice and find it. T-15.XI.6:1
Not knowing that…
…The meaning of love lies in what you have cast outside yourself…T-15.XI.6:4-5
Christ is not a body of flesh, but an idea of Truth. An idea born in you each time you are willing to look with Jesus or the Holy Spirit upon a brother and see in him the truth that he is not a body. For as you release your brother from the prison you have erected around him, so too do you release yourself from that which you are not.
The lesson I was born to teach, and still would teach…T.15.XI.7:5-6
The celebration of Christ’s mass is thus the celebration of the end of sacrifice rather than it veneration. It is the recognition that the body does not in any sense define us, and that we are all an idea in the mind of God or a thought of the single Thought.
That is because you recognize, however dimly, that God is an idea…T-15.VI.4:4-7
On this level, love is perfect, communication is complete, and loss or gain are both meaningless concepts. Physical birth and death are but dreams, and so implicitly, is everything which happens in between. It is significant that the two most overt celebrations of the Christian world revolve around the birth and death of Jesus. The Course is a call to relate to these events as symbols which reflect to us, and can lead us to, a knowledge that the only true birth is a re-birthing of our awareness of Christ through the Holy Spirit; the ressurection is but a relinquishing of the idea of separation and a reawakening of the awareness of our eternal nature as Christ–God’s Son, and death is but a dream of “peace.”
Teacher of God, your one assignment could be stated thus…M-27.7:1
In this there can be no compromise for to attempt to do so is to endeavour to combine orders of reality inappropriately, which can only result in conflict and confusion. The key always lies in who or what we believe ourselves to be. If we identify ourselves as a body, the gifts we give and receive will be bound to the limitations inherent in it. This is the alternative:
When the body ceases to attract you, and when you place no value …. T-15.IX.7.
Christmas, the gift of choosing again.
Christmas is a time of much gift giving. We recognise, however dimly, that the most important giving is to do with something intrinsic to us. It is, therefore, a time when we make time to be with the ones who are closest to us, or, to extend a hand to those who are stranger to us, or who might be less fortunate than ourselves. We have the saying, “It is the thought that counts,” rather than how humble or grand our physical gift might be. Christmas is seen as a time of reflection in which we think about the quality of our life–”and so this is Christmas, and what have we done?”
Yet, as we have all no doubt experienced, Christmas can also be a time in which worship of the body can reach almost hysterical proportions. By the time we have gone through the hurley burly of gift buying and wrapping, organisation of social engagements, making sure we have left no one out, our bellies are likely to be too full, or we are too tipsy to have the space to quietly appreciate each other, let alone our relationship to Jesus or God. Also, Christmas can be a time of great ambivalence. The ego world whips out its best in terms of what it can give and seem to provide, and yet behind it we can sense the personal conflicts, the judgements, and the old wounds which still tend to keep us feeling isolated and separate. Christmas in the West is like a great pressure cooker time of apparent good will and joining–yet the very intensity of it tends to reveal our ill will and lack of desire to sincerely join (for all our “good” intentions.) For some, Christmas is the loneliest and most desolate time of the year.
Nor does Christmas, as it is popularly practised, answer the great riddle of the passing of time and the onset of death. Indeed, there tends to be such a build up in and around Christmas, that by the time it comes and goes, it is almost a non event. The party has to end, as all parties must, and our ordinary life resumes again. For all our wishing of a happy new year we all know that many will not be there to celebrate next year.
Christmas can however be a very powerful time if we learn how to relate to it consciously. It can help us to understand and do these things:
- See through the ego’s game. No amount of material gifts, pleasures etc. can compensate for, hide, or get rid of our felt lacks and limitations. Moreover, we start to see that our incessant pleasure seeking masks great guilt and fear.
- Open up to the truth that our happiness does exist beyond the bodily level and is no way dependant on it. We can transcend the condition of being human, and in that learn what it is to give and love. Only Spirit has the freedom in which to truly give.
- Now that we are learning in which direction to look for salvation, we can let go guilt for all the times we could not love or give, but rather sought to bargain and blame. As minuscule limitations, apparently separated off from the great sea of life, we were far too fearful of our own survival to ever give of ourselves. Once we begin to see this, we let go our own guilt and find the space in which to forgive others their limitations. Christmas can indeed be a time to, with gentleness and humility in our hearts, choose again.
We are asked:
So will the year begin in joy and freedom…. T-15.XI.10:8-14
The True Gift: The Gift of Union.
Jesus, in speaking of our celebration of his birth offers this key to understanding what the true gift is:
We who are one cannot give separately. …T-15.X.3
Jesus suggests when we are willing to accept our relationship with him is real, all else will fall into place and we will no longer have a misguided attraction to the things of this world. You will recall from Part I of this talk that Jesus was a human who so completely identified with the Christ, that he became that. In becoming the Christ wholly and completely, with no part that he would keep separate, he re-awakened to his eternal relationship to the Father, such that to relate to Jesus Christ is to relate to the Father. That relationship is the only thing which exists in truth–Jesus simply accepted that completely.
Our gift then, becomes one of relinquishing in any instant the false thoughts which make an image of our -selves, so that we then become free to accept what we are beneath the veil of our delsuional self concepts:
This Christmas give the Holy Spirit everything that would hurt you… T-15.XI.3.
To go back to the image of sacrifice, we give up all that sacrifices the truth of relationship, so that only love remains. To recall Helen’s beautiful poem, “The Holiness of Christmas*”
…Nothing else you lay before|
The newly-born except your doubts and fears,
Your pale illusions and your sickly pride,
Your hidden venom and your little love,
Your meager treasures and unfaithfulness
To all the gifts that God has given you….
So the process is, as always, one of bringing illusions to the truth, darkness to light, limitations to the unlimited, and fear to love. Given that what is other than the truth is what we have made and therefore believe in, it is we who must see through our own creations, and in doing so, realise we do not want them any more. Indeed, they hide from us what we truly want–to be as our Father created us, totally, completely and wholly, because that is only the way we can be as God created us.
God’s creation is indeed a gift, it is what it is because it is a gift. So we do not need to earn the awareness of union. What we do need to do is be willing to give up all that blocks our awareness of it.
When we give up these blocks we finally begin to realise that to be in relationship to our brother is to be in relationship to God; to be in relationship to God is to be in relationship to our brother. It was only in the hallucinatory world of the ego in which it seemed to be meaningful to think we had relationships, some being more special than others, and some not existing at all. Beyond the hierarchical world of dreams, relationships, and communication is total and complete, eternally. Not even our worst ego manifestations can threaten that. When we begin to sense this, we cease to feel vulnerable all the time, so that we are no longer afraid to be willing to give the gift of lack of judgement. In other words, acceptance of ourselves and each other becomes meaningful. And with acceptance there dawns appreciation and not far behind appreciation, love is. Then we can begin to feel as an actuality the advice Jesus gave early in the text:
You are the work of God,… T-1.III.2:3-4
Our gift to Jesus and ourselves is to give up all thoughts that contradict this truth. We will naturally then, be vehicles of light, pointing the way to that which exists beyond all darkness. In any moment we can be the “Star of Christmas” leading our brothers home. That is the dawning of Christ.
Linda & James Hale
“Portions from A Course in Miracles Copyright © 1975, 1985, 1992 reprinted by permission of the Foundation for Inner Peace, Inc.
The ideas represented herein are the personal interpretation of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the copyright holder.”
* “The Gifts of God” Helen Schucman. Foundation for Inner Peace, Inc. 1982