Lesson 81: Review of Lesson 61: I am the light of the world, and Lesson 62: Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world.
I got snippy with one of my band members the other day. We were rehearsing a song and he kept asking questions that I had already gone over and I could feel my frustration with him rising a bit. He’s an amazing man who takes A Course in Miracles to heart and puts it into practice in his life. He truly knows he is the light of the world and is dedicated to forgiveness as his function. I love him dearly, but he was trying my patience.
Lesson 80: Let me recognize my problems have been solved.
“Problems,
problems, problems,” sings Ziggy Marley and the Wailers, “We
got to solve them … Problems, money problems, woman problems, political
problems
Problems, religious problems, race problems, life problems.”
So many
problems we believe that we have, but as the last lesson taught if we recognize
that we have but one problem – a belief in separation – then it follows that all
problems have been solved. No matter if you think the problem is about money, relationships,
politics, religion, race or anything about this life, they are different
manifestations of the one problem we all share – the ego’s lie that we are each
separate beings living our own separate lives.
In Reality,
we are one. In Reality, problems do not exist. In the ego’s reality, problems
appear to be everywhere, and some of us even relish solving those problems,
sorting things out and tying it all up with a bow. But, then, like roaches,
more problems crawl out of the woodwork, just as we think we’ve solved the one
before us now.
Our
problems seem to mushroom because we don’t yet believe we only have one
problem. We still believe there are many – and that some are more difficult to solve
than another. But, often we find, when we get to the root of the situation,
that there is a common cause for all problems.
Lesson
79: Let me recognize the problem so it can be solved
We believe
we have many problems in our world: war, famine, disease, oppression – so much
suffering going on. Those are the macro-problems we face, but we each have our
“own special problems,” today’s lesson observes, that we wish we
could solve.
We can’t
solve problems, though, until we recognize them and understand their root
cause. This lesson tells us that no matter how we perceive the problems around
us and believe them all to be distinct in their own way – they are all the
same. The root of every problem we believe we see in this world has one source:
Our belief in separation – that tiny, mad idea that we are somehow separated
from God and one another.
It’s
interesting that this lesson should arrive in a time when our world is
practicing “social distancing” due to the coronavirus pandemic. It
would appear, at first blush, that this pandemic is increasing our problem of
separation. In bodily form, at least, we are the most separated we have ever
been.
However, I
believe this pandemic is helping us recognize that our true problem is one of
separation. While we may be bodily distancing ourselves from one another, what
appears to be growing is our sense of unity – our sense of a common purpose –
and our growing generosity toward one another.
One of the
slogans I recall most vividly from watching Marianne Williamson’s weekly talks was
this: “You can have a grievance or you can have a miracle.”
While I
enjoyed the slogan very much, and have repeated it often, today’s lesson
invites us to let those words seek deeper into our heart and mind so that we
can actually live from this wisdom and not just parrot its sentiments. I won’t
sugarcoat it; this lesson is difficult to do, especially for those of us who
love our grievances.
Perhaps we
should back up and talk about what a grievance is. It certainly is those areas
we feel outraged about – the suffering and injustice in the world, the leaders
we blame for causing it and those others we blame for not doing anything about
the leaders who are causing all the suffering. But grievances can seem tiny as
well – that irritation you feel when the lines are long or when you perceive others
as hoarding seemingly scarce resources.
Just as
there is no order of difficulty in miracles there is no scale of grievances.
Tiny grievances are just as prohibitive to miracles as those we consider huge. A
grievance is a grievance, no matter how trivial or important it seems and keeps
us from experiencing miracles.
This lesson
asks us to think about someone with whom we have a grievance. Who are you
holding a grudge against? Think about that person.
The one that
always leaps to mind, besides my father, of course, is our current president.
His manner of being – the lies he tells, his selfishness, greed and other
pathologies – drive me around the bend. I cannot fathom why others cannot see
that he is a conniving, self-dealing grifter who believes all mechanisms of
society, economics and politics should serve his needs alone. Thinking about him
increases my anxiety and feelings of anger, isolation and, yes, superiority. I
cannot see him as anything but a lowlife who thrives off the suffering of
others.
One of the
things I learned growing up in the Southern Baptist tradition was about God’s
grace. It was something that God freely gave to everyone, without condition.
Grace was unearned and was bestowed on you just because you were here. However,
there was one condition. You had to accept this grace before you die, or else,
you would end up frying in hellfire for all eternity.
A Course
in Miracles turns
this piece of egoic theology inside out. Today’s lesson tells us that we are
entitled to miracles just because of who we are. Not because of who we are in
our body, but because of who we are in eternity. We are not these bodies so a
“get-it-now-before-you-die-or-else” kind of grace is actually pretty
useless. It’s the ego’s invention, meant to make us grateful to it as our god
for saving us from whatever it has defined as “hell.” In Reality, the
ego IS hell. It creates it for us in every moment of the day.
We, however, have a choice of whether or not we live in this hell of ego. We can choose to live in heaven right now by realizing we are entitled to miracles, “because of what you are.” And, this lesson says, “You will receive miracles because of what God is. And you will offer miracles because you are one with God.”
This is not something we have to do before the body dies – because our entitlement to miracles is an eternal thing – because of who we are, because of who God is and because we are one with God.
I recently ran
across an internet meme that read: “In America, there are more prison beds
than hospital beds and more gun shops than free clinics. We’ve been sick for a long
time.”
Today’s
lesson seeks to underscore this idea that we’ve been sick for a long time, not
just in America, but as a human race. We’re sick because we believe fully and
wholeheartedly in sickness. We believe that our bodies will grow old, get sick
and we’ll eventually die. It’s true that all bodies die – it’s how we’re
constructed here in this bodily illusion.
This lesson,
though, says the laws we’ve constructed here in this little “r”
reality are meant to ensure our suffering. We rely on bits of coins and paper
to pay for the basics everyone needs such as food, clothing and shelter. No
coins and paper? No food, clothing or shelter for you unless someone more
charitable comes along and gives it to you. No round pellets or fluid to push
through your veins? You’ll get sick and die.
These are
the laws of this universe we live in, because we have written them and believe
them to be true. I struggle a bit with this lesson, because, especially in this
time of pandemic, you don’t want to blame the sick for being sick, but every
illness under the sun has been created by the rules and laws we humans have
concocted and live under.
This bodily
world we live in can be an unforgiving place. As fear around a pandemic takes
hold around the world, we can see clearly the selfishness, the
“everyone-for-themselves” kind of thinking as commodities such as
toilet paper and hand sanitizer disappear from the shelves. Some have even bought
up large quantities of necessities, hoping to sell it back to others at a
premium.
This is the
ego’s world – a place where forgiveness, unity and the common good go right out
the window the moment we fear a threat to our own bodies.
Today’s
lesson invites us into a new state of mind, one that realizes this unforgiving
world is not our true reality. Yes, we live in it while we are in a bodily
state, and we should be prudent and careful about the state of our bodies, but
our minds do not have to buy into the fear that seeks to engulf us during this
time.
In our
minds, we know the Light has come. This old world of fear and despair can pass
away without us even noticing.
I have often
seen this lesson expressed as “There is no will but Love,” and I
think that helps to clarify the point of today’s lesson. As a recovering
Southern Baptist, when I encounter sentences such as “There is no will but
God’s,” I recoil a little bit inside. That kind of sentence was used, in
my experience, by leaders who wished to exercise their control over others. “God’s
will,” then, was whatever they said it was.
For example,
I was told it was definitely NOT God’s will that I embrace my lesbianism. I was
told that God’s will was for me to meet and man, marry him and have many
babies. This is something that went completely against every fiber of my being.
I have known from a very early age that my sexual orientation was toward women,
but as anyone who has struggled with this can tell you, my
“orientation” isn’t just about sex – it’s about who I emotionally and
spiritually, as well as physically, tend to form deep intimate bonds with. That
has always been women.
For someone
to tell me it’s not God’s will for me to deeply love another human being simply
because we are the same gender is pretty insane. I’ve seen many people embrace
the idea that their innate sexuality was an affront to God’s will and then live
against who they truly are. It has destroyed many of them. Many realize later
that they have to embrace who they truly are to do God’s will in their lives.
I chuckle
every time I read this lesson because of this one line: “Do you really
want to be in hell?”
It makes me
laugh because that’s where we always put ourselves when we rely on the ego to
tell us what to do, where to go and what to say to those we encounter during the
day. We spread the contagion of hell every time we follow the ego’s directives,
because the ego wants to project all of its grievances, all of its selfish and
greedy desires out onto the world. This is, the Course says, how we create
the world: “Your picture of the world can only mirror what is within.”
The entire
point of A Course in Miracles is help us eliminate the hell of fear that
lurks inside of us in the form of ego and live fully into the heaven of the
Divine that also resides within. We created this world, the Course said,
when we “forgot to laugh,” when we forgot that we are joy, love,
peace and compassion incarnate. We are created by Love to be Love, but we
forgot our true self and instead created bodies to give the illusion of
separation. Our task now is to remember who we truly are – Light encased in flesh.
Lesson 72: Holding grievances is an attack on God’s plan for salvation.
Body image is a big topic in the world right now. Recently, singer Billie Eilish even took off her shirt during a performance to underscore exactly what today’s lesson seeks to teach us: every single one of us is more than our outward appearance.
It’s a powerful
message and one the Course acknowledges is needed if we are to overcome
our egoic fear and live into the Love that we have been created to be and
communicate in the world. We have a terrible time with our bodies in this
illusion. As this lesson says, we tend to either denigrate or glorify the body.
I grew up in a tradition that denigrated the body and saw it as the seat of all
evil – only redeemed by one man’s sacrifice on a cross.
Those new to
the Course may see this lesson as more denigration of the body. It’s
true that this lesson tells us that our “natural state” is to be
without a body, but that is not to denigrate the body – but to put it in its
right perspective. We are NOT these bodies. We have them because we believed
the tiny, mad idea that we are somehow separate from God. Because we believe
this, we manifested bodies that appear to make us separate and distinct from
one another. The Holy, however, knows the truth about us, and has given us the
Holy Spirit to communicate to us about who we really are – thoughts in the mind
of God that need no bodily form.
