God is with me. I live and move in Him.
Often, our study and practice of A Course in Miracles leads us to states of metaphysical analysis that, profound and helpful as they can be, can also block the direct experience of happiness and inner peace to which that study and practice is given.
What is God? What is reality? What am I in truth? It is not that these are unworthy or unimportant questions. They are fun and interesting and can help point the way to the end of guilt and fear. Asking and answering them is a form of healing.
But also, we can use them as a means of avoiding healing. We can become invested in being right with respect to the answers, which corresponds to being invested in others being wrong. We can use the asking-and-answering to separate rather than join, to divide rather than unify.
We can slip all too easily into what Tara Singh called the lovelessness of I get it and you don’t.
Lesson 222 is one of many antidotes to that slippage. The suggestion is that God is All-in-all, transcending the artificial divide between our so-called physical lives and spiritual lives.
Thus, God is both the Spirit which directs our actions (W-pII.222.1:3) AND the food and water we consume in order to live (W-pII.222.1:2). He holds us in love (W-pII.222.1:4) AND is the air we breath (W-pII.222.1:2). God is both Source and Sustenance, neatly bridging the illusory frames we use to divide and abide in the Whole.
So our prayer today – the conceptual language we use to pass beyond concepts altogether – is an invitation to release our insistence on the big questions in order to remember what it means to rest in peace with the Source of All Life.
Yes, that is technically a “big” deal. But if we remember that “big” – and it’s opposite, “tiny” – are our words and our concepts, then we can let them go and ask God to remind us of the divine language which rests in a single name, “I Am.”
“I Am” is not a name so much as an experience. It is felt and known in the same way you “know” to draw the next breath, and in the same way you “feel” the effects of that breath. It is so subtle that you often miss it, and yet so powerful and life-giving that without it, “you” are not.
Therefore, we set aside our own ideas and concepts in order to rest with God in Creation, allowing our rest to be given to us in the form of remembering what is already given. We are inviting God to gently open in our hearts and minds the awareness of what cannot be doubted, only accepted with gratitude and joy.
And when we rise from this rest and return to the world, we will know the truth – our hearts will sing – “How still is he who knows the truth what He speaks today” (W-pII.222.1:5)!
