We think of a miracle, such as a sudden physical healing, as an event.
Actually, the real miracle is not the event, but how we perceive the event in our lives. Ask yourself which is the real miracle: when the check finally arrives, the deadline is extended, the lawsuit is settled, the exception is made? Or when you cope, serene and smiling in the face of unbearable circumstances, triumphantly blowing everybody's mind-including your own - with your poise and courage?
Marianne Williamson describes a miracle as "a parting of the mists, a shift in perception, a return to love." The sacred continuum of Love is what makes miracles possible: Spirit's love for us, our love for each other, our love for Spirit. In her book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles, she tells us that once miracles were all we knew, because we existed in Love. Then we woke up on earth and "were taught thoughts like competition, struggle, sickness, finite resources, limitation, guilt, bad, death, scarcity, and loss. We began to think these things, and so we began to know them." Love was replaced by fear.
When we exist in fear-which for many of us is real life-miracles become the exception, not the daily round. But it doesn't have to stay that way. What we need to do is find our way back home, back to our authentic self.
There are many paths to Wholeness. The one Marianne Williamson began taking in 1977 was A Course in Miracles, which she explains is a "self study program of spiritual psychotherapy" based on universal spiritual truths transcribed by a Jewish psychologist in mystical dictation sessions during the mid-1960s. Through a daily-meditation and workbook exercise, seekers learn to surrender all the ego's preconceptions - what we want, need, and think will make us happy-exchanging it only for the practical daily application of Love in our lives. "Whether our psychic pain is in the area of relationships, health, career, or elsewhere, love is a potent force, the cure, the Answer," she reassures us.
The introduction to A Course in Miracles states that the crux of the three¬ volume, 1,188-page course is very simple:
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lives the peace of God.
In becoming aware of this, we experience the miracle of Real Life. "In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal," Marianne Williamson reminds us, "a return to inner peace. We're not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change."
