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A Gift from the Sunday Service

by Rev. Larry Glenz

After attending the Sunday teleconference service with Robert, Mary and some of my Pathways brothers and sisters, I find myself motivated to write on the topic that we shared today. Our session this morning was focused around Lesson 100 from the ACIM Workbook, “My part is essential to God’s plan for salvation.” By reading and meditating together for an hour on Sunday, I seem to have my most inspiring messages coming from Holy Spirit. It seems appropriate that time zones and great distances are no obstacle to our Sunday services; especially considering that we have been taught that time and space are illusions anyway.

The message I received with increased strength in our service today was that God needs me to be happy in order that He can carry out His plan. Lesson 100 says, God’s Will for you is perfect happiness. Why should you choose to go against His Will? Certainly I can’t think of a good answer to that; but I also know I’m not joyous all the time. I do understand that I could be and actually should be happy all the time. When I am not — something has gone wrong. I have decided to hold the hand of the ego instead of the Holy Spirit. 

How do I know when I am aligning with the ego? Easy — I am not happy. I have chosen the wrong teacher each time I feel anger, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, or any of the negative emotions. I have usually blamed the circumstances surrounding me for my lack of happiness; but I realize that is always ego thinking or wrong mindedness. 

Airplane crashes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and epidemics are actually all illusions that we bring into our lives through the ego thought system. We are not the victim of circumstances beyond our control; we create them ourselves. Once I accept full responsibility for the circumstances of my life and hand them all over to Holy Spirit, I begin to accept that happiness is God’s Will for me.

Each time I make a mistake and choose with the ego, I will be given another chance to choose again. God needs me to be happy. All I need do is accept His function for me. What a wonderful function He has given me. When I turn to Him, he will be there. And I can reach Him now. I am His messenger today and I must find what He would have me give.

I give great gratitude for these Sunday teleconference services with Robert and Mary. My mind seems to hear the Voice for God with considerably greater strength and clarity when I feel connected to my brothers. This is how I am feeling about the Sunday services; and this is no small gift.

Rev. Larry Glenz is a Pathways of Light minister living in Long Island, New York.

© 2009, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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Playing Basketball with God

by Jack Hartog

In my 40s, basketball became my passion. I had competed a little in high school, just missing making varsity in my senior year (being beaten out, I am exceedingly proud to say, by a future successful NFL running back). While I still played better than the average bear, my middle-aged “game” (in quotes, to emphasize the objectively minimalist content of my skill level) left a lot to be desired.

But I loved, simply loved, going to the gym and practicing, even all by myself. All aspects of practicing: lay up drills, running back and forth on the court to improve my wind, working on dribbling, shooting foul shots, using as much as possible my “off” hand (my left hand, other than useful in typing and occasionally holding utensils, generally functions simply as counter-balancing ballast for my right hand) and repeating and repeating my increasingly deadly “jump” shot (the quotes are there because my level of lift was about as high as the font in which these words appear).

After a while, I no longer was the last one chosen in pick-up games. Indeed, after a couple of years of practicing two to three times a week, I was often selected very quickly, and on those days when the really good players went elsewhere for more serious competition, I was one of the better players on the floor.

I found my progress very satisfying at many levels. Just being able to compete without humiliation was an achievement, especially given that I was often the oldest person playing. My physical health improved — I lost weight I could amply afford to lose and I had more energy for other activities (well, more energy after my thoroughly middle-aged body took a day off to recover). My confidence soared in games as I mastered the nuances of the many skills involved and distinguished between the moves I could actually perform and those which I could only envision but not complete (“playing within myself,” as those in the know say).

I liked the whole experience: the sweating, feeling the good soreness of exercise, periodically buying new sneakers, and donning well-worn gym clothes. I especially grew to appreciate the camaraderie among the players. When I would run into them shopping or in a restaurant, I would joke with those, who like me were lawyers, that we would see each other only on the court or in court. With others, I would remark loudly, “I didn’t recognize you dressed.” Occasionally, a celebrity would show up at the gym — a well-known sportscaster, a college ball player, a former pro athlete — triggering excitement marked by excessive efforts to appear casual. I became aware that playing basketball was a psychological metaphor— the attitudes and manners we display on the court always reflect who we are. I uncovered searing insights about myself, especially concerning competition.

Of course, there were always recurring challenges: constant minor nagging injuries, from sprained thumbs to twisted ankles; the bully who really didn’t want to play but simply sought to work out his anger in a game; difficulties finding parking sometimes; and the days when there were too few to play a game or too many good players so that I played little. There were always some negatives. But, on balance, I was having a blast.

I remember my first and last games particularly well. In my first game, I was assigned to defend a kid I later found out was 19 years old and the starting offensive guard for Georgia State. He was only about an inch or two taller than me, but he easily weighed 50 pounds of pure muscle more. My assignment? Keep him from getting rebounds. Right. My real assignment? Just live through the game.

My days with a basketball permanently ended when I was 51 years old, when I sustained a back injury (not glamorously from a hard foul while taking the ball to the basket but ignominiously while carrying luggage). Just before that trip, I played a one-on-one game with a guy in his early 30s. I recognized him — he was an up and coming local newscaster. He now is with CNN. We had the court to ourselves late this one afternoon. I was taller and in general a better player than he was, but his competitiveness was as abundant as his energy level. We trash talked and jostled our way through two games, splitting them, and, although mutually exhausted, went to a third game. The only thing at stake was pride, nothing more. I recall thinking to myself, “He really needs to win, and I don’t.” I was in this game for the fun of competing within my own well known limits. He was in it because competing in everything and not losing simply were his first choices in everything he did. I think he won, but I really didn’t care, and truly remember only the game, not the result.

So here I am, a dozen years later, reminiscing about my lost love, basketball. All of this — all the dedication, hard work, and time I put in to playing basketball in my 40s, and all the satisfaction, fitness and pure joy I got out of it — came rushing back to me in a meditation.

In the meditation, I was wondering why my spiritual practice had become so stalled and sporadic. My ability to commune with God, to experience a presence beyond my senses, almost on demand, has been continual. Yet I frequently experience this sense that I should be doing something more. “Should” is a word I have learned to be wary of. It is almost always laden with guilt or remorse, a moral demand to touch the sun before my wax wings inevitably wither in the heat. When attached to emotions, “should” is particularly dangerous. No one likes to be told what he “should” be feeling, because you feel what you feel. When applied to necessary tasks, “should” simply evokes my contrarian impulses.

In any event, like a bolt out of the blue, it occurred to me during this meditation that if my body could no longer play basketball, my soul could play with the Divine in meditation. I could practice, but without injuries, parking problems, gym fees, finding others to play, or ever losing! My God, I thought, if I just enjoyed and practiced spiritual things with anywhere near the level of intensity, frequency, devotion and joy I practiced hoops, my spiritual fitness could soar.

Wasn’t playing basketball and praying with Spirit, like the rest of life, simply a process to which I could choose to be devoted? Are they not similar in that both involve repeated practice, and through which both lead to communing with the Truth of Being, turning the moments of our lives into their substance? Was there really so much difference, beyond one being physical and the other metaphysical?

One on one games between my ego and God. Sweating replaced by stillness. Strengthening exercises to reverse separation. The rewarding humility of practice. Instead of jump shots, I could witness myself repeatedly catching guilt, anger, anxiety and doubt and throwing them into the basket of nothingness from which they came. Rather than having my hands practice dribbling and passing a ball, my mind could seek to re-examine and channel the thoughts that ran through it. Teamwork with other gym rats replaced by service to all I contact in participating in the forms of this world.

And always, always, a profound gratitude for the joy of playing the game.

Jack Hartog is a Pathways of Light member and student of A Course in Miracles who lives in Miami, Florida.

© 2009, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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Temptation to Madness

by Rev. Lee Catalano

Your point of greatest power is not when you are at peace, but when you are in the grips of temptation — the temptation to hatred, viciousness and anger. You are not guilty for these temptations, but you are empowered as you learn to no longer be deceived. “Anger is never justified.” ACIM22

The unseen temptation to madness is going on all of the time. There is nothing else going on in this world. You think that anyone is having any experience in this world that is worthy of a Son of God? You are sorely mistaken. Everyone is driving to nowhere, in order to do nothing.

Now, if you bring a mind of forgiveness along, then you are headed everywhere, for there is nowhere that Heaven is not. So long as Heaven is your goal in all things. Heaven is Peace. That is the closest you will get to Heaven in this world. It is the peace that passeth understanding.

When you feel peace in this world, you call it Love, because you are so sure that it is not of this world, and you are correct. You are being prepared for Love, the everlasting, eternal Love of God the Father, as a continuous state of mind.

There is nothing more for you to do than to remember your purpose. Your purpose does not take you away from your worldly obligations, but it does purify them so that they actually bring you happiness. Cleaning the floor without guilt is joyful. Having a board meeting in a room with equal Sons of God IS happiness.

Rev. Lee Catalano is a Pathways of Light minister living in Belmont, Massachusetts
Web site: heavensongministrypages.com

© 2009, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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The Gratitude I Earn

Susan Dugan

Lately I have caught myself in the act of joining in long, self-indulgent, highly enjoyable conversations with other mothers on my daughter’s soccer team equally miffed about the antics of their likewise unappreciative, insensitive spawn. I have caught myself blaming associates for failing to recognize my talents and contributions, blaming those I live with for failing to thank me for the meals, the laundry, the rides, and the sympathy I so regularly and conditionally proffer.

I have caught myself in the act of offering and thereby receiving conditional gratitude, and in so doing, have severed myself from the only true gratitude that exists — gratitude for what I truly am, and for the gift of forgiveness that enables me to remember.

I went through a period, in my search to reclaim what seemed missing in my life, of embracing the practice of gratitude so popular in recent years — articulating a couple things I was grateful for every day in my morning meditation; encouraging my daughter before bed each night to give thanks for the kindnesses and delights she’d experienced that day, the kid on the playground that let her go first on the ringers. The happy accident of a Golden Lab puppy encountered on a walk in the park, the taste of the tropics evoked by her favorite coconut ice cream once again available at the corner parlor, the gift of grandparents and family friends who loved and supported her, our resilient green earth. The idea was that extending a heartfelt thank you was more than the right and polite thing to do; it could actually milk the universe of more prosperity, more success, more recognition, more understanding, more love. By counting our blessings we could invite even more into our life, while somehow minimizing the inevitable pain of a dualistic world.

The ultimate problem? Other kids have bad days, puppies die, ice cream melts, grandparents age and sicken and can no longer visit, friends move on; our resilient green earth grows weary in its orbit of our repeated assaults in the name of human progress. Little girls, who once thought you hung the moon, now blame you for every obstacle encountered in their otherwise meteoric rise toward independence. Parents who once walked on water now drown in a sea of heretofore unnoticed imperfections.

The ego thought system always wants to help us devise ways to coax more from our illusory environment. But there is never enough to replenish the metaphoric hole we carry in our metaphoric hearts — the result of what A Course in Miracles calls the “tiny mad idea” of running away from the one home we share, the one and only heart that still beats in us despite our persistent denial. However hard we try, we cannot coerce a world specifically designed by the ego to keep us seeking outside ourselves, but never (permanently) finding, into delivering the eternal happiness we forfeited when we believed we separated from God. We followed the ego into a projection of our guilt over that seeming rupture. Like the special love bargains we make in this world — contracts that stipulate what you must do to retain my love — our gratitude is equally conditional, based on our need for external approval and recognition for all we give. Based on a nagging sense of lack, nothing outside us can ever ultimately satisfy.

A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 197, “It can be but my gratitude I earn,” describes the manipulative role gratitude plays in the ego thought system:

“You make attempts at kindness and forgiveness. Yet you turn them to attack again, unless you find external gratitude and lavish thanks. Your gifts must be received with honor, lest they be withdrawn. And so you think God’s gifts are loans at best; at worst, deceptions which would cheat you of defenses, to ensure that when He strikes He will not fail to kill.”

When we listen to the ego we believe that this world’s God, created by the ego in his image, is equally hooked on external appreciation, on the habit A Course in Miracles calls “giving to get,” a habit that at its core reflects the murderous thought of annihilating our source that drives the defense/attack cycle in which we seem hopelessly mired. The ego’s God is equally stingy with his love because what passes for love in this world is ephemeral at best, and never, ever enough.

“The gratitude I earn,” the unique definition of gratitude referred to in A Course in Miracles, is the true gratitude for the one love I am that — appearances to the contrary — embraces all the seeming fragments at war with themselves to prove themselves in a world that exists only in my split mind. The gratitude I earn is thankfulness for the one Love I am when I remember without self-judgment to forgive what I am not — the ego’s perceived need for specialness.

The gratitude I earn is my growing appreciation that no one or thing outside my mind could possibly jeopardize the peace I am, despite what the body’s eyes would have me believe. I earn that gratitude through the Course’s radical process of forgiveness. How? By catching myself in the act of feeling unappreciated by my child, my colleague, my spouse, my friend, recognizing that the problem perceived “out there” is merely another product of my ego-identified mind, and asking for help from my right mind to see things differently. 

“It does not matter if another thinks your gifts unworthy. In his mind there is a part that joins with yours in thanking you. It does not matter if your gifts seem lost and ineffectual. They are received where they are given.”

Through the consistent practice of forgiveness our one mind begins to heal. I am beginning to actually appreciate my own judgments, the red flags that remind me I have once again forfeited happiness by believing in an illusion of unfair treatment. But it is all in my mind and I can and must choose again. Recognizing my true identity in the person I want to blame for overlooking all I have given eventually teaches me to awaken from this nightmare of specialness and separation I have chosen over perfect unity. And so I offer thanks today for once again reclaiming my innocence — growing a little more conscious, a little bit closer to awakening — by changing my mind about you.

Susan Dugan is a Pathways of Light ministerial student living in Denver, Colorado.

© 2009, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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