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The Path to God

It seems that there are many paths that I can take in my life. But in truth there is only one. All roads lead to God. I look back over my life and some of the things I have experienced argue against this idea. It certainly doesn?t look like I have always been on the right path. It doesn?t seem that I have always been on the path to God. But then, when I reconsider, I see that I have experienced in life exactly what I need to be where I am now. I also see that, yes, all roads do lead to God, because God is all there is.

I?ve done a lot of crazy things in my life. During those times, it certainly didn?t seem that I was on a path to God. I didn?t sleep through the sixties, and I lived the seventies as if they were the sixties, too. I burned my bra, I practiced free love with enthusiasm, I inhaled! I made mistakes that felt really big. I hurt myself and I hurt other people. I spent some time being very angry at God. I openly and frankly cursed Him. And each thing I did brought me a step closer to my Father, because there is no place else to go.

At some point in the eighties, I made up with God. How amused the Universe must have been to hear that I was returning to where I had never left. Now I sat my foot more deliberately on the path home. I began to realize that I wanted the road to God, and I started to really put some effort into it. I studied and meditated. I opened my mind to seeing things differently. I worried that I would choose the wrong path. The Holy Spirit tried to show me that all the paths, no matter how different or odd one might seem, wound up right back at the same place.

I wasn?t very consistent in my spiritual efforts. I would be working really hard, and then suddenly I would wake up to the fact that I was floating aimlessly through life again. I would feel guilty for losing my way, for veering off path again. As if I could. As if there was some other path.

I spent the nineties slipping on and off my intended spiritual path. I would do what I thought God wanted me to do and I would feel good about myself. Then I would mess up and I would feel guilty. I would feel like a failure. I would feel like I had made a promise to God and then failed to keep it. God just kept right on loving me, carrying me. When I felt able I would get back on my feet and try again. Why did I think that I needed to walk my path on my own? Why did I think it would be better if God did not carry me?

With the new millennium I came near to celebrating another decade in this life. It also brought a new determination to walk a straighter path. I finally realized that I probably was not going to remain in this life forever. I felt a driving force moving me steadily toward God. I asked for whatever it would take to keep me going-to get me to my destination. I expressed a willingness to do whatever it took. God answered my prayers, and I heard the Holy Spirit whisper in my heart in a way I never had before.

I was led to Pathways of Light, and they provided a structured program that would help me reach my hearts desire. I was shown how to use A Course in Miracles to move me forward at a faster, surer pace. I was led each step of the way. I was assured that I need only focus on my true purpose and everything else would be taken care of. Did that mean that I would never have any problems? No, but it did mean that whatever problems came up in my life, I would have the option of taking them to the Holy Spirit to be solved. If that is what I chose to do, then the problems themselves would move me another step down the path.

My path brought me to the Church of the Brethren. I am so grateful for this opportunity to share with, and learn from, such a terrific bunch of people. I can hardly believe my good fortune to find a church so inclusive, so loving, and so open minded. But then, it is not really good fortune; it is another step planned for me by the Holy Spirit. I set my intention to follow His lead, and He, in turn, led me to exactly the place where I should be.

I would like to share with you some of the things that I have learned while on this path.  I have learned that I have never done anything wrong. I have taken a few side roads, but they all led back to the path. They slowed me down, but that?s OK because I learned many lessons while on them. I spent some time in regrets and guilt, and that slowed me down, too, but what I learned was that guilt and regrets are a waste of time. What I have done or failed to do is irrelevant to God. He knows His creations and He knows that my actions cannot change what He created. I am just as God created me. Still.

I have learned that there are only two voices; the voice of the ego, and the voice of the Holy Spirit. I can choose the voice I want to hear. It is always my choice which I listen to. One will lead to chaos and one will lead to peace. I love the simplicity. I can ask at any time, ?Who am I listening to?? and the answer is always only one of two voices. The answer is very clear and the choice to listen to the Voice for God is always possible.

I have learned that peace is my one goal. Peace is all I want in life. I have tried lots of other things and none of them have brought me happiness. I don?t remember where I read it, but something that has always impressed me as true is that intelligence is the measure of your ability to make yourself happy. If that is so, my intelligence quotient has risen over the years.

If I have to choose between being right or being happy, happy is going to win out every time.  That is another place in my life that has become simpler. I look at my choices and ask which one will bring peace into my life, and that is the one I choose. 

I?ve learned that everyone, without exception, is always giving love, or asking for love. There?s that simplicity again. If my boss speaks to me in anger, I know that he is not expressing love, so he must be asking for love. My choice is to return the attack, or choose a loving response. Which will bring peace into my life? So simple.

I?ve learned that when Jesus told me not to judge, he wasn?t joking. He really knew what he was talking about. He was very aware that there was no way I could know everything there was to know about each person involved, past, present and future. Without that information to work with, how could I make any kind of informed judgment? It was amazing to me how much smoother my life?s path became when I stopped trying to do what I am clearly not qualified to do. When I step back into that role of judge, it is exactly like stepping onto a rocky path, and I stumble.

While I could see that it was a mistake to judge the people in my life, it took a little longer to apply the non-judgment rule to everything else in my life. I just didn?t see that at first. Then I began to apply the same criteria to events. I don?t know what this event means in the long run.

At one time, I thought that I absolutely could not live if I didn?t have a certain man in my life. I judged that he was necessary to my happiness and that having him was a good thing. I was
wrong about that, but I couldn?t have made a clear judgment, because I couldn?t possibly know all that would happen as a result of my machinations to make this alliance possible.

I am learning to let life be what it is. I am learning not to judge what is happening, and instead, to seek peace no matter what seems to be happening. This, too, has made life simpler and happier. If my focus is peace instead of change, I am able to disengage from what is happening around me. One way I see this in action is through work. I used to think that when I got a new customer it was an exciting occasion. I judged that as good.

The thing is, if getting a new customer is good, what is losing a customer? So long as my goal is increasing my customer base, my peace is constantly at risk. Even when I get a new customer, my happiness is tainted with the fear of losing a customer. I can change my goal. I can decide that all I want is peace. I can stop judging each event as good or bad. When I am tempted to do so, I can give that judgment to the Holy Spirit. I can ask him for another way to see this. When I bring God into my life, I bring peace into my life.

I have learned that every seeming problem in my life is just a forgiveness lesson. It is an opportunity for me to practice forgiving. It doesn?t matter what seems to be happening, this is what it is for. When I hit those rocky places on my path, I ask myself what it is I need to forgive. Forgiveness is really simple; it is just a change of mind.

If I think you have done something to me, I forgive the idea that you have attacked me. Instead I allow the Holy Spirit to show me a different way to see this. I see your ?attack? as a call for love. The Holy Spirit may show me that you didn?t really do anything at all, and that I am actually seeing my fears reflected in your actions, and that is why I feel attacked. I forgive the picture I was holding of you, and this allows me to see the Christ that you are.

All paths lead to God. My choice is who I want to walk with. I can walk with the ego in fear, or I can walk with God in love. It makes no difference in reality, but in my experience it makes a world of difference. One brings me happiness and peace and the other leads me down a rocky and rough road; same road, different experience. When I walk the path of Love, God walks with me. When I walk a different path, God still walks with me, I just don?t know it.

© 2005, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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Retroactive Forgiveness

I have talked about forgiveness more than once, but I want to revisit this idea again. Forgiveness is my purpose in life. It is what I do. Anytime I feel anything less than joy about whatever circumstances pop up, I know that I have before me another chance to forgive. It is through forgiveness that I am healed. If I have held onto a grievance, then that grievance has had time to play itself out through my body, and so when I forgive, I give my body a chance to heal. Holding a grievance affects my mind. It holds me prisoner to raging emotions; anger, fear, guilt, vengeance, despair.  Forgiveness frees me, and allows me to experience joy again.

I want to talk about retroactive forgiveness today. This is the idea that we can forgive today what has happened in the past and so be free of its effects. I have wasted a lot of time on regrets. I am sorry for things I have said and done in the past. I am burdened with grudges I hold against people for things they have done in the past. I want to clean up all of this detritus.

I have been keeping these grievances imprisoned in the dark cellar of my mind, bringing them up from time to time to reexamine; to revel in righteous anger, or to wallow awhile in guilty regrets. Now I am ready to ?clean up my act? as folks say.
Even the oldest unforgiving thought still affects my life, and so I want to be free of it. There is a most powerful passage from A Course in Miracles:    The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love. (T.26.IX.6.1) 

Forgiveness will do this for me. It will free my mind, it will create in my life the holiest of spots. Forgiveness works just as well on past regrets as it does on what is happening in my life today. It is never too late to forgive. It doesn?t matter how ancient the grievance. Nor does it matter at all how big or how small the unforgiveness. Each is just as destructive to my peace of mind. If I hold a grudge because my ex-husband said an unkind word to me, I have lost my peace. If I am angry because I think that someone has ruined my life, I have lost my peace. Either way, I have lost my peace.

To start the forgiveness process I must first understand what true forgiveness is. Most commonly we look at forgiveness as a mercy we bestow on someone who doesn?t deserve it. We say to ourselves that this person did something wrong, they don?t deserve my forgiveness because they truly wronged me, but I am a big person so I will go ahead and forgive them. It feels like I am sacrificing my own best interests so that this person can be forgiven.

I am going to use an old grievance I had held onto for a very long time as an example. Let?s look at it from the conventional view of forgiveness. About 30 years ago (yes, I have been dragging around this albatross for 30 years!) I worked for a doctor. He was a real horror to work for and eventually he just got to be too much. He was angry at me for quitting and held it against me.

While I did not like working for him, I did love working in a doctor?s office. I loved helping people, and I was good at it. When I applied for a similar job in another city, the doctor gave me a bad reference. I had done such a good job for him, and even after I quit, I came back on my own time and helped his new employee learn her job. I did not deserve the reference he gave me.  Because of the bad reference, I did not get the job I applied for, and I never tried for another job with a doctor.

Conventional wisdom holds that to forgive him for the bad reference would mean that first I recognize that he wronged me, and then I decide that, being the better person, I will let him off the hook for what he did. What happened is that I found I was not that good of a person. I resented what he said. He embarrassed me. He also kept me from a kind of job that I would have enjoyed and been good at. Every time I thought about him, I would feel a surge of anger. From time to time, I would bring out this old grievance so I could experience my righteous anger all over again. It sounds funny to say that I got something out of this-and that I somehow enjoyed my anger, but I must have because I kept doing it. For thirty years!

Whatever little satisfactions I get from replaying in my mind my little drama with the doctor, does not come without a cost. I can have my grievance, or I can have peace. I cannot have both. We tell ourselves that we can compartmentalize our anger but this isn?t true. Anger at anything, is going to spill over into other parts of our lives. If you happen to come into my life while I am reliving this particular drama, look out because the chances are good that my anger will spill over onto you. You say something to me and I snap at you. Later we are both left wondering what happened.

I have chosen for peace often enough now that I want peace all the time. I really miss my peace when I choose against it, so I want to truly forgive the doctor. I am no longer willing to give him my peace in exchange for anger no matter how righteous I think it is. Can I forgive him at this late date, I wondered? I doubt he is even alive now. But here?s the thing, it doesn?t matter when I forgive. It doesn?t matter if he is in his body to accept my forgiveness. Let?s face it; he isn?t interested in my forgiveness.

I am not forgiving him because he needs my forgiveness. In fact he lived on blissfully unaware that I harbored a grudge against him. In truth, it is only I that am prisoner to my grievances. Do I believe that he walked around burdened with this heavy guilt about how he wronged me? It is only I who struggle through life under the burden of my perceived grievances. I am not choosing forgiveness for his sake, but only for my self.

There are some things in life that seem so hard to forgive when we look at forgiveness in the way I just described. Well, no problem is so big that it can?t be solved by a good miracle, and what is more miraculous than a change of mind.

So, how do I change my mind? Before I pull anything up from the dark places in my mind to really look at it, I ask the Holy Spirit to look with me. The Holy Spirit brings light to my mind and that light shines away the darkness. If I try to look on my own, I only see what I remembered storing there. Nothing changes. I see his error, and my anger. I didn?t get vengeance in the moment and so I seek for it in my imagination. This is all I see.  With the light the Holy Spirit brings, I am able to see this differently.

Here is what the Holy Spirit showed me when we looked together. He showed me that the doctor didn?t really hurt me. He spoke some words. They were not true. That really happened, and it would be silly and ineffective to try to say it didn?t. But what he said is not what caused me pain. It is how I felt about what he said that was the problem.

There was something in his words that brought up for me a feeling of unworthiness. There was a part of me that believed I was guilty, if not of this, then of something. I didn?t want to feel guilty and unworthy, and I didn?t want to look at those feelings, so I projected them onto the doctor. There, now he is the guilty one. He is to blame for this bad feeling in me.

The problem is, as long as I think he is responsible for my feelings, I have given him all the control. He can keep me feeling bad about myself for 30 years. Forgiveness shows me that he is not guilty. He is not to blame for my feelings. Through the process of forgiveness, I am able to take complete responsibility for my feelings.

I also thought that the doctor robbed me of my future. I wanted to be part of a healing place and his bad reference kept me from doing this. The Holy Spirit also told me that I wound up exactly where I needed to be. I thought that the doctor prevented me from experiencing my destiny, but the Holy Spirit said that he put me on the road to my destiny, and that I owed him only thanks as I owe only thanks to all my brothers, without exception.

Through the process of forgiveness, I am able to give the belief system that supports unworthiness to the Holy Spirit for correction. Through the process of forgiveness, I am healed. I did not do the healing myself. All healing is of God. My part was to be willing to accept the gift of healing, and forgiveness was the way I did it. I traded my righteous anger for the peace of God. It was a good deal. I don?t miss that drama at all.

True forgiveness happens as I become willing to see this differently. I become willing to see that I chose to feel anger at his words and actions. I accept full responsibility for my own feelings and I stop trying to make them someone else?s fault. The process of forgiveness forgives, not the person or his actions, but rather it sees that it is only my perception of what happened that needs to be changed.

In the old way of perceiving forgiveness, I was making what the doctor did real, and then was trying to forgive it. It didn?t work. Through the miracle of true forgiveness, I recognize that he didn?t do anything to me, and I am forgiving the thought that he did, by seeing the situation differently.

Forgiveness is all inclusive. In order to experience the peace of God, I forgive everyone for whatever I thought they did to me. I make no exceptions. That is its beauty. I don?t have to take each instance and decide which is deserving of forgiveness. I don?t have to figure anything out. I love the absolutes, the ?nevers? and the ?always?; they take the guess work out of it. I already know that I want to forgive whatever the circumstances, I only need to bring God into the process and it is done.

So what I have learned about forgiveness is this:
1. Forgiveness is retroactive. It doesn?t matter how old the perceived wrong, it can be forgiven in the present moment.
2. Forgiveness is the way to peace. It is all inclusive and no one or thing gets left out. There is no place in my life where I will say everything else gets forgiven, but this one grievance I am holding onto.
3. Forgiveness is not about anyone else. It is about changing my own mind with the recognition that I alone am responsible for my feelings. I am always free to change my mind about how I feel about my grievances. I am always willing, with the Holy Spirit?s help, to see this differently.
4. And most important of all, I am not alone in this process. I give to it my willingness, and God does the rest. When I fail to accept forgiveness and have to repeat the process, I forgive myself and just get on with it. I do the process as often as I must in order to fully accept forgiveness.
5. And finally, as forgiveness becomes my goal, and the way I live, I live in peace.

© 2005, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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