Lesson 58: Review of Lessons 36 – 40
The ideas from Lessons 36 – 40 are:
36. My holiness envelopes everything I see.
37. My holiness blesses the world.
38. There is nothing my holiness cannot do.
39. My holiness is my salvation.
40. I am blessed as a Son (Child) of God.
Singer and songwriter Rickie Byars sings about living in a “Wholly Holy Way,” proclaiming that love is all around us, seeking to learn from failure and asking to walk in each day a little wiser. Her song helps us to understand what this lesson means when it talks about our “holiness.”
For those of us who grew up in more fundamentalist Christian traditions, such as the Southern Baptist Church, humans are considered the furthest thing from “holy.” Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant strain of religion, once compared himself (and therefore the rest of humanity) to “a stinking bag of worms.” This form of religion teaches that there’s nothing good about us and God had to send his son, Jesus, to die on a cross to even make the human race into something that didn’t make God puke every time He (and, yes, it was always a He) thought of us.
This idea that we could be “holy” was preposterous.
I guess it’s all in the definition one may hold of “holiness.” In my background, only God or Jesus were to be considered “holy.” Humans could be “raised up” by God’s grace, but there was a sense that you were never going to be considered “good enough,” or “clean enough” without some kind of cosmic overlooking of all your amazing horribleness.
The Course presents an entirely different picture of humankind. We are not “stinking bags of worms,” we are merely lost in the tiny, mad idea that we are separate from God, each other and all of creation. The truth of the matter is that our essence, the core of who we truly are, still remains in union with God. This world we have created is our classroom – a place where we learn to remember who we truly are, and in that remembering, we bring everyone back home with us – since there’s only one of us here.
Our “holiness,” the Course would say, turns on our remembering our “wholeness.” We have never been anything but whole – residing in unity with God and everyone else beyond this world of bodily illusion. Our task here is to remember that and then seek to live in a wholly holy way.
We live from our wholeness – our holiness – when we no longer see ourselves a guilty – as that stinking bag of worms – and can “come to accept the innocence that is the truth” about ourselves. When we can operate from our sense of wholeness, we not only accept salvation for ourselves, but we can become an instrument for God to save the whole world.
Living in a wholly holy way means to give up guilt, to give up fear, to give up anything that creates a feeling of separation between ourselves and anyone and anything in the world around us. When we overcome our fear, we find the only thing left is Love.
Hafiz states it plainly:
“It is
a great injustice and a monumental act
of cruelty for any religion to make someone
fear God.”
This fear of God is the tiny, mad idea that created the separation. Living into our wholeness – living life in a wholly holy way – is our salvation.
Photo by Sippakorn Yamkasikorn from Pexels