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July-September,  2023

Learning to Listen

by Rev. Tacey Reese, Ordained Ministerial Counselor

I wanted to share about listening to the truth by listening to Holy Spirit. I’m not sure the truth can actually be put into words. In fact, I know it can’t.

One time my Muskogee Creek teacher told me that that’s why we call it the Great Mystery. But there’s a certain experience of Truth, isn’t there? We all know It when we feel It. And our experience is more important than our intellectual understanding.

There are two lessons from A Course in Miracles that stand out to me on this topic. Lessons 106 and 107 if you want to read them later. I like to put the two keynote ideas from these lessons together like this: “Let me be still and listen to the truth because the truth will correct all errors in my mind.” These lessons remind me of Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.”

We all need stillness in our lives, yet sometimes we forget to give ourselves this gift. And it is a gift. It’s a gift to ourselves and it’s a gift to our Creator. We need the stillness of just being without doing. And we need the stillness of contemplating our Creator and listening to Its Voice, the Holy Spirit, the Voice for God and the Voice of Truth.

Lesson 106 begins with this beautiful paragraph and I quote:  “If you will lay aside the ego’s voice, however loudly it may seem to call; if you will not accept its petty gifts that give you nothing that you really want; if you will listen with an open mind, that has not told you what salvation is; then you will hear the mighty Voice of truth, quiet in power, strong in stillness, and completely certain in Its messages.” (ACIM, W-106.1:1)

So, our Brother is asking us to put aside our thinking mind, our egoic mind, the mind that thinks it knows everything, even what salvation is.

And He tells us also that Holy Spirit’s Voice is strong in stillness. So to hear Spirit, I need to practice stillness. I need to incorporate stillness into my daily life.

In the next lesson we’re told more about truth, what it is and what it does. It says: “When truth has come it does not stay a while, to disappear or change to something else. It does not shift and alter in its form, nor come and go and go and come again. It stays exactly as it always was, to be depended on in every need, and trusted with a perfect trust in all the seeming difficulties and the doubts that the appearances the world presents engender…When truth has come it harbors in its wings the gift of perfect constancy, and love which does not falter in the face of pain, but looks beyond it, steadily and sure.” (W-107.4:1-3,5:1)

Well, that certainly sounds like something I want, and I know you do too! And later in the lesson, Jesus says, “It is impossible that anyone could seek it truly, and would not succeed.” (W-107.6:4) This is very reassuring! He doesn’t say it’s improbable that we won’t succeed, he says it’s impossible!

So, how do we do this? To start, I must enter into a relationship with Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is in my mind right now, placed there by God, so I’m already halfway there.

I’m actually already in relationship with Holy Spirit, but maybe I didn’t realize that. I just need to acknowledge that and to cultivate it. And I do that in stillness. Quietly listening. With an open mind and an open heart.

I talk to Holy Spirit too, all day long and into each night, but what I’m talking about here is how I listen to the truth.

I talk to Holy Spirit about all my needs, my thoughts, my feelings; I talk to Holy Spirit about everything. And I might be busily engaged in a task while I’m talking.

But when it comes time to listen, I get still. I watch my breath, and I notice the pause at the end of the outbreath. I let myself linger in that pause and I imagine it expanding.

I allow this peaceful pause to become what I call the sacred silence. And in this silence, I listen. Sometimes I hear messages in words, other times it comes as a feeling or a knowing.

As I mentioned earlier, the truth cannot be confined by words. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like I hear anything at all except the sound of my own breath. Yet even then, I know the truth is there.

Jesus has assured me of this. He told me it is constant and unwavering and looks beyond all illusion. So I stay steady in the stillness, knowing the truth is there, knowing it is part of me and so I can be just as constant and unwavering as It is, as God is. And lingering in this stillness, I listen and am renewed.
You will be too.

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