Part 1 Undoing the Way We See Things Now
REVIEW V God is Love, and therefore so am I.
LESSON 175
- (159) I give the miracles I have received. God is but Love, and therefore so am I.
- (160) I am at home. Fear is the stranger here. God is but Love, and therefore so am I.[1]
Daily Prayer for Review:
Steady our feet, our Father. Let our doubts be quiet and our holy minds be still and speak to us. We have no words to give to You. We would but listen to Your Word and make it ours. Lead our practicing as does a father lead a child along a way he does not understand. Yet does he follow, sure that he is safe because his father leads the way for him.
So do we bring our practicing to You. And if we stumble, You will raise us up. If we forget the way, we count upon Your sure remembering. We wander off, but You will not forget to call us back. Quicken our footsteps now, that we may walk more certainly and quickly unto You. And we accept the Word You offer us to unify our practicing, as we review the thoughts that You have given us. In Jesus name. Amen.
Personal Notes and Application: This morning when I woke up, there were all the thoughts from dreams, the past, and all the chores waiting me for the day all in a jumble. The aches and pains from yesterday still with me, the tired muscles, the sore back… Garden, they say. It is so healthful, they say, but didn’t I go and get carried away with it? Now coupled with all the other projects we have going on around this place, I am barely able to move without something hurting.
Yet beyond the pain is such happiness and joy and excitement. There is this love of life, this deep forgiveness for all the taxes and levies against it, the respect and awe of the miracle of it all, the joy of the green sprouts pushing up through the dirt, the wilted leaves coming alive with a drink of water, the sweet green marbles tucked all in a row within a pod.
In lesson 159, Jesus says that the only way we can understand that we are healed is when we heal others; the only way we accept forgiveness is when we forgive others, that miracles can only be experienced when we give them to others.
The vision of Christ is the miracle in which all miracles are born. Jesus tells us that the vision of Christ is the bond where giver and receiver are united here on earth as they are in Heaven. When we look upon Creation, including ourselves, with the eyes of Christ, we are sinless. There is no grudge. There is nothing but love and forgiveness. This has been the most difficult thing for my mind to wrap itself around, but once I got it, I am free from the grudges, resentments, and stress that had plagued me for years.
I knew that I wanted to love and to be loved, but I did not know how to love people – including myself. I liked others when they behaved themselves and were nice to me; I did not like them when they misbehaved and disappointed me. Simple and uncomplicated, it was the only way I could manage relationships. To love people was to be in a constant state of forgiveness toward them, and try as I might, it seemed impossible; I could not cope.
The vision of Christ changes this completely. We no longer require ourselves to go through the ups and downs of special relationships designed to keep us trapped in forms and fictionalized versions of “love.” As we free ourselves of the tentacles of what poses for love in this world, we are free to love Creation in a state of forgiveness, for with the vision of Christ, we know that this world means nothing. All of its “likes” and “dislikes,” its little hatreds, its wars and its peace, its marriages and divorces, its mean girls and bad boys, its high priests and lowly prophetesses, its dichotomies and opposites, its justice and injustice is only a distorted, perverted echo of what is real and holy and forever.
As we ask for and receive the vision of Christ, the world can no longer get to us. Oh, we might flare up now and again to drive the moneychangers out of the temple, but the aches and pains, the trials, and tribulations of a dream, stay in the dream. We know it is not real. We know that it is our desire for specialness and spite which is responsible for all this. We know that giving up that desire and exchanging it for the vision of Christ is the wake-up call. This is the source of all miracles. This is what we share in order to experience. Share this vision with someone today!
In reviewing lesson 160 we are reminded that fear is no longer the meaning of our being. We are no longer driven to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of humanity, snapping and snarling over the limited resources, forming tribes and clans to war against those who are different from us. When we give up fear, we give up our defenses against the world. When we give up our defenses against the world, we forgive it for its idea of separateness, its desire to be special, to hoard, to form cliques and clubs, to love this one and despise that one. We forgive it everything because it was all a mistake, a bad idea, a little wrinkle in eternity that evolved in time and will end in time.
In our minds then, fear is a stranger. We are no longer afraid. The shortages, the injustices, the struggles for dominance and power, the blacks against the whites and the whites against the blacks, the males against the females and the females against the males, the poor against the rich and the rich against the poor – none of it matters – it is a dream of death, and it ends when we open our eyes and see it for what it is.
While our forms may be in the world, our minds are at home, at one with God. At home with God, we begin to understand our experience in the separation through the eyes of Christ who has awakened us. Our stint in the madhouse of opposites is over! For now we know who and what we are in Him.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 175. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
Audio credit: http://www.eckiefriar.com
