Healing and Sickness are my Choice
by Tom Baker
Lesson: Chapter 7, IV. Healing as the Recognition of the Truth & Lesson 136:
Sickness is a defense against the Truth
Date: November 9, and November 16, 2008
In the all denominations of the Christian church, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, the believer who is estranged from God is called a sinner. As a Catholic priest, my clientele, so to speak, were parishioners who had sinned and were seeking forgiveness through my holy office. Sometimes the sinner had a physical or mental illness but the illness was never thought of as part of the parishioner's estrangement from God. Someone might warn me of their cold but it was their sins that we concentrated on. Furthermore, we never expected the cold symptoms to be affected by the absolution, my blessing, or my prayer. Yet in the four Gospels, more often than not, the people who come or who are brought to Jesus for help have a physical or mental illness and it is to address this illness that they are there. In the Gospel accounts Jesus is not only a wandering teacher but also a dependable and free healer. While Jesus answers the Pharisees who accuse him of cultivating the bad company of sinners with the announcement that it is sinners he has come to save, the actual people he helps are sick people. In the time of Jesus it was often thought that sick people were being punished by God and so sinners and the sick were one in the same.
However, Jesus in the Gospels never suggests that God made them sick. He simply cures them, often with the cryptic phrase, "Your faith has healed you," and tells them to return to their villages and their lives. In A Course In Miracles, Jesus does equate sickness and our estrangement from God but not in terms of sin or God's punishment. He says instead, to quote the title of Lesson 136, that "sickness is a defense against the truth." (W. lesson 136, p. 257). Sickness is our way of defending ourselves against the Truth or Reality of God which is a wholeness or oneness of which we feel unworthy and, consequently, of which we are afraid. Sickness is our hiding place from all encompassing Love.
"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.
Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done." (W. lesson 136, p. 257).
When I am sick, whether it be insomnia, arthritis, kidney stones (three of my favorite hiding places), I am cutting myself off from all other people and the universe; I see myself as a victim of my body and my body as a victim of forces beyond my control. I think that my condition cannot fully be understood by the providers I seek out for treatment and that my condition is so unique that even my fellow sufferers cannot really know how it feels to me. No one understands. Sometimes I say that I am living out my karma. Other times I don't know. But if I am to be completely honest, I must confess there is a secret relief in being sick, a painful security in having a condition I can name and treat and conquer. I am intimidated by the idea that I have made up this sickness myself as a defense against God's truth, but I cannot quite deny it. The analogy that comes to mind is the active alcoholic who claims that it not his choice to drink, that in fact he would not drink were it not for his nagging wife, misbehaving children, stressful job, rude neighbors, and corrupt government. Finally it is his decision to drink and it is his decision to stop. Finally it is my decision, although I conveniently forget making it, to be sick and my decision to lay sickness aside and open to the truth which, to use a popular phrase, will rock my world.
It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.
How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. Thus is your 'true' identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be." (W. lesson 136, p. 258).
Our defense has no effect on God or, in reality, on us. However, in our dream of separation we suffer tragically in this wrong-headed attempt to defend the self that is not really us. The Course is the Holy Spirit's response to all our defenses against the truth. As Jesus sums up the Course at the end of the Introduction: "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God." Lesson 136 expands upon this summary this way:
"God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin." (W. lesson 136, pp. 258-259).
The remedy is to remember first that sickness is a defense against the truth and then to accept the truth of what we really are which is the wholeness of Love's creation, the peace of God. The lesson has us open to that acceptance with a healing prayer: Sickness is a defense against the truth. I will accept the truth of what I am, and let my mind be wholly healed today.
The passage in Chapter 7 that inspired my reference to lesson 136 was as follows with an emphasis on the sentence in bold type: "God is All in all in a very literal sense. All being is in Him Who is all Being. You are therefore in Him since your being is His. Healing is a way of forgetting the sense of danger the ego has induced in you, by not recognizing its existence in your brother. This strengthens the Holy Spirit in both of you, because it is a refusal to acknowledge fear. Love needs only this invitation." (T. Chap. 7, IV. Healing as the Recognition of Truth, p. 119.)
When we agree to heal another we allow ourselves to forget the ego-induced image of God that we use sickness as a defense against. Thus healing another strengthens our determination to trust God without defenses or conditions or deals. To say a simple "yes" to what we simply are.
I ask you to continue reading in chapter 7, V. Healing and the Changeless Mind and beyond, and to look for workbook lessons that relate to the theoretical material there. The Course is best studied when there is a constant rhythm, or creative tension if you will, between principle and application, spirit (text) and incarnation (workbook). Each week I will try to cite both so we do not get bogged down in theory or obsessive with how truth must be lived out. The pitfall in spirituality is that the truth is learned well enough but is not grounded in the everyday, while the pitfall in religion is that the practice becomes an end in itself and just another expression of the ego. My goal is to have a mind of heaven and a heart of earth and know the Spirit as joining both.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2008