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Study of Manual for Teachers 6-7-12

6-7-12

2 In this perception of the universe as God created it, it would be impossible to think of Him as loving. For who has decreed that all things pass away, ending in dust and disappointment and despair, can but be feared. He holds your little life in his hand but by a thread, ready to break it off without regret or care, perhaps today. Or if he waits, yet is the ending certain. Who loves such a god knows not of love, because he has denied that life is real. Death has become life’s symbol. His world is now a battleground, where contradiction reigns and opposites make endless war. Where there is death is peace impossible.

‘The Holy Spirit has had me looking at anger the last few days. This is different. I don’t usually get angry… I thought. Maybe I got angry and then set it aside really quickly. Maybe I got angry and called it something else. At any rate, I have seen the anger and while I have been surprised by it, am grateful to have this opportunity to heal. You can’t even ask for healing of something you have not acknowledged.

Maybe all that anger is just symbolic of the anger we have about death. For many years I held a secret grudge against God because I knew He could take my children any time He wanted to. It was a secret because if I acknowledged it maybe that would make God angry enough to do it. Then I began to learn that God doesn’t do that, but I noticed that He doesn’t prevent it either, and so He was still guilty in my eyes. I never told Him how I felt, of course. I never even told myself.

Many, many people hold this belief. At the funeral of a child someone said to the parents, “You must have done something really awful for God to punish you this way.” Where does a belief like this come from? It comes from that seemingly bottomless well of fear and guilt that keeps all the prodigal children from running back into their Father’s loving embrace.

This woman seemed cruel in her harsh words, but was really just afraid of God Whom she saw as terrifyingly omnipotent. This kind of thinking is simple projection, placing the fear of death onto someone else by making them guilty and therefore deserving of punishment. It gives a way out of heartbreak, for as long as the frightened person can be good enough, God will not visit them with tragedy. In her confused mind she dared not feel compassion for the grieving person or she would be opening up her life to the same pain.

The problem with giving God the credit for all the things in life we like and all the things that go right, is that we also must place blame for all the things we don’t like and that don’t go our way. A Course in Miracles helps us to unravel this confused thinking as we learn that life as we know it does not exist and is simply an illusion, a belief in the mind, a thought picture which we experience as being outside ourselves.

We are only experiencing the answer to an ancient question. We don’t die because there is nothing to do die from, there is nowhere to go. The idea of death is just another effect of the idea of separation, and separation is not reality, so death could not be reality. Separation is not real because it is not of God and so death is not of God. God is not cruel.

Now that I understand and accept the idea of death so differently, this morning I looked at those old thoughts of “what if death were imminent” to see what was in my mind. I didn’t find any fear about my own death. I don’t think of it as dying anymore. I think of it as waking up somewhere else. Maybe I would die to the illusion altogether and never again believe in it.

So I thought about one of my kids with a terminal illness or lying in the hospital on life support. How would I react? What would be my prayer at that time? Would I still pray for them to be saved? Would I still beg for mercy from a capricious God, bargain with promises of a life better lived, offer myself in my child’s place? I can’t imagine believing in that God again. I think I would pray for the strength to see through the appearances to the truth of that child’s being.

What I would dread would be the grief of separation, too many days stretching before me without that wonderful person in my life. I think that communication is meant to cross all barriers within the illusion. I don’t think it is necessary that we lose contact with any part of the Sonship just because that one is no longer appearing as a body, but evidently I have not reached that place where belief becomes certainty so I cannot see past the grief of loss at this time. As always, I open my mind and heart to you, Holy Spirit. Please heal my uncertainty. 

© 2012, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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