It is our transformed lives—

each of us showing up as who we truly are— that will change the world.

Have you ever had the feeling that you’d give anything to live the life you feel you’re meant to live…even if that life has no shape in your mind’s eye, but only in your heart?

A Course of Love (ACOL) became, from the moment the first words were spoken twenty years ago, my new life. It was a love affair, a vocation, a mission, and a message that was in my keeping . . . but meant for the world.

Yet it came into a life already half lived (I was 43 years old in 1998) and redirected it. Something new was changing my life’s course, presenting itself as paramount to the life of my family, to the life I envisioned for myself as a creative writer. While it felt vocational, it was too new to be a life that would “provide” a community the way joining a religious life would; too new to provide a living wage; too “of me” to be escapable, even when on rare occasions, I wanted it to be.

I wasn’t reluctant or recalcitrant. I was devoted. But it wasn’t easy. I was often lonely. I was often broke. And I almost lost myself to it a few times. Sometimes I laughingly say that it put me through hell. But doesn’t it often feel this way with those things that turn out to be our greatest blessings?

Those things that turn out to be our greatest blessing ask everything of us

It’s taken me a long while to make my peace with being ACOL’s first receiver, and to move into the new life promised. . .my own life. Me living my life doesn’t change anything between me and Jesus, me and ACOL. I’m still the first receiver. I still have the relationship with Jesus. I still want to share ACOL with you.

But it is with newfound joy that I can say I have to also be Mari. I look back and see my “worst of times” years in the light of the emergence of new life…the individuated life I’m now living in union and relationship, in intimate and wholehearted sharing,engaged in dialogue and creation of the new. This is the life that, side by side with Mary Love and other companions on the way…I want to share and to encourage with this site: the life “beyond the book” that Jesus calls us to when he says at its end:

“Put the book away and go be it.”

You may have as hard a time doing this as I have had.  Take your time. When you’re ready, you’ll know.

I started this site because, while it is Jesus and A Course of Love that transform our lives. . .

It is our transformed lives—
each of showing up as who we truly are—that will change the world.