Beyond the book, there is ending and beginning both.

I am standing at a new beginning. Mary Love is standing with me. So are many others called to be forerunners of the new, pioneers and pilgrims of the new.

Sometimes it is questionable. What is old? What is new?

In this exquisite message about ACOL, there is an invitation into that mystery that falls outside of all categories. Speaking of A Course of Love Jesus says:

This is a course you do not know you need.  It carries an aim you do not know you have. Your mind cannot conceive of it nor learn it, and what your mind cannot conceive of you do not realize you can know. But you can.

If you realize the truth of this statement, you will realize who you are.

Here, I introduce you to yourself.  Here, I invite you to know what you do not think you can know.  Here, I invite you into the mystery of identity-less identity…through identifying you correctly.  

Here is our heart.

This is a course of the heart. These are the thoughts of love you “have” but do not think, the language of love that you possess but cannot articulate, the voice of love that you know but no longer hear.  

With utter fearlessness and grace you can now rest. You can now reap. You can now receive.  If you are willing.

Put out your hands.  Open your clinched fists.  Open your eyes. Open your heart. Turn the page. Read. Turn the page. Listen. Hear my voice. It is your own. This is your own course. This is you. This is your self you hold, the babe you carry.

There is no ending that is not also a beginning.  This is ending and beginning both. What would you end?  What would you begin? You cannot know unless we begin at the beginning…with who you truly are.  And so we begin.

~Jesus

And so we begin . . . again

Like all great mysteries, the mystery of this Course of Love became a mystery only in time. It stands, for me, like a silhouette of the truth on the background that is life. Like the bunny that hops into view, a dark shape in the white snow outside my window, what is mystery appears to come “out of nowhere” and yet to have its beginning before the beginning. Mystery that cannot be explained “in time” is sacred mystery, new and ancient, slumbering like a mountain peak with one eye always open and fully awake.

It was December of 1998 when this Course first entered me with a quiet power that shut out everything else. Before I realized it, I was on my knees. This was my first step to letting Jesus in, and once taken, I realized he had always been there…but not in this way.

I did not know mystery nor realize that I was engulfed in it. I thought I would come to understand it and be wise with understanding.

Now, sitting in the twilight of a winter’s night, I know this is not the way of mystery. I do not understand the mystery but I know it to be sacred.  

There is no intellectual knowledge to await. Because our minds rule our lives, this course will not fit into our regular pattern of life; into what we “think” our lives are. It will reorient our lives. Courage of heart is needed to withstand this reorientation, to swim peaceably in mystery.

Tonight, with darkness gathering, trees standing tall and black against a sky illuminated by snow, I know only that the language of the heart is needed to speak the unspeakable, the mystery which is that of which we most desire to speak and to share together in silence. Like the snow, it is the voice of the heart’s own mystery that illuminates. There beyond the darkness of the thinking mind that separates us from all we seek to know is the knowing of our sacred hearts.

Why do we need mystery? Where else do we encounter that which we “don’t know,” that which will allow us to create what we don’t know . . . yet?

This is Beyond the Book.

~Mari