Lesson 127: There is no love but God’s.
Back when Donald Trump was running for the highest office in the US, I was watching Marianne Williamson’s then-weekly talks on A Course in Miracles. Her book, A Return to Love, had primed me years ago for the Course‘s ideas but I was really beginning to dig into the book and workbook during this time and was absorbing all I could from teachers of the Course such as her and Ken Wapnick.
Her talks were given to an unsurprisingly liberal audience that filled a church in New York City each week to hear her. She talked about the election a lot in those days and after Trump managed to enter the White House by the electoral college, she began, in earnest, to use him as a teaching tool for the Course.
Everyone, including Williamson, was dismayed at what had happened in the election and many were grappling with their feelings about the turn of events and their personal feelings about the man who had taken over the office. Some were very worried, of course, and still others could not get over their visceral hatred for Trump.
Williamson, who repeats herself a lot in these talks – but still is questioned about the same old things in the Q&A portion – said the same thing over the course of many of her talks after the election. She talked about how much God loved Trump. Perhaps she did this to get the predictable gasp from the audience, but I think her constant mentioning of this idea – that God loves someone we personally find reprehensible – as a way to reinforce today’s lesson: There is no love but God’s.
Williamson would stage a conversation between herself and God and ask, “But, God, what about Trump? Am I commanded to love even him?” And she would say that God would look Trump up and down, nod and say, “I like him.”
Her point, of course, is that the Love that the Course teaches isn’t like the love of the ego. “Love is a law without an opposite.” There is no such thing as “hate” in God’s realm. There is only love – and not the fickle, picky and conditional love the ego tries to pass off as the real thing.
The wholeness of this Love, the lesson says “is the power holding everything as one…”
You, me, your momma, your daddy, your friends, your siblings, your pets, the strangers you meet … Trump, we’re all held together as one in the Love of God – within the only Love that truly exists.
This upsets our ego to no end. “If there’s no one to hate, what’s the point of living?” it asks. The ego is only energized by equal and opposite reactions to its actions. It thrives on competition, on specialness, on being better, faster, stronger and smarter than someone else.
“What the world believes,” this lesson reminds us, “was made to hide love’s meaning, and to keep it dark and secret.”
How do we go about learning the difference between the ego’s love and God’s Love? Hafiz has some ideas:
“Reveal yourself to us so that the cries of darkness no longer
disturb any you love. Become that, which the unlit wick
goes for to light.
“Heaven guards our souls because they are so precious.
A brightness we can give even God needs. If this was not
true why would He ever bow to us? And that He has, I know.
I have seen His profound humility.
“Service to others will help you become deaf to a voice
inside of you that does not believe in happiness.”