God Is
by Tom Baker
Date: March 13, 2011
Before Helen Schucman started scribing A Course In Miracles on October 21st, 1965 she had a number of dreams and visions in which Jesus appeared to her with a message. In one vision Jesus handed Helen a scroll which read God Is. He told her that if she unrolled it to the left she could see her entire past and if she unrolled it to the right she could see her entire future. Helen decided to leave the scroll as it was, symbolically in the present with the simple, fundamental, and all inclusive thought: God Is. In lessons 42 through 47 this phrase is used as the beginning point to describe our relationship to God and His to us. It is like beginning a thought with the still point of no thought and no separation and no time.
In Lesson 40 we are given our true identity. It is the "special" identity that Christianity has given Jesus: the Son of God, but with the qualifier of "only". In other words being the Son of God is what makes Jesus special. In the Course Jesus is clear that "Son of God" is the title for all of us, implying that when the historical Jesus referred to himself as God's Son he was teaching us not about something exclusive to him but how that which was natural to him was also natural to us. Just as he called his disciples to be "the light of the world" (reiterated for us in Lesson 61) he reminds us in Lesson 40 that we each are blessed as a Son of God, and begins the lesson with the Old Testament name for God "I am." Thus we begin with the touchstone of Being then receive our blessing as a Son of God.
Were the ego to use this lesson it would have us prove we were a Son of God and no doubt remind us that we were basically unworthy of being a Son of God, etc. In other words it would be a title demanding labor and proof and even suffering. In the Course we are simply to use it as a reminder of our essential happiness. We actually do this same kind of thing with children and even each other in times of discouragement when we remind someone that they indeed are precious to us, a profound and wondrous human being.
Lesson 41 addresses our deepest fear, namely, that we have been abandoned by God. We live out this fear of abandonment in our fears that others will not love us and our threats to withdraw our love from them. Yet in our deepest heart of hearts we long to know that God is with us always: encoded in "Good-bye" is the older phrase "God be with you." It's hidden, but we desperately want to know it and often, only in our desperation, are we willing to begin to believe it. The Source of holiness, of joy, of life, and of peace goes with us all the time and everywhere. We are told to begin our day, desperate or calm, with this: five minutes of assurance that we go nowhere without God.
Then come the lessons in which "God is" is completed and we are completed in God.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2011