In past Christmas editions of The Lighthouse I quoted from Helen's early Christmas poem, “The Gifts of Christmas.” I do so again, as an introduction to this article.

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.
(The Gifts of God, p. 95; italics ours)

The hallmark of God's Love, reflected in this world, is that no one is excluded from its gentle touch. No one. In a sense, this makes life here quite easy, as all judgments would be subsumed under the Holy Spirit's one judgment: love -- its expression, or the call for it (T-14.X.7:1). Yet living this principle of true judgment is far from easy, for the law of specialness demands someone be sacrificed if we are to find peace. This is certainly not the peace of which Jesus speaks, in which all are included within its stately calm and sacrifice is asked of no one (T-18.I.8:2). Indeed, A Course in Miracles teaches that God cannot be remembered in a state of war:

The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness (T-23.I.1:1-2).

Thus, since the Sonship of Christ is perfect Oneness, for my mind to withhold even a single member from entry into its circle of Atonement is to declare war on the whole of it. Christ is welcomed into a manger of holiness and peace, not a battleground of sin and hate, as Jesus reminds us:

My birth in you is your awakening to grandeur. Welcome me not into a manger, but into the altar to holiness, where holiness abides in perfect peace. (T-15.III.9:5-6).

How difficult it is to realize that our grandeur is everyone's; one person's holiness is all persons'! Moreover, the altar to God can be reached only if we bring all people with us -- not in form certainly, but in the content of the mind's forgiveness, which omits not a single Son. In other words, all special love and hate relationships -- our dance partners on the floor of death -- have to be seen as one with us, a vision that undoes thoughts of judgment and condemnation. As we shall now read, if there is no condemnation in God, there can be none in His Son. If, then, we seek to exclude our brothers by attacking them, we cannot but be excluding ourselves, for our Self is one in the Wholeness of Its Creator:

You cannot enter God's Presence if you attack His Son.…Christ is at God's altar, waiting to welcome His Son. But come wholly without condemnation, for otherwise you will believe that the door is barred and you cannot enter.…Christ waits for your acceptance of Him as yourself, and of His Wholeness as yours.… There is no condemnation in the Son, for there is no condemnation in the Father. Sharing the perfect Love of the Father the Son must share what belongs to Him, for otherwise he will not know the Father or the Son (T-11.IV.5:6; 6:1-2; 7:3; 8:2-3).

Thus, to enter the stately calm wherein dwells God's holy altar, and remember our Identity as Christ -- to “know the Father [and] the Son” -- we need to turn away from the temptation to see God's Son as separate and isolated, and rather see him as he really is -- one. The ego's raucous shrieks (W-pI.49.4:3) of judgment and hate are reinterpreted for us by the Holy Spirit, and become a red flag that signals the need to turn within for the problem and its solution.

A guiding rule of thumb as we go through our days is this: Have no thought about someone you would not wish to share with everyone. This principle of sameness reflects Jesus' New Year prayer for us:

Make this year different by making it all the same. And let all your relationships be made holy for you. This is our will. Amen (T-15.XI.10:11-14).

This directly corrects the ego's principle of differences -- the source of its thought system of separation, as well as the means whereby it sustains that thought system through the practice of specialness. Thus we love some people some of the time -- but never all people all of the time. This ego love is not the Holy Spirit's, Whose Love is for all, always: “What you give through Him is for the whole Sonship, not for part of it” (T-16.I.7:8).

When we attack others --whether in deed, word, or thought --we keep them separate from us. It is impossible to love one who is perceived as different and separate, for love is total. That is why it makes no comparisons (T-24.II.1:1). Observe how governments dehumanize their enemies, using differentiating forms of rationalization to justify the content of attack. Murder is justified through vilification of those deemed unworthy and inferior, and a universe of good versus evil, justice and injustice, is established on the corpses of those sacrificed for the “greater good” of the victors. Victimizer and victim become the only cast of characters the ego recognizes as legitimate in its play of judgment and hate, sacrifice and loss --a play acted within hearts and minds on both the individual and collective stages of life.

Yet when we turn to the stately calm within, we see something quite different. Indeed, we hear something quite different. Our minds' ears, hearing through the trans-perceptual lens of Christ's vision, listen to the plaintive wail that aches in everyone's heart --the little child within desperately trying to cope with the pain of feeling alone, abandoned, and fearful of punishment. Who is there among us who does not wander “in the world uncertain, lonely and in constant fear” (T-31.VIII.7:1)? Who is there who does not call for help that is not only believed to be absent, but undeserved? Who does not cry out in the sorrowful agony of aloneness, weeping for the innocence that will never be regained (P-2.IV.1:7)? In each one of us beats the anguished heart of a lost child who believes it will never find its home again, unaware that it is, in fact, the Child Who has never left His Father, yet still awaits acceptance of His holy Self:

It is this Child in you your Father knows as His Own Son. It is this Child Who knows His Father. He desires to go home so deeply, so unceasingly, His voice cries unto you to let Him rest a while. He does not ask for more than just a few instants of respite; just an interval in which He can return to breathe again the holy air that fills His Father's house (W-pI.182.5:1-4).

Typically, there are two ways-special love and special hate-through which people manifest their anxious despair of living as aliens here: “strangers in a strange land.” They relate to the world either in a socially acceptable, even helpful manner, ingratiating themselves to others, or they relate antagonistically, often in cruel and vicious ways. It is not difficult to feel joined with the former, yet the latter certainly try our forgiving patience. Nonetheless, we are taught throughout A Course in Miracles to look beyond the differentiated forms to the unity of content. In this context, Jesus' instruction means to hear the same melodies echoing in each and every seeming fragment of the Son of God-melodic strains belonging to the dirge of guilt or the song of Heaven. Thus we cannot hear the forgotten song, which is in everyone, until we first hear the dirge of death, which is also in everyone; first we listen for the minor key of universal hate, and then the major key of universal love.

Easier said than done, however, for to our egos the stately calm within our minds is not our friend, and certainly not our home. Indeed, we chose to leave the original Stately Calm when we made the choice for the ego's home of individuality and specialness. This is a home we are not eager to give up, and are thus resistant to hearing the call from the Holy Spirit's stately calm within. Who wants to answer a call that is in everyone, when the cost is no longer hearing our own call for specialness? Make no mistake about the intensity of this call; our very survival as a separated self depends on answering it. It is the attraction of specialness for specialness, the ego's answer to Christ's attraction of love for love (T-12.VIII). And what else is specialness but the need to exclude others from our kingdom of separation, which secures our place within its defensive walls of fear and hate?

Now safe, we continually turn our attention to the defenses that protected us in the first place-the frantic projections of guilt. Substituting for the Son as God created him, in our dream of separation we install God's conqueror on the throne of autonomous self-creation, thus establishing a little kingdom of conflict that parodies the stately calm that God created in, and as His one Son. We would die before abdicating this throne, as we all choose to do as bodies, with each dying breath whispering the name of the one responsible for our unfair demise -- all the private and public figures we have cast in the dream role of victimizer. Thus do we continue our delusional thinking that our peace is secured through exclusion. The Holy Spirit's stately calm has thus turned into a grandiose peace, an ego fortress that is guarded by hungry dogs of specialness and exclusion, in which only certain, special people are allowed in, and even then a heavy price is exacted for their entry into our kingdom. They must lose that we may gain, suffer that we may be at peace, die that we may live.

Such indeed has been the “stately calm” of the kingdom of Jesus the world has venerated for over two millennia. It has been a veritable fortress, allowing in only those chosen ones dedicated to perpetuating the sanctuary of specialness, while forbidding entry to the love that would dissolve the ego's hallowed walls of hate with the single sound of the all-inclusive Voice of Christ. And so, when we chose to exclude God's one Son as He created him, he had no recourse but to disappear “from…sight into his Father” (T-12.VIII.2:3). Thus was the Son of God recognized no more, and in his place emerged the son of specialness, in whom we are well pleased. This parody/ travesty on God's creation is beloved of us, and substitutes for him who is beloved of his Father (T-24.VII.1:7,11; 10:6,9). To protect this beloved ego self we would even kill, for such is our function, given us by the ego's god, who brooks no competition for its kingdom. Is it so surprising, then, that we do not gladly and gratefully welcome into our mind's manger this stranger called Jesus, whose gentle advent in our hearts heralds the end of the ego's rule? To make welcome for this gentle stranger is to disavow the ego, which means to disavow our individual and special self:

When you unite with me you are uniting without the ego, because I have renounced the ego in myself and therefore cannot unite with yours. Our union is therefore the way to renounce the ego in you (T-8.V.4:1-2).

From the perspective of our dreams of individuality and specialness, resistance to this stranger makes perfect sense. The journey to the stately calm within on which he leads us, and ultimately beyond even that to the Stately Calm within our Source, allows no thoughts of judgment or hate, specialness or need. Forgiveness is the means Jesus uses to transport us from the dreams of bodies to the dreams of mind, wherein dwells God's one Son -- both the means of our redemption and our goal as well:

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).

Within this stately calm -- “cooling stillness wreathed with lilies round” (The Gifts of God, p. 99) -- is Jesus stranger no more, for he is reborn as the Child Who is our release, the Child Who is God's Son, the Child Who is our Self. Thus does Jesus call us to extend this forgiveness to all people, that his peace become his manger of rebirth for all people. There is no more important quality of Jesus' loving presence in our hearts and minds than its all-inclusiveness -- “By this you know he is God's Son.” This, then, is his invitation to us to become like him, and join him in the stately calm within-“the holy place of peace which is for all of us”:

Peace, then, be unto everyone who becomes a teacher of peace. For peace is the acknowledgment of perfect purity, from which no one is excluded. Within its holy circle is everyone whom God created as His Son. Joy is its unifying attribute, with no one left outside to suffer guilt alone.…Stand quietly within this circle, and attract all tortured minds to join with you in the safety of its peace and holiness. Abide with me within it, as a teacher of Atonement, not of guilt.… Come gladly to the holy circle, and look out in peace on all who think they are outside. Cast no one out, for here is what he seeks along with you. Come, let us join him in the holy place of peace which is for all of us, united as one within the Cause of peace (T-14.V.8:1-4,6-7; 11:7-9).

There is a catch, however, which we have seen before. We cannot abide in this stately circle of light and love without going through the circle of darkness and hate -- the passage from specialness and exclusivity to all-inclusive love. Forgiveness, to state it again, is the means of our passage through the murky and vicious waters of judgment and hate, conflict and death.

Yet God can bring you there [the world of innocence and light], if you are willing to follow the Holy Spirit through seeming terror, trusting Him not to abandon you and leave you there. For it is not His purpose to frighten you, but only yours. You are severely tempted to abandon Him at the outside ring of fear, but He would lead you safely through and far beyond (T-18.IX.3:7-9).

This fear is not inherent in God's Son, but is his substitute for the love that is inherent in his Self. Fear is ultimately born of our resistance to this truth of our Identity, for within Its Stately Calm there is no separate interest or special self, no separation or specialness -- only the One Self. It is to preserve this separated identity that we all “are severely tempted to abandon Him at the outside ring of fear.” Our egos do not want to be led “safely through and far beyond,” for in that circle of love and light there is no room for us, creatures of specialness. The path of separation and exclusion inevitably leads to separation and exclusion -- of our Self. And to quote King Lear, “that way madness lies.” Since salvation can be found only in this one Self (W-pI.96), we are doomed to lives of misery and pain, a price we are more than willing -- happily even -- to pay for our ego's stately calm of innocence, won at someone else's expense. Thus do attack and condemnation become our rebirth in the ego's manger of hate and guilt. This is the manger we must first recognize as our chosen home before we can turn to the true stately calm, there to be truly reborn as Christ. Therefore --

Whenever you are tempted to hold an unkind thought of anyone, turn to the stately calm within.

Whenever you are tempted to make another person the object of your need, turn to the stately calm within.

Whenever you are tempted to feel justified in your judgments of others -- good or evil -- turn to the stately calm within.

Whenever you are tempted to hold a thought about someone you would not also see in everyone, turn to the stately calm within.

Within that place of “holy stillness dwells the living God you never left, and Who never left you” (T-18.I.8:2). And within that holy stillness dwells also His beloved Son, the innocent child of God's Stately Calm, in whom “the holy Christ is born…today”:

Watch with me, angels, watch with me today. Let all God's holy Thoughts surround me, and be still with me while Heaven's Son is born. Let earthly sounds be quiet, and the sights to which I am accustomed disappear. Let Christ be welcomed where He is at home. And let Him hear the sounds He understands, and see but sights that show His Father's Love. Let Him no longer be a stranger here, for He is born again in me today (W-pII.303.1).