Everyone is a frightened child who wants to be loved.

The Thought of God surrounds your little kingdom, waiting at the barrier you built to come inside and shine upon the barren ground. See how life springs up everywhere! The desert becomes a garden, green and deep and quiet, offering rest to those who lost their way and wander in the dust. Give them a place of refuge, prepared by love for them where once a desert was. And everyone you welcome will bring love with him from Heaven for you. … And under its beneficence your little garden will expand, and reach out to everyone who thirsts for living water, but has grown too weary to go on alone (T-18.VIII.9:1-5,8).

Everyone is a frightened child who wants to be loved, and “has grown too weary to go on alone.” Everyone. Jesus depicts the universal condition of pain and alienation in this poignant passage from the workbook:

This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place that called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is the voice reminds you of. Yet still you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown. Nothing so definite that you could say with certainty you are an exile here. Just a persistent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again (W-pI.182.1).

If you could be aware that returning home to love is all that people desire—no matter what they say or do—you would see the hurt child within them, and could not but hold their yearning in loving comfort.

To see the fearful, lonely child means allowing yourself to see the pain behind people’s attack. No matter how vicious and cruel the behavior, there is still suffering underneath. Indeed, people would not attack unless they were suffering. No matter how hateful the objects of your judgment, they would not behave, say, or think as they do unless they were filled with the torturous pain of a little child who believes love has been taken away, and is left all alone in the universe, without hope.

Hearing the pain of alienation in others, as does a loving, caring adult with a frightened child, you reassure them that everything is all right, in whatever way is appropriate. However, if you do not hear the child’s plaintive call for love, seeing an evil monster instead of the innocent child, it is only because you do not want to hear it in yourself. One could say that the goal of A Course in Miracles, therefore, is to have us hear the pain behind the defensive wall in all people—victim and victimizer, you and I. Our hearts would then go out to everyone, touching them where they hurt, for healing is universally loving and kind. Walls are defenses, and without them love will enter. Indeed, love is already there, and without our walls, it naturally extends to everyone.

Excerpted from “The Secret Wall” The Lighthouse newsletter, Volume 15, Number 2, June 2004.