The first moment I opened
A Course in Miracles
I was drawn by its flawless beauty
and poetry and heart,
but stung fast
by its insistance on hard work.
A Course in Miracles
is an elegant spiritual discipline
both user-friendly and palpably practical,
which focuses on our true identity,
true silence, and true forgiveness.
In the process of teaching those lessons
ACIM demands something
we may not want to give:
a stunningly high level of devotion.
In short,
A Course in Miracles takes no prisoners.
You either get down to learning
the wide, wordless beauty of Love
and the inescapable naughtiness of the ego,
or you stay trapped in the back of the class
with other ACIM students who try to evade
the nature of our Real Identity,
and the nature of Real Love.
Let me tell you:
many's the day I have spent
in the back of the class.
Wanting to toss
A Course of Miracles into the trash.
But, you see, I didn't.
Or maybe I should say it another way:
It didn't let me.
Of course,
mistakes are permitted when you study
the deep, rich pages of A Course in Miracles,
Permitted! They are profoundly expected.
The silent angelauthor of ACIM
tells us our entire identity is a mistake
and that our world is a dream.
It follows, then, that all thoughts
relating to our sly, temporal identity
are mistakes by default.
And our task, as fumbling initiates
of A Course in Miracles?
To learn how to See behind the dream;
to learn how to Hear the still, small voice of God
humming like faint strains of Bach
in the depths of our Real Heart.
That's the assignment in a nutshell.
A Course in Miracles urges us
to learn to listen
to the sweet, divine music within
daily, hourly, minutely, secondly
-- as we breathe, as we move,
as we walk, as we speak, as we pray
and we are Home free.
I have A Course in MIracles by my bedside.
I have A Course in Miracles at my desk.
I have A Course in Miracles in my briefcase.
But most of all,
14 years after I discovered it,
I have A Course in Miracles
in my heart.
by Elsa Joy Bailey |
