Nothing to Forgive

Yesterday's lesson, #359, contains this line: "we have made mistakes which have no real effects on us." And then it says, "Sin is impossible." That is the basis of forgiveness in the Course: There's nothing to forgive, no sins; just mistakes that have had no real effects. Let me remember that today.

The Law of Love

TODAY'S LESSON: Today I let Christ's vision look upon all things for me and judge them not, but give each one a miracle of love instead.

If I could wave a magic wand that affected everyone who knows me or interacts with me in any way, what would I like that to do? I would want everyone to refrain from judging me in any way, and to always look upon me with love. Isn't that what you would want?—for them to view you with eyes of compassion, understanding, mercy, and tolerance? To have everyone look past your mistakes to your heart?

The Course is telling us that we have such a magic wand. The wand we can wave to manifest such a wave of love and compassion is this: Give to others what you want them to give to you. Yes! It's the Golden Rule. What you give is what you receive. You are giving to yourself. "I...give to them the freedom that I seek." I "give what I would find and make my own."

How do I want other people to treat me? How can I make that happen? By treating them the way I want to be treated by them. It's as simple and as profound as that. This is the Law of Love.

Misquoting Jesus

Last week, I picked up two books from the library by Bart D. Ehrman: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, and Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. I think these are books that some of you would like to read.

Ehrman also wrote Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. His area of interest is fairly obvious from the titles. I've just finished Misquoting Jesus and I really loved it. The Introduction was especially interesting to me because he tells his story of being raised as a liberal Protestant (Episcopal), having a born again experience in his teens, attending Moody Bible Institute (about 13 years after I attended evening school there) and then Wheaton College, and finally Princeton Theological Seminary. Gradually, his faith in the "inerrancy" of scripture was eroded as he studied more and more deeply into history, the existing manuscripts, and the huge number of scribal errors made as the books were copied over and over and over, over the course of centuries. His path roughly parallels my own. As he puts it:

"It is one thing to say the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the original—so saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals...Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are...copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places...These copies differ from one another in so many places that we don't even know how many differences there are...There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament."

He explains why that is so, describing who the copyists were (mostly amateurs). He points out that very few people were literate. Sometimes manuscripts were laboriously copied by people who could not actually read what they were copying! Mistakes were inevitable. And often, people changed things because, in their opinion, the wording of what they were copying was "not right."

For instance, he says that most Bible scholars agree that the first 18 verses of John, and all of Chapter 21, were added at a later time. Their vocabulary is different, their style is different. The gospel seems to come to a clear end at the end of Chapter 20, but then there is another chapter. Some think the original author added these parts in a later version. Others think someone else added them. Yet, all the manuscripts that we have include them. So, how do we arrive at the "original" of John? Leave out these parts because they were not originally part of the book? Perhaps try to reconstruct John's sources, such as a signs source and a discourses source? The scholars can't even agree on what the "original" of John (and other books) really would mean. All we can do is get back as close as possible to the original of what manuscripts we have.

And then, of course, there are the dozens of Christian writings, contemporary with the ones included in our current canon, that were widely read in the first few centuries but eventually rejected by the established church.

Ehrman shows how, and why, the King James Version of the Bible is notoriously unreliable, having been based on "a Greek text derived ultimately from Erasmus's edition [1522 AD], which was based on a single twellfth-century manuscript that is one of the worst of the manuscripts that we now have available to us!" He discusses many passages that are in most of our English Bibles that, based on the evidence of the manuscripts now available, don't really belong there, such as the last twelve verses of Mark. Some "proof text" verses are not what they seem to be, including I Timothy 3:16, often quoted to "prove" that Jesus was uniquely "God manifest in the flesh," when the original reading seems to be simply, "He who was revealed in the flesh."

Anyhow, I devoured this book, and probably will devour the second one as well. I think I need this kind of balance to my fundamentalist background. There is still this lingering thought in my mind that it isn't right to contradict anything in the Bible. If the Bible says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," then it must be so. Therefore, when the Course asserts that God did not create the world, my mind has trouble accepting it. But if, as Ehrman asserts, the Bible actually is "a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live," then disagreeing with any particular passage in the Bible is perfectly acceptable.

I still do believe that God inspired the men who wrote the Bible, although what they wrote was surely colored by their own culture, learning, and even by their human egos. I doubt that all the choices about what to accept as "the word of God" were as inspired, and I'm sure that most of the changes that occurred in the copying were not inspired. That leaves me with a book I have to respect, and even revere as a prime source of spiritual wisdom, but a book that is no longer my final authority. 

Evening Classes Approved

I met Sunday with one of the Unity ministers to discuss holding a second Course group at the church that would meet Thursday evenings. She agreed that it would be a good idea, and we will be announcing it in the Sunday service this coming Sunday, Dec. 9. I will also be holding a class on "Introduction to Workbook Practice" twice, once Tuesday Dec. 18 at 10:30 a.m., and again Thursday Dec 20 at 7:00 p.m. I've asked everyone who plans on doing the Workbook with me in 2008 to attend one of these meetings.

I'm excited about doing the Workbook again, excited for myself. It has been at least six years since I last went through the Workbook in a consistent, daily way. It might even be longer. I've felt a need to do it again, and I began practicing the lessons  at the end of the Workbook about a week ago. I'm finding it challenging to remember the lesson during the day, so I've set an hourly reminder on my computer to help out, since I am sitting in front of it more often than not. The difficulty I am experiencing just underscores for me that I've let my spiritual practice drift, and a refresher pass through the Workbook is just what I need.

As one person after another came up to me requesting an evening Course group, one passage from the Manual for Teachers that I'd recently studied with the morning group kept coming to mind:

"Certain pupils have been assigned to each of God's teachers, and they will begin to look for him as soon as he has answered the Call. They were chosen for him because the form of the universal curriculum that he will teach is best for them in view of their level of understanding. His pupils have been waiting for him, for his coming is certain. Again, it is only a matter of time. Once he has chosen to fulfill his role, they are ready to fulfill theirs. Time waits on his choice, but not on whom he will serve. When he is ready to learn, the opportunities to teach will be provided for him." (M-2.1:1-7)

I figure I must have "answered the Call," "chosen to fulfill [my] role," and am "ready to learn" because the pupils have been showing up! I note especially that it is not when I am ready to teach but when I am ready to learn. 

The Meaning of All Perception

Today's lesson, #336, is "Forgiveness lets me know that minds are joined." As I read it, it seemed relatively unfamiliar. It is not one of the lessons I've come back to over and over, or that I have chosen to read aloud in my Text class. I was struck by this line: "Sights and sounds, at best, can serve but to recall the memory that lies beyond them all." In poetic form:

…For sights
and sounds, at best, can serve but to recall
the memory that lies beyond them all.

The highest purpose that can be ascribed to everything we see and to everything we hear is to be reminders of the underlying reality of Spirit. What is the purpose of my computer? To call to mind the One Spirit. What is the meaning of beautiful music? To help me remember God. What is the lesson I can learn when I see someone who is crippled or deformed, or find my quiet walk disturbed by blaring rap music from a passing car? That behind that malformed shell, and underneath what I perceive as jarring noise, is the radiant Reality of the Son of God.

A woman named Edith Bernard recently wrote to me about Lesson 28 in the Workbook, which says:

"You could, in fact, gain vision from just that table, if you would withdraw all your own ideas from it, and look upon it with a completely open mind. It has something to show you; something beautiful and clean and of infinite value, full of happiness and hope. Hidden under all your ideas about it is its real purpose, the purpose it shares with all the universe." (T-28.Int.5:1-3)

What is "the purpose [the table] shares with all the universe"? What is the revelation that awaits us behind every object of perception? The answer Edith saw was simple, and consistent with Lesson 336: "one could say the 'seen purpose' of all things is unification." She said, "the unity of mankind can be found within all objects and is, in Truth, the purpose of our seemingly divided universe." Edith is absolutely right!

Today, let everything I see, and everything I hear, serve to remind me of union with God. And when my perception seems to offer me something other than Oneness, let me pray, "Above all else, I want to see this differently."