…in the source of A Course of Miracles and A Course of Love

In October of 1962, when I was seven years old, the country was gripped by the Cuban missile crisis. Soviets had installed missiles 90 miles from the coast of the United States. This was a clear and present threat to the USA. We children began to train to cover our heads and crouch under our desks whenever air raid sirens sounded. That’s the way the Cuban Missile Crisis reached the children of the United States!

Just sixty years ago, Khrushchev had invaded Cuba (the Bay of Pigs). The U.S. had troops in Turkey. Negotiations ended the crisis when Kennedy agreed to withdraw from Turkey and Khrushchev to dismantle the nuclear missile sites in Cuba. But for thirteen days in October the world stood on the brink of nuclear war, those air raid sirens blared, and children ducked. 

After my older siblings graduated from St. Adalbert’s school, the school I attended then, I was moved to a new school closer to home. St. Adalbert’s was a Polish parish due to the nationality of the majority of the residents of the area and thus parishioners). But by then we had moved, and the decision was made that I go to a school closer to home. That school was St. Matthews, which was a German parish. We were not Polish or German. I literally had no awareness of these differences at the time, except that at St. Adalbert’s, my older siblings had participated in Polish dancing, complete with the wonderfully exotic and customary clothing worn for such dances. 

I’d never given any thought to these ethnic designations until I found out, twenty years later, that my husband, who is Lebanese, did not attend St. Matthews, which was just blocks from his home. This was because, since they weren’t German, his older siblings had not been allowed to do so. Even while the policy had changed by then, (the mid 1960’s) the hurt remained. This was ethnic discrimination on a small scale. (Sometimes it’s good to remember how many US citizens were only second-generation immigrants then… and now.)

Yes, there are reasons beyond ethnicity that keep one posturing leader after another testing their country’s might by devastating another. This year we heard the air raid sirens blare as we watched a new exodus started in the Ukraine. Atrocities are still carried out one people to another. Those from men to women, we learn of more privately, often from brave women, like Iraqi human rights activist, Nadia Murad. While much remains unexposed, I often ask myself, why don’t these accounts that we do have—these words of pain and visions of horror that break our hearts—make it stop?

Why wasn’t it stopped by the death of Jesus, who was not a Jew, but an ultimate outsider who was put to death?

All of this reminds me, not of the manner of Jesus’ death, so much as the manner of his healing. When Jesus healed, he healed indiscriminately. I’m remembering this because my parish priest, Fr. Adrian, expressed it recently in a way I couldn’t forget. He said, “All of them were cleansed, one of them was healed.” The healing came, he said because this man (the loan Samaritan) saw the source of what had occurred in him, and that’s what it is to have faith.” From Lk 17:17-18

The source of A Course of Love is Jesus. I put my faith in him as a young girl and kept it when, as a young woman, he asked me to receive his words for a new time. In a way we put our faith in each other. I hope you might feel that as he comes to you, that he has faith in “you” too. That’s why he gave us A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love. In both, I feel the power of his love. Religious words sound “old” in many ways, and yes, the words of these courses are here to reach us in a new time, but this call to remember the Source is essential, because that is the faith we’re asked for. When I began reading A Course in Miracles I wasn’t sure it was the voice of Jesus, but it didn’t take me long to know that it was. With A Course of Love, I had no doubt.

I say this to encourage you to look at these works as acts of faith on “your” part, not in a way that needs a religion, but in a way that needs you, and me, and us, to see their Source. Being grateful and committed to being who we are here to be, is our act of faith, and of hope, for the salvation of the world.