The gift

Christmas for many is comfortable and sweet, a time to enjoy the fun and traditions year after year. Then things change. Loved ones pass away, families and friends rearrange their lives. Family homes are sold; children move out. Or maybe we feel we've "done" enough Christmases and wonder whether we might deserve to be a bit selfish, curl up with a good book, and just hide away until the holidays are over!

Christmas for many others is different; there are no choices and no celebrations. Just another day with a crust of bread or a scrap of food or maybe nothing. No toys, no color, no light. No hope anywhere to make one day different from another.

We might ask what the common denominator is for these opposite ends of materiality—the haves and have-nots—that could turn lives around and make them worthwhile and satisfying. Might the answer come: all that needs to be done is for us to have a better idea of the Christmas we're celebrating and to move our prayer out to embrace the world instead of staying within our own known and personal boundaries. Maybe doing something new, like giving a gift without wrappings—giving a prayer.

A gift of prayer is like a diamond. The facets reflect light in many directions, light that reaches and transforms thought so that different aspects of human lives can be touched, changed, and healed. Isn't this the Christmas gift we all want to receive?

I had often thought how special it would be to receive spiritual healing at Christmastime. This would be the most precious of all gifts. Then, a few days before a busy Christmas a couple of years ago I started to develop severe flu symptoms. Praying on the wing about my spiritual selfhood and oneness with God, I struggled on for a couple of days until it became clear I was unable to keep going. I felt like crawling into bed, but I didn't want to throw in the towel and give in to the sickness.

The idea came that Christmas was about stillness and listening and could be celebrated right then, even before the holiday. I needed this tranquillity in my thought. I needed quietness and stillness. I just needed to listen. I wanted to hear a spiritual message—an idea from God. I knew this would be the appearing of the Christ in my consciousness. I can't say it was easy, as there were still chores pushing for attention, but I stood firm and sat very still.

After a while the idea came that I needed to pray for the world rather than fuss inwardly about the "personal Christmas" in which I was involved. I saw that awakening to God's presence everywhere was a divine demand requiring my obedience. As I entertained this idea I found myself mentally moving in an outward direction.

Heart-rending pictures of people in makeshift tents in atrocious weather, people incarcerated for whatever reason, people homeless and hopeless and hungry and lonely—all these pictures came into my thought. I asked myself, What is Christmas to them? Is one day any different from another? What can I think right now, where I am, that might make some difference to their lives? And then I realized, "Even though I'm not feeling so good myself—I can think outward, I can pray for them, right now!"

Ideas began pouring into my thought about Christmas and the Christ. What the Christ is, what it does. I saw the Christ as the most tender, caring, warming, gentle power that existed anywhere. It was the sheltering arm of a Father-Mother God who is everywhere. It was the nourishing and feeding and satisfying power that was inexhaustible. This was already the true consciousness of everyone—whatever people's language, their religion, their politics, or their nationality. The Christ neither overlooks, ignores, subjects, nor overrides. It gives man dominion over the earth. Ideas kept coming and I kept rejoicing. I began to feel God's love for man.

Feeling steadier, I went out to do some errands, but as I walked around I began to lose everything I had just been loving about the Christ. Aggressive materialism was busy; all the rush and noise, bells and lights—and so many red poinsettias! Then an angel thought rescued me and said, "Aren't all these symbols of celebration here because the celebration of the Christ, Truth, coming to human consciousness was here first, and isn't that the very same Christ you have just been recognizing as the only power present here and in other parts of the world?"

In Science and Health a marginal heading reads "Ultimate harmony," and farther down that paragraph the book states, "Truth will at length compel us all to exchange the pleasures and pains of sense for the joys of Soul" (p. 390 ). I realized that the harmony I needed would be found by exchanging the mental images I was seeing for the spiritual harmony that God was being. Hurry and impatience were only the spiritual vitality of Life, seen in a restricted way. Noise and clamor were really Soul's melody and harmony, out of tune. Even material excessiveness had to be seen as a limited concept of spiritual abundance. The poinsettias took on a new look. They now heralded the exuberance of the Christ. I didn't mind how many of them I saw—I loved them! I loved the spiritual idea behind everything around me.

Christmas morning arrived and I woke completely free of all symptoms. I had received the Christmas gift I had always wanted—the gift of Christ-healing.