Every loving thought held in any part of the Sonship belongs to every part. It is shared because
it is loving. Sharing is God's way of creating, and also yours. The
ego can keep you in exile from the Kingdom, but in the Kingdom itself it
has no power. Ideas of the spirit do not leave the mind that thinks
them, nor can they conflict with each other. However, ideas of the ego
can conflict because they occur at different levels and also include
opposite thoughts at the same level. It is impossible to share opposing thoughts.
You can share only the thoughts that are of God and that He keeps for
you. And of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The rest remains with you
until the Holy Spirit has reinterpreted them in the light of the
Kingdom, making them, too, worthy of being shared. When they have been
sufficiently purified He lets you give them away. The decision to share
them is their purification. (ACIM:T-5.IV.3)
In the introduction to her new book, One Again, Linda McNabb
likens the process of forgiveness to her experience as a personal
organizer, who helps people sort out the worthwhile from the worthless,
the wheat from the chaff. And this is the process of "following Jesus"
as it is described in the language of the Gospel literature. (He did not
mean going to church, for there were no churches. People simply came
together to share their experiences, and in the middle eastern world
this meant leaving your house, and going outside to talk with the
neighbors, the Greek word for it in the Bible, which very tendentiously
is translated as "church" was ekklesia, a "calling out," a gathering. In
today's terms it would be perhaps a Meetup in a diner somewhere.) The point of the process is that what's worthwhile is kept, and everything else goes by the wayside. In terms of the Thomas Gospel this process is indicated without a lot of explanation, by e.g. Logion 76, where the point is to keep the pearl and discard the rest. That is one way of putting it. In the Course, Jesus summarizes it very clearly a few paragraphs down from the one quoted above:
How
can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is
gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your
kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them
of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own
perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They
came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is
eternal. You can indeed depart in peace because I have loved you as I
loved myself. You go with my blessing and for my blessing. Hold it and
share it, that it may always be ours. I place the peace of God in your
heart and in your hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold
it, and the hands are strong to give it. We cannot lose. My judgment
is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our
being. His quiet children are His blessed Sons. The Thoughts of God
are with you. (ACIM:T-5.IV.8)
Linda's book is yet another
retelling of the legend of the prodigal son, or if you will, the
prodigal daughter in this case. She sums up beautifully how "I was born
insane and it went downhill from there" and recognizes in retrospect
that the "insanity" is the very notion that we could be an individual
and separated from God our Source, the "tiny, mad idea" of the Course.
But as long as we keep acting out the thought of separation, there's no
saying where we might end up. Or, as Ken Wapnick would joke, nice kids
would stay home in Heaven with daddy - no reason to come and hang out
here in the insane asylum. Linda shares the experiences of her descent
to hell, with the themes being very much in common with many of us, with
all the common idols of the postwar generations, starting with sex,
drugs, and rock 'n roll. Granted, many of us may not have experienced
the extremes that Linda has, but that is irrelevant, it is her
willingness to share the process which can be helpful to many, since
most of us are in deep denial of how miserable our lives really are. But
then she continues, and describes her process of her way out.The story of how she came across the work of Gary Renard in her journey is priceless also, for surprise, surprise it shows up at just the right moment in her process, and helps her deepen her inner work of forgiveness, and understand it in a larger context. None of us start the way home, unless and until we begin to realize that this ain't working, or in the classic language of Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford, "There must be another way." That is when we meet the stranger on the road who seems to have the answers which we suddenly know were what we were really looking for all along, and so begins the homeward bound journey, when we know that we share one and the same goal with all our brothers, namely to find the way home.
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