A major contribution of miracles is their strength in releasing you from your false sense of isolation, deprivation and lack (T-1.I.42:1).
The human experience includes loneliness and frustration. We often feel deprived of love or companionship. Hardships abound – people go without food, are subjected to violence, suffer and die. We all know this; we all see this. If it is not our experience today, it might be tomorrow.
We live with uncertainty, and we fear what might happen to us and those we love, and in our fear we make a world in which fear is reasonable. We are, as the Course makes clear over and over, doing this to ourselves.
Miracles teach us that this understanding of ourselves and the world is upside-down. It’s a way of seeing that reflects confusion rather than clarity; it is a distortion of reality rather than a revelation of reality. By gently shifting us from fear-based to love-based modes of thinking, miracles enable us to know reality as God creates it. We don’t have to accept poor translations or painful alternatives
Miracles correct the error that we are incomplete. They undo the belief that God creates unequally. And they heal the mind that seeks to meet its own needs through competition and conflict rather than through communication, coordination and cooperation.
These are actual felt experiences in our lives – they are moments when we rise about petty grievances, or decline to indulge argument, or ask ourselves sincerely if there is another way to look at a situation that feels troubled or broken. We live them out in ways that make us happy and allow us to share our happiness without a lot of drama or conditioning.
Miracle-minded thinking often shows us that we are not alone but in relationship. We are not isolated but connected, joined at levels that bring forth life rather than death, and joy rather than sorrow. We are not problems in need of fixing, but perfect creations of a loving Creator who need only realize their perfection. Love holds everything.
We tend to want bright light experiences. There’s a reason ascended master literature sells the way it does. It reflects our desire for something grand and special. Which is not a crime against God or nature! But miracles are not like that.
Imagine that the world is hard to see. It is cloudy and dark; everything is blurred. You bump into things a lot; you miss opportunities to meld. This is a lonely and painful way to live.
The miracle gently points out that the lens we are using is the problem – the world is not as it appears and so our reaction to it is not real either. And when we accept this, then we can accept a new lens. That is what ACIM does for us – it offers us the Holy Spirit’s translation of our life in the world rather than ego’s.
This is why the miracle is more like switching our a pair of broken glasses for a pair that works. It’s like updating our prescription from one that doesn’t work to one that does. And when we can see clearly, then our response to the world also clarifies. Miracles are ordinary; you work them every day. What the Course does, is allow us to do this more intentionally, and more inclusively.
The move from fear to love corrects our misconception of reality by undoing the effects of fear. In the context of separation, it is given us to remember wholeness and to share the effects of that remembrance with all our brothers and sisters, and all of life.
It’s closer to a party than a therapy session, and closer to a therapy session than surgery, and closer to surgery than suffering. Love holds everything; the miracle has no other lesson to teach us.
