A Course in Miracles Lesson 67

Love created me like itself.

There is great power in affirmation. As Gertrude Stein once noted, repetition is really a form of insistence. It is a way of saying this is true in the face of voices that call it false. This lesson from A Course in Miracles, then, is an opportunity to affirm and reaffirm our identity as perfect thought in the mind of God. We are undoing the ego’s voice, by turns savage and sugary, which seeks to distract us from questioning its authority.

The voice which proclaims our identity as love, as kindness, as holiness, as joy is not – as we tend to understand the term – our voice. It is literally the voice of God because it is the voice of Love. This is true no matter how fragile and uncertain it feels to us. The fragility is not of the voice that speaks but of the ears that listen. Under the ego’s rule, we are resistant to any suggestion that we are something other than guilty, fear-ridden and worthy only of a tremulous existence leading to death.

So we have to come to this lesson ready not to speak, but to listen. That’s important. It feels as if it’s a speaking lesson – we get to say nice things about ourselves. But what is the point of speaking if the words are not heard? Indeed, we might say that there is no speaking until the words are heard. That’s what we’re being asked to do here then. We’re being asked to listen, to hear what God says about us.

The hearing that this lesson contemplates is not like listening to your professor teach you about Emily Dickinson. It’s not like taking heed of the meditation music that you play in the background while your write or pray or cook or knit.

Rather, it is about awareness. It is about entering into stillness and simply being there without trying to add to it or take away from it or interpret it or even understand it. Real hearing is deeply related to gratitude, because thankfulness merely sees what is and appreciates it. We might think of this lesson as an opportunity to thank God for our creation merely by being aware of that creation. God is not asking for anything else.

Even if our experience of practicing Lesson 67 is not earth-shattering, we are still making progress. The undoing is at work merely by our willingness to be still, our willingness to hear at all. This is what the ego cannot abide – our consistent turning away from its voice and its so-called laws. I might not believe that I am love, but I know that I am not the depressing picture the ego paints. Accepting there must be something else, I turn within to find it. That turn – that decision to shift – is itself God, because it is the yearning for wholeness, and that yearning only ever leads us to the wholeness we naturally are, and have been forever.