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January-March, 2007

Changing the Purpose of the Body

by Rev. Linda Wisniewski

In my childish fantasy world, there’s a part of me that still believes I could ward off sickness, pain and suffering by being a “good” Course student. 

‘If only I study hard enough, do my daily lessons ‘religiously,’ nothing bad will ever happen to me.” So when I get sick like I just did with a sinus infection, does that mean I am doing something wrong; that I’m bad; I’ve sinned and deserve to be punished?

I know, having been a diligent student of A Course in Miracles for the past four years that this is not true, even though in my ego thought world it seems true. After all, isn’t the ego thought system designed to make us all believe we are guilty and deserve punishment? Doesn’t it make us believe, as we learned when we went to our childhood religious classes, that God is watching our every action, judging us to be naughty or nice and meting out punishment accordingly?

In my religious school, I was told that to earn God’s blessings, we had to suffer to prove our love. Thankfully, the Course is showing me that all this magical thinking is “insane” and its purpose is to keep us from the truth of knowing God as only Love and that as God’s children we are as He is. We do not have a separate identity from Him.

So then, why did I get sick once again? What’s it all about? I’m learning first of all that in my little mind I can’t answer this on my own. For every time I try to answer from this little place, the answers make me more confused and “crazy” and more “sick.” So I am learning to take everything to Holy Spirit and ask, “What is this for?”

I am learning that everything — and the Course means everything — we experience in the dream provides us with an opportunity to forgive. It’s only through forgiveness that we can awaken from the dream and remember we never left our Home with our Heavenly Father. So what opportunity is this episode of sickness bringing me to forgive?

As I took this to Holy Spirit, I was helped to see how I use sickness to create a special separate identity in the dream world I created. This dream world was created because my big grandiose ego believed it could create a better world than the world God created. Now what would be better than the creation of love, peace, and joy? Well, in its grandiose thinking this one insane thought believed creating its own body was better. It thought:  “Oh my, now in my own little separate body, I can have my own separate identity. When things seem to get hard and yucky, and I feel unloved because I am not getting enough attention or feel overwhelmed and am being attacked, I can escape by creating sickness. Then others will notice me again and will bring me chicken soup and presents and I will feel loved again. Oh, won’t that make me feel special! Or, if I am beginning to feel overwhelmed by all the work I created for myself to do to give me a sense of my own importance, I could escape from it all by again creating sickness and get away from it all. I then could hide out and get away from all these people who are making me sick in the first place.”

Sickness, I falsely believe, allows me to escape a world I created to get away from God who I also believed I wanted to escape from.

But I am also seeing that in this grandiose thought system which creates all this specialness, I am keeping myself separate from my Self and keeping my Self from experiencing the grandeur of my Oneness in God. This Grandeur comes from joining with my true Father and taking my place as His Christ Child with all my Brothers. And God in his Wisdom gave his Children freedom to choose between their grandiose childish fantasies they believed they created or forgive these fantasies and with the help of Holy Spirit replace them with the truth.

As I took my fantasies of the specialness I created from sickness and asked Spirit to help release them and see the truth, I observed a lot of fear, i.e. resistance coming up. A part of me which still wanted to hold on to making the body real was afraid that if I gave it up, I would die and that would be the end of me. Was I really ready to fully surrender the belief that I am a body?

I am learning that Holy Spirit is patient and gentle and understands our fears, resistance and ambivalence. After all, what child who creates a magical world wants to give it up? Who wants to have their bubbles of magical thinking burst? So Holy Spirit showed me that what I needed to forgive was the attachment, the value I gave to my body and sickness. Holy Spirit showed me that I could still choose to remain in the dream and in my body but to use it for a different purpose, a holy purpose.

I could use the body as a communication device through which to extend God’s love, peace and joy. I also had the experience lately to see in the dream how this could work.

Recently, I was asked to perform a wedding after the judge who was supposed to perform this wedding suddenly died. Two days before the wedding, I came down with a sinus infection and could hardly talk and was continuously sneezing and coughing. I was fearful that I too wouldn’t be able to perform the ceremony for this couple who experienced their own panic when this other officiant passed away a month before their wedding. I became frantic.

However there was a part of my mind that remembered that on my own, I could do nothing and that Holy Spirit was there to help me to see this differently. Holy Spirit told me to be still, surrender and do nothing. As I became still, I heard His gentle Voice whisper, “You are not performing this wedding. God is. It is God’s Voice and Love extending through your body that will bless this Holy Union. It is His Words and His Blessings that will join this couple in marriage; just step back and let Him do it and extend through you.”

As I heard this, I found myself able to relax into peace and my fear thoughts calmed down. During the ceremony, even though I still felt dis-eased, I didn’t cough or sneeze once, and the voice that came through was loud and clear and powerful. My body was being used for a holy purpose to extend God’s blessings and love through me.

I am coming to understand that everything, even sickness comes as an opportunity to practice forgiveness and each time we do, God blesses us. Each blessing serves to awaken us and help us remember, as Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz, that it is only a dream and in truth we never left home.

I am also realizing that in my childish fantasies of believing that sickness gave me a special identity, I made myself little and lived from this little place. I see now I can ask Holy Spirit to replace this and help restore me from this little, if grandiose, identity to my grandeur in God and live from expansion and not contraction.

Now instead of judging myself for creating sickness, I can rejoice in having another opportunity to forgive and awaken. After all, isn’t this serving God’s plan for awakening and faithfully fulfilling my function?

© 2007, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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