Building a Gentle School
by Tom Baker

Lesson: Based on "Healing will always stand aside when it would be seen as threat. The instant it is welcome it is there." — A Course In Miracles, Manual for Teachers, 6. IS HEALING CERTAIN? p. 20.
Date: March 28, 2009

In the summer of 1978 I was preparing to take my priestly vows. I wanted to be a good example to my parishioners. When they saw me I wanted them to see Christ. There was one problem however. Christ did not smoke. I did. Sometimes two packs a day. I figured that if I were to be really, authentically Christ-like that I had to become a non-smoker. My scheme, as is usual for me, was complicated. I decided to spend the summer living the life of a Trappist monk at a Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia. I assumed that the monks did not smoke and so if I lived there among them, sharing their life and following their rules, I would not smoke either. I would become a non-smoker by virtue of a compulsory lifestyle which forbade smoking. On the long drive to Georgia from Indiana I smoked by last pack of cigarettes, flicking the last butt away as I turned into the Magnolia lined road that led into the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. The smell of cigarette smoke was replaced by the rich perfume of Magnolia blossoms. I relaxed and thought, "Quitting cigarettes will be a delight!" I moved into my little room in the guesthouse and spent the afternoon praying in the bright silence of the monastery church. When the dinner bell rang I went to the dining room and sat down to eat with a visiting Jesuit priest. He would be spending the week at the monastery, he said, and knew the monks well. As we were finishing our meal, I told him about my plan to stop smoking and he looked at me with surprise.

"You’re right about not smoking in most places, but here in the guesthouse dining room you can smoke all you want." He took out a pack of cigarettes, lit up, then pushed the pack across the table at me. "Quit next week. Have a cigarette." Time stood still. I thought, "Here is the devil in the disguise of a priest." My hand with a mind of its own reached for the pack.

Then the priest began to cough. As he coughed his face turned red and then as he continued to cough and sputter his face turned purple. I snatched my hand away. The thought occurred to me that the Jesuit priest could be me in twenty years. I declined his offer of a cigarette. During my first week of praying and working in silence whenever I craved a cigarette I would stop and listen, and in that quiet place I would often here the Jesuit priest coughing and by week’s end I had lost my desire to smoke. It was not the perfume of Magnolia blossoms that strengthened by will to quit smoking. It was the image of the priest’s purple face and his deathly cough that kept me from lighting up in the guesthouse dining room. I quit smoking not because of the allure of life but for the fear of death.

Edgar Cayce, Paul Solomon, and many others have often said that earth is a school. When people have near death experiences or when they are deeply hypnotized to a memory of spirit between lifetimes they remember earth as a place of learning, as a school. But a school that is severe. Yes severe. In M. Scott Peckett’s popular book The Road Less Traveled the first line is "Life is hard." Most of us would agree. The school of life is hard. But why must it be hard? Why must our lessons be severe? Is it because we have sinned, that we are being punished, learning our lessons the hard way, punitively? That would make God into a kind of sadist, the Horrible School Master in the Sky, sending us to earth school lifetime after lifetime to learn to love him through pain and suffering and sacrifice. Yet, the great spiritual teachers have been gentle. The Buddha taught us to quiet our minds and follow the gentle middle way, Jesus healed the sick, welcomed the outcaste, relieving suffering rather than encouraging it; and today the Dali Lama says his religion is compassion and teaches a gentle tolerance of the sometimes sadistic Chinese. The great spiritual teachers have come to the severe earth school with lesson plans of softness and love and forgiveness. For it is we who make our school what it is, not God.

But what do we come here to learn? Enlightenment, love, forgiveness. Yet, how much do we want these things? How much do you want to be enlightened, how much do you want love to direct your every thought, word and deed, how much do you want to forgive and be neighbor to the world?

The story is told of the young man who goes to the Buddhist teacher asking to be taught enlightenment. The old teacher tells the young man to follow him to the river. The monk leads the student into the water and asks him to trust him. Then the teacher holds the student’s head under the water. He holds it there until the young man begins to struggle. At last the old monk lets go and the student explodes to the surface, gasping for breath. As the student stands in the river taking deep breaths, the old monk tells him, "When you want enlightenment as much as you wanted breath when you were under water, then you will be ready to learn." Much of what we learn in the earth school we learn negatively. Some have learned the value of sobriety by being drunk and almost losing everything. At AA meetings people tell the bad stories of drinking to remind themselves and others of the good life without alcohol. I learned the value of marriage in the severe school of celibacy. Only when I was without the hope of marriage at all could I begin to appreciate the deep contentment of committed love. In short, I learned to love marriage by not having it. In the earth school, at least up until now, you experience something completely to learn that you really do not want it: war, poverty, illness, the abuse of power, addiction. We have learned who we are by experiencing who we are not, we have learned to appreciate what we have by experiencing not having it. We breathe with delight and abandon only when we have been forbidden to breathe. A severe school indeed.\

Can it different? Can school be gentle? Of course. We are going through that process as I speak. The renaissance of consciousness represented by the year 2012 is simply the gentling of the earth school. The new lesson plan is to learn what you want by having it, then keeping it by giving it away. When my wife loves me in her own way I do object and wish for her to love me in my way. She loves me by doing things for me, while I want her to love me by having intense conversations and showing amazement at my insights. She smiles and makes the bed, gets me a treat at the grocery, organizes my desk.

She loves me the way she chooses. Which school do I want? Shall I go back to celibacy and learn again to appreciate the love that is not my idea. I appreciate her love the way she gives it to me, I breathe it in, I share it with another: I give a gift, I do a kindness; I celebrate being loved. I’m learning Kathy’s love in a gentle school. When I am worried I demand that God intervene, that God tell me exactly what to do and how to do it. Yet there is only silence. Silence. Quiet. Stillness. Peace. Which school do I want? Shall I go back to the Church with its rules and its threats of damnation and its loud dogmas? I appreciate the way God loves me, embracing me in silence, holding me in stillness, showing me peace. I share God’s silence with others, I listen, I am present, I am harmless, I am willing to help. I’m learning God’s love in a gentle school. Now breathe. Deeply breathe and delight in being alive. Now breathe for the world, take a deep breath for the old, the angry, the hungry, the sad. Share your vitality with the world. You are building a gentle school.

Passage from the Course:

"Healing is always certain. It is impossible to let illusions be brought to truth and keep the illusions. Truth demonstrates illusions have no value. The teacher of God has seen the correction of his errors in the mind of the patient, recognizing it for what it is. Having accepted Atonement for himself, he has also accepted it for the patient. Yet what if the patient uses sickness as a way of life, believing healing is the way to death? When this is so, a sudden healing might precipitate intense depression, and a sense of loss so deep that the patient might even try to destroy himself. Having nothing to live for, he may ask for death. Healing must wait, for his protection. Healing will always stand aside when it would be seen as threat. The instant it is welcome it is there. Where healing has been given it will be received. And what is time before the gifts of God? We have referred many times in the text to the storehouse of treasures laid up equally for the giver and the receiver of God’s gifts. Not one is lost, for they can but increase. No teacher of God should feel disappointed if he has offered healing and it does not appear to have been received. It is not up to him to judge when his gift should be accepted. Let him be certain it has been received, and trust that it will be accepted when it is recognized as a blessing and not a curse. It is not the function of God’s teachers to evaluate the outcome of their gifts. It is merely their function to give them. Once they have done that they have also given the outcome, for that is part of the gift. No one can give if he is concerned with the result of the giving. That is a limitation on the giving itself, and neither the giver nor the receiver would have the gift. Trust is an essential part of giving; in fact, it is the part which makes sharing possible, the part that guarantees the giver will not lose, but only gain. Who gives a gift and then remains with it, to be sure it is used as the giver deems appropriate? Such is not giving but imprisoning.

It is the relinquishing of all concern about the gift that makes it truly given. And it is trust that makes true giving possible. Healing is the change of mind that the Holy Spirit in the patient’s mind is seeking for him. And it is the Holy Spirit in the mind of the giver Who gives the gift to him. How can it be lost? How can it be ineffectual? How can it be wasted? God’s treasure house can never be empty. And if one gift is missing, it would not be full. Yet is its fullness guaranteed by God. What concern, then, can a teacher of God have about what becomes of his gifts? Given by God to God, who in this holy exchange can receive less than everything?" (M., 6. IS HEALING CERTAIN?, pp. 20-21.)

Building a Gentle School by Tom Baker

Building a Gentle School
by Tom Baker