God, being Love, is also happiness.
Yesterday I asked if it made sense that love would bring forth anything other than happiness? I suggested that any logical inquiry would affirm that yes, love begets happiness.
Today’s lesson both confirms this truth, and extends is unto God, who is not apart from love.
Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it. Nor can it be experienced where love is not. Love has not limits, being everywhere. And therefore joy is everywhere as well (W-pI.103.1:1-5).
We might ask: okay, what’s the problem then?
The problem is that mind – being free to choose – can choose to not believe this, and instead make a world of fear, guilt, hate and violence and pretend that is its home and reality.
When mind does that, it effectively redefines love as both limited and capable of being opposed (W-pI.103.1:7). It ceases to reflect perfect safety and happiness, and instead reflects a situation in which attack and defense are reasonable.
Thus, our self-made love – and the world and selves subject to it – fail to achieve the liberation which is the function of our ACIM practice. God becomes a punisher, a capricious and unpredictable ruler, and we are sinners standing in dreadful opposition to Heaven.
If that or anything like it is our underlying thought system, then we are going to be unhappy indeed.
The current sequence of ACIM lessons aims to undo this strange belief, replacing it with the clear and helpful idea that God, being Love, is also happiness (W-pI.103.3:5).
If we are faithful to our practice, then we will experience a change in thought. Being will lighten.
. . . welcome all the happiness it brings as truth replaces fear, and joy becomes what you expect to take the place of pain. God, being, Love, it will be given you (W-pI.103.3:2-3).
If nothing else, we can rest in the assurance that there is another way, and we are now walking it. We can stop, go a step or two backwards, or merely take half-hearted baby steps. It doesn’t matter. We have made the choice to remember what we are in truth, and our choice becomes the light by which the memory dawns in our mind as reality.
What we are is love, and so happiness is our natural state, and in this understanding we realize our unconditional oneness with God.
