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The Promise of Hope
(Volume 8 Number 4 December 1997)
Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.
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The following stanzas are the opening four of one of Helen Schucman's last poems, "The Resurrection and the Life," written on New Year's Day, 1978. It is a particularly interesting piece in its integration of Easter and Christmas themes. Indeed, Helen had expressed to me the thought that she felt it was really two poems, the first being these first four stanzas, and the second the remaining three. I discuss the poem and Helen's reaction to it in Absence from Felicity, pp. 431-33. Here, then, are its opening stanzas, which serve as a fitting introduction to this article:
As Jesus repeatedly teaches us in A Course in Miracles, the ego's goal in making the physical world was (and continues to be) to perpetuate the illusion of hope in an inherently hopeless situation. It accomplishes this goal by impelling us to seek and find the answers to our perceived problems in anything and everything that is external to our minds, thus of course ensuring that we shall never truly find them, since the Answer can only be found within the mind that the ego has all but successfully buried:
Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. All its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There is no choice in its alternatives. Seek not escape from problems here. The world was made that problems could not be escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to gain that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death (T-31.IV.2:1-11).And it is the darkness of death that attracts us, as the section on the third obstacle to peace explains (T-19.IV-C). Thus, we intentionally come into this choiceless world to live, suffer, and ultimately to die. Yet the ego's strategy in making up the illusory world was to conceal this underlying attraction behind a veil of forgetfulness. It is this deliberately selected amnesia that prevents our remembering that it has indeed been our minds' choice to live in the darkness of separation, individuality, and specialness. This is really our decision not to return to the light of truth, the loving Presence of the Holy Spirit which, in our right minds, continually calls to us to choose again. His call is a winged whispering that gently reminds us midst the ego's raucous shrieking to choose the living Christ -- the true Son of God -- as our Identity, and not the moribund travesty of creation the ego calls "Son." Our lives here are classrooms, as Jesus teaches us in A Course in Miracles, wherein we have the choice of learning either the ego's dark lessons of guilt, hate, and despair, or the Holy Spirit's light-filled lessons of forgiveness, love, and hope. Choosing, according to the Course, very simply comes down to which teacher we choose to learn from, a decision based upon the lessons we wish to learn. Because we have chosen the ego, life has indeed been difficult, the world being a "dry and dusty" place "where starved and thirsty creatures come to die" (W-pII.13.5:1). Yet, "in crucifixion is redemption laid" (T-26.VII.17:1), and so when life seems darkest and most futile, we can still choose to hear the inner Voice speak of another way of perceiving the world. All that is required from us is the little willingness to ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help. This entails our willingness to be still and let Him speak the way. "The wise are silent," Helen's poem tells us, for they have seen through the ego's trickery and therefore realize that no response to illusion is needed. Patience is one of the ten characteristics of advanced teachers of God -- the wise ones -- for they "are certain of the outcome [and] can afford to wait, and wait without anxiety" (M-4.VIII.1:1). Indeed, one of A Course in Miracles' most important descriptions of forgiveness underscores this aspect of patient and trustful waiting:
Forgiveness…is still, and quietly does nothing.… It merely looks, and waits, and judges not (W-pII.1.4:1,3).This patient looking and waiting is born of the certainty that things are not what they appear to be. The ego's darkened image of failure and death falls softly away before the gentle advent of forgiveness, held out to us by Jesus, our Western world's greatest symbol of life and truth. As the poem in its opening verse states of the crucified and seemingly deceased Jesus: "Come, My child/And judge Him not. He is not dead. So bright/His radiance that nothing still remains/Obscured from Heaven in the doubt of night." In other words, our perceptions lie, for they bring to us witnesses to the seeming reality of the separated world of time and space, gain and loss, and life and death. Our -problems here seem so real, our needs so pressing -- it is -- almost impossible to recognize the ego's sleight of hand that has us see something where nothing is, and not see what is truly there. It is for good reason that throughout the Course Jesus describes the ego in words suggesting a magician, the master of illusion. And so A Course in Miracles teaches us how wrong we are, and indeed have always been -- about everything. That is why the poem says: "So still the birth you did not understand/Who came to you. Nor can you see/The Child of hope Who in a manger lies." Our individual lives are the mangers in which, to recast the lovely line from the workbook (W-pII.182.10:1), Christ is reborn each time the wanderer returns to his home. Our home is temporarily the right mind, which corrects and -undoes the ego's wrong-minded insistence that our home is in the body and the world, an existence based upon the -illusory order of needs, derived from our sense of lack. This lack begins at birth and does not cease until death, the seeming end of the ego's bodily dream. And within this dream of scarcity, the birthplace of all specialness, we stumble around with eyes that do not see, and brains that do not understand, even though the Child of hope rests within our minds, patiently awaiting our decision to return to Him, our true Self. The redemption that lies in crucifixion rests within the power of our minds to choose to see the world through eyes that do see, enabling us to share in Christ's vision. Just like the freed prisoner in Plato's famous allegory, the wise ones who see though Christ's eyes know the difference between appearance and reality, between shadows and the light. Thus, again, they are not taken in by the world's problems, recognizing that they are all the same. And being all alike, they require but one solution -- the vision of Christ that sees through the illusory veil of materiality to the truth within. As Jesus states about the "dark clouds of guilt":
Let your Guide teach you their unsubstantial nature as He leads you past them, for beneath them is a world of light whereon they cast no shadows (T-18.IX.8:3).And later in the text:
There is no problem, no event or situation, no perplexity that vision will not solve (T-20.VIII.5:7).Once our own voice of fear and specialness has been stilled by our decision to truly listen, a new perception comes to us (W-pII.313), and we can see and hear. The winged whispering of the Holy Spirit is allowed to speak to us at last of the simple truth of Jesus' message of resurrection and life, of forgiveness and the Love of God. The world no longer holds us by its sirenic calls that tempt us with the seeming joys of the separated life, for we have passed through the illusory world of death to the peaceful land of our gentle rebirth as God's most holy Son:
When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and seen it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and watched them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear, life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need persuade you to accept the gift of vision? And after vision, who is there who could refuse what must come after? Think but an instant just on this; you can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that there is something else for you to see (T-20.VIII.11).Historically, Christmas arose as a "pagan" celebration of revelry that centered on the winter solstice, December 22, the shortest and thus the darkest day of the year. Centuries later, Christians took this holiday for their own (eventually moved to December 25), where it became a symbol of the birth of Jesus, the Christian light of specialness that came into the darkened world (John 1:1-14). Yet as a mere symbol, Christmas can have a different meaning ascribed to it, if we so wish. In A Course in Miracles, it symbolizes the rebirth of Christ in all of us, and therefore is a true and non-special light, whose sign is a star that shines in darkness, (T-15.XI.2:1). And so Christmas is also a symbol of the promise of hope, which does not lie outside ourselves in a magical Other, but guides us rather, like a shining star above -- "unchangeable in an eternal sky" (T-30.III.8:4) -- to the Heaven within our minds (T-15.XI.2:2). It is the hope that Christ, our true Self, is born in us whenever we choose to make His Thought our own, setting behind us the shabby thoughts we once thought were worth more than the treasures of Heaven. Thus, the final stanza of Helen's wonderful poem echoes Jesus' promise of hope and comfort to all who still choose death's darkness over life's radiant light, and would prefer the mournful dirge of separation to the ancient and joyous song of union:
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