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Study of Text, Chapter 13: III.The Fear of Redemption, P 10. 7-6-16

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 10

10 You who prefer separation to sanity cannot obtain it in your right mind. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it for the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father Who truly loved His Son. Therefore you made of Him an unloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father could give. And the peace of God’s Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real Father, having attacked his own glorious equality with Him.

Journal

Jesus says that if I prefer separation to sanity I cannot obtain this in my right mind. I must use the ego mind to do this. I have a feeling there is a deeper meaning to this statement than I am aware of, but I do understand that this is why we have a split in our mind. In order to experience separation we had to find a way to make that happen. We could not do it unless we left our mind in some way, because we could not believe such an insane idea.

Regina Dawn Akers gave me a way to understand this, and so I have a helpful visual. We made a room in our mind that we could enter and be separate from our Self. Once in this room we shut the door on reality (on our right mind) and so we are able to imagine an experience that could not happen, and convince ourselves that it is happening.

Then Jesus tells us that we were at peace until we asked for special favor, which of course He could not give us. Here is how I understand this. We had this tiny mad idea. It was the idea that there could be something separate, that there could be a you and a me, and that we could be apart from each other and different. Now that we are imagining ourselves as separate from each other, we often project this idea of asking special favor in a direct way, and because we believe we are separate, we believe this is possible.

For instance, when I hear a siren, there is a secret prayer in my heart that I don’t know anyone it is coming for. In other words, I am praying that my family is safe, and this is happening to a different family. Or I see sports teams praying for victory over their opponents, or stars praising God for making them more successful than their competitor.

All these are examples of asking for special favor. We could not have this thought in our right mind because we could no more believe in the possibility that love could have favorites or degrees, than could God. Looking at this it is easy to see why Jesus said that we were at peace before…. How could we be at peace with the idea of separation? There can be no peace in this idea.

This idea of separation, of special favor, was alien to God and of course being not God, could not be granted. So we pretended it had. We made that little room, we went into it and we closed the door on reality. Now we could pretend that God was giving special favor. We traded peace for a belief in specialness. We traded love for specialness.

Just as we had to give up sanity for this experience, we had to give up God as He is. Instead, we made up an illusory god that could participate in our fantasy. This was a scary god, one who might grant favors and might not. One who might choose us or might choose another, and there seemed no sure way to gain his favor or even to predict it. We made up a god who we imagined wanted our sacrifice in exchange for his strange unpredictable love. No wonder we are afraid of this god.

But worse yet, because in our minds we betrayed our true God and our true Self, we feel like we have reason to fear Him as well. This is another totally foreign concept to God, but it is hard for us to let it go because in our little room betrayal is possible and even expected.  We fear what we made and our peace has been shattered. Now we are trying to backtrack, to find out way back to that door, and to leave this insane and awful room. We are learning that we have nothing to fear and that our peace is whole and complete just as it always has been, in spite of our dreams.

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