Sean Reagan

There is no love but God’s.

Slightly more a than a third of the way through the ACIM workbook, we reach a lesson that declares itself “the largest single step this course requests in your advance towards its established goal” (W-pI.127.6:5)

This step has to do with recognizing the full breadth and meaning of “there is no love but God’s” (W-pI.127.3:5).

Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the Father and the Son which holds them both forever the same (W-pI.127.4:7-8).

Love does not recognize differences (W-pI.127.1:4), and it does not change (W-pI.127.2:1). It cannot be given to one person and withheld from another (W-pI.127.2:4). Love does not judge (W-pI.127.3:1). Wherever it appears, it appears perfect and complete, never once adapting itself to circumstances (W-pI.127.1:5).

Thus, love does not obey the laws of the world. Indeed, the world – and the laws by which it appears to operate – exist to obscure love, to “hide love’s meaning, and to keep it dark and secret” (W-pI.127.5:2).

Lesson 127 is an invitation to go beyond the limits established by perception, to free our mind from “all the laws you think you must obey; of all the limits under which you live, and all the changes that you think are part of human destiny” (W-pI.127.6:4).

Here, the course gently shows us a way out of suffering that is not temporary and not conditional. It points to a love that does not come and go and is therefore not subject to perception. Our eyes do not see it; our hands cannot feel it; our thoughts cannot think it.

How, then, do we know this love?

Call to your Father, certain that His Voice will answer. He Himself has promised this. And He Himself will place a spark of truth within your mind . . . He will shine through your idle thoughts today, and help you understand the truth of love (W-pI.127.9:1-4).

Is it clear? We call. That is what we do. We ask God to remind us that He abides with us forever, and that’s the end of our role. We ask and then we wait, confident that our cry will be answered.

Come to this lesson then in radical trust. Tell yourself that no matter what the course has been like so far – the progress you’ve made, the confusion you’ve felt, the ground you’ve lost – that today you will reach all the way to God. Today you will hear God’s Voice reminding you that you are not separate, not from God and not from your brothers and sisters.

←Lesson 126
Lesson 128→

All that I give is given to myself.

The fundamental idea this lesson teaches appears over and over in A Course in Miracles, because it reflects a law (giving and receiving are the same) that – once understood and brought into application – ends the separation and all the suffering that goes along with it.

If you believed this statement, there would be no problem in complete forgiveness, certainty of goal, and sure direction. You would understand the means by which salvation comes to you, and would not hesitate to use it now (W-pI.126.1:2-3).

In a nutshell, what we offer to another, we offer to our own self, because we are not actually separate from our brothers and sisters (broadly defined to include starfish, birch trees and asteroids). If we offer conditional love – which is simply fear – then that is what we get in return. If we offer love, then that is what we will recieve.

This giving and recieving does not occur at the level of the body, though it is experienced there in various forms. Giving and recieving – and the spirit in which they are brought forth – are interior and abstract, occurring at the level of thought.

Thus, the notion that to give and receive are the same is alien to the ego, for whom the body is both temple and war zone. The ego, which reflects the body’s appetites, its drive to get, sees others as mainly as competitors and sometimes as temporary allies. It is incapable of creation, and knows nothing of love.

A Course in Miracles relates this to its evolved frame of forgiveness. On the world’s view, which is the ego’s view, forgiveness is a form of “charitable tolerance” designed to prove that we are better than our brother or sister (e.g., W-pI.126.3:2, 3). We give it or we don’t – it’s up to us. And we only give it if we think there is a benefit to us.

The course reminds us that this is not how God views forgiveness, and thus it is unrelated to salvation. It is not what A ourse in Miracles teaches. Forgiveness does not rest on the whims of those who do not remember that they are united in Creation with all Life. There is a better way, which involves recognizing our inability to forgive and connecting it to our need for forgiveness.

Not having given Him the gift He asks of you, you cannot recognize His gifts, and think He has not given them to you. Yet would He ask you for a gift unless it was for you? Could He be satisfied with empty gestures, and evaluate such petty gifts as worth of His Son? Salvation is a better than this (W-pI.126.7:1-4).

And so this is the promise A Course in Miracles makes: we are alien unto love and on our own incapable of finding our way home but help is at hand in a literal way. The idea behind this lesson occurrs over and over in ACIM, but its repetition would be meaningless if it were not for the calm conviction that the specific help we need to understand and practice this idea is already given to us.

Therefore, when we are ready to learn, we will learn. And we cannot fail.

Thus, today’s lesson is an invitation to set aside our limited ideas about forgiveness and life and love and just make a space in which God’s Voice can speak to us. Yesterday we practiced making that space; today we get a better sense of what might happen in that space.

Repeat today’s idea, and ask for help in understanding what it really means. Be willing to be taught. Be glad to hear the Voice of truth and healing speak to you and you will understand the words He speaks, and recognize He speaks your words to you (W-pI.126.10:2-4).

No more than this willingness to learn is asked of us. When we give it, we give the gift of remembering our home in Creation. And having given it, we receive it.

←Lesson 125
Lesson 127→

In quiet I receive God’s word today.

Today our practice opens up to direct contact with God. In quiet and stillness, with neither insistence on certain outcomes nor resistance to others, we wait on God’s Voice to call from within our mind, which is where God abides (W-pI.125.1:3).

Today, we refuse to judge and we refuse to accept the judgment of the world. We lay it all down – our “petty thoughts” and “personal desires” (W-pI.125.3:1) – and instead gather at “the throne of God,” which is a “quiet place within the mind,” and patiently wait for God’s healing Word. Nor will we wait in vain.

He has not waited until you return your mind to Him to give His Word to you. He has not hid Himself from you, while you have wandered off a little while from Him (W-pI.125.5:1-2).

Our confusion about our identity is what obscures remembrance of God’s Presence in us as our real Self. Our confusion arises because we hold a mistaken belief – that we are bodies and that the world of perception is the real world – as if it were gospel.

This error is not a sin for which we can never be forgiven. But it does lock us into a mind which is closed to miracles, and thus brings forth only illusions. The solution is to come to stillness. To be still is to stop projecting, and to give attention to the whole of experience, without rejecting or pushing back on any of it.

This state is a prerequisite to direct contact with God.

His Voice awaits your silence, for His Word can not be heard until your mind is quiet for a while, and meaningless desires have been stilled. Await His Word in quiet. There is peace within you to be called upon today, to help make ready your most holy mind to hear the Voice for its Creator speak (W-pI.125.6:2-4).

We are not called to high drama nor supernatural experiences today. For when we hear God’s Voice, we hear our own voice (W-pI.125.8:1). It is our word that God speaks (W-pI.125.8:2).

It is the Word of freedom and of peace, of unity of will and purpose, with no separation nor division in teh single Mind of Father and Son. In quiet listen to your Self today, and let Him tell you God has never left His Son, and you have never left your Self (W-pI.125.8:3-4).

This is the message that we receive, for there is no other message God could give. We will hear “the Word in which the Will of God the Son joins in His Father’s Will, at one with it, with no illusions interposed between the wholly indivisible and true” (W-pI.125.9:4).

←Lesson 124
Lesson 126→

Let me remember I am one with God.

If our problem is that we are confused about what we are, and therefore suffer a spiritual identity crisis, then this lesson neatly ends it by inviting us to “give thanks for our identity in God” (W-pI.124.1:1).

Note that it is not our identity “as” God but rather “in” God. Our oneness is not a merging in which both entities dissolve, but rather one in which our own self-construction disappears because it cannot be maintained before the light in which we are created both infinite and eternal. Concerns about world and body are undone in the simple truth of our God-lit identity.

Everything we touch takes on a shining light that blesses and that heals. At one with God and with the universe we go our way rejoicing, with the thought that God Himself goes everywhere with us (W-pI.124.1:4-5).

This does not describe a supernatural occurrence. There is nothing unduly mystical about it. It merely recognizes what we are in truth. It is effectively a correction for the error that we are bodies trapped in non-zero-sum competition with our brothers and sisters. It is a new way of seeing our self that is characterized by not insisting that we understand what we see. It is a form of nonresistance. We open up to Creation on terms that we do not set and for which we will not advocate.

To the ego, for whom the body is a home and the world an environment, this passivity makes no sense. Indeed, it is an actual threat, because if it works it makes clear that ego is not only not necessary, it’s not even real.

We will trust God’s Voice to speak as He see fit toay, certain He will not fail. Abide with Him this half an hour. He will do the rest (W-pI.124.8:5-7).

This is an alien posture to the ego, yet we need to remember that it is our learning that has brought us to this juncture. We do not face this half hour by accident but by divine design in which our God-created Self has joyfully participated. If we are ready to say yes, our liberation is at hand.

And yet, critically, our judgment of the exercise’s success is not the point. It doesn’t matter what we think is going to happen or what we think has happened. A Course in Miracles never deviates: we are not the judge of our spiritual progress. In fact, regardless of our judgment – it worked, it didn’t work – the truth is that it has already worked.

You may not be ready to accept the gain today. Yet sometime, somewhere, it will come to you, nor will you fail to recognize it when it dawns with certainly upon your mind. This half an hour will be framed in gold, with every minute like a diamond set around the mirror this exercise will offer you. And you will see Christ’s face upon it, in reflection of your own (W-pI.124.9:3-5).

That is our identity, when all is said and done. That is what we remember when we remember what we are: we remember that we are Christ and that Christ is us. This remembrance transcends the limited identity of the body – whether it is a twenty-first century body tending a garden in New England or a first century body writhing on a cross while bored Roman guards toss dice.

The world – which includes our body, for they are brought forth together – is a reflection of our mind, and our mind is holy. When we remember this, then the world loses its ability to cause us either grief or ecstasy. We become calm and still, the center of a vast storm that will pass whenever we tell it to. What is not real cannot have effects.

Therefore, come to the half hour today happily. Let it be what it is – deep, profound, annoying, distracting, uncomfortable, boring. Whatever it is, let that be your gift to God. All that matters today is showing up. Showing up is willingness. Showing up is the gift God asks of us. In time – perhaps today, perhaps ten years from now, perhaps in another life for all we know – God will show up to us. And His appearance will remind us that He never disappeared from us, nor we from Him.

We are one with God. For this we give thanks, over and over and over.

←Lesson 123
Lesson 125→

I thank my Father for His gifts to me.

Lesson 123 invites us to a very specific form of gratitude – we offer gratitude to our Creator for the gifts we have been given in and through our practice of becoming responsible for projection and thus remembering Creation. As we make this shift from fear to love, love expands and increases, accelerating the shift.

Gratitude heals and its healing is generative.

In his book The Voice that Precedes All Thought, Tara Singh, who credited his personal relationship with Helen Schucman for his understanding of the role gratitude plays in A Course in Miracles, wrote that gratitude anchors us in nondual awareness of love.

Gratefulness does not know a lack.
It trusts in the Will of God
and leaves God’s things to God.
It knows that
for what you are grateful you will never be denied.

All else is duality, fear, and selfishness,
bound to the body and its sensations (11)

So gratitude is not ancillary to a meaningful spiritual practice. It is not merely a list that we make. It is integrated into the woof and weave of our learning. It is not an accident that the previous two lessons’ emphasis on forgiveness arrives here, asking us to adopt a posture of giving thanks in order to receive thanks.

In other words, to be grateful is to be forgiving in the specific way that A Course in Miracles understands and asks us to apply that concept.

Be glad today, in loving thankfulness, your Father has no left you to yourself, nor let you wander in the dark alone. Be grateful He has saved you from the self you though you made to take the place of Him and His creation (W-pI.123.2:2-3).

Forgiveness is both the light of understanding, and the end of self-imposed darkness. We no longer believe the lies of ego, and turn instead to the truth revealed by the Holy Spirit when we simply listen. When we listen to the Holy Spirit, which is to forgive, we see the real world and for that vision, we naturally give thanks. That thanks returns to us a thousandfold, creating a cycle of sharing that “fills the world with gladness and with gratitude” (W-pI.123.6:5).

ACIM students are messengers who carry the word of God forth to their brothers and sisters, not as a function of wordiness or intellectual insight, but rather in gentleness, happiness and kindness. We know one another as equals and that equality means we are given to cooperation and communication with one another. We are beyond competition and the suffering it begets.

We sing the song of thankfulness today, in honor of the Self that God has willed to be our true Identity in Him. Today we smile on everyone we see, and walk with lightened footsteps as we go to do what is appointed us to do (W-pI.123.4:2-3).

The time we set aside to give to gratitude is designed to remind us that the cause for gratitude never goes away. It is not merely a holy half hour but holiness itself. As we allow this holiness to inform our day – minute by minute, hour by hour – we find ourselves increasingly blessed by the sustainable awareness of God’s Love as the foundation of our shared existence.

←Lesson 122
Lesson 124→

Forgiveness offers everything I want

Lesson 121 is both well-integrated into the workbook curriculum of A Course in Miracles and a handy guide to what forgiveness means to students of the course. With its overview of what forgiveness is and how it functions in our daily practice, we are better-equipped to tackle the dramatic promise of lesson 122.

Forgiveness offers everything we want.

Yet we have to ask – we have to go into – what is it that we actually want? Winning lottery tickets? Hot sex? Calorie-free ice cream sundaes? And end to this or that politician’s career? A house on the beach?

The external thing that we want – and we all want them, to one degree or another, in one form or another – is in fact a symbol of what we actually want. What we want is what the external thing points to – and, in the end, it always points to clarity, certainty, meaningfulness. It points to happiness and peace.

Thus the promise of Lesson 122 is not that we’ll secure the material abundance bodies crave but rather the gentle tranquility of a mind no longer imprisoned in – no longer mercilessly subject to – the body’s drives and appetites. It’s not that the body goes away but that our focus shifts with respect to it. This shift begets happiness.

In A Course in Miracles, the peace and joy of a healed (and healing) mind are themselves indicated by another symbol, one which encapsulates all the others to simplify our learning: forgiveness shows us the face of Christ.

[Forgiveness] lets you recognize the Son of God, and clears your memory of all dead thoughts so that remembrance of your Father can arise across the threshold of your mind . . . What gifts but these are worthy to be sought? (W-pI.122.3:2, 4)

Whatever uncertainty we have, whatever sacrifice we think we’ve made, whatever suffering we believe we undergo undergo, whatever doubt plagues our mind . . . forgiveness is “the perfect answer and solution to them all (W-pI.122.4:2). It is effectively an open door unto the perfect peace and happiness of Heaven, offering us salvation in the simplest form imaginable. We merely ask the Teacher of God to show us the Face of Christ, and then wait in quiet confidence that what is true will be revealed to us because it is true.

Accept salvation now. It is the gift of God, and not the world. The world can give no gifts of any value to a mind that has received what God has given as its own (W-pI.122.7:3-5).

In lesson 121, our practice emphasizes our brothers and sisters as objects of love and hate, inviting us to learn how in truth they are the same, and we with them. Today, we step into the gentle abstraction of love itself, without insisting on (indeed, refusing to settle for) anything that readily reduces to form.

Before the light you will receive today the world will fade until it disappears, and you will see another world arise you have no words to picture. Now we walk directly into the light, and we receive the gifts that have been held in store for us since time began . . . (W-pI.122.12:1-2).

The Face of Christ is not literally the face of the one who studied with John the Baptist, suffered under Rome’s imperial cruelty, and lived on in the collective of followers who survived him. Rather, it is “the great symbol of forgiveness” (C-3.4:5).

It is salvation. It is the symbol of the real world. Whoever looks on this no longer sees the world. He is as near to Heaven as is possible outside the gate. Yet from this gate it is no more than just a step inside. It is the final step. And this we leave to God (C-3.4:6-12).

We are ready, you and I, to enter into the light in which our proximity to Heaven is made real, delivering us unto the open arms and welcome of God. This is the unity which forgiveness reflects, the Will of God which is the “bridge to Heaven” (C-3.5:2-3). Shall we cross it now, hand in hand?

←Lesson 121
Lesson 123→