[Please note: ACIM passages quoted in this article reference the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) Edition.]
Yesterday’s class was on “Christmas in the Course.” As some of you may know, I’m not a Christmas guy. Rather, I’m a “make sarcastic, denigrating comments throughout the Christmas season just to survive it” guy.
However, the main idea from yesterday’s class has me totally in its grip. That idea is that we are not supposed to praise, laud, and celebrate Jesus’ birth as a distant, long ago event involving a uniquely divine being. Rather, we are supposed to repeat that event now, in our own lives. Which means we are supposed to make the same decision he did and let the Christ be born again in us.
That last point is a very familiar idea, and I think that’s been my problem. It always seemed like such a common idea that I never really let in the significance of it before. Here’s how the significance of it is hitting me now. I feel so incredibly imperfect, and given that, the road from here to perfection seems impossibly long, difficult, and full of chasms without bridges. How am I ever going to reach the end? How will I ever turn this imperfect self into something perfect? (I realize that’s not really my job, but that’s how I must be thinking about it in the back of my mind.)
What a wonderful idea, then, to think that an already perfect me could be born in me—already holy, already in harmony with God, all attributes already fully developed. A perfect self already fully formed. All it needs to do is emerge.
This idea comes through in many ways in the Course. It is front and center in the Christmas references. But it’s also there in the references to the “soul” in the early dictation. Jesus once remarked to Bill that a certain Freudian slip Bill made “was an expression of a Soul gaining enough strength to request freedom from prison. It will ultimately demand it.”
It’s also found in Helen’s very first vision, in which she saw an ancient priestess kneeling and wrapped in heavy chains. Over time, though, the priestess slowly rose up and the chains slowly dropped off, until at last she was standing and raised her eyes to look at Helen. When Helen at last worked up the courage to look at her, she said, “I burst into tears. Her face was gentle and full of compassion, and her eyes were beyond description. The best word I could find in describing them to Bill was ‘innocent.’ She had never seen what I was afraid she would find in me. She knew nothing about me that warranted condemnation.”
So in all three images—the Christ child being born in us, the Soul first requesting and then demanding freedom from prison, and the ancient priestess rising up from chains—we have the same basic idea. There is a pure, divine aspect of us that wants to emerge in us. At first, it will emerge in a small, weak state. But the more we let it come forth, the more it will grow in strength. At last, we will recognize it as our true Self, thus saving us from the rotten self we seem to be. Look at this prayer for Lesson 303, “The holy Christ is born in me today”:
“Your Son is welcome, Father. He has come to save me from the evil self I made. He is the Self that You have given me. He is but what I really am in truth. He is the Son You love above all things. He is my Self as You created me.”
Notice how the Christ being born in me happens to replace and “save me from the evil self I made.” That’s what has been hitting me since the class.
The Christmas references in the Course emphasize that our job is to make a home in us for this emergence, this birth. We have to make a place that is compatible with the Christ child, a place that is receptive to His birth. It’s as if we have to make a special environment in which He, an alien to this world, can survive here.
This may all sound like old hat. But it’s really been grabbing me today. Like all of us, I have a deep desire to be a good person. It’s as simple as that. How amazing to think that all I need to do is make for a suitably hospitable “nursery” inside me, and a perfect person will emerge in me, first to live in that nursery and then to grow up, and finally to be accepted as the real me. Isn’t that an incredible idea?
I find, therefore, that I am paying a lot more attention today to my thoughts, words, and deeds—still not enough, but I am much more concerned with making sure that the conditions inside me are more suitable for that birth. I actually think that birth already happened, in that one of the events that brings on the birth is joining with another in a holy relationship, and I’ve done that. But I think the infant is still very small and fragile and needs far more suitable conditions in the nursery before it can really grow.
