Lesson 69: My grievances hide the light of the world in me.
When I was a kid, the Southern Baptist tradition taught something known as the Rapture. It was a tale of how the world would end. God would “take up” the righteous and leave the damned on earth to fight apocalyptic battles among themselves as Jesus and the Devil battled for their soul. You really, really didn’t want to be “left behind.”
I feared the apocalypse. I was shown biblical passages that talked about the moon turning to blood and God raising the saved from the dead. The part about sucking up the living like a divine Hoover wasn’t in there, but that didn’t keep the story from scaring the bejeezus out of me.
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the true meaning of the word “apocalypse.” It simply means a revealing – a lifting of the veil between this world of ego and the realm of God. My religion taught that it would be an epic, violent and bloody battle for that veil to be lifted. A Course in Miracles says all we have to do is recognize that the veil isn’t real, and its gone. No fuss, no muss and nobody gets sucked up into the Divine Hoover.
All those things the ego likes to use to hide this fact from us are like clouds, this lesson tells us. They may obscure the Reality, with a capital R, of who we truly are, but they are part of the illusion and can be easily swept aside if we are willing to lay down our grievances and believe that we truly are the light of the world.
There is nothing to fear from the apocalypse. Instead, we should welcome the end of this ego world because once we sweep aside the veil of grievance, all that will be left in this world is God’s shining light of love – because that’s all any of us truly consists of.
The Muslim mystic poet Rumi puts it this way:
I stood
before a silk worm one day.
And that night my heart said to me,
“I
can do things like that, I can spin skies,
I can be woven into love that can bring warmth to people;
I can be soft against a crying face,
I can be wings that lift, and I can travel on my thousand feet
throughout the earth,
my sacks filled with the sacred.”
And I replied to my heart,
“Dear, can you really do all those things?”
And it just nodded, “Yes,” in silence.
So we began and will never cease.
Photo by Raphael Brasileiro from Pexels