Would you say that the world you live in is coming together according to your own thoughts about how it should come together? Are your efforts to make it come together working for you? As I reflect on my own experience, reality isn’t bending to my ideas and efforts. My experience might be like yours, which is that things just don’t come together in the way that I think they should. That goes for circumstances and people.

What is really happening is that the world comes together in the mind of God, but not so much in the mind of human beings. The world is together in the mind of God, which is a higher level of intelligence and wisdom. And sometimes, perhaps we tune in to that. We have a sense of the goodness of what is happening in all things. That goodness doesn’t just contain the things that we think ought to be happening, and not just the things that are coming together, but also the things that are falling apart, all of which provides for what is emerging. Reality is emerging now, and that continues and continues.

When we release ourselves into that larger grace, there is a sense of peace, a sense of the order of things, and a knowing of the power of love that is moving in our life. Our own feelings about what is happening can be disturbed. We feel many things as a human being. Peace doesn’t come because all those feelings are somehow resolved, but because we release whatever angst is present in the feeling realm, without judgment, and open up to the heart of God.

Perhaps we can sense that the world is being held in the divine heart. Just driving through the countryside in the Midlands of England this morning on our way to visit with Janet and Dean Wagstaff, people who have quickly become close friends, that realization was so strong for me. We were listening to Sunday afternoon Love Songs on BBC Radio 2, which had a good sprinkling of Christmas music. I was feeling a warmth of love rising up in me and thinking about the people in my life that I love so much and who are so dear to me. And then I realized that the love I was feeling was, yes, for those people but somehow larger than any one person and larger than us as human beings. It’s that same love, that same warmth, that same urge that I know others feel as well. Then we showed up at Janet and Dean’s and the warmth of home and family that they share was throughout the home. There was the warmth of connecting with someone in person with whom I’ve been connected spiritually for so many decades. It was just glorious.

Through it all, I had an awareness of how, as a human being, I am held in that same warmth. I am held by the warmth of love, as are all people and all things—that power that is within us, that surrounds us and holds us and loves us all the days of our lives. And sometimes the awareness of that can fade, and if it does we are in the struggle of the human heart and the struggle of the human mind, which are trying to bring things together, and then believing that things aren’t coming together the way they should. There are so many things in the human world that seem to be coming apart, so it is easy to feel disillusioned and disheartened if you expect to have your own human ideas and feelings resolved or fulfilled. And yet there is something that is coming together. No matter what happens, that coming together just continues. And there isn’t any way that we, as human beings, can block it.

It is a deliberate personal practice to come back to that place of awareness. It is a place of sanity, for one thing. I’ve discovered that the mind of God is the only sane mind around, including my own. Living with an awareness of the mind of God and letting that intelligence and wisdom flow through my own thoughts is what brings wisdom. So a personal practice that opens us up to that mentally and that opens our heart to the heart of God that holds all things, including us, is the course of wisdom. It is the path to peace.

This month, we celebrate Jesus’ birth into the world. Christmas celebrates the child of God, which he is seen to be. It’s an iconic image, the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, with angels above, shepherds and wise men near, and Joseph and Mary in the stable. He was the child of God, and yet I don’t know of any time when he claimed that exclusively for himself. Each of us who are born into this world is a child of the heart and mind of God. We are here to be a living embodiment of the consciousness of God.

This might seem like a religious belief. I’ve used a word used in the religious world, God. Perhaps for you, like me, that word means something that is larger than any religious belief. It is a name for the source of that warmth that I felt today, and for the seemingly irrational urge from within to love. It’s a name for the wisdom that allows us to move through the ups and downs of our lives, and which guides us through the things that come together and fall apart, the things that make us excited and delighted and the things that seem like they are disappointing. It is this wisdom that allows us to have assurance and confidence in what is being born now, whatever the circumstances may be.

So I use this first Pulse of Spirit in December to proclaim that you are a child of God; I am a child of God. We are born out of the mind and the heart of God to be a living embodiment of that reality on earth. That is our calling. It is our destiny, and it is a living reality to be known now, which is the only time that it could be known. In that experience, there is the sense of peace and well-being that is known in the aliveness of life itself. Here is the evolution of Creation. Here is the evolution of who we are as humanity, becoming all of what we are created to be in the passage of time, and bringing all the creativity that we have to bring into the world. With that, there is the evolution of the world itself—the human world, and then the natural world too. We are becoming a sun, the living human embodiment of the wisdom and the love that made us. We have the supreme privilege of knowing that as a human being. And if we will allow our very human pattern of thinking and feeling to recede enough, we can greet each other anew and share the awareness of God-consciousness that is so natural to us as children of God.

And yes, we have love for one another and love for the world we are in. But in the end, doesn’t it just come down to simply living in a state of love? That is the nature of reality. And so we have that to know and to share in a natural way, not trying to make it be so but simply letting reality be what reality is. Reality is love. Even though our human hearts try to make our fears or resentments reality, the only reality is love.

So let us celebrate the Christmas season by celebrating a man who knew that. But more importantly, let us celebrate Christmas by being the child of God who knows this truth for him- or herself.