Lesson 39: My holiness is my salvation.
As a Southern Baptist kid, I was taught that hell was an actual place, with actual fire, actual demons with actual horns and pitchforks where you actually were burned alive each day but not consumed by the fire. You went there because you were a bad person in your life – or you danced, drank or wore your hair long as a boy or wore pants as a girl.
It was a scary place to think about, especially as a pants-loving girl.
When I came out as a lesbian, hell was most often the threat that was used against me. If I had a dime for every time someone told me that my sexual orientation would send me to hell, I could have bought Joel Osteen’s stadium church a million times over. That would be me, living my best life.
It took me a long, long time to overcome my fear of hell – to realize that if it truly is a literal place, I’m already there, because I have put myself in hell by believing all those stories about hell in the first place. As A Course in Miracles points out in this lesson, hell is a choice we make whenever we accept the ego’s idea that we’re guilty of something.
The Course posits that this physical realm came into being because we decided against the Reality of our true Self as one with our Creator. We are all thoughts in the mind of God, joined in a non-dual unity where Love is the only thing that is real. The Course says this physical world of separation was created when “the Son of God forgot to laugh.”
We forgot that we were created and born in joy, and in our True Self, love is all we know. Love – the only kind that’s Real – has no opposite, since Love is the only thing that exists in the mind of God.
“If guilt is hell, what is its opposite?” the lesson asks us today, urging us to see that hell is a choice we have made by believing we are guilty for creating the separation from God in the first place. We feel bad for forgetting the Holy laughter of unity and in our guilt we project our anger, fear and sadness out into the world, creating a hellish existence of anger, fear and sadness on both the personal and corporate level.
We reinforce our own private hell by creating one out in the world in a self-affirming and self-fulfilling prophecy that world is evil, cruel and terrible. The way out of this hell is to remember our holiness – to recall that who we truly are is innocent and has never left the mind of God where Love is the only thing that is real.
If we want to use our holiness to save this world, we must first accept our own holiness, the notion that we have nothing to feel guilty about because our forgetting to laugh has only caused illusions to appear. We can awake from the dream by recognizing when we are having unloving thoughts about people and situations in our life, and correcting those thoughts, reaffirming our holiness.
My unloving thoughts about my dad kept me in hell for a long time, as did my unloving thoughts about people who condemned me for my sexual orientation. When I released my feelings of guilt around both the divorce and my innate sexuality, hell evaporated.
My holiness was my salvation, and it continues to be in every hellish situation I create for myself.
Today’s lesson is a reminder to return to the heaven that we were created in and have never truly left. St. Thomas Aquinas pondered this very idea, writing:
“We use words like ‘returning.’
Think about that. Inherent in that word is separation,
“And separation from God is never
really possible.
“What can you be that God is not? ‘You
cannot be what I am not,’ my Lord once said
to me.”
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