This morning a few of us met for breakfast. This was a diverse group, almost random, farmers, clergy, a health nut laborer, a party animal turned Catholic 'fringe-dweller,' myself and a once diagnosed schizophrenic. The latter is also a mystic, unbeknownst to him. He was uncharacteristically bursting to share with the group and grabbed the crucifix-talking-stick quickly and intently. This is what he said--reading it so that he would not wander off-point--a self-aware concern given his 'diagnosis.' This is it verbatim. He gave me the perfect-cursive ink on legal paper notes on condition he remain anonymous. I told him I wanted to relate them here and in the podcast. Thank-you, anonymous mystic for your letter to God.

     I took up writing you this morning because I wanted to listen to you, and if I listen to you, I can't formulate anything to say. Now, perhaps I should just be quiet, but I have something to share.
    Ever since the fourth of July I have been praying to hang in there with my family because I know if I exclude myself from them I become unhappy, because it is God's will that I include myself with them no matter how hard it is, because in that is true happiness.
     Yesterday, I was sitting outside [the coffee shop] again and asked God if I was forgiven for my sins, and He answered me, no. 
      I asked Him, why,  and he said I have not forgiven all people from my heart. 
        So I told Him that I forgive all, and he said, no, you have not.
     So, I thought about that, about my step-dad in particular, and right away, a dark cloud came to engulf my soul, where I could see my whole life and his involvement in it, and I felt this deep repugnance for him. And I told God that if he was in prison, I would give everything I had to get him out. And God said, that would not be enough. 
     I told God that if he was trapped in a fire that I would sacrifice my life to save him, that if I was in heaven and he was in hell, that if I had the opportunity to allow him in where I was, that I would. I told God, you know I would.
     God said, that is not enough.
     I told God, I just cannot forgive him with my heart. God said, sure you can.
     I asked God how I could forgive him with my heart . God said, you have to come to understand him.
     So I tried really hard to understand him for what seemed like a great while, but the truth is, the harder I tried to understand him, the greater my repugnance I felt for him. I told God that I could not understand him. 
        God said, sure you can. I asked how.
     God said in order to understand him, you must first forsake all being understood yourself.
     Well, this was new to me. So I prayed for it, and forsaking to be understood turned out to be quite easy and relaxing as opposed to spending all that energy to be understood and to justify myself. 
     Then I prayed to understand him in that light by the grace of God, and the truth was, I did so effortlessly.
     
I went home and sat with him at the supper table and looked at him for a long time. I liked to look at him. I told him that I loved him, and I meant it. He told me that he loved me, and it meant something to me.
     In fact, not only had I forgiven him, but I came to see how much he had done for me in my life. In fact, not only did I see how good he was and how much he did for me, but I saw if I was to be saved, it would be through him, and if I was saved, he would be also.
     How many people had God saved through me that I can see? None. And how strangely great it is that this was happening with my step-dad, who earlier that day I felt like strangling.
     I asked God if I was forgiven for my sins. There were others I needed to forgive with my heart, but my step-dad was the first domino in that line, while perhaps I was last. I asked God if I was forgiven for my sins.
     God said, yes.
     I asked if I was saved and going to heaven.
     God said, it is a process [ laughed]. It is a process for the first domino to affect the last.

Stunned, I inwardly pinched myself to hear what was happening. This was a clear, experiential description of forgiveness--the miracle illustrated perfectly among these decidedly conventional, weathered salt-of-the -earth types. I asked him what he would do with the folded yellow pages. He said he would probably throw them away. Here they are. Maybe this is some kind of domino for me--it's a process.   
        


        

Cute title but Jesus answers it pretty clearly--a dual understanding is provisional to experiencing the Truth, which is One, or Non-dual. The Singularity is the goal, and time-space is the vehicle that makes the non-rational moment where dimensions collapse under their own weight into an incomprehensible point--it's the only thing worth talking about, but there is nothing to say. Duality is the nest from which the Son of God fledges. If He finds it too comfortable, the Parent Bird will turn on Him. The once accommodating, fawning, loving  wing of protection becomes the enemy until the twig-surfing lay-about finds itself staggering among harsh forces it feared. Quit before you are fired they say. On a serious note, imagine you are Kenneth Wapnick, [having edited ACIM in trilateral communication with Helen Schucman and Bill Thedford] experiencing the undoing of years of refinement, undone in a court of law, thus releasing the rough edges for popular consumption.
     Mies van der Rohe said God is in the details, but another bromide puts the devil there--Ken found through personal experience that the detail-battleground can lead to pain and worse. Unless ACIM can align itself with a powerful empire like Rome, evangelize itself into the world by missionary force and burn deviants at the stake as heretics, God and the devil will duke it out in the details, mourned and cheered in a Coliseum of the washed and unwashed. "Hey, it's a polemical problem, take your pick, Reality is "I-thou" or maybe just "I." Declaring a clear, enforceable definition of 'what is contraband' helps the compliant and rebellious alike.
     In other words, A Course in Miracles' only meaningful contribution to western thought is its focus on non-dual Reality--everybody is free to be a Presbyterian or Catholic if they want, but give some headroom to the mystics. Maybe, [obviously, unfortunately for the doubtful mystics who would benefit from a vested authority to make 'the narrow way' seem more official], there's a good reason to allow schizoid interpretations of Helen, Bill, and Kenneth's baby to fledge their well-intentioned nest. The drunken walk of ACIM teachers includes statements like, "I guess it all comes down to intuition," or "What do you do when you are doing the work of forgiveness and your brother is not?" "We have to correct our brother in 'love,' and allow Spirit to determine what form our inevitable split will take." These are wormholes of interpretation not included in the text that will lead to some singularity in some other universe. Does it matter?
     Yes--for the mystics.
     True enough, they have Vedanta, Tat Twam Asi, or Aham Brahmasmi to assuage their craving for the 'singularity experience,' somehow, mostly against their better judgement, but these lack something Ken's edit of Jesus' teachings has--"The Holy Spirit"--this is an alternative to the body, a different Mind with which to think, a partner in the project Who does the heavy lifting.
      Indian Advaita-non-dualism can lead to heroic efforts in concentration, mind-control, self-abnegation, and renunciation that often become a new field of striving by a 'spiritualized ego.' There is also the need to wrap the austerities in a soft blanket of guru devotion, to Ramana, Nisargadatta, Papaji or Gangaji. It is 'all good,' assigning values is not the point.
     The Course has a unique dualistic voice to lead relentlessly away from a world of appearances into, and dependent-on a world of meaning, a world of relationship that gives way to 'abiding in The Self' which has no useful "I'" and no functional "thou." Brilliantly and compassionately it does this in a radical schoolroom context of difficult text book, well-defined program of lessons, and supportive materials to answer left-over questions. In addition, the program provides one Face, Jesus, and an ill-defined essential source for reorientation, The Holy Spirit. Someone explain why this is not perfect as it is.
     My argument at a distance of 50 years away is that Kenneth Wapnick is as essential to the imprimatur on Course interpretations as Helen and Bill. Certainly the Cayce family, 'Master teacher's raves in Wisconsin, or any attainments of Atoning Circles have nothing to say beyond the wishes of the original trinitarian psycho-spiritual therapists who etched it in carbon paper by 1978. 'Evil-Ken-Wapnick' would agree--but he had no such dark  sci-fi counterpart and proceeded in due diligence to protect the work through legal means that failed, watching the Psychological-trinity's work get tossed to the hungry hounds of innovative advantage, the kids that want to SEE what all the squeaking is about in the parent's bedroom, the sausage haters who want to show the world how it's made. Mea Culpa, mea maxima culpa.

David Hoffmeister wieghs in on the 'versions' issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmdZ6Ymv04I

Emily Perry describes ACOA Course Compilation.​         
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhml7mvC50c

Britney Shawley discusses text options.        
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPRq4N2c8Uo   

Carol Howe shares the most important aspect of ACIM.
 www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUgNE1WAQ4U

Gary Renard has thoughts on it.     
www.youtube.com/shorts/vxvHi9NjtlU

Carl Jung believes in God--does he care if He is in form or or beyond it?
​https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KYgzceVZA9E

     It's my blog-post and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to. You might cry too if it happened to you. Here is the deal. Because of the You Tube channel and meeting with Joanna to do our version of deep dives into the text, I have acquired a huge level of respect for this 'monolith that appears among the boomer-generation, tricking bone wielding apes  with indecipherable sounds to the fringes of Bible correction--a clever ruse to make Jesus lovers out of materialistic humanists who are atheists at heart. The apes have to stack boxes to reach bananas; it is in their nature. If the bananas are in the Urtext, Sparkly version, or Circle of Atonement's gift to students, boxes will be stacked. In my awe at the coherence of the 1978 text and the placement of original players I become sad at what looks like opportunism, for what? We all stack boxes. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Dear Ken,

Thank-you for the foundational work you did on the first published version of ACIM. For what it's worth, I think it would have served us best if it had stayed that way and that your interests had been served and not overturned in a Court which is absolutely antithetical to any intention within the Course itself. I also recognize your adherence to certain concepts may have precipitated the relinquishment of your control over the Course content. I may be frustrated with your indictments like , "You made it up!" or "You don't exist!" or "God does not understand what you are saying!" because, though anchored in the Course teaching, they lack subtleties which are also a part of Course teaching. But the distortions you brought could have been considered necessary Canon Laws to be ameliorated with pastoral counsel. Instead, we have a free for all which was, I think, an outcome you feared all along. My own anti-authoritarian streak may have balked at your control back in the day, but maybe the toady acolyte in me would have kept the rebellion to myself. 
     Without personal grounds, knowledge, or reason, I say I love you. Out of loyalty to your dedicated work and persistence that really polished the Gem, I hold you as  Saul turned Paul for those who would embrace this latter-day Good News called A Course in Miracles. Remembering your role is part of the revelation, along with Helen and Bill of course. What did the boomer apes do to deserve it but put coherence itself at risk, eliciting the blessed Avatar to publish. Amen      
​

Who is "The Master?"
Maybe it would be better to start with "What is a master?"

This is from the A.I search just now:
1. One that has control over another person, a group of persons, or a thing, especially. The owner or keeper of an animal.
2. The owner of a slave.
​
And now from Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 1993:
fr OE Magister, akin to L Magnus, large. 1. A male teacher. 2. ..a person with a degree higher than Bachelor's. 3. a religious leader 4. a worker or artisan qualified to teach apprentices. etc...'consummate skill, great figure from the past whose work serves as a model or ideal, one having authority over another, one who conquers or masters. on and on with no reference to slavery or animals. 

Honestly, it did not seem a definition search comparison between on-line and a hard copy on the shelf would be so poignant, depressing, and appropriate to the topic of 'the challenge of commitment.' 
     I could cry. A master seems to have become a DEI liability or, like the billboard for Kansas State on I-70 which shows a happy black youth in cap and gown, captioned in huge italicized letters, "We've got this, World." Yes indeedy, the graduating class of 2025 from KU will take care of everything, starting with an AI search for all the information they need. We begin as masters and reverse engineer what we do as mastery. Is that it?
     The Master, was a 2012 movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Watson and brilliantly presented by Joaquim Phoenix as a troubled subject of Philip Seymour Hoffman's depiction of an L. Ron Hubbard type "master." In this case, a guy who, like the Scientology guru/sci fi author, has far-reaching ideas and techniques about the problems of humanity and how to solve them. The movie is nearly perfect in every way [If you like that sort of thing] in its depiction of the complex relationship of an accidental student and a determined teacher. A question lingers behind every scene, "Who has the power in this relationship?" Go watch it again.
      When do you bow down, press face into the feet of the one who knows and say, Take me, if you will.? When do you recognize the master, the one who you have realized is above, perched, positioned to grasp, identify, and lift up the one who is below. When do you say to yourself, I am below this one. This is right. It is right to submit to this one. It is right to commit to this one. When does the realization of that relationship finally cause you to put aside your ineffective tools and the half-baked results they brought, and humble yourself before one who has to love you because they have come to be above you, to lift you up. When do you put aside the rusty tool of bogus pride, "I've got this World" and say, "I never did and never will get this. The world has me, and I don't know what to do about it--behold the master and the call to commitment!"

7. The Atonement is a total commitment. ²You may still think this is associated with loss, a mistake all the separated Sons of God make in one way or another. (ACIM, T-2.II.7:1-2)
     "No, man, no, I can't do it."
     "Sure you can..."
     "No--It's not there."
      "Do you WANT to--I mean, if you Could do it, would you?" 
     "I guess so, I mean, why even think about it?"
    "Let's not pretend you can do it. Forget it, no need to try. Let's pretend pitiful is the goal--now, even though you can't do it, or you'll get creamed if you try, forget all that--do you want to. No risk." 
     "No risk? Okay. Yes. If I could just end up there, no risk, I would do it."
     "Good. Now let's pretend there's a magic friend--somebody else's, not yours. You are just sitting there with no friends, but this magic friend of someone you know just likes to do stuff. Fulfill wishes, for no reason you know of."
     "Okay. Magic friend--easy enough."
     "Say to yourself, "Magic friend, do that thing I can't do--but I want to, but I won't even try because I'll get killed." 
     "Okay. Done. I said it."
     "I'm the magic friend. Just go with it. It's just words. Tell ME like you mean it."
     "Okay. You just like to fulfill wishes--I want to do this thing, be over there but I am scared shitless. No risk, no strings, here I go, 'magic friend, save my ass and keep me alive in the process. No 'shards of a shattered ego' lying around to hurt people"
     "Done." 
     
Spoiler alert, the student has all the power, (until they give it to the master.) The student chooses the master (after the master chooses the student). If they don't know they have all the power, they will strike up a relationship that conforms to the AI definition--beast master, slave-owner. 
     ACIM could also be called ADAI, A Description of Irony. The half-baked student  holds all power over the mighty Father-God-Creator until the student admits they need help. They want help and  will commit to the better way. It is often is a case of driving with the brakes on--the wanna be student craves the promise held out by enlightenment which is a happy, purposeful life of ease and grace but clings to the self-persona that longs for release from what they have rather than what they seem to be. There's no way forward here without first person singular.
     I have pursued an abundance of modalities aimed at self-improvement, even freedom, release, and enlightenment. I'm still the same thing plus more experiences. The problem is that "I" want to change or empower "I" to have the enlightened life. "I" have no intention of tossing the steering wheel to someone else; that seems like suicide. This whole idea of staying in control is the problem, but it seems like a smaller problem than giving control to some other thing that will eventually betray me, no doubt about it, got all the proof starting with birth when they drugged me into oblivion so they could pluck me out of the birth canal like the electrician recently extracted a comatose bat out of my attic with a pair of pliers. I am afraid of being used, that being a best case scenario.
     The 'practice makes perfect' strategy can achieve "mastery" given enough "commitment" to the necessary steps and an awareness of the pitfalls. Master of the World even, like Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, or Gandhi the Mahatma.
     Jesus the Christ, by contrast, did not submit to a strategy. He volunteered to vacate the Right Hand of God to do time on earth--apparently because that other 'Morning Star; named Lucifer, was cast here like lightening. The Christ would have arrived at roughly the same time for an opposite purpose. The Luciferian morning star came to get control of the situation while the Christ-impulse came to undo the concept of "getting control" and instead "give control" to the One that actually runs all strategies and circumstances.
     I recognize that it can be repugnant to the Course student to drag the right hand of God into it because it is symbolic of religious fatalism, punishment, and queasy memories of eternal damnation--that is a personal problem. Whatever mythic verbiage one uses to express a 'master worthy of the steering wheel' will work. "Lucifer" by any name is still the ego in ACIM. "Sin" by any other name is still a mistake that functions as an anvil around the neck until it is recognized as a mistake. The paradigm of traditional Christian constructs  is intentionally parallel to ACIM symbolic language in the same way that Lucifer and Jesus are after the same thing--both want control where it truly belongs. The Christian referent is not an accident in any dimension. The Euro-Western world has done with 'masters' what they did with Dodos, Carrier Pigeons, buffalos and the people that pray to them before hunting. Christianity was our last stop on the Master-Teacher line and it has been effectively sterilized. Choose your master, If you are in a body, he has already chosen you--so there is the "choose again" strategy. Blah blah blah. Even in first person singular there is nowhere to go. 
     I ran into Peggy, an old art class chum in the last week of the last year in college. I had not seen her since my freshman year when we sat near each other, exchanging cynical comments while we did art stuff, portraits and blind contour drawings and other elective activities. Four years later, Peggy glowed. The sarcastic smirk was transformed into a sincere smile. She was happy and told me about it. Of course she did--it's called evangelization, telling the good news. 
     A jaded, sarcastic ex-cheerleader from Knoxville High goes to a frat party and meets a guy in an Izod shirt, khaki pants and docksider shoes who tells her [with point for point accuracy] how she feels, how unhappy she is, why she is that way, and gives her the way out. She is amazed at his prescience and takes the next step. he puts his hand on her head and says, "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior." She feels faint, undone, she says yes and is changed--permanently, easily, gracefully. There is nothing else for her to do but let Jesus the Christ steer her vehicle through life.  She tells me it's easy, just say it and mean it, or just say and don't mean it. 
     I apologize for coming to this crossroads once again and falling short. I don't see any difference between Peggy's born-again experience and the meeting of an ACIM student with the Holy Spirit, Jesus, or The Master--whatever language the student's special condition can tolerate. It is all the same. So far I can cry at the beauty of escape and believe in its reality, but I am still so many years later, unable to say, "It is finished, Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85cAFs65o1U
​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAQiAQROi7g
​​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN49cvR05Nc

​​I remind myself to not shoot the messenger. There's no way to get past the world's most uncomfortable moment except to go through it.

Tooth Is Stranger Than Friction

The Real World that Jesus describes in ACIM is just over the obscuring hill of perception--it's there; we just don't see it. This past week I went to the priest [dentist] confessed my sins [x-rays showing root decay] and she gave absolution [yes, we'll accept you as a client] on the condition I do the required penance [go to an endodontist for 2 root canals]--let's find the Real World of joy and peace, hidden just beyond the needles, rubber mouth dam, inability to swallow for 2 hours, and the smell of roasted bone. It is there--Jesus told me so.
    "Miracles as such do not matter. ²The only thing that matters is their Source, which is far beyond evaluation." (ACIM, T-1.I.2:1-2)
        Intensity. The pain, '10 on a 10-scale,' Saturday night that allowed for no sleep. The emergency appointment. The reality of the process--long and expensive, promising pain but not miracles. The root canal itself would be there, already is there in the mind--jaw-drugged into submission, sheet rubber square stretched over the target area, high-pitched drills, 3 inch needles, and constant vigilance for the jack-in-the-box pain spike, "Sorry about that." Intense--yet tedious, unimportant, even stupid. And it's all about the body. Is it? is this about the body, or something else? 
     NOW begins the healing miracle to escape a nightmare over which there is no control except the hand of God. Pain intensity on Saturday was a 'go signal.'  I submit to the message, "All things are lessons I must learn; all things are echoes of the Voice for God." I respond in a 'special way' by making an appointment ASAP, suspending judgement, going through motions that, from here on, are dictated by apparent others--the brothers, the saviors. They issue the call Home in a form that is made to obscure their gesture of love. Now I am lost, not journeying but wandering in a foreign land, at God's mercy or His Hand--as I see it--as I choose. I have known 'the way of pain.' The landscape of equipment, drugs and paid professionals is my usual territory. But thirty years ago I found a testament , ACIM, that tells me 'to find what is not findable,' only 'offered, as experience,' as revelation, as a formless vision.
     Looking for signs--Google Maps, street view shows the location in Manhattan (Kansas)--just behind a service called Ascension Via Christi [Ascension of Christ]. The Doctor's name is Christopher, or 'Christ bearer.' This is for me--the first miracles of light piercing the physical pall of procedural doom. They will see me on Friday, 'a good day to die.' Prepared for inevitable outcomes, I am fully prepared to be amazed and or 'crucified.'
     Nothing happens--it was meet and greet. Christopher says, "What do you want? Do you have a plan? And reviewed the costs, pointing at the 3-D tell all x-ray. "Figure, uh, this one, then this, and this at so much--do the math and, well, we are in for 15 thousand, at least--per plan, anyway. And why do anything without the full plan?" Again , for the third time he says, "What do you want to do?" I say, "As far as I know, I'm here for 2 root canals." He looks at his hygienist assistant like they are deciding between Arby's and Burger King for lunch and says, "Well, I guess we'll go with that."
     It is about free will, isn't it?
     Four days pass and I'm in a chair, lips thick and tingling--I could bite them off and would not notice. There is something else here, isn't there? Isn't that what Jesus said? Am I making this up? "

Yet it is given you to be beyond its laws in all respects, in every way and every circumstance, in all temptation to perceive what is not there, and all belief God’s Son can suffer pain because he sees himself as he is not. (ACIM, T-24.VI.4:5)

"Give me your blessing holy Son of God." It's a dental visit. There is a moment where the drill goes rogue , "Oh, Sorry about that," and I'm thrown back to Dr. St. Eve the army dentist drilling sans Novocain when I was a tender sprout--but here is the temptation. No! there is something else beyond view. What is it? "Give me your blessing holy Son of God." This is intensity, love through a filter, not pain, pain is the form. There is something inside or beyond the form. "Give me your blessing holy Son of God." 
     It ends--a dental visit. Not more or less than I thought. "Give me your blessing Holy Son of God." I will not be tempted to think I was right and Jesus was wrong. I refuse this 'making' under the power of my own dream-weaving. "I claim God's apparent insanity as my only hope of sanity--crazy as it seems." 

2. Miracles as such do not matter. ²The only thing that matters is their Source, which is far beyond evaluation.
3. Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. ²The real miracle is the love that inspires them. ³In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.
4. All miracles mean life, and God is the Giver of life. ²His Voice will direct you very specifically. ³You will be told all you need to know.
(ACIM, T-1.I.2:1–4:3)

     Take it or leave it.

"So Jesus asked the twelve, "Do you want to leave too?" 
Simon Peter replied, "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

Wait a second--ACIM is just one of those books, like the Four Agreements, Urantia, The Nature of personal Reality, no reason to get out over our skis, is there? If free will is the defining characteristic of what it means to be human, what is the best use of that endowment--To freely let a fog of inattention settle over free will's injunctions or to do a fundamentalist number on it, twisting my perceptual machinery around some idea that those mechanisms obscure things rather than reveal something true?     

Quote On bad, seemingly small habits, made powerful.
    “I was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me a prisoner. The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes a compulsion. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint" --St. Augustine

Quote On good seemingly small habits made powerful. "
​     Throw self overboard and work. Remember, the grass when made into a rope by being joined together  can even chain a mad elephant.'"
--Swami Vivekanada

The procedures of the second root canal were the same as the first except that I knew what was coming--and they knew that I knew what the process would be. This made for fewer explanations and more expectations. This is the very set up for the word 'sin' used in ACIM. The concept of sin is not about breaking divine laws or committing a moral transgression, but rather about a fundamental misperception of reality. In this instance it would be the temptation to know what this was going to be, by what it had been the first time. "I am one Self united with my Creator; safe, and healed, and whole; at one with my brothers and with all creation; free to forgive and free to save the world," is a comprehensive reminder that I am not an object reclining on a chair with a rubber block to keep the mouth open so that a guy can work in there. Christ has fragmented into 4 human forms, 2 female assistants 1 endodontist, and 1 patient. It is one 'thing,' one 'event,'  pulled apart so the miracle of a unified Son of God can be experienced by all. 
     Recognizing the 'tendency to sin,' that is, to lapse into an easy understanding of the situation--I noticed every wave of anxiety, and they came rapidly, one after another. There was no rest from vigilance and so I visualized myself as suckling at God's teat--mouth wide open, trying to swallow and only awkwardly successful. Dr. Christopher, dedicated to performing his name's sake--to be the Christ bearer--drilled and washed, 'love incoming,' and with each wash of anxiety, expecting a shock of pain, my inner chatter went something like this:

"This is love. This is the milk of kindness. The sensation of pure love is not frightening. Thank-you for caring for me. Let me receive love in the form You intend. Bless my brothers who are one with me that I might be blessed. I am blessed to receive love like the Infant Christ at His Mother's Breast. Let me savor this time and experience love in this form, the only form I can understand."

The inner talk went on, mostly unbroken for about an hour. It was, like the rubber dam in my mouth, designed to keep 'sin' outside and to not allow myself to be overwhelmed by the idea I was involved in a dental visit. If the dental visit overshadowed the rain of love that took form as 'human'  care, then I would miss this obvious opportunity to receive the 'reinterpretation' by the Holy Spirit. It does seem mad, doesn't it? Occupational hazards of taking the Course seriously. 
     When it was finished, there was a light feeling in the room, warm. The assistants chatted about  diets, concerts, and plans. The doctor and I talked about REM, the only concert he apparently ever went to. He asked again about what I wanted at the next visit--to do the final caps one at a time or both at once. I said both. He said it seemed like I was okay with the time, the mouth, the whole dam thing, etc... 
​     Pulling out of the parking lot I wondered about the forms miracles can take; as dramatic relief, a gentle unfolding, deliverance seen in hindsight, recognition of what was always there, or like in this case, peace and love where it seemed unlikely.