Between December 27, 1973 and February 8, 1977, Helen Schucman, scribe of A Course in Miracles, wrote down a series of thirteen poems, all addressed to Jesus. This series explored the full spectrum of Helen's stormy relationship with the one she referred to as: “My Lord, my Love, my Life” (“Love Song,” The Gifts of God, p. 53). Some of the poems reflected her love and dedication to Jesus, while others expressed her hurt, anger, and disap­pointment at the “fact” that he did not keep his promises to her. On New Year's Day, 1974, Helen wrote the second poem in this series: “Bright Stranger.” These verses more honestly explore Helen's relationship with Jesus, placing the responsibility for his absence in her life squarely on her own shoulders. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Strange was my Love to me. For when He came
I did not know Him. And He seemed to me
To be but an intruder on my peace.
I did not see the gifts He brought, nor hear
His soft appeal. I tried to shut Him out
With locks and keys that merely fell away
Before His coming. I could not escape
The gentleness with which He looked at me.
I asked Him in unwillingly, and turned
Away from Him. But He held out His hand
And asked me to remember Him. In me
An ancient Name began to stir and break
Across my mind in gold. The light embraced
Me deep in silence till He spoke the Word,
And then at last I recognized my Lord.
                   (The Gifts of God, p. 43)

The aspect of the poem I wish to focus on in this article is the powerlessness of Helen's attempts, mirroring our own, to keep Jesus' love away. One of the most prom­inent themes in the text's symphonic structure is what we can refer to as the Atonement principle. One of its earliest statements comes in this form:

Peace is a natural heritage of spirit. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is not free to establish what his inheritance is (T-3.VI.10:1-2).

Thus we are totally free within our dream of separation to believe anything we choose. In the context of the above statement we understand how we can choose to see our­selves as separated children of the ego. However, this does not mean that we can actually change our true inheritance as the one Child of God, our natural heritage of spirit. This theme, again, recurs throughout the text, reflecting its centrality in Jesus' correction of the ego's thought system of separation and usurpation. It is also a most happy- making theme for us whenever it is presented, for it serves as a continual reminder that we have no real power over God. It is the ego's belief that we do have this power that is

the birthplace of guilt. Who usurps the place of God and takes it for himself now has a deadly “enemy.” And he must stand alone in his protection, and make himself a shield to keep him safe from fury that can never be abated, and vengeance that can never be satis­fied (M-17.5:7-9).

Who, then, can protect us if God Himself is perceived to be our enemy, hellbent on our punishment and destruc­tion? In the end, therefore, this fact of the Atonement will prove to be our greatest comfort, for it means we did not do what we believed; God is not destroyed; His Son Christ is not crucified; we did nothing wrong. Indeed, nothing happened: “Not one note in Heaven's song was missed” (T-26.V.5:4)

This sense of comfort is similar to what children feel when they know that they cannot control their parents or other authoritative figures. Each temper tantrum, each act of resistance, is a fervent and plaintive call to be stopped and controlled; not punitively, to be sure, but gently and firmly. Such gentle firmness alone can let children know that they are indeed children, and thus will be protected and nourished as they grow. On the other hand, to be able to manipulate, seduce, and control, fosters deep-seated anxiety that reflects children's growing awareness that they are indeed on their own, for there is no one strong enough to care for them. Children almost instinctively sense parental anger, frustration, and punitive responses for what they truly are: defensive reactions designed to conceal their own underlying inadequacy and fear. How then, children conclude, can we be taken care of by them, the adults who are already fearful of their inherent vulner­ability in a hostile, uncaring universe? Who, again, is there to protect us when authoritativeness shifts to authoritari­anism? Such overwhelming anxiety, born of the belief that we must take care of ourselves, is the ultimate source of the special relationship, the mother of all ego defenses that calls upon our own cleverness and wiles to ensure that our needs are met since, after all, there is no one else who can or will meet them.

This dynamic becomes even more powerfully relevant to us as students of A Course in Miracles when we con­sider its metaphysical underpinnings. The last thing in the world our frightened separated selves need is to have a God (or Teacher) Who overreacts to our temper tantrums and infantile, selfish attempts to fill our Father's shoes by usurping His role as Creator. That is why Jesus repeatedly comforts us in the Course with the happy fact that God does not even know about a separation that never hap­pened, and indeed, never could happen (see, e.g., T-4.II.8:6-7). Again -- “Not one note in Heaven's song was missed.” The flow of music in God's symphony of love and oneness was totally unaffected by the tiny, mad idea (T-27.VIII.6:2), and thus remains unchanged throughout all our cacophonous sounds of separation and specialness, of guilt and fear. Heaven's non-reaction thus serves as the supreme model for our learning. Jesus' statements about himself as our model (e.g., T-6.in.2:1) but reflect in spe­cific form the archetypal pattern of God's “response.” Our Creator's not even noticing our tiny, mad idea illustrates to us -- who most certainly did notice it -- how not to make the error real when someone is having an ego tantrum. The power of love is found in its non-opposition and non-defensiveness, as we read in the text:

How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger, nor by opposing them in any way. Merely by letting reason tell you that they contradict reality. They go against what must be true. The opposition comes from them, and not reality. Reality opposes nothing. What merely is needs no defense, and offers none. Only illusions need defense because of weakness (T-22.V.1:1-8; italics mine).

How comforting then is Helen's poem, for its central theme, once again, is the inadequacy of the ego's defenses against Jesus' love:

…I tried to shut Him¹ out
With locks and keys that merely fell away
Before His coming.

Helen's locks and keys can be thought of as the many forms taken by our special relationships, more specifically our judgments and our hates. These clearly are our ego's attempts at projection, making someone else -- in this case Jesus -- responsible for what we secretly accuse ourselves of having done: the hidden hates and secret sins Jesus refers to near the end of the text (T-31.VIII.9:2). Thus we read in “The Ancient Love,” another of Helen's “Jesus” poems:

Love, You are silent.…
…Is silence what You gave
In golden promise as the Son of God?
Is this bleak unresponsive shadowland
The overcoming that You offered.…
…You promised that You will
Forever answer. Yet, Love, You are still.
                  (The Gifts of God, p. 44)

This transparent attempt at transposing blame through projection is one of the ego's most classic defenses. It con­veniently makes the sin of separation real -- thereby ensur­ing our survival as an individual entity -- at the same time placing responsibility for it on another. And so in Helen's poem we see that the aching silence in her heart is not her doing, but Jesus'. The thundering silence of the meaning­less (W-pI.106.2:1) comes from vacating the place of love in her mind. His presence has disappeared behind the hate-filled veils that Helen -- and indeed, all of us -- had caused to drop when that presence became too threaten­ing. The good news, however, is that our rejection of love, and disappearance from it has not caused love to vanish. As Jesus reminds us early in the text:

Only those who give over all desire to reject can know that their own rejection is impossible. You have not usurped the power of God, but you have lost it. Fortunately, to lose something does not mean that it has gone. It merely means that you do not remember where it is. Its existence does not depend on your ability to identify it, or even to place it (T-3.VI.9:1-5).

Thus our fear has no power over Heaven's love. The fact that Jesus is experienced as gone does not mean he is. His love has not truly disappeared; only our awareness of it.

The question remains, however: Why, then, is Jesus' love threatening; so threatening in fact that we need to keep it away with locks and keys? It makes no sense, really, to keep away the one who can lead us out of hell. But, of course, making this body and world our home makes no sense, for as the workbook tells us:

This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place that called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is the voice reminds you of. Yet still you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown. Nothing so definite that you could say with certainty you are an exile here. Just a persistent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again (W-pI.182.1).

And yet we stubbornly maintain that we are at home here, despite this haunting memory in our minds, despite the obvious pain and misery that life in the body inevitably entails. Why? Why choose a life of fear -- the stranger -- instead of a life of love, our Self? Another workbook les­son answers the question:

What could the reason be except that you had asked this stranger in to take your place, and let you be a stranger to yourself? No one would let himself be dispossessed so needlessly, unless he thought there were another home more suited to his tastes (W-pI.160.3:2-3).

This home more suited to our tastes is fear, for our sepa­rated and individualized life has its origin in that wrong-minded state. Since ideas leave not their source, as Jesus frequently reminds us, then we -- the idea of a fearful Son -- have never left our source in the thought of fear in the mind. To reject fear is therefore to reject our self. To revisit the theme of our earlier quotation: We are free within our illusion to believe that love is fearful, and fear is loving, but that has no effect on the reality. Indeed, we -- the Self God created -- are at home; fear is the stranger in our minds (W-pI.160). The locks and keys -- our projections of hate and judgment -- are but the desper­ate attempts to retain our identity as separate and special selves. And these defenses are not our own alone, for Helen's poem speaks for all of us who so insanely try to keep away the one who truly loves us.

Thus it is that Jesus' ever-present love, despite our attempts and protestations to the contrary, should be our model for looking beyond the barriers of hate to the love that burns so deeply within all of God's Sons. We need him to teach us how to touch the heart of our brothers' pain, seeing through their locks and keys -- their defenses that we are asked to see as calls for love. Jesus' mercy and kindness should be our own, a prayer that is echoed in the concluding lines of Helen's lovely poem, “A Jesus Prayer,” that is addressed to him:

A perfect picture of what I can be
You show to me, that I might help renew
Your brothers' failing sight. As they look up
Let them not look on me, but only You.
                  (The Gifts of God, p. 83)

We all are tempted to keep the “stranger” of love away, for its presence of all-inclusiveness threatens the very bastions of our ego's fortress of separation and judg­ment. Indeed, as was articulated in Helen's very first poem, “The Gifts of Christmas,” a poem incidentally writ­ten on Christmas Day in 1969:

Christ passes no one by. By this you know
He is God's Son. You recognize His touch
In universal gentleness. His Love
Extends to everyone. His eyes behold
The Love of God in everything He sees.
No words but those His Father's Voice dictates
Can reach His ears.
                  (The Gifts of God, p. 95; italics mine)

It is precisely this universality of Christ's Love that is the source of our need to defend against it. Our very exist­ence as a special self, separate and different from our Cre­ator and Source, depends on keeping others separate and different from us. Only in that way can we maintain the illusion of our separate and different identity. The Word of God that Helen finally heard speaks of Atonement for all God's Sons, without exception. So much, then, for the evi­dence and justification for our petty judgments and pro­jected hates. They are not the words of Jesus and so they cannot be real and cannot be heard, except in illusions. That is why we seek to keep the loving presence of Jesus estranged from us in the realm of illusion, and the illusion of fear and hate as friends and allies.

Though the following lines were written at Easter time, they are nonetheless appropriate for the Christmas season:

I was a stranger and you took me in, not knowing who I was. Yet for your gift of lilies you will know. In your forgiveness of this stranger, alien to you and yet your ancient Friend, lies his release and your redemption with him (T-20.I.4:3-5).

It is through our forgiveness of our special love and spe­cial hate partners that these bitter locks and keys fall away and the bright light surrounding the stranger suddenly illu­minates his face. And we can see, and we can hear!

In conclusion, let us pray that we all echo Jesus' New Year's resolution from the text:

Make this year different by making it all the same (T-15.XI.10:11).

Let us then pledge to ourselves that this will be the year -- different from the others -- when we see all our relation­ships and situations as serving the same purpose of help­ing us give Jesus the key to our locks, that they may gently fall away “before his coming.” Thus does his lovely light illuminate our darkened hearts, heretofore barricaded by our fear and hate. In this new though ancient light we are able to find his hand that has never ceased reaching for ours. His the hand that takes us across the bridge that leads from the ego's world of fear to the real world of forgive­ness and love; his the Word that speaks Atonement; and ours the word that says, at last, Amen. This word will then be our gift to each other and to ourselves, this Christmas season and every season, without exception. We shall have demonstrated that the ego's separating fear has no power over the love of God's one Son, and we happily say, para­phrasing Helen's line:

Christ passes no one by. By this we know
We are God's Son.

FOOTNOTE: 1. Helen always capitalized pronouns relating to Jesus. This is unlike what is done in A Course in Miracles, where the lower-case pronoun emphasizes his inherent equality with us as part of God's one Son.