... see Creation as Wholly Innocent

Remembering Our Innocence

“Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality.” (ACIM W-340)

ACIM has proved to be beautiful, yet challenging to apply and quite deep. I studied The Course for more than three years and practiced the lessons it prescribed in the Workbook for Students, but I somehow felt that I was progressing slowly. Even more stormy weather came into my personal life, and the more I studied and practiced, the rougher it seemed to become. You might recall similar moments in your life when you feel as if everything is coming apart, as if there’s very little you can do to hold it and yourself together, yet you know you’re headed somewhere. You reach out and grasp in the dark for a thread with which to get out of the maze.

This is how I felt throughout 2001 and 2002 as my prayer took on a new form. I asked again for understanding, and for an accelerator of sorts. Somewhere, there was a missing link I wasn’t grasping in this voluminous material that I knew contained truth. I was failing to fully grasp it.

In August 2003, I attended a seminar in Anaheim, California, that was sponsored by the largest distributor of ACIM materials. There, a publisher named D. Patrick Miller was onstage and recommended a book he’d recently put out called The Disappearance of the Universe. It had been written by a then-unknown author called Gary R. Renard. I trusted D. Patrick, as I’d also read his balanced journalistic accounts of the history of ACIM and other writings. I ordered The Disappearance of the Universe, or D.U. as its readers now fondly know it, immediately upon returning home from the seminar.

What followed was akin to the experience of intense psychotherapy. It felt as though I were being opened up like a can and poured from the inside out. Many emotions, dreams, visions, ideas, thoughts, feelings, and sensations flowed to finally bring clarity and a sense of true direction and guaranteed peace at the end of this journey. My search came to a stop. Now there was nothing but work left to do in order to reach the goal.

D.U. has been my companion in the study of A Course in Miracles ever since, and it proved to be a spiritual accelerator. It also sealed the answer to my childhood prayer about God’s impossible cruelty and endless and flawless unconditional love for all of His creations. Most of all, it offered a clearer understanding of a simple process of advanced forgiveness that helped me find the way home again along with all of God’s children—not some, but all. There are no exceptions in His infinite mercy and complete, perfect love, which casts out all fear and where no one is left behind—a gospel of complete inclusion and of perfect mercy.

“If God was the maker of this world, He would indeed be a cruel God,” says D.U. Now, at first glance this statement doesn’t sit well with our traditional upbringing. In fact, we may tremble in fear when we read it, seeing it as blasphemy or heresy, based on what we’ve been taught. Yet this simple misunderstanding is the source of all our pain and the block to accepting God’s completely benign presence in our lives. We see Him as the maker of both our joys and our sorrows, and this causes us distress. We then see Him within the frame of a fearful and withdrawn dualistic perspective, where God has two faces, not one, and a flimsy will. As a defense, we set out to make a will that isn’t His but ours and are destined to live in endless competition with the Almighty, who does nothing in return but love without end. God is infinite love. And not only is that all that He is, but that’s all there is, all that you are, and all that I am.

However, in order to see this truth clearly and experientially, you must purposely and voluntarily take on your cross. You must be willing to give up and remove the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence in you. The speck that Jesus spoke about in Matthew 7:5 is in your own eye, as is the plank, and both are quite easily removed if you but invite him to gently put his finger into your eye and pluck them out.

Your willingness to give up your sense of separation from your fellow humans and from God is the only way to take away the pain of the world so that every tear shall be wiped away, as promised in the book of Revelation. The key is to forgive others, yourself, and the world—the whole thing, even Jesus and God Himself if you still hold a grievance in your mind from years of misunderstanding their relationship to you. “A forgiven world rises before your eyes in innocence and majesty, to bring the face of Christ in every brother,” says ACIM.

As D.U. states in its pages, the apparent suffering that ensues whenever we embark on a path of self-transformation and enlightenment is merely the unconscious guilt that surfaces now in order to be forgiven. I had misunderstood the stormy nights that came forth after beginning my work with The Course as indicators of failure, when in reality they heralded the truth that I was really doing nothing more than learning how to face the makings of my own ego, and that’s what needed to be healed.

That’s ultimately what needs to be forgiven so that your total innocence is remembered. You don’t effectively welcome Jesus as a personal savior until you’re ready to forgive yourself and then do so effectively. You can’t give of what you don’t have. An empty vessel can’t offer water to those who thirst; it must first fill itself with water, which it can then give and pour abundantly. To receive forgiveness, one must forgive. To receive peace, one must first choose it.

NOTE: Based on an article that appeared in the September '07 issue of Hay House's Present Moments newsletter