ACIM Chapter 9. II. The Answer to Prayer P 3, 4

ACIM Chapter 9. II. The Answer to Prayer P 3, 4

II. The Answer to Prayer, P 3

3 The Bible emphasizes that all prayer is answered, and this is indeed true. The very fact that the Holy Spirit has been asked for anything will ensure a response. Yet it is equally certain that no response given by Him will ever be one that would increase fear. It is possible that His answer will not be heard. It is impossible, however, that it will be lost. There are many answers you have already received but have not yet heard. I assure you that they are waiting for you.

Sometimes, I hear people say that God’s answer can be no. It is their way of understanding why they don’t seem to receive an answer to their prayers while holding onto the idea that God hears them. I used to do that myself. Now I understand that all prayer is answered and that I know the answer when I am ready to receive it. I do not lose an answer because I am afraid of it, because it waits for me.

Sometimes, I accept the answer in little tiny bits at a time. I understand that the world is an illusion, and that includes my body. How is it, then, that I think the body is in charge? Weight problems have plagued me since I had my first child in 1969. How could that be? My body is an illusion; how can an illusion decide what it should weigh? How can it do anything?

I understand the logic behind the idea that the body is not stronger than the mind.

But I still have this same problem with weight, and so I become confused. I asked for clarity and healing and I received it, but I have accepted it a little at a time. I should go through my writings and find each new thing I learned about body issues and just look at the progression.

Here is part of the answer that I have been willing to accept: It is twofold. First, I suddenly understood that I needed to stop asking the Holy Spirit to prove I was right and instead simply ask Him to show me what He wanted me to know. The second part came with Lesson 325, the keynote to salvation.

I accepted that weight problems don’t happen to me and do not occur in the world. They are desires in my mind being manifest in the world. I totally accepted that this was true, and so I stopped trying to lose weight from my body and started giving my full attention to the beliefs that were sourcing my desire to fight this never-ending battle.

When I see such a thought or belief, I ask the Holy Spirit to remove it from my mind. I ask Him to clarify what He wants me to know about this, and I wait patiently to see if I have understood Him. If my mind is healed then the body will reflect that. He gave me the thought that I should stop telling myself that I was helpless before this problem. I am not a victim of my body’s appetites. My mind is the decision maker, not my body. I made the decision to lose weight, and I did.

This is far more important than having a slimmer body.

This is the answer to my prayer that I remember what I am. The relationship with the body has been a hard relationship for me to release to Spirit. I am learning lessons about this through my weight issues, through recognizing that pain is not real, and through the healing of the body as I heal my mind.

Weight was just another container for the same error. It was like a jar that held my belief that I am a body and the body is my prison. It held the belief that the body is stronger than the mind and that I have sinned in my desire to have a body. And it held fear and guilt. Weight is just one of the containers. There is also pain, suffering of every kind, and death. The containers look different, but the content is the same: fear and guilt. In asking for help in seeing this differently, I am asking for much more than to change the size and shape of a body. I am asking to remember that I am the Son of God.

II. The Answer to Prayer, P 4

4 If you would know your prayers are answered, never doubt a Son of God. Do not question him and do not confound him, for your faith in him is your faith in yourself. If you would know God and His Answer, believe in me whose faith in you cannot be shaken. Can you ask of the Holy Spirit truly, and doubt your brother? Believe his words are true because of the truth that is in him. You will unite with the truth in him, and his words will be true. As you hear him you will hear me. Listening to truth is the only way you can hear it now, and finally know it.

Sometimes, when I hear someone’s words, I am certain that they are wrong. I have a brother who is very “Old Testament” in his religious convictions. His vision of God is so unyielding and harsh as to feel unloving to me. How do I have faith in his vision when I cannot imagine this God He so fearfully and faithfully follows?

Here is what I am given when I ask about this. My brother loves God, and that love doesn’t change because it appears in his mind to look like something I don’t recognize as love. If I fail to see Christ in my brother and fail to hear Christ’s meaning in his words, then it is my mind that needs to be healed, not his. I must be listening with a lack of love, and what is God but Love? If I am not listening with love, I must be listening through my ego.

I see that this must be true in every case.

Everyone is made in the image of God, and nothing has ever changed that. Therefore, everyone is Love and everyone is certain and perfect and true. The confusion of the ego mind is an illusion and has nothing to do with what they are. When I look at my brother, what do I see? Do I see Christ? Or do I see a body? When I hear his words, do I hear truth, or do I hear confusion?

The answer to that question has nothing to do with anyone else and has nothing to do with what anyone says. It is a reflection of the mind in which I think I think. If I hear anything other than God when I listen to my brother, I am listening with ego and judging through ego. I am standing before the Christ and calling It insane. Now, who is insane?

We all tend to do this.

Even in the Course community we fall prey to the ego desire to judge and to be right. We argue over what a passage means, and we blithely correct a brother when we decide he misunderstands. Then, we call it “being helpful” in order to justify our actions. We argue about meanings in the very book that teaches us the way out of hell is to join as one and be faithful to each other. How insane can we get?

Even as I sit here writing and thinking how true this is, even as I receive a vision of what is being given in this paragraph and am astounded that I never saw with this clarity before, even as I sit here in self-congratulation that I am free of the desire to judge my brother by my interpretation of his words, I notice a thought in my mind about a teacher that I doubt.

I think about him, and I think he is wrong, and the ego starts listing his faults and his misunderstandings, and I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. It all happens in a flash and takes only a second, but I imagine Brother Jesus chuckling in the background as I am pulled up short. Ok, maybe there is more to this than getting a clear understanding of how foolish it is to judge and doubt my brother.

First comes some clarity.

But then, to be of any use, the understanding must become experience. “Holy Spirit, I see in my mind the beliefs I projected onto my brother, and I see that I then condemned him for those beliefs. Please heal my mind. Heal my mind, Holy Spirit, because it is always my mind that I see reflected in my brother. I long to see my brother for the Christ he is, so please heal my mind.”