PART II.  SECTION 3:  WHAT IS THE WORLD

Lesson 250 Let Me Not See Myself As Limited

1. Let me behold the Son of God today, and witness to his glory.  Let me not try to obscure the holy light in him, and see his strength diminished and reduced to frailty; nor perceive the lacks in him with which I would attack his sovereignty.
2. He is Your Son, my Father.  And today I would behold his gentleness instead of my illusions.  He is what I am, and as I see him, so I see myself.  Today I would see truly that this day I may at last identify with him.[1]

Notes and Personal Application We all have characters in our lives who cause us to worry and give rise to concern.  While every single person we meet has their own particular set of virtues and vices, it is the foibles of our family members and close friends which bombard our peace and cause us the most consternation.  When those we hold dearest exhibit personality disorders, greed and selfishness, lack of direction, a tendency towards careless relationships, and bad manners it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to bear witness to their glory. 

Especially in the case of our children and grandchildren, it is all too easy to fall prey to our egos and expect them to be extensions of ourselves.  We interfere in their lives, we demand their allegiance to our traditions, we expect them to like our friends and despise our enemies.  Often we stand between them and learning the necessary lessons that they need not only to survive and thrive in this world, but the spiritual truths that Holy Spirit teaches throughout the natural unfolding of their development.  We demand they adopt our values, take over the family business, raise their children in the same religious dogma, and never bring shame or infamy on the family name.  We make it very clear that their joy fills us with happiness, their achievements and glory brighten our lives, while their heartaches give us pain, their dishonor and shame brings us sorrow, their unhappy mental states give us cause for alarm.  Many times our egos trick us into believing that we are to blame for every wrong choice they make, every heartache they experience, every setback or attack they endure.  We make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as God in their lives instead of brothers. 

Today we are to look past the specialness in the relationships we have in our lives.  We see them not as extensions of our ego. We put aside all our desires and wishes for them in the world, and we recognize them as brothers, as part of the Sonship in all its glory.  We will not interfere with their glory!  We will not focus upon their needs or their limitations.  We will not focus upon the ways in which we failed them, or they failed us.  Jesus tells us today to recognize His sovereignty and their sovereignty.  In other words, when we quiet our minds and hearts, put aside our human wants and desires for those who are special to us, we can recognize our oneness with Christ.  We can stop worrying and fretting.  We can stop blaming ourselves or wondering what we can do to alleviate their burdens or make up for past wrongs.  We can stop pressuring them to do things our way, to make the choices we think they should make, to avoid the pitfalls we made.  We can happily stand aside and allow them to lead their own lives, learn their own lessons, come to God their own way.  We do not have to preach at them, lecture them, or worry over them.  We trust in God; we trust in them. 

In Part Two, Section Three – What is the world, we learned that the world and all that is in it is God’s Son, making up a story of separation, seemingly trapped in an illusion of despair and death, in desperate need of salvation.  Today, let us awaken in Christ.  Today, let His holy light be our holy light; His strength be our strength; His sovereignty be our sovereignty.  Let us trade in our special relationships for holy relationships and see others as we see ourselves, as holy Sons of God, equipped with all we need to find our way to Him. 

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[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 250. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).

Audio credit: the friar patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com

PART II.  SECTION 3:  WHAT IS THE WORLD

Lesson 249  Forgiveness Ends All Suffering and Loss

1. Forgiveness paints a picture of a world where suffering is over, loss becomes impossible and anger makes no sense.  Attack is gone and madness has an end.  What suffering is now conceivable?  What loss can be sustained?  The world becomes a place of joy, abundance, charity, and endless giving.  It is now so like to Heaven that it quickly is transformed into the light that it reflects.  And so the journey which the Son of God began has ended in the light from which he came.
2. Father, we would return our minds to You.  We have betrayed them, held them in a vise of bitterness, and frightened them with thoughts of violence and death.  Now would we rest again in You, as You created us.[1]

Notes and Personal Application:  In my first year through the lessons, I had no words for this lesson.  I had no real understanding of it.  I knew that forgiveness was critical to my return to God and I was willing and able to forgive myself and others as the Son of God, and yet I didn’t understand how the simple act of forgiving would end the world’s suffering, how it would bring back the dear ones in which death and estrangement had snatched away, how the madness of the world would stop.  Though my individual experiences with forgiveness gave me a deepened sense of peace, joy, and understanding, the hurts still lurked between times. I still missed our daughter, our parents, our friends and family members who had bit the dust in one way or the other.  There were moments, even days, that the sense of pain and misery would send me into a spiral of self-condemnation, depressing thoughts, and a flopping about feeling as if I had no where in which to put the gloomy shadows that darkened my mind.  Growing old with this miserable sense of loneliness and despair, depleted my life of all meaning. It did not seem a bad thing to die, to let my life be essentially over.  Temptation came at such times in the form of making lifestyle choices that would hasten my own death, such as overeating, becoming lethargic, developing a penchant for watching TV shows, reading novels, and shutting myself off from others in order to stop spreading the affliction that seemed to infect everything I touched.  Forgiveness did not seem to be working for me. 

Yet forgiveness is the key to end all suffering and loss.  Sticking with our Course and letting each day’s lesson teach us more, get through the willful resistance in our minds, taking down our defenses against the truth, letting the world teach us its falsity and lies all works together to bring this truth home to our minds.  When we develop the heightened sense of forgiveness, when it completely takes over our mind, we see the world for what it is.  We see ourselves for who we are in the flesh and we are filled with pity.  We are filled with tenderness.  We are filled with mercy. 

We are not called to deny that good and evil exist on this level of existence, we are called to deny that this level exists at all!  We are not called to despise our flesh and punish ourselves forever for choosing a realm of opposites, we are called to see the realm of opposites for what it really is – not a place of punishment, sin, and shame, but a virtual reality placed in time that teaches us the most important thing we will ever learn – we are nothing without the Everything of God. 

Forgiveness is the key because as long as we believe that death and estrangement, divorce and betrayals, murder, war, rape, cynicism, disease, decay, and death define our reality, we are in a state of constant offense or defense against that which is only a made-up story.  We are here to play our parts – parts that must be forgiven because we all took part in making up this story.  We all had a hand in making up the story of separating from God and from each other.  No matter how small or how large our role is in this story, no matter how seemingly insignificant – Jesus teaches us that those who are born here chose to take God’s Creation and put their own twist on it.

For those of us who are fond of blaming Satan on everything evil in the world, the Course teaches that the devil is our own egos.  There is no outside force involved.  The story of the world is the story we make up about it.  It is the lies we have believed about Creation that make our perceptions of the world seem real.  When we forget our Sonship, when we put aside our Brotherhood, we are floundering about lost and lonely in a world of shards, fragments, and pieces searching for a way to put it back together again in a place that harbors opposites and division, rather than wholeness, unity, and love.  The best we can hope for here is the special relationship, a tricky alliance complete with rules, expectations, and obligations that foster neediness, stress, and an ongoing sense of sin, shame, and fear. 

Once we see the world for what it is, we can forgive it.  We free ourselves from special relationships and seek only holy relationships, which focus on love, forgiveness, freedom, mutuality, and oneness with God.  We stop holding grudges toward this one or that one for failing us.  We stop holding ourselves accountable to the obligations and tiresome expectations that others would demand from us.  We forgive the past and all that it holds because we understand it is only a story, a chapter in our lives that is over, that we revisit only for purposeful exercises in understanding, illustration, and wisdom. 

This is how forgiveness paints a picture of a world where suffering is over, loss is impossible, and anger makes absolutely no sense.  We see it as the inglorious story of man, not the story of God.  God’s Kingdom has never and will never go to war because there is nothing to fight against.  A Kingdom with all power, glory, and honor cannot and will not seek more power, glory, and honor.  God’s kingdom is love, joy, and peace because it is Everything.  God’s Kingdom has no interest in this false kingdom except to bring His prodigals home.  Leave his-story, God says, and come back to My Story, which is your story, which is Our Story, which is the One Story that ever was, which ever is, which ever will be. 

Today forgiveness leads us to return our minds to God.  In holy humility, we admit to ourselves and to our Father how we have betrayed our holy minds.  We have filled them with bitterness.  We have cherished soured and perverted thoughts against Creation.  We have preyed upon and gorged upon that which was meant to be loved and cherished, held in reverence and awe.    We have infested our minds with thoughts of bloodshed, cruelty, derision, and death.  Forgiveness frees us of our blame and shame.  Our minds return to God – no longer riddled characters in the story of man – but beloved, everlasting Sons as God created us to be. 

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[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 249. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).

Audio credit: the friar patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com

PART II.  SECTION 3:  WHAT IS THE WORLD

Lesson 248 Whatever Suffers Is Not Part of Me

1. I have disowned the truth.  Now let me be as faithful in disowning falsity.  Whatever suffers is not part of me.  What grieves is not myself.  What is in pain is but illusion in my mind.  What dies was never living in reality and did but mock the truth about myself.  Now I disown self-concepts and deceits and lies about the holy Son of God.  Now am I ready to accept him back as God created him, and as he is.
2. Father, my ancient love for You returns, and lets me love Your Son again as well.  Father, I am as You created me.  Now is Your Love remembered, and my own.  Now do I understand that they are one.[1] 

Notes and Personal Application:  This morning, as I do every day, I ask the Lord to bring the lesson home to me, to give me personal application, to make the ideas, the concepts, the prayers and meditations real to me.  It is one thing to have a theoretical understanding of a concept, but to really get something and to experience it as truth, we must have something to pin it upon.

In today’s lesson, Jesus is reminding us that those who live in the flesh have disowned the truth.  In other words, we seem to exist and have our being in an alternative, temporal time warp outside the endlessness of eternity.  In this alternative dimension, truth does not seem to stand alone.  All that is true and lovely and of good report has an opposite.  There is the yin and the yang.  There is male and female.  There is light and darkness.  There is right and wrong.  In this world we are assured one thing and yet get quite another.  Everything that is true is tinged with untruth.  The promise of youth is answered with the inevitability of age, decay, and death.  In this hellish realm, we embrace that which abhors affection; we seek logic and reason where there is none; we glorify that which eats us alive.  Jesus tells us today, to stop cherishing this realm of falsity and deny its hold and power over us. 

This morning in our devotional discussion, James and I both went down a path that could have led to pain, suffering, shame, and unease.  We were talking about our past in the light of who we are now.  Memories of our former lovers, spouses, and romantic encounters, seen in the light of falsity fill us with sorrow that we had not been together, that we did not share those years, that we had been so foolish as to have tried to find love with anybody but each other. 

Through the physical eyes, through the condemning eyes of the world, our former relationships are a source of regret at best, shame, contempt, and spite at worst.  There is a much-rehearsed litany of all the reasons that this one and that one failed us, disappointed us, betrayed us, or in some way, shape, or form did not measure up to assuage our loneliness, gratify our desires, or respect our boundaries.  There is a less-rehearsed litany of all the ways in which we had failed ourselves, had gladly hopped into the sack with someone before we so much as knew their middle name or their favorite color, not to mention the nuances of their particular character.  While all our good sense was screaming silently at us to run, we obligated ourselves further to those who would only take advantage.  No wonder we wince at the memories!

Yet today Jesus is telling us that none of this suffering is real.  God has no use for pain or suffering.  It simply was not created by Him and it is not part of His Will or Nature to see us suffer, deservedly or otherwise.  When we see our past through the eyes of Christ, we can revisit it with love, with deepened understanding and forgiveness, with gratitude of all the lessons we learned.  When we take responsibility for our failed romances, marriages, and relationships, we no longer feel victimized by them or our former selves.  We can bless ourselves and the people with whom we shared that time frame.  We can remember the fun and excitement, the kindness and generosity, the ups and the downs in the light of God’s love.  Our story would not be complete without them in it!  Their story would not be complete without us.  It is simply that – a story about separation, a story about making something other than God’s Will. 

Once we recognize this key truth of the world, we can be free of it.  It is only a story, a dream, an illusion.  It is an illusion of the prodigal mind which has seemed to separate from its Source.  We save ourselves and the world from grief, pain, and suffering by recognizing what it is and what it is for – a story of separation, the story of us, finding our way back to God and our oneness with Him. 

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[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 248. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).

Audio credit:  the friar patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com

PART II.  SECTION 3:  WHAT IS THE WORLD

Lesson 247 Without Forgiveness I Will Still Be Blind

1. Sin is the symbol of attack.  Behold it anywhere, and I will suffer.  For forgiveness is the only means whereby Christ’s vision comes to me.  Let me accept what His sight shows me as the simple truth, and I am healed completely.  Brother, come and let me look on you.  Your loveliness reflects my own.  Your sinlessness is mine.  You stand forgiven, and I stand with you.
2. So would I look on everyone today.  My brothers are Your Sons.  Your Fatherhood created them and gave them all to me as part of You, and my own Self as well.  Today I honor You through them, and thus hope this day to recognize my Self.[1]

Notes and Personal Application:  We blind ourselves to the truth of God when we continue to hold condemnation and unforgiveness in our hearts toward others.  When we look upon the world and the people, circumstances, and events as sinful, evil, and out to get us, to persecute us, to take away our sunshine, to steal Christmas, to deny us our pleasures and treasures, we are blind.  We still do not get what salvation is all about.  No matter how much we talk about Jesus, we do not know Him.  No matter how many people we drag to church, no matter how much we read our bibles, no matter how much we cry out to God, as long as we fail to see others as ourselves, as long as we are content that we get to go to heaven while others burn in hell, as long as we see God as the unloving father who prepares dungeons of torment for His prodigals, we have missed the point.

In today’s lesson Jesus urges us to see that the idea of “sin” stands for attack.  If I can call my coworker sinful and think of myself as holy, I am attacking my coworker.  I am not recognizing our oneness.  I am seeing myself as separate from him and therefore separate from the Lord. 

Years ago I was having such a struggle with a coworker.  I kept complaining about her in my prayers.  I cited her wrongdoing: the lies she told, the ways in which she cheated, stole, and used people to get what she wanted.  Sharing an office, I was privy to the personal phone conversations she took on company time.  I sat, dumb and seething, as she turned family members against each other; played favorites; lied to her husband in a soft, crooning voice, cajoled officials, wormed her way in to high places.  Our office was full of her secret purchases, boxes and files of bills and letters from creditors crammed our file cabinets, bookcases, and work closet.  Day after day I was regaled with the boring, trite ongoing drama of her out-of-control personal life. 

And yet everyone seemed to prefer her over me!  She was tall and thin and bleached her hair.  She was showy, sporting the latest fashions and trends.  I despised this woman but every time I went to God in prayer, God told me how much He loved her.  He would turn a deaf ear to all of her wrongdoing.  He did not want to hear the bad report.  His still quiet voice inside would ask me to forgive her, to love her, to learn what she was teaching me. 

I have come to realize that we were one – that her problems were my problems; that her mistakes were my mistakes.  While I thought of myself as more honest, smarter, and spiritual, I was blind to the truth of our oneness.  Her mistakes may have taken a different form than my own, but that did not absolve me from the attack and condemnation that I chose to perceive rather than her loveliness, her purity, her innocence, and goodness.  I was so caught up in my jealousy and superiority toward her that I was blinded to her divinity, and therefore to my own.  I could have offered her forgiveness, but instead I cherished the thought of her as a narcissist, a sociopath, a raving egomaniac.  If she was all that, then I mistakenly thought that I could be something else. 

But it does not work that way, Jesus tells us.  We suffer as long as we refuse the simple truth of His Vision.  Refuse the Vision of Christ for anybody and we deny it to ourselves.  We remain trapped in a dark pit along with all we see as different from ourselves.  What we see in our outer world is there to teach us lessons in separation and darkness.  I learned so much about myself from my coworker.  Perhaps her wrongdoings seemed more blatant than my own, but they brought to light my own tendency to be sneaky, to tell fibs, to exaggerate my own worth, to compete and push myself to the forefront, to rely on my charm and winsomeness, to nose in the affairs of others, to get ahead in a game that goes nowhere. 

As long as we are engaged in pointing fingers and blaming others for their godlessness, telling their stories of shame, and broadcasting their mistakes, we are causing our own suffering.  We are not healed, and we cannot offer salvation and healing to others.  We can invite people to our tabernacles and offer them a social “gospel,” a pleasant place to come and make friends with other nice people who try not to tell lies, cheat on their taxes, or covet their neighbor’s ass, but we are not recognizing our true function in Christ.  We are not standing with Him.  We are not accepting our role in the plan of salvation. 

We honor Christ every time we refuse to give place in our minds to sin in any form.  We honor Christ each time we deny the power of sin and shame to defeat us, to frighten us, or cause us to cower.  We honor Christ when we can look upon the world with forbearance and forgiveness because we recognize it as the farce it is. 

Today look on everyone through the eyes of the Father sure of His Sons’ return.  He created all of us, we are one with Christ, His beloved and truest, trusted Son.  We honor God when we honor one another and hold each other in our minds and hearts, not with our fallen, perverted natures, but our true natures in God.  Today we come before God not as the accusers, but as the forgivers.  We tell Him of how dear our brothers are to us, how worthy of our affection and love, how grateful we are to them for being part of us, our created being, our story incomplete without them. 

Today we honor God through His Creation and it is through His Creation that we come to know our true and everlasting Selves. 

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[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 247. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).

Audio credit: the friar patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com

PART II.  SECTION 3:  WHAT IS THE WORLD

Lesson 243 Today I Will Judge Nothing That Occurs

1. I will be honest with myself today. I will not think that I already know what must remain beyond my present grasp. I will not think I understand the whole from bits of my perception, which are all that I can see. Today I recognize that this is so. And so I am relieved of judgments that I cannot make. Thus do I free myself and what I look upon, to be in peace as God created us.
2. Father, today I leave creation free to be itself. I honor all its parts, in which I am included. We are one because each part contains Your memory, and truth must shine in all of us as one.[1]

Notes and Personal Application Lately I have been have a D.H. Lawrence fest.  It started with rediscovering the book Sons and Lovers that my friend Janet had given me for my birthday years ago when we were living in Shanghai.  I reread the book and ever since have been reading everything I can get my hands on from the author.  What he has to say about the reduction to absurdity found in idealism struck me as I was reading over today’s lesson.  We want the universe to be something else and not what it is.  We think we understand the way it should be from our little bits of knowledge, our extremely limited perception, and from our stunted viewpoints of reality.  We think the cat is cruel for playing games of death with the mice, and yet we do not want the pests pooping in our silverware drawers and nibbling holes in our tableware.  In the House that Jack Built, as Lawrence refers to the world, people should have been different than they are, everybody should have been somebody else and not himself![2]

Today I was processing a lot of veggies from our garden.  I made a big jar of refrigerator dill pickles from our excess of cucumbers.  The okra was soaked in vinegar solution, dried, and set aside for a future fry.  The ripe tomatoes were made into an Instant Pot full of ketchup ingredients for James who does not like all the corn syrup in Heinz.  The eggplants were put up.  It was a lot of work, but I enjoy doing things like this.  While I was working my mind dwelled upon our grandson Jonathan who left for Air Force basic training yesterday.  I was trying my best not to feel bereaved.  It seems as if not only our own children, but now our grandchildren have grown up and left the nest before I am ready. 

Only yesterday he was our little blonde, blue-eyed cherub who toddled about and tramped through mud puddles with me.  I thought of our candy picnics, our rides to Hershey to see his cousin, Halie, the times he traveled with us to Chattanooga to see our Friar clan.  How the grandsons used to quarrel amongst themselves about who got to sit next to Grammy when we sat down to eat, who got to sit in the front seat with me when we went for a drive, who got to carry my luggage or help bring the groceries in.  And then he hit puberty and adolescence and he was gone even before he went off to the Air Force, always up to something with his friends, with sports, with other interests.  My heart cried for him – not because I am not proud of his accomplishments, his courage, his stalwartness, and bright plans, but because he felt gone from me.  Grammy is not a big figure in his life anymore.  I feel put on a shelf along with all the other things from his childhood.  He has his own life to start now and because he chose to go away, it will be months before we get to see him again. 

When I opened up about my thoughts to James, he was experiencing much the same thing.  The distance between us and our bootcamp grandson looms large and worrisome in our minds, yes, but there is also the feeling of time having slipped past us way too fast.  Jonathan’s childhood is over and with it the vital role that we played in his life.

Last weekend we hosted a send-off dinner for him and then a brunch before he left, but it just did not feel like enough.  We were at a loss for words to express to him our love, our deep affection, our hopes, and high regard.  And so we left the good food, laughs, and memories suffice.     

But when we are honest with ourselves, we understand that time and people are not meant for us to hold on to.  We are in no position to make judgments, to put our own needs and desires to be important, necessary, and made mindful of on others.  It does not matter that we have collected bits of hard-won wisdom over the decades of our lives, our grandchildren must learn their own way, enjoy their own adventures, accomplish their own dreams.  All we can see, and experience is that our grandson grew up way too fast and now he is off on his own preparing to serve his country, with dreams of manning great flying machines.  It is not for him to stick around making sure that grammy and grandpa know where he is and who he is with and what he is doing, assuring them of his safety, comfort, and companionship. 

We free ourselves when we give up these concerns and go with trust in God.  Worries, concerns, and a sense of neediness, despair, and grief are gone when we accept the peace of God.  How we honor our grandson is how we honor all of creation – we leave him free of our own ego demands and desires.  We recognize our oneness, our certainty in God, and the truth that shines in all of us the world over, no matter where we are, whom we are with, and what role we choose to learn our way back to God. 

Today walk in this freedom.  Refuse to judge no matter what occurs.  Do not put a right or wrong on it.  All roads lead back to God – here in the house that Jack built.   

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[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 243. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).

[2] D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Novels…Kindle Edition.

Audio credit: the friar patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com