II. The Answer to Prayer, P 4
4 If you would know your prayers are answered, never doubt a Son of God. Do not question him and do not confound him, for your faith in him is your faith in yourself. If you would know God and His Answer, believe in me whose faith in you cannot be shaken. Can you ask of the Holy Spirit truly, and doubt your brother? Believe his words are true because of the truth that is in him. You will unite with the truth in him, and his words will be true. As you hear him you will hear me. Listening to truth is the only way you can hear it now, and finally know it.
Sometimes when I hear someone’s words I am certain that they are wrong. I have a brother who is very “old testament” in his religious convictions. His vision of God is so unyielding and harsh as to feel unloving to me. How do I have faith in his vision when I cannot imagine this God He so fearfully and faithfully follows?
Here is what I am given when I ask about this. My brother loves God and that love doesn’t change because it appears in his mind to look like something I don’t recognize as love. If I fail to see Christ in my brother and fail to hear Christ’s meaning in his words, then it is my mind that needs to be healed, not his. I must be listening with a lack of love, and what is God, but Love. I must be listening through my ego.
I see that this must be true in every case. Everyone is made in the image of God and nothing has ever changed that. Therefore, everyone is Love and everyone is certain and perfect and true. The confusion of the ego mind is an illusion and has nothing to do with what they are. When I look at my brother, what do I see? Do I see Christ? Or do I see a body? When I hear his words, do I hear truth or do I hear confusion?
The answer to that question has nothing to do with anyone else, and has nothing to do with what anyone says. It is a reflection of the mind in which I think I think. If I hear anything other than God when I listen to my brother, I am listening with ego, and judging through ego. I am standing before the Christ and calling It insane. Now who is insane?
We all tend to do this. Even in the Course community we fall prey to the ego desire to judge and to be right. We argue over what a passage means and we blithely correct a brother when we decide he misunderstands. Then we call it “being helpful” in order to justify our actions. We argue about meanings in the very book that teaches us the way out of hell is to join as one and be faithful to each other. How insane can we get?
Even as I sit here writing and thinking how true this is; even as I receive a vision of what is being given in this paragraph and am astounded that I never saw with this clarity before; even as I sit here in self congratulations that I am free of the desire to judge my brother by my interpretation of his words, I notice a thought in my mind about a teacher that I doubt.
I think about him and I think he is wrong and the ego starts listing his faults and his misunderstandings and I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. It all happens in a flash and takes only a second, but I imagine Brother Jesus chuckling in the background as I am pulled up short. Ok, maybe there is more to this than getting a clear understanding of how foolish it is to judge and doubt my brother.
First comes some clarity, but then to be of any use, the understanding must become experience. “Holy Spirit, I see in my mind the beliefs I projected onto my brother and I see that I then condemned him for those beliefs. Please heal my mind. Heal my mind, Holy Spirit, because it always my mind that I see reflected in my brother. I long to see my brother for the Christ that he is, so please heal my mind.”
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