I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
We do not practice A Course in Miracles alone. We practice in relationship with others, always shifting from special to holy relationship as we become less invested in and attached to fear, and more open to love. Any blessing that we extend to our brothers and sisters – broadly defined to include owls, whales sharks and photons – blesses us as well.
This blessing is shared in part because our oneness is indivisible. It is elementary. It cannot be reduced any more that it can be expanded or added on to. But even at more pedestrian levels of separation – which includes separate bodies, separate interests, separate life trajectories – we are still blessed by the blessing we offer others. Why? Because doing so reflects our function of loving in a loveless place (T-14.IV.4:10).
The children of Heaven live in the light of the blessing of their Father, because they know that they are sinless. The Atonement was established as the means of restoring guiltlessness to minds that have denied it, and thus denied Heaven to themselves. Atonement teaches you the true condition of the Son of God (T-14.IV.9:1-3).
And as we learn the true condition of God’s Creation, we naturally extend it.
When we actively seek to bring our will – and, by extension, our living – into alignment with Christ and, through Christ with the Absolute, we are loving as God loves. And God’s love does not come and go. it is not conditional on behavior or performance. We rest in it as our foundation, our essence, and its extension – which occurs naturally, without effort or intention of our own – reminds us of that essential foundation.
When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer. Only your own volition seems to make deciding hard (T-14.IV.6:1-4).
When we set aside our tiny will – our “volition” – the space opened restores to our shared memory both our oneness and the fact that even our confusion and resistance cannot undo what is fundamentally true. We can forget God and we can deny God, but we cannot make what is true untrue.
When you have let all that obscured the truth in your most holy mind be undone for you, and therefore stand in grace before your Father, He will give Himself to you as He has always done. Giving Himself is all He knows . . . (T-14.IV.3:1-2).
We turn within to make contact with God, who is our Creator, and who calls us to create like He creates – in love, for love and through love. The course uses the symbolism of the heart here, to emphasize the deeply intimate experience of realizing our union with God. We are not perceiving something far away in time or space, but rather remembering – and bringing forth – something that is so much a part of us that to have ever believed it wasn’t seems silly.
Sorrow arises out of a sense that we are deprived of something, or have lost something. And this, in turn, depends upon a belief in sacrifice as real and meaningful. God’s Love does not return what was lost or give back what is missing. Rather, it heals our confusion about what we are. In that healing, our ideas about sacrifice are undone, and so the cause for sorrow ceases to exist.
Joy does not turn to sorrow, for the eternal cannot change. But sorrow can be turned to joy, for time gives way to the eternal (T-22.II.3:6-7).
Again, this is an intimate experience arising from our willingness to offer the world a love that it does not know how to extend itself and which, as often as not, it refuses. Our work is not to fret about what happens but simply to avail ourselves of what is given, here and now, as the essence of what we are in truth. Let us remember God’s Love, and in remembering be transformed, and in that transformation, take all our brothers and sisters, and the world we share, home.
