My home awaits me. I will hasten there.
A Course in Miracles invites us to reconsider the purpose of the world. What is the reason it exists? What is it for?
If I believe it has a value as I see it now, so will it still remain for me. But if I see no value in the world as I behold it, nothing that I want to keep as mine or search for as a goal, it will depart from me (W-pII.226.1:3-4).
The suggestion is that we investigate the world’s value. Do we care whether the snow will make it harder to drive to work? Are we resentful because have cancer or a migraine? Do we care more about our kids than kids in a warzone on the other side of the globe?
For most of us, if we are honest, we have to say yes. We perceive differences, and we evaluate those differences based on what they either take from or give to us, and we judge them good or bad accordingly.
The question isn’t whether living this way is natural or right or wrong. It’s whether it makes us happy or unhappy. And, again, if we are honest, most of us are not happy in a natural, sustainable and enduring way.
Most of us, when we are happy, it’s because we believe we are gaining something. But in order for us to get anything in the world, somebody else has to go without. Can we truly be happy if our brothers and sisters suffer on our account?
A Course in Miracles is not a spiritual path that fixes this problem. It’s not about learning some philosophical trick to retranslate experience or using the intellect to rearrange the facts of experience, making them add up to anything other than zero.
It’s about letting go of the world as a site of loss or gain altogether. Not even death counts as loss against our power to choose salvation.
If I so choose, I can depart this world entirely. It is not death which makes this possible, but it is a change of mind about the purpose of the world (W-pII.226.1:1-2).
This “change of mind” is a decision to no longer seek to replace the truth with illusions (W-pII.226.1:5). We are willing to have a world of competition, of winners and losers, of fear of loss and dread of suffering be gently washed away a love that is not of the world.
Father . . . Your Arms are open and I hear Your Voice. What need have I to longer in a place of vain desires and of shattered dreams, when Heaven can so easily be mine? (W-pII.226.2:1-3).
The Truth is, and is revealed when we stop insisting that we know what it is. We are not here because we are spiritual experts and giants in Christ. We are here because we are confused and have thus invested wrongly. This lesson is yet another reminder – and thus another opportunity – to choose again another way.
Let us rest in the hope that the way home will be shown to us today, and if not today then tomorrow or the day after. There is no need to postpone the end of suffering. Let us consent to be taught how to remember Christ together, and in the remembrance gather all our brothers and sisters, so that together we might be restored to the Love of God.
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