Today we begin our 2021 study of the Text portion of A Course in Miracles, Foundation for Inner Peace, 1992 Edition. I am working on a syllabus to help keep us on track. I will post this as soon as it is finished and edited. This is our first attempt at completing the text in a year, and so please bear with me as we are starting a day late. No worries about our progress, if we miss a section one day, we will catch up the next. We will continue to share our personal insights, understanding, and application and welcome you to do the same! Thank you for going on this journey with us. May God bless and keep us as we prepare our minds and hearts for His Kingdom through our unity with His Holy Son, our Savior and Guide.
INTRODUCTION
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.[1]
In 1992, during a discussion of spiritual yearnings and insights, a co-worker informed me that I sounded like a student of A Course in Miracles. Dan urged me to do my best to get my hands on a copy of the manuscript. He expressed concern that there were entities who were vying over ownership of the text and that it very well may not be available much longer to the general public. “It has a radical message,” I remember him saying. “It speaks of the world as not being real.”
My heart leapt at these words. “There are others like me!” I remember thinking, with a great sense of jubilation. Shortly after this conversation, I found a lone copy of the Course at the King of Prussia mall and brought it home. However, my first attempts at reading it made little to no sense to me. It seemed way beyond my ability to comprehend and having no teacher, I put it aside for several years.
However, fifteen years later I was called to read the text from beginning to end. I cried with joy recognizing the Inner Voice which had been speaking and calling to me from the time I could remember, as Jesus the Christ. While I had failed to accept and trust my Inner Voice because it was so unlike the Christianity that I had been indoctrinated with, here was a text that spoke of the Father’s love, the brotherhood of Christ, of Reality unthreatened by fiction and lies, of a God I could trust and respect, of certain salvation, of everlasting joy and peace. Gone were the images of jealousy, vengeance, spite, and malice – our Father awaits our return with everlasting patience, mercy, understanding, and love!
In 2019, Holy Spirit instructed me to study the workbook lessons and the text. Learning to teach and teaching to learn, Holy Spirit encouraged me to use my gifts of instruction and writing to teach application of Course principals, to share deeply and openly the ways in which the daily concepts can be applied to the real, everyday issues in our personal and interpersonal lives. Over the course of years 2019 and 2020, two of my most special relationships were made holy. Jointly we shared our learning, acceptance, illustrations, and challenges surrounding the Workbook lessons. In 2021, our small group started a brother blog entitled I Choose Love to continue sharing lessons while on this blog, and for this year, we dedicate ourselves to reading, reviewing, and applying the text.
Thank for joining us this year as we begin our ACIM text study, for…The time is now. You have not been asked to work out the plan of salvation yourself because, as I told you before, the remedy could not be of your making. God Himself gave you the perfect Correction for everything you made that is not in accord with His holy Will. I am making His plan perfectly explicit to you and will also tell you of your part in it, and how urgent it is to fulfill it.[2]
[1] A Course in Miracles. Introduction. Foundation for Inner Peace. Second Edition (1992). p. 1.
[2] A Course in Miracles. Text 5:7:4. Foundation for Inner Peace. Second Edition (1992). p. 89.
Audio credit: http://www.eckiefriar.com
Syllabus under construction. Coming soon!
