“I gladly make the ‘sacrifice’ of fear.”
– A Course in Miracles, Lesson 323
The one time I got to see A Course in Miracles teacher Marianne Williamson in person, she called on me to ask a question – and I blew it. With my voice quivering and my hands sweating (I mean this is one of my heroines, after all), I asked some convoluted question about sacrifice.
I could feel her eyes rolling at me. Not really an original kind of question for someone who studies and talks about the Course nonstop. I honestly don’t remember one word of her answer to me, but I imagine whatever she said was the summation of this lesson. We are not called to “sacrifice” anything in this world, except our fear.
What kept me from hearing her in that moment (other than being starstruck) was my … wait for it … fear. I had arrived at her workshop that weekend wracked with fear. I was just beginning to embrace the ideas and concepts of the Course and I was genuinely afraid that it would cost me everything I had built and held dear – my romantic relationship, my relationships with others who didn’t cotton to this whole metaphysical “nonsense” and professional spiritual avenues that I had been pursuing.
The thing is, deep down, I knew that the jig was up in all of these areas of my life. I had accepted a deep calling to grow in a different direction that would take me away from all of these things that I felt like were top-line priorities in my life. As it turns out, the moment I stopped being afraid of losing all of those things, I lost them.
Did that cause me pain? In the short-term, it certainly did. I had to rearrange my entire life – pack up my stuff and find a new place to live – both literally and figuratively. Did it feel like sacrifice in the moment? Sure did.
Here’s the miracle though – in Reality, the only thing I sacrificed was my fear. In Reality, that’s the only thing we ever sacrifice. It’s fear that keeps us in the ego’s grip of “giving up” things or “choosing others” over ourselves or seeing ourselves as some victim of other people’s demands on us. We’re afraid of what people will think about us if we don’t act as they expect. Or, we’re afraid everyone will abandon us if we chart our own woo-woo path off the ego’s grid.
And all of that may well happen. It did to me. However, what I found on the other side was only joy, peace … and relief. I was no longer under the spell of fear – fear of loss, fear of rejection, fear of being all alone. Instead, there were new relationships, new ways of living and being, new ways of engaging with the Holy and the world that awaited me. I just had to be willing to “sacrifice” my fear first.
It’s an ongoing cycle, of course. Now, I have new fears (well, old ones really, but now they’re coming up to be healed), that I need to examine and sacrifice all over again to clear the way for more miracles to emerge in my life. This is the process of “purification” that the Course speaks about – clearing all the barriers to love as they arise for healing. The only “cost” associated with this process, this lesson tells us, is the remembrance and restoration of our true, Divine Self, “for the salvation of the world.”
Purity, Hafiz says, “cuts the plow reins.
“It keeps you from working and dining in the mud.
“It frees you from living behind a big ox that bites.
“What can purity do, my dear? It can lift your heart on a rising, bucking Sun that makes the soul hunger to reach the roof of creation.
“It offers what the whole world wants: real knowledge and power.
“It offers what the wise crave: the priceless treasure of freedom.
“Pure divine love is no meek priest or tight banker;
“it will smash all your windows and only then throw in the holy gifts.
“It will allow you to befriend life and light and sanity and not even mind waking to another day.
“It reveals the excitement of the present and the beauty of precision.
“It confers vitality and a sublime clarity until finally all the heart can do is burst open with great love and cheer!
“O purity, O dear truth and friend within me, why didn’t you tell me sooner you could do all this—
“cut the reins of illusion, so we can all just go wild, loving God and everyone all day!”
That, my friends, is no sacrifice at all.
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