The Forty-Fifth Principle of A Course in Miracles

A miracle is never lost. It may touch many people you have not even met, and produce undreamed of changes in situations of which you are not even aware (T-1.I.45:1-2).

The miracle’s capacity for healing is not contingent on our awareness – or even our acceptance – of it. Even when we do not perceive its effects, those effects are there. It’s like gravity; we don’t walk around noticing that the reason we’re grounded is gravity. We can but we don’t have to. Gravity just works.

Like gravity, miracles just work. Like the sun, they are always present. Even when clouds cover the sky, the sun is the source of light and warmth. Our personal awareness is not a prior condition for either the existence or the utility of miracles.

More critically, the effects of the miracle are not only about us. They extend unto the world, unto all our brothers and sisters (broadly defined to include starfish, gophers and rain forests), often in ways that we cannot predict and may not have intended. This means, by the way, that some of what we experience as a miracle is simply the ripple effects of miracles kindled in the minds of our brothers and sisters. There is always cause for gratitude.

So our intentions and understanding are not pre-requisites for miracles. Only our willingness matters. Only the openness of our hearts and minds.

Open-mindedness comes with lack of judgment. As judgment shuts the mind against God’s Teacher, so open-mindedness invites Him to come in . . . Only the open-minded can be at peace, for they alone see reason for it (M-4.X.1:2-3, 6).

Imagine that we are in relationship and that our relationship is unbalanced. I overshare with you, say, and you put up with it. I routinely transgress your boundaries – not maliciously but definitely selfishly. One day you realize that the transgression hurts both of us, and so you gently set a boundary I cannot transgress.

You experience this as relief; I may experience this a rejection. In your relief you are able to repair some other relationships, exponentially expanding your capacity to help and be present to others in useful ways. You are able to extend love more fluidly; you are able to receive love more openly.

Maybe I stew in hurt for a while and then reach out to a therapist to try and understand what happened. Maybe I pray on it. And a month or a year or more later, maybe I realize the way that you acted helped both of us. And then I can begin to repair other relationships, expanding my own capacity for helpfulness and love.

That is a way it can happen when we practice A Course in Miracles. That is a way that working miracles can unfold in time, healing those with whom they reach.

By the way, the other relationships that we heal may well be unaware of what transpired between you and I. They may know nothing of our struggle and our shared healing from that struggle. Yet they are able to bask in the light our healing brings. They know its effects, even without being able to name the cause of those effects.

Note, too, that our experience of the miracle – mind and yours – was not the same. The healing occurred in different ways and at different times. It assumed different forms. But the healing itself is undeniable. And its effects are not contingent on its form.

The only effect of the miracle is healing, but in the context of separation this always appears in varying forms. The miracle meets us where we are in precisely the way we need it to meet us. This is what A Course in Miracles means when it refers to Atonement as an “interlocking chain of forgiveness” (T-1.I.25:1).

We may never know the full extent of the effects of the miracles that appear in our living, but we can be confident that they are never lost. They are never without effect or purpose. Miracles are always at work in the world to restore to us our shared identity in and as Christ.