During this season of special music, gift-giving and joy, many families and individuals are experiencing stress and guilt. It can hang over the mind as the darkness of the winter season, blocking out the light of peace on earth.

Living in bodies for their short duration on earth brings on stress and guilt if our minds are not carefully monitored. Feeling on one level we are separated from God, or True Wisdom, we sense our stress and guilt as the result of sin. We feel alone and isolated. Indeed, as long as we identify ourselves as primarily a body, we will have this “attraction to sin”. We know at one level we are fixated on keeping sin alive because it is this attraction that keeps us alive! So we think.

Do you ever feel you are hyper attracted to keeping aware of this world’s sins? You watch your spouse or close friends with constant eyes toward their imperfections and failures. Suddenly they are caught! You win! Your body has won! You feel great! The offending one has been caught and “God is angry.”

Such attractions are inherent in seeing ourselves as mere bodies. A mistake seen as a sin, can kill us, and destroy our peace of mind. If we don’t keep a constant vigilance, we will lose everything. In extreme form, we will be forever tormented, never given another chance. For our sins have not only violated ourselves but the God of creation, who we believe “made everything good.”

What if we could come to the place where we see miscues as errors to be corrected or simply overlooked and ignored rather than sins to be punished with guilt and pain? What if we could overlook the darkness in our lives and in others by simply seeing faults as errors and mistakes to be corrected, to be even overlooked, rather than sins to be punished? It would make Christmases much happier I’m sure. How can this happen? By learning to see ourselves and those around us as Spirit with temporary bodies rather than as bodies seeking to find Spirit or that which is eternal.

Yet we tend to fill our days with this attraction to guilt, pouring over newspapers and reports to find the latest infractions and sins of famous people and politicians. Newscasts and media feed this hunger as quickly as we can log onto the internet or turn on televisions! We are attracted to it like gravity, feeding at the trough of guilt and anger over our very limited body duration.

Actually, such attractions simply bury or kill the Son or Daughter of God within which we are. Indeed, in many of our religious teachings, we even project how the One Perfect Son of God had to die in order to assuage his Father’s awful anger at our sins and failures. All this merely portrays how we seek to “kill the Son of God” within ourselves, which is our True, Eternal Self.

To give our season of light-in-darkness a renewed jump-start, try seeing yourself not as a body but as Spirit. It will be like experiencing the solstice of awakening. See the Spirit Self as One with God, the Creator of us all as Him or Herself. Soon you will be able to let all those sins drop away as shadows in the night, as mistakes to be overlooked and passed by. Sit with this thought for awhile, repeating it over and over until it sinks deep into your being; “God is Spirit and Love, and therefore so am I!” Love overlooks sins as mistakes to be corrected. If they can’t be corrected immediately, that’s fine because in eternity’s view, they mean nothing anyway. Give yourself a break, a release.

In golf, the great teacher Harvey Pinnock used to say, “When you make a bad hit or swing, don’t dwell very long on what you did wrong but think anew of what to do right. You’ll get a good game going much more quickly.” We all make bad hits and swings in life. More often than not, someone will even point them out to us. But don’t dwell too long on the wrong hits and swings. Admit your mistakes but keep returning to the right swing, the true swing that is within us all.

If you see or catch yourself today attracted yet again to the sins of society, realize you are only digging yourself deeper in guilt and anger. You are simply attached and attracted to that which is merely temporary and mortal. Let it go. Do nothing but observe and learn to have a little laugh at your misses. It’ll be a better Christmas for you, and for those around you.