Part 1 Undoing the Way We See Things Now
REVIEW VI
I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.
Lesson 205
- (185) I want the peace of God.
The peace of God is everything I want. The peace of God is my one goal; the aim of all my living here, the end I seek, my purpose and my function and my life, while I abide where I am not at home.
I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.[1]
Personal Notes and Application: Today we are on our fifth day of Review VI. We open our morning and evening meditation with the friendly and happy-making assertion about who and what we are not and who and what we really are: I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.
While I would never discourage young people from studying A Course in Miracles, I believe that it makes more sense to come to the teachings after experiencing the world. When we were young and full of piss and vinegar, as James likes to put it, we would not have wanted to be anything but our bodies! No matter how much trouble they were, how spiritually deprived, how they embarrassed or harassed us, we lived for them. We took delight in the pleasures and displeasures our bodies seemed to make of us and for us. We were driven by the idea that our bodies – both our shame and our delight – were somehow going to get us where we wanted to go and give us that which for what we were yearning. Looking back we both laugh and cringe over all the ways in which we tried to reconcile these two irreconcilable thoughts – we were to worship a God who made the body, and yet the body seemed to be a thing in and of itself, and not of God at all!
If someone would have asked me what I wanted at an early stage of my life, I would not have said the peace of God. I wanted to be a published writer. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to distinguish myself somehow and someway from others. I longed for adventure, travel, to be on the arm of some new and dashing guy, a marvelous lover, a world-wise fellow who would teach me the ropes. I yearned to meet and make friends with people more like the characters I found in literature, people who would sit and discuss ideas with me and share my love for books and writing and ponder the meaning of the universe, rather than the lot I seemed to be stuck with who were suffering their unhappy, love-starved lives with flirtations and affairs, their pretending to be one thing but being quite another, their repetitive, go-nowhere cycles of planting bad seed and hoping for a good harvest. I wanted to be free of such people because I wanted to be free of that version of me. I wanted to meet someone that would change my current state and make me into something else. In other words, the peace of God was not on my want list, and there is no shame in that. It was a very necessary phase of my life where I had to experience wanting a lot of other things and even getting them in order to find out that without the peace of God, that other stuff meant nothing at all.
What I have learned in time and through time is that it is only the peace of God I want – for when I have the peace of God, I have Everything. Happiness becomes my new standard and goal. Without the peace of God, I may have everything I thought I wanted, but it will be as nothing, and happiness will always be something I am seeking but never finding.
Today we will spend our meditations times and our little moments throughout the day reminding ourselves that no matter what we think we want here in the world, without the peace of God it will be over before it began, it will be spent, it will be fast a fading memory and then gone forever. The world’s promises to bring us pleasure, to tickle our fancies, to make us smarter, bigger, better fail to do bring us anything but disappointment. There is no point getting cynical about it, boo-hooing, griping or complaining. Things here do not last and there is a very good reason for this to be so – it is not God’s Kingdom, it is not God’s Will, and we can never make it what it is not.
Nothing that happens in the world dares to disturb the tranquil, quiet calmness we experience with the peace of God. We may not understand how this can be, but this is what we want. The world will always find something to separate us, to build cases against each other, to take up our signs and wear our special colors, to join its causes and go to war. The world may call for peace, but what it really wants is bloodshed, let us make no mistake about it. It is only the peace of God we want, because this the only peace there is!
Today we quiet our minds and turn off all that would call for discord. We clear the altars of our mind of all that is not the call of love, and we offer them to God. We pray,
“I want Your Peace on the altar of my mind, O Father. While I am living in the dream of separation, my one goal is to experience Your Peace. It is my function to seek Your Peace and find it and share it with others. My body does not define me. The bodies of others do not define them. We are still as You created us. Let us experience Your peace. In the name of Jesus, with whom we are one. Amen.“
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 205. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
Audio credit: http://www.eckiefriar.com
the friar patch 