I want to turn back to Helen's poetry, "The Gifts of God."
As many of you know, these were poems that Helen had written down.
The first half of them were actually written during the period
she was taking down the Course, and then the last half were written afterwards.
They all share all the thoughts and themes of the Course in different ways.
Helen felt that taking these poems down was different from taking the Course down.
She felt that in the poems that she consciously had more of a say
and it was like more of her voice with Jesus, in fact some of the poems
really the "I" would be Helen, other times it would be Jesus.
And she felt more of a freedom to tamper with the poems
than she ever did with the Course. Now she didn't really change the poems
other than to do a little minor editing if she felt that the meter
wasn't quite right, or she didn't like a phrase, or something.
But the poems really basically came the same way as the Course did.
There are groupings of the poems; some of the groups dealt
with Christmas, some with Easter, and some, like this one, really crosses both of them.
And the poem I want to read to you is "The Resurrection and the Life."
It was the last poem or almost the last poem Helen had written.
I think she had written one more after this. It was written actually on New Year's day in 1978.
It's a strange poem in the sense that it is really two poems.
It's seven stanzas, the one poem, and they all share the same rhyme scheme,
a very complicated rhyme scheme. There are six lines in each stanza
and the second, fourth and sixth line all rhyme.
So there is a unity of form, but the content is different
and Helen insisted they were two separate poems. In fact, I remember
in her original typing of it when I went over it with her she actually drew a line
between the fourth and fifth stanzas.
For some reason the poem was printed here as one poem,
but I'm going to read you only the first four stanzas
because they stand alone basically and are a little separate from the end of it.
Again, this is a poem that in many ways unifies a lot of what
we've spoken about today, the whole idea of what it means to be loving
and to be silent, which of course means silent to the ego.
And again, it combines both the Christmas themes and the Easter themes.
You think Him dead Who rose again for you, [this is Jesus]
And so you cannot see the shining light
In which you are delivered. 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
Second stanza:
So still the birth [now here again you get the Christmas image]
So still the birth you did not understand
Who came to you. Before your frightened eyes
The Lord of light and life appears to fail
His promises of Heaven's grace, and dies
Forever on a cross. Nor can you see
The Child of hope Who in a manger lies.
So again, clearly, the specific reference is to Jesus, his birth and his death,
but in the larger sense it really is a portrait of the Son of God of which we all are.
That being a Child of God, a Child of love, a Child of Heaven's grace,
we would have thought we would have lived eternally,
and yet the ego's dream tells us that all this was a lie.
And so we don't see the hope, because all we see is the darkness of death.
What we see is the body, the seeming birth of the body,
the end of the body through death, and life here of course is a crucifixion
that ends in death, and we forget and don't realize that all of this is just a sham.
It's all just a veil. It's not reality, it's just a dream.
But within the dream it seems to be so real, so compellingly real
that we forget that we can't see "The Child of hope Who in a manger lies."
The third paragraph:
The wise are silent. Stand you by a while
And let the wise men show you what they see
That came of you from stillness and from peace
Which rest in you, but speak to them of Me.
And then be comforted. The living Lord
Has come again where He has willed to be.
"The wise men," and obviously this is a specific reference to the wise men
who attended the birth of Jesus, but the "wise" here have nothing to do
with the magicians or the magi two thousand years ago.
The wise are those advanced teachers of God who know the difference between
appearance and reality. They are the ones who know what it means to love and be silent.
They're the ones who stand in the midst of the ego's darkness,
the ego's battleground in which blood is spilled all over the place,
the ego's world of specialness, of hate and murder,
deception and pain, and smile sweetly and say, this is nothing.
It requires no response. It requires no correction.
It requires no healing, because there is nothing there.
These are "the wise." That's why they are silent. So,
Stand you by a while And let the wise men show you what they see."
So let us be taught by these wise men.
Let us be taught by that wise man who is within us,
who only wants to teach us what He knows and wants to share with us
the love that comes from that wisdom.
And they come to "you from stillness and from peace."
And this stillness and this peace rests in you. It's not outside of you.
So these wise men are really our Self. This is our right-minded thought.
That's what the Holy Spirit, the Holy Sprit in the end is not separate from us.
He is us. But not the us that we think we are.
And these wise men speak about Jesus as he says,
"but speak to them of Me. And then be comforted."
Because Jesus is this wonderful symbol that shows us the difference
between appearance and reality. His birth was an illusion.
His death was an illusion. His love was not.
The form was nothing. People idolize the form, the form was nothing.
It was the love that is everything but it is not a love that is in him,
it's a love that is in the mind of God's One Son of which we are an indivisible part.
And when you are in the presence and allow yourself to be in the presence of that love,
then you realize that there's nothing going on here. What's to respond to?
All you simply do is that you love, you smile sweetly
of that gentle laughter that says, this means nothing.
The final line of that stanza, "The living Lord Has come again where He has willed to be."
That's the rebirth of the Child. Christ is reborn as a little Child
each time a wanderer chooses to leave his home.
And now the final stanza.
Wait now for morning. In the silence hear
The winged whispering that hails the Son
In quiet certainty and lovely calm
Whom death released to life. He is the One
For Whom you wait. Then look again on Him,
And join His benediction, "It is done."
The "quiet certainty and lovely calm Whom death released to life."
That's what it means, once again, to be reborn, that we're reborn
from the ego's life which was death. And so now we're born again
by having a second chance to choose the Holy Spirit instead of the ego.
And at that point then we can look on the risen Christ,
and remember what resurrection means. Resurrection is awakening
from the dream of death. It has nothing to do with the physical resurrection.
That's another place you could see where the church got it all wrong.
It wasn't an awakening that happened to Jesus, it was an awakening that
he was pointing to in each of us. But by seeing it only in him, we very nicely excluded.
So this is something that he did and of course he was different.
He was special. He was the Son of God, but it's not something I could do.
And the whole point was that the resurrection was something he did for all of us.
That's why he says in the manual, you were with me when I arose.
When I awakened you had to awaken because we're all one.
It was not something that was done in one man, in one historical time.
It happened in the mind and therefore the mind being outside of time and space,
it happened in all of us. And when we listen to the wise men
and we hear "The winged whispering" of that loving silence,
then we are able to look again on him And join His benediction, "It is done."
That's the acceptance of the Atonement.