1. The Gifts of Fatherhood 1-5
- You have learned your need of healing. Would you bring anything else to the Sonship, recognizing your need of healing for yourself? For in this lies the beginning of the return to knowledge; the foundation on which God will help build again the thought system you share with Him. Not one stone you place upon it but will be blessed by Him, for you will be restoring the holy dwelling place of His Son, where He Wills His Son to be and where he is. In whatever part of the mind of God’s Son you restore this reality, you restore it to yourself. You dwell in the Mind of God with your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone.
- To be alone is to be separated from infinity, but how can this be if infinity has no end? No one can be beyond the limitless because what has no limits must be everywhere. There are no beginnings and no endings in God, Whose universe is Himself. Can you exclude yourself from the universe, or from God Who is the universe? I and my Father are one with you, for you are part of us. Do you really believe that part of God can be missing or lost to Him?
- If you were not part of God, His Will would not be unified. Is this conceivable? Can part of his Mind contain nothing? If your place in His Mind cannot be filled by anyone except you, and your filling it was your creation, without you there would be an empty place in God’s Mind. Extension cannot be blocked, and it has no voids. It continues forever, however much it is denied. Your denial of its reality may arrest it in time, but not in eternity. That is why your creations have not ceased to be extended, and why so much is waiting for your return.
- Waiting is possible only in time, but time has no meaning. You who made delay can leave time behind simply by recognizing that neither beginnings nor endings were created by the Eternal, Who placed no limits on His creation or upon those who create like Him. You do not know this simply because you have tried to limit what He created, and so you believe that all creation is limited. How, then, could you know your creations, having denied infinity?
- The laws of the universe do not permit contradiction. What holds for God holds for you. If you believe you are absent from God, you will believe that He is absent from you. Infinity is meaningless without you, and you are meaningless without God. There is no end to God and His Son, for we are the universe. God is not incomplete, and He is not childless. Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself. Do not deny Him His Son, for your unwillingness to accept His Fatherhood has denied you yours. See His creations as His Son, for yours were created in honor of Him. The universe of love does not stop because you do not see it, nor have your closed eyes lost the ability to see. Look upon the glory of His creation, and you will learn what God has kept for you.[1]
Jesus starts today’s text reading with the assertion that we have learned our need of healing. This is what we bring to the Sonship. We cannot return to the Sonship holding on to our sickness and calling it our “individuality,” our “human rights,” our particular take on how much our identification with the color of our skin, the gender of our bodies, our sexual preferences, or our professions in the world matters. We cannot have what God has for us as long as we are yammering that we have a right to our addictions, that we have a right to our specialness, that we have a right to author ourselves and to make up our own versions of God. The only thing that matters in our return to God is that we know our need for healing.
We are prodigals and we seem far from Home. We cannot go home dragging this world with us and asking God to intervene in our special causes. We let all of that behind. We are restored when we are willing to say, “Please heal me, Father and take away all that would sicken me and deprive me of You.”
When we see our brother struggling with the constant barrage of issues that seem to arise in this bad dream, we do not judge and condemn him, but rather the ego thought system which has sickened him. Practicing this and teaching this is our way to restore our awareness of what we are in God.
Nothing that belongs to God can be apart from Him. We are not cast out of His Kingdom; we are simply asleep and dreaming the dream of what could be so if it were possible to make up our own version of reality. We can sail along in our fantasies for only so long until they turn against us, viciously and without respite. For some of us, just a little taste of the savageness of the ego can awaken us to our need for healing; for others, the savagery becomes their god for whom they are willing to enslave themselves. No matter where we find ourselves on that spectrum, sickness is sickness, and we are all in need of healing. There is no point in comparing ourselves to others and judging who can still be saved and who is past redemption – being past the point of redemption is impossible with the creations of God, for no one can be missing or be lost to Him.
You have a place in God’s Mind which can only be filled by you, even as I have a place in God’s Mind which can only be filled by me. We were created to fill our spots and without us, those spots would be empty. This is an impossibility for creation can never be messed with – it goes on forever extending itself, whether we are aware of it or not.
We can leave time behind by recognizing and accepting that beginnings and endings were not created by the Eternal who placed no boundaries on Creation or those who create like Him. We are not aware of this in our human state. In our human condition, we are not without boundaries. We must follow the rules, we must not overtax ourselves, we can only go so far and extend ourselves so little before we need replenishment and respite. Our human forms do not hold up in time but rather age and wither and disintegrate. We make the mistake of believing that all of creation is limited because in our physical world we are limited. We do not know our own creations because trapped in the limited perceptions of humanity, we are blind to the love, the peace, the joy we have extended and that goes on extending throughout eternity.
What holds for God, holds for us, His Creation. There are no contradictions. When we believe we are absent from God, we believe that He is absent from us. This cannot be for Jesus tells us that eternity is meaningless without each one of us and we are meaningless without God – we are part of the universe, we are the universe, we are part of the Sonship, we are the Sonship.
Denying God as Father does not stop the universe of love anymore than refusing to see all of Creation as His Son gives us the right to judge and condemn our brothers. When we look with the Vision of Christ upon the world, we see the glory of God’s Creation, we glimpse what God has kept for us beyond the world of perception. We see that with or without our awareness all that we have in God was never lost nor has it gone missing. It is not being held for us in a closed and locked vault awaiting our return, but it is being used by God, increasing and extending outward and gaining value. This is our inheritance in Him. Denying ourselves this does not make it go away.
In your personal devotions today, recognize your need of healing. Ask Holy Spirit to make you aware of any shreds of ego which are tempting your mind to castigate you and your brothers rather than to see yourself and others as sickened by this world and in need of return to God. Ask Holy Spirit to illuminate our text reading to you so that you will recognize the gifts of Fatherhood that await us when we return our hearts and minds to Him. Bring Him your humanity and lay it upon the altar of your mind. Accept your divinity that God has been keeping for you, awaiting your return. Be courageous in your walk to God and in God. Thrust upon Him all the sickness, perversions, meanness, and ignorance that the ego would make you out to be and let Him show you what you really are in His Mind and in His Kingdom.
This is what we bring to God. It is the foundation of our restoration and redemption. We bring Him our need of healing. We can donate all manner of goods to the church, to the poor, to our favorite charities and causes, but all God wants from us is our humble recognition that we are sick in our hearts, our minds, our lives without Him.
“Heal us, Dear Father, for without You we are nothing,” is not only the prayer of our awakening, but the foundation stone of our return to Him.
“Dear Father, Open our eyes to what You have kept for us,” is the prayer of acceptance of what we are in His Kingdom.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 11 God or the ego. I The gifts of fatherhood. 1-5. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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