God is but Love, and Therefore So Am I (Workbook Lessons 171-180)
Preamble
There is a meme that it’s best to avoid talking about sex, religion, and politics. These are topics that people are passionate about and a conversation on these topics can quickly reveal differences in values and perspectives that can then lead to bad feelings between people. And yet, I can’t write this blog about personal peace without eventually talking about the God of the Bible, both because I was raised Catholic and also spent a lot of time among Jehovah’s Witnesses during my formative years, and because A Course in Miracles makes many references to God, to the teachings of Christianity, and to the Bible. In this blog post, I am going to talk mostly about God and a little about the Bible. I imagine that no matter how carefully I choose my words, I may offend some readers. I apologize in advance for this.
I alluded in my first blog post (“All Minds are Joined”) to being angry at God for a long time. What I was angry about is the idea taught in any number of religions that there is only one way to earn God’s favor, namely the way taught in that particular religion. I no longer feel angry about this belief, but since others do embrace it, I want to offer a different perspective. A Course in Miracles uses many concepts from Christianity in a radically different way. For example, the God described in A Course in Miracles is not the God of the Bible. Even “miracle” means something completely different, as do “sin” and “atonement.” For this reason, there is a section in ACIM called “Clarification in Terms” to help elucidate the intended meanings of key concepts. In this section, we also find the following statement:
A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary. (C-in.2:5)
Whichever religion you, the reader, belong to, or even if you don’t affiliate yourself with any religion or religious beliefs, I believe that your journey will bring you Home. And if you belong to a religion that teaches that there is only one way Home, I hope that you will find room in your heart to forgive the alternative perspective presented here.
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I grew up like a lot of Catholics learning about the God of the Christian Bible. In the Old Testament, there is a God who looks out for the people he cares for and favors. He sometimes tests their faith, but he generally listens to their prayers and helps them get out of difficult situations. But this God also has people he dislikes and even despises. He gets angry and is willing to snuff them out for their bad deeds. In one account, God floods the earth so that all but a few favored people drown. In another account, he rains down fire on the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah where, we are told, there are a lot of sinners and they are burned to death. Then there is the story of the parting the Dead Sea so the people God cares about cross to safety and the other people that he doesn’t care about die. To me, this God sounds like a judgmental, all-powerful human, one whose love is conditional.
In the New Testament, Jesus appears, and the God that he and his disciples teach about sounds quite different. As the first letter of the apostle John tells us, God is love. There are many versions of the Christian Bible and they all seem to translate 1 John 4:12-13 slightly differently. Here are two examples to illustrate that the translations often express more or less the same ideas:
No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. (King James Version)
No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in union with us, and his love is made perfect in us. We are sure that we live in union with God and that he lives in union with us, because he has given us his Spirit. (Today’s English Version (TEV), 2nd Edition)
On the one hand, these are beautiful words teaching us that by loving one another, God dwells in us or lives in union with us. What’s not to like about that? But on the other hand, there is still a condition there. God dwells is us or lives in union with us only if we love one another. In verse 7, the apostle writes, “Whoever loves is a child of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (TEV). Where does that leave people who are not loving? Do they not count as children of God?
I’m no Bible scholar, of course, but I do know that Christianity in general teaches that God loves us only if we accept Jesus as our savior and also that Jesus’s blood sacrifice in turn is needed to atone for original sin. Even behind the loving words of the New Testament, it seems to me that there is an enormous shadow. Late into my teens, I struggled with this shadow. I could see that we already live in a world of divided interests, rife with conditional love. If I couldn’t turn to a God who loves us no matter who we are or what we do, then I reasoned that I was no worse off without God than with God. Wanting to free myself from a set of teachings that caused me more distress than comfort, I turned away from God altogether and considered myself an atheist for many years.
As I wrote about in the posts, “All Minds are Joined” and “Falling in Love,” I gradually returned to spiritual life in my 30s, drawn first to the idea of oneness from eastern philosophy and later through learning to hear the love in the Catholic Masses I began attending with my husband. I also explored a lot of different ideas over a period of years, for example, through reading accounts of near-death experiences, past life regressions, and reincarnation. What really spoke to me is the idea that even though the body dies, love never dies. It was only once I was introduced to A Course in Miracles that I found a God whose love is entirely unconditional.
The teacher who has taught me the most about God is Dr. Kenneth Wapnick, whose depth of understanding of A Course in Miracles and whose clarity of teaching is unparalleled. What Ken tells us is that although A Course in Miracles mentions God on just about every page, it says relatively little about God directly. Here are some quotes from the Course touching on the nature of God as ‘one with everything,’ which is also our nature:
God is All in all in a very literal sense. All being is in Him Who is all Being. You are therefore in Him since your being is His. (T-7.IV.7:4-6)
What he creates is not apart from Him, and nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him. (W-pI.132.12:4)
Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in his being, he encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say “God is,” and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. (W-pI.169.5:1-4)
This is a lot to wrap one’s head around, especially coming from the Christian tradition in which God is the Supreme Being. We identify as bodies and so we understandably expect a God to talk to and interact with. As Ken explains, A Course in Miracles ‘meets us where we think we are,’ in a world of separation removed from our Creator. The Course therefore talks about our heavenly Father who loves us, sees us as completely innocent, and whose only wish for us is that we be happy. But Ken goes on to explain that descriptions of God as our Father and we as his children are metaphors—they have to be. The Course teaches that there is no world, there are no bodies, and there is no separation of any kind at all. There is only Love. That is what God is and that is what we are, hence Lessons 171-180, God is but love, and therefore so am I. (This lesson is so important that the Workbook devotes 10 days of practice to it.)
Although A Course in Miracles does not say a lot about God, since God is but Love, it does have a lot to say about the impediments to the awareness that we are but Love also. Ken teaches us that the way we come to understand the nature of God and of ourselves is by undoing our identification with the mistaken thought system that projected the universe of separation. Through practicing what I call “Course-style forgiveness” and thereby becoming less and less attached to our identities as individual people living in a world of form, our awareness and our experience change. This happens gradually and by our own permission. A Course in Miracles assures us that we will never be ‘abruptly thrust into reality.’ Instead, we will have more and more experiences of peace and love until we are ready to accept only Love as our unchanging Reality.
In my next post, I will talk more about forgiveness as taught in A Course in Miracles.
To hear Dr. Kenneth Wapnick’s teachings described above in his own words, go to the YouTube video, God_Themes from “A Course in Miracles”, found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIONm2jFwt4&t=22s
All quotes are from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd., #306, Novato, CA 94949, www.acim.org and info@acim.org, used with permission.