This is my holy instant of release.
The will that we share with God is creative, loving and merciful. Most of us like those adjectives and will happily adopt them as our own. But absent the experience of knowing God’s Will as our own, they degene. rate into magic. They become mantras we use to distract ourselves from the real work of giving up dreams born of separation.
God’s Will extends only Love. But this love is impersonal and neutral. Like sunlight it does not distinguish between the objects it rests upon. As Jesus said so long ago, God causes the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike. Distinctions and evaluation are separative, not unitive.
We do not have to magically – or supernaturally – undo judgment. We can’t do that. All we can do is see the way that our will is presently not aligned with God, and then become willing to learn a new way of seeing. “Seeing” here is a term of art that is closer to psychology than physiology.
It is tempting always to ask what does God’s Will create? But that is a confusion arising from our sense of being separate from Creation. We think that creation means writing a poem or baking a pie or having a child. Those things are fine – do then or don’t. They are just examples of the physical reproducing itself.
God’s will “creates” by extending itself, and what is created is a sense of peace and happiness. But, again, not the peace and happiness of “I got what I wanted and/or needed.” It is a peace and happiness that transcends the body’s narrow definition of contentedness.
We don’t want to rush ourselves into pretending that we know God’s Will is ours. We want to gently question our conclusions, and keep our mind clear and ready. Forgiveness waits (W-pII.1.4:3). Forgiveness is ready to receive. And when it does receive, what it receives surpasses understanding and extends itself naturally, without effort.
Imagine a prism. When sunlight passes through it, beautiful rainbows appear. The prism doesn’t decide to do this or consent to do it. It doesn’t work for some light but not other light. Its function is what it is, and it cannot refuse that function.
We are like prisms unto the light of God. As that light reaches us, and extends through us, it becomes beautiful and radiant – not because WE want it that way, but because what it is and what we are harmonize in this particular way. Love is extended naturally, without qualification or condition, and we become happy accordingly.
God’s Will is merciful in the specifically ACIM sense of not perceiving “sin” at all. It corrects errors without dwelling on them. It does not accept the judgment that renders some things – some people, places, objects or ideas – as better than or worse than others.
True mercy is intent only on knowing the other as God knows them, which means we have to set aside our internal standards of evaluation – the body’s craving for survival, the conditioned mind’s service unto that goal. Who are your brothers and sisters really? How do you know?
All of this is hard to do because it is unfamiliar. The body – and the mind conditioned to believe it is the body – are like a river used to flowing a certain way. It takes practice and devotion to reroute it. But this lesson is clear that our practice and devotion do not necessitate time. It may take time to awaken; but also, this instant may itself be our instant of “holy release.”
Therefore, we come to the present with gratitude and humility. Our intention is to set aside fantasies of our spiritual growth, our inner peace, and our happiness. They have brought us nothing but grief and pain, and we would accept – and offer – a new gift.
Today, in our time with God, let us lay down our many defenses against love – all the projections, all the distractions, all the worries – and simply wait in joyful hope to remember together the home we never left, and the Creator whose Will to create we share.
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