I want to look at two other poems now. They both deal with silences.
The first poem is not a very nice poem. It's called "The Ancient Love,"
and basically it's an indictment of Jesus.
As many of you know, some of Helen's poems deal with themes like this
where she is blaming Jesus for her own misery and there are other poems
where she basically just acknowledges her love for him. This is not that poem.
This poem basically accuses Jesus of being silent, of not being there for her,
and clearly is a projection of her having silenced him.
So this is an example of the ego's silence. And it does express
what would lie at the bottom of all of our minds, this deep, deep sense of sin
and hideous guilt for what we believe we did to God and therefore, of course, to Jesus.
That we're the ones who rejected Them. We're the ones who, once again,
said your love is not enough. I'll find my own love, thank you.
Your kingdom is not what I need. I'll make my own kingdom.
And the guilt over this is so horrific, that again we literally made up a world
to cover it and a world in which we reinact this same dynamic
of silencing the Love of God, but this time in the world we project it out,
and we say the reason I am so unhappy, the reason I am so miserable
is because of what You've done. And so certainly in the two thousand years
of Christian history one of the key figures in this whole drama would be Jesus.
That we would blame Jesus for not being there for us.
And again, that's what Helen's poem is expressing here.
Love, You are silent. Not one shining word
Has reached my heart for an eternity
Of waiting and of tears. I have forgot
Your face that once was everything to me,
But now is almost nothing. What You were
I do but half remember. What You are
I do not know at all. What You will be
Is unimagined. Sometimes I believe
I knew You once. And then again I think
You were a dream that once I thought was real.
My eyes are closing, Love. Without Your Word
I will but sleep, and sleeping will forget
Even the dream. Is silence what You gave
In golden promise as the Son of God?
Is this bleak and unresponsive shadowland
The overcoming that You offered those
Who understood the Father through the Son?
Is endless distance what must stand between
My Love and me? You promised that You will
Forever answer, Yet, Love, You are still.
Each of us I think could have written this poem.
Again, it's a searing indictment of Jesus for not being there for us
and for not keeping his promise. But it is quite obvious that
if we really look within, that the indictment should be focused on ourselves.
We're the ones who betrayed him. We're the ones who condemned him
to a silent existence in the grave of our minds.
His love is always speaking. His love is always present,
but we're the one who have silenced it. But again the guilt over that is so horrific
that we had no choice but to cover it over and project it out
and blame everybody else, including Jesus and God.
In fact, one could even say that all religion is an attempt to cover over this guilt
by either pretending that God is not angry and that God loves us,
or projecting all the guilt out and making God into the heavy.
So we either make God and Jesus into a special love partner,
saying that they really are wonderful and they do love us and we love them
and we're one happy family, which is clearly a defense against this kind of feeling.
That we're the ones who abandoned them forever and therefore
they have no choice but to abandon us, or to take this special hate form
which is that they don't keep their promises, that they only love certain people
or certain groups, or choose certain groups and not other groups.
In other words, that the God that we end up worshipping and the Lord
that we end up worshipping is one of specialness.
There's another poem called "Conversion," which is another poem
written on Christmas, actually it was written the same day
that "The Holiness of Christmas," was written, which is a very interesting poem.
It's in three stanzas, and the first stanza talks about the silence of the ego,
very similar to what I just read about. And then the next two stanzas reflect
the true silence, the Holy Spirit's silence,
that is really a silence that quiets the ego's shrieking.
I remember when Helen had written this down, we couldn't get a title for it.
Helen's original title was "Silences," because obviously it talked about two silences.
And the title just didn't seem to fit and I forget who it was who gave the title,
whether it was Helen or me, but the minute that we got that name,
"Conversion," the whole poem flowed very, very easily,
because you get the conversion from the ego's silence in the first stanza
to the last two stanzas which is the silence of the Holy Spirit.
And that conversion or that shift reflects that shift in our mind
from having chosen the ego to choosing the Holy Spirit. So let me read the first stanza.
There is a silence that betrays the Christ
Because the Word of God remains unheard
By those in bitter need. Unspoken still
The Word salvation holds for them, and kept
Away their resurrection from a world
That is but hell and alien to God's Son.
Homeless they wander, nowhere finding peace,
Unknown, unknowing, blind in darkness, and
Unborn within the silence of the tomb.
That's a very grim rendering of what our life is really like.
And again, it's a grimness that we try to cover over by saying everything is
really wonderful or there are happy things that go on here,
that there's always hope in this world. But there is no hope in this world,
because this world is not our home, as the beginning of Lesson 182 says.
And so each of us wanders in this world, "Unknown, unknowing, blind in darkness."
Homeless in this world desperately trying to say this is not the case,
there is meaning in this world. And if I don't have it, well then I will yet one day find it.
Or if I don't have it and other people have meaning, well they have the meaning
because they took it from me and therefore my meaning lies in hating them.
So one way or another we all desperately try to find meaning in a world
that is inherently meaningless. The only meaning that this world
holds for us is in discovering that it has no meaning.
And that the real meaning lies not in this world but lies in that part of our mind
that we had excluded and that we had betrayed, just as this opening line says.
"There is a silence that betrays the Christ
Because the Word of God remains unheard
By those in bitter need."
So that the real sense of betrayal, the real guilt that we feel,
was not in the tiny mad idea that seemed to arise out of nowhere in our minds.
The betrayal came when we chose the ego's interpretation over the Holy Spirits'.
And the reason I think it is important to underscore that is because that's
what would allow us to connect to that in our everyday life.
It's not the tiny mad idea that's the problem,
the impossible thought of being separate from God.
The problem is our listening to the ego that took it very seriously.
And thought that it was a glorious, glorious day when that thought was born.
And it's that decision for the ego and betraying the Word of God in our minds,
that we relive over and over and over again.
Every time we have any thought of separation, any thought of specialness,
any thought of neediness, any thought of criticism, of anger,
of mild annoyance, any thought that speaks of duality and separation of the Sonship.
All of that regardless of the form, large or small, all of this is nothing more
than a shadowy fragment and a reenactment of that original thought
when we betrayed the Christ by banishing the Holy Spirit from our kingdom.
That's the guilt.
And it's only when we become aware that that is what the problem is
and that we can't fault the world, that we can't find anything positive
in the world that we can then really go within, and say, there must be another way.
There must be another silence.
And that's what now leads into the second paragraph.