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April-June, 2010

Excerpts from Course 903: Gratitude for God’s Gifts

Pathways of Light

When you are full of gratitude, you are appreciative, open and give your full attention to what you are grateful for. Your system of values gives it great importance in your mind.

The dictionary defines gratitude as an appreciative awareness and thankfulness. Gratitude encompasses acceptance, appreciation and love. What you value highly is agreeable and satisfying to you.

The opposite of gratitude is rejection… not valuing… a turning away from… excluding… not accepting or opposing. What we don’t value, appreciate and accept, we turn away from… We avoid it and take our attention away from it. We reject it from our awareness.

Read Text Chapter 6, Section I, paragraph 17 on page 95. Jesus is explicitly saying that it is very important to develop our ability to be grateful for what we are as an extension of God’s Love. In Chapter 6, Section I he says, “Teach only love, for that is what you are.” (page 94, 13.2)

In A Course in Miracles we are learning to appreciate God, appreciate the gift of God’s Love, unity and wholeness, instead of our illusions of separation from God’s Love. We are learning to remember that we are one with God and to accept God’s gift of Himself instead of choosing to forget that we still are part of God.

Jesus tells us: I do not need gratitude, but you need to develop your weakened ability to be grateful, or you cannot appreciate God. He does not need your appreciation, but you do. You cannot love what you do not appreciate, for fear makes appreciation impossible. When you are afraid of what you are, you do not appreciate it, and will therefore reject it. As a result, you will teach rejection.

Jesus points out to us that our ability to be grateful needs to be strengthened and enhanced. He is helping us understand that we need to appreciate God in order to remember our true Identity as part of God. We need to open up our closed minds and be grateful for our true Identity as Love instead of rejecting It.

Most of the time we are not consciously aware that we are teaching rejection and rejecting Love, our true Identity. But when we are angry, when we judge and look down upon our brother, when we focus on the faults of others, we are in essence rejecting God. The idea that we think we are separated from our brothers and from God is a rejection of the oneness of our true Identity in God — Who we truly are.

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