Category: A Year of Miracle Writing

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 19, 2020 — The paradox of problems”

Lesson 78: Let miracles replace all grievances

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 18, 2020 — Look at the size of that grievance!”

Lesson 77: I am entitled to miracles.

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 17, 2020 — Tattoo you”

Lesson 76: I am under no laws but God’s.

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 16, 2020 — Put down your shield”

Lesson 75: The Light has come.

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 15, 2020 — Living in Light”

Lesson 74: There is no will but God’s.

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 14, 2020 — Love’s dance”

Lesson 73: I will there be light.

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 13, 2020 — Mirror, mirror”

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.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 12, 2020 — Some body to hold on to”

Lesson 71: Only God’s plan for salvation will work.

I don’t know about any of you, but I have a TON of plans for my own salvation and I always have. I knew I would be okay in this world if I just found the right job, the right place to live, the right partner to do all that living with and the right community to support me in all of that.

Yeah, it never quite worked out that way. I spent a lot of time looking for jobs, homes, partners and communities. They all disappointed me at some point – and in my dissatisfaction, I made new plans for salvation – new jobs, new homes, new partners, new communities.

It reminds me of the scene from Evan Almighty when Steve Carrell’s character says to Morgan Freeman’s incarnation of God, “This isn’t what I had planned.” To which Freeman bursts out laughing: “Your plans.”

“If you want to make God laugh,” the old joke says, “tell Her your plans.”

Today’s lesson reveals the truth about all my plans: “Such is the ego’s plan for your salvation. Surely you can see how it is in strict accord with the ego’s basic doctrine, ‘Seek but do not find.'”

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 11, 2020 — Seek but do not find”

Lesson 70: My salvation comes from me.

Oh, man, my ego really, really doesn’t like today’s lesson at all. It flies in the face of the religious tradition in which I was raised. If I had said to my religious teachers of my childhood, “My salvation comes from me,” they would have strung me up immediately as a heretic. Pearls would be clutched. Collective gasps would be gasped. The world would implode.

The arrogance of such a statement would render them all aghast. Salvation, I was taught, comes only from one man – that Jesus guy – dying on a cross for your sins, and don’t you forget it, buster. “You’re a filthy sinner who deserves hell and the only reason – hear me, now – the ONLY reason you’re not going straight to hell this minute is because Jesus died for your sins, you terrible, wretched, worm of a soul,” they all said to me.

Those old tapes of fire and brimstone still play their top hits when lessons like this pop up in the workbook, promising me that I have gone far afield from the faith of my childhood. Thank God I have, because those old tapes no longer make any sense to me – they don’t have a beat that’s easy to dance to – and for good reason. Dancing is of the devil anyway.

Continue reading “AYoMW: March 10, 2020 — Dancing with the devil”