This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on November 10, 2013.
“Seek you no further. You will not find peace except the peace of God. Accept this fact, and save yourself the agony of yet more bitter disappointments, bleak despair, and sense of icy hopelessness and doubt.” (From A Course in Miraclesworkbook lesson 200, paragraph 1, lines 1-3)
“There is no peace except the peace of God.”
I stood alone at the blackboard in my forgiveness classroom, awaiting the arrival of my imaginary bearded wonder. Scrawling the title of A Course in Miracles lesson 200 (the culmination of the first part of the workbook designed to weaken our robotic allegiance to the belief in separation realized and remembered through guilt) over and over again. Hoping its grating-as-chalk-on-a-blackboard, but ultimately liberating truth, might finally permeate my scant gray matter once and for all through the magic of kinesthetic repetition.
Earlier in the week, in a sleeping dream, I had found myself once more deeply engaged in a conversation with our inner teacher, wherein he again conveyed a “quickening” in my practice, and asked if I could feel it. Which I instantly translated to mean my decision-making mind was ready to take the next steps in letting a little more unconscious guilt over the secret belief that I separated from God and exist as a unique individual go. A little more open to bringing the specific, dark forms of my hallucinated impediments to peace back to the light of our right mind to shine away. And for several days, I did, indeed, seem ready to truly see the devastation my belief in separation seemed to have wrought with a part of my mind that never judges and knows beyond all ego evidence to the contrary that real Love for all could never be compromised.
And yet, I awoke this Monday morning once more inexplicably, discouragingly tuned to the ego’s 24/7-hate-radio broadcast recounting more breaking news of inner peace destroyed by a seemingly endless array of serious and trivial causes, with no memory of having changed channels. Raptly listening to reports of my father’s suddenly compromised health, uncertain finances, the trampling of my delicate boundaries by a tactless family member, the woeful negligence of another. Multiplying atrocities half-way around the world, the continuing antics of the U.S. House of Representatives, stabbing pain in my left knee, reports of incoming inclement weather, a near-death experience brought on by reckless consumption of a leftover bag of Halloween candy on the part of yours truly.
Worse, I couldn’t seem to write myself out of the hole I’d dug as I normally could. The blank computer screen smiled mockingly back at me. Having completely forgotten again that my only Self-worth comes from God, I trembled in fear, rushing back to my classroom in a desperate attempt to fill the grumbling void and maybe even earn a little extra credit from you know who.
Striding through the door now, late as usual, sans coat, sandals smacking the tiled floors—time and outdoor temperature of no concern to that man despite my earnest attempts to reform him–Jesus flipped on the overhead lights, dropped his briefcase on his desk, and stood watching, arms crossed over robed chest, head cocked, bemused.
Hoping to impress, I continued without looking up. After filling the entire space, I erased it, and started all over again. “I know what you’re thinking,” I said, scribbling along:
“You usually do.”
“How very Zen-like, right?”
“Good one.”
“Or maybe more along the lines of, if there is no peace except the peace of God, why do I keep chasing its endlessly morphing opposites?”
“How’s that been working out for you?” he asked.
“Funny,” I said.
“Actually,” he continued, “my real question was more along the lines of, what the heck do you think you’re doing right now?”
He had a point; he always does. I’d gotten it all wrong again. Instead of forgiving myself for listening to the ego, I was punishing myself, just the way teachers used to punish us for any number of perceived infractions back in the distant day of my seeming childhood. Thereby making the “sin” of refusing to see the problem “as it is and not the way I set it up,” as A Course in Miracles puts it, real. When all I really needed to do was recognize I’d just become afraid of joining with Love again and could see peace instead of this (workbook lesson 34) right now. By just reminding myself, as workbook lesson five does, that I’m never upset for the reason I think. My father’s health, the behavior of my special relationships, Congress, my joints, wars, my candy hangover, were simply scapegoats for the guilt I still craved within but needed to see without in a temporary, ultimately futile effort to let myself off the hook for something that never even happened.
My cramped fingers could take it no longer. I sighed, dropped the chalk, staggered back to my desk, and assumed my seated position, hands demurely folded. Trying to impersonate the good-girl student I still aspired one day to become, I even bowed my sorry head. “I really, really, really don’t want to do this anymore,” I said.
“I know.”
“But, Jesus, I do it anyway! I mean, even after all this time, it still doesn’t always feel like I have a choice. Something seems to happen ‘out there’ and then something else and something else and I’m right back in the fray; thrashing at windmills, competing, cajoling, negotiating, rescuing, attacking, defending, lamenting, rationalizing, blah, blah, blah, blah blah.”
He plunked down on top of his desk in front of me, plucked a tissue from his invisible, infinite supply.
I pressed it against my leaky tear ducts. But honestly, the situation just didn’t seem that grim anymore. And even though fielding one damn thing after another requiring my immediate attention seemed to have toppled my resolve to make applying true forgiveness of what never was to all the seeming objects of my projection my goal, I couldn’t remember any of the details. I dried my eyes. My shoulders relaxed from their upright, locked position as I settled into a welcome sense of complete exhaustion.
“So what you’re really saying is until we awaken from this dream of an alternate reality of animated forms competing for innocence and attention in a fantasized world, our only job is to refuse to justify the seeming cause of our distress in any given moment and bring it back here to look at with you. Rather than letting the illusions pile up and appear to overwhelm us, the instant we catch ourselves blaming something external for our loss of peace, we can join you right here and remember to smile?”
We were both doing that right now.
“Always good to talk with you,” I said.
He shrugged. “It was nothing, really.”
“Ha!” I sat up straight in my chair; squared my shoulders. “OK, I think I’m ready to go back out there again.”
He nodded. “Knock yourself out,” he said.
(Have I mentioned he really is a whole lot funnier than anyone out there gives him credit for? :))
“Peace be to us today. For we have found a simple, happy way to leave the world of ambiguity, and to replace our shifting goals and solitary dreams with single purpose and companionship. For peace is union, if it be of God. We seek no further. We are close to home, and draw still nearer every time we say:
‘There is no peace except the peace of God,
And I am glad and thankful it is so.’” (From paragraph 11, lines 4-9)
Susan Dugan’s books – Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness, Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want, and Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness – are available at RMMC and on Amazon. She writes about ACIM based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings at ForaysInForgiveness.com and teaches Tuesday nights at RMMC.