A Course of Love and Grace
By Mari Perron
As seen in Miracles Magazine, Jan/Feb 2009

A Course of Love is a three-book series of revealed writings on the nature of the self: books on being who we truly are. I was the scribe, or receiver; Jesus was the voice, or the giver. This experience raised many questions for me, and although they have been responded to, they live on.

I’ve always been fascinated by questions, and I’ve been looking at the question of what started people on their spiritual paths. Was it an experience that wrestled a new question from them? Was it a question that came from daily life, one of life’s meaning and purpose? I’ve seen that the initial question often remains the guiding question, pointing the way more surely than an answer.

Oddly, my own spiritual journey began with questions that weren’t my own. They were the questions a good friend began to ask after her baby girl, Grace, died. They were big, broad questions about life and death, the nature of both, and of God. She and I and another friend began to explore them together, each in our own ways, looking at energy, healing, angels, soul, symbolism. We explored them as they related to our own lives and issues, which began by seeming quite different, and yet were reconciled by an awareness of a certain universality of concerns. We were reading, talking, observing, dreaming, living, grieving, and experiencing…sometimes in amazing ways. We worked together, and so mundane work tasks became what we did while we talked. When we couldn’t talk as we worked, we’d head outside for breaks or to a restaurant for lunch. I remember asking them one day, over burgers at the Big Ten, to join me in Holy Relationship. I was reading ACIM. I’d given them each copies.

We shared an incredible intimacy. We got to know each other in the deepest sense of knowing. There was nurturing, understanding, joining, consolation, devotion. We eventually collaborated on publishing books (The Grace Trilogy) about our experiences.

Just before The Grace Trilogy was released, I got called by a dream to leave this job: “You can no longer sell your mind for money, your mind belongs to God.” It took me nine months to do it, and nearly another nine months before I found that my new “work for God” was going to be the scribing of a “new” course in miracles, one that was to be for the heart what A Course in Miracles is for the mind.

Looking back, I know that there was something about that time before the course, about the shared love of three friends, and the baby Grace, and the spirit of Grace, that opened my mind to the heart’s particular questions: questions about our humanity, our capacity to love, and our capacity to share one another’s joy and pain.

But equally, the months between when I left my job, and the coming of A Course of Love brought new and different questions. I was unemployed, lonely, and searching with everything I had for what this new work might be. In the weeks just prior to this Course’s inception, these feelings reached their peak, as it became clear that I ought to return to work for the financial well-being of my family.

This dismal time drew forth the classic questions: Who am I? What am I to do? But they sounded more like, God, what the heck is it you want from me? I’m here. I’m ready. Where’s my work?

In desperation, I turned to A Course in Miracles, which I’d read seven times, but put away for a while. I opened it at random to a section of the Manual for Teachers, and the first words my eyes lit on were “Help is here.” The Teachers of Teachers then began to guide me to my work for God: the scribing of this course.

For the next three years, as I took the inner dictation from Jesus and physically wrote the three books, I lived an odd life, one that took everything I had to give in a way that was different from anything I’d done before. I lived with the satisfaction of a meaningful existence, while at the same time, my mental capacity to do anything else diminished, my physical energy declined, and I struggled with the basics of living. It wasn’t until the books were almost complete that I was overcome with a great love, and realized that I’d been holding something of myself in reserve so that I could get the work done. This love was like an infusion. My energy began to return, I was at ease in my own skin, happy, ready to really live in that way you feel when it becomes clear, after some major event, that you weren’t truly living before.

But while the awareness of that great love lasted, the new life it promised started to elude me once again. Jesus says in this course, “Share who you are to be who you are.” My new difficulty was finding a way to share. It’s not always easy to share who we are.

I was back to that same old question, but in a new way. Who am I now? I knew I’d changed, but the change was hard to understand or communicate. I wiggled around in the same skin I’d briefly felt at ease in. Eventually, I was called to an orientation of solitude, and it seemed every time I peeked my head out into the world, I stumbled. What was going on?

The newness this course calls us to is a lot to get used to.

A Course of Love begins in a way that could almost be seen as a review of A Course in Miracles, except that Jesus says that we have entered the Time of Christ, which is described as a time of direct union and relationships with God. It is the Christ in us, or our true self (God’s idea of us rather than our own), who will do this learning. This is rather startling and yet comforting news. We don’t have to apply any effort. We don’t even have to try to learn. We only need to be receptive (although this can be easier said than done).

The initial means of finding this receptivity is an appeal to the heart: “It is to our heart that we appeal for guidance, for there resides the one who truly guides. … Such foolishness as the heart’s desires will save you now.” (3.17-18)

After the appeal to the heart, Jesus speaks of the division there has been between mind and heart and says that unity is found in ending the division, which he expresses as being wholehearted. This wholeheartedness, this internal union, is our union with our true self. It is coming to know in a new way. Just imagine – all those tugs of heart and intuition that were once ignored for the mind’s logic. We still have thoughts and feelings, but they increasingly become thoughts and feelings of union rather than of separation. “Those who know the truth find it for themselves by joining mind and heart.” (21.10)

In the second book, The Treatises of A Course of Love, Jesus says, “The ego is gone.” This is welcome news, and far different than saying the ego isn’t who we are…if we can accept it. As Jesus says in both courses, we’re far more willing to accept the “bad” about ourselves than the good. But Jesus keeps assuring us, and says that with the ego gone, we can elevate the personal self. It is as if we’re asked to see that within us all along, in ourselves as we were created – in that conscious presence, in the love in our hearts, in our mind’s ability to engage, in our capacity for relationship – lie all the answers we’ve been seeking to find, as well as the fulfillment of our quest to know who we are and who God is.

When we are made ready to turn to our own true self for guidance, (or our “internal guidance system” as Jesus says in ACIM) we have discovered that it is who we are. We’re not on our own; we’re not separate. We’re joined.

On it’s own, A Course of Love is nothing. On our own, we are nothing. But joined with the Christ in us, we are living truth. We are no longer false; and no longer relegated to the false world of the ego’s construction. We can exist in union with our human and divine nature. We can make them one.

When we try to outreach where we have been, to grasp onto a higher rung of consciousness, we seek to achieve a state that will always exceed our grasp. But from the ground of being, from wholeheartedness, it will come in the manner of the one who has been seeking us.

These may all sound like fine ideas, but how do you know they are true, or that this awaits you through your engagement with this course? You might wonder about the ways in which these ideas may differ from what you have come to accept from the teachings of Jesus in A Course in Miracles.

I like to imagine these ideas as possibilities. It excites me to explore the possibility that the “illusion” was of the ego, that the ego was the dream we needed to awaken from, and that when it is gone we can live truly, embodying our Christ self. It energizes me to imagine the possibility that the unconditional love I’ve always felt from God, that personal love for me, could actually be related to me as I am…with all my imperfections. I imagine the possibility that it may be for you as it was for me, that what you have been holding in reserve – your own self and the great love that you are – is what will release you to be who you are and to create a new world.

When I was receiving this course, I began by believing I needed to be a blank slate for Jesus. I needed to get rid of myself. By the time of its conclusion, that blankness, and even my presence were no longer enough. I was being moved into a new relationship, one of participation and partnership. I believe my own journey is a small example of the movement Jesus calls each of us to begin. Jesus asks us, in ACOL, to be forerunners of the new. I’ve begun to realize that the only way I may quit stumbling is to share this excitement for the new.

A new course, in order to be new, like a new self, in order to be new, needs new ideas, the very new ideas that can lead to new life. This is where they’re found – in the final treatises and The Dialogues of A Course of Love. Here, Jesus redefines what it means to be human. Still, ACOL is not inconsistent with the heart of Jesus’ message in ACIM: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Jesus did not say that we can’t awaken from the dream. He teaches the difference between the perception that created the illusion and the knowledge that ends it. In The Treatises of A Course of Love, Jesus declares, “The time of illusion is now called to an end.”

I won’t say too much more about A Course of Love, The Treatises, and The Dialogues. They’re for you to discover. But I’ll tell you why they’re relevant to this magazine, and relevant to you. I heard, during the receiving, that A Course in Miracles readers had “been made ready” for A Course of Love. Course in Miracles readers have shown such dedication, such devotion to Jesus, that I don’t want you to miss hearing his new messages. You can let him lead you the rest of the way home to who you truly are.

The questions that began my journey, questions about our hearts, our humanity, and our identity, are addressed here. I invite you to another encounter with Jesus, and your own heart, that can reacquaint you with yourself, your questions, and your answers.

Mari’s next book is “The Given Self."