On my decision all salvation rests.
What I really enjoy about this lesson is the idea of God trusting me with his kids. I’m being flippant but you know what I mean. We spend a lot of time on “trusting God” and here we reverse that. God trusts us.
What I find amusing in a low-level frustrating kind of way about this lesson is the way certain sentences end up so convoluted by pronouns that they effectively lose all meaning, e.g., “You would give your Son to me in certainty that he is safe Who still is part of You, and yet is mine, because He is my Self” (W-pII.238.1:5). Huh?
But what I think is most noteworthy in this lesson is its one-sentence title: on my decision all salvation rests. Why that? Why here and now?
With respect to trust: A Course in Miracles typically personifies God as a superior male, the Father to end all fathers. Though it uses “Kingdom” quite a bit, it never uses “King” or “Ruler” or anything overtly militaristic.
I appreciate that! It is consistent with everything we know about the historical Jesus, whose emphasis was not on Rule but rather collaboration with a Loving Father whose patience, gentleness and kindness transcended our imagination.
And so in that spirit, I am grateful to consider a father who trusts me. As a father and a son in this life, I understand the role that trust plays in establishing and nurturing healthy relationships, and the way its absence undermines wholeness and happiness. I think the course is being very pro-family here, very pro-functional family.
With respect to the overly-dense sentences . . . I know, I know. If you go through them carefully, taking note of what’s capitalized and what’s not, they eventually parse into meaningful nuggets. Do I think Jesus spoke that way? No I do not. Do I think that ACIM sometimes indulges semantic density as a kind of juvenile pretension to intellectuallism? Yes. Yes I do.
Is all that merely opinion and therefore not worth the pixels comprising it? Of course it is.
What really stands out here is that the lesson’s title directs our attention not to trust, or ambling pronoun-strewn sentences, but to the decision we are entrusted by God to make – the decision upon which all salvation rests. No pressure!
What is the decision? It is the decision to “heal the separation by letting it go” (T-5.II.1:4), which is also our shared response to the Holy Spirit’s call to joy, given Him by God for our salvation (T-5.II.3:2).
The Holy Spirit is in you in a very literal sense. His is the Voice that calls you back to where you were before and will be again. It is possible even in this world to hear only that Voice and no other (T-5.II.3:7-9).
When we choose to listen to the Holy Spirit, we are choosing to listen to God, who is not in us because we are in God (e.g., T-5.II.5:5). The Holy Spirit teaches us this by teaching us how to be happy together. Our “decision” really amounts to saying, over and over, “sure, I’ll be happy. How?”
And then we wait on the answer. The answer is always given, because the answer is what we are in truth! But here in the world it takes time to learn this, and then to accept and trust it. But as we learn to accept and trust it, we realize that we are merely reflecting the trust that is already in us.
In a real way, we are what we seek. We already live where and how we want to live. But we have forgotten! Today we take yet another gentle step together in the direction of remembrance.
