[acimlessons_list] Lesson 103 - April 13

[Sue Roth]

Lesson 103 - April 13

"God, being Love, is also happiness."

PRACTICE SUMMARY

Purpose: to try again to correct our false belief that God is not fearful.
To realize instead that, since God is Love, He must be a giver of pure joy.

Longer: every hour on the hour, for 5 minutes (if you cannot do this, at
least do the alternate)

* Say, "God, being Love, is also happiness. To fear Him is to be afraid of
joy." 
* Then, just as in previous days, enter into a meditation aimed at finding
the happiness God placed in you. Seek this holy place in you filled with
anticipation, expecting God's joy to take the place of your pain. Realize
you cannot fail, because you seek what is already yours. Also seek this
place filled with a sense of welcoming the happiness that will surely come
to you. And remember to draw your mind back when it drifts off to thinking
about all the false promises held out to you by the world's definition of
happiness.

Frequent reminders: frequent
Reinforce your expectation that you will find God's joy by saying, "God,
being Love, is also happiness. And it is happiness I seek today. I cannot
fail, because I seek the truth." By bolstering your expectancy, this will
enhance the depth of your hourly practice periods.

Response to temptation: whenever you feel any form of fear
Quiet all your fears with these words, "God, being Love, is also happiness.
And it is happiness I seek today. I cannot fail, because I seek the truth."

COMMENTARY

"God, being Love, is also happiness."

There's one I never heard in church! "God is happiness." (Well, the
Westminster Catechism of the Presbyterian Church did say that man's chief
end is to love God and to <enjoy> Him forever. But you didn't hear "enjoying
God" talked about very often.) Yet the way the lesson logically presents it,
the idea is obvious and inescapable. Without love, no one could be happy. If
love was absent, happiness would be absent also. That seems so simple to
understand. Happiness must be an attribute of love; they go or come
together.

God is Love. "Love has no limits, being everywhere" (2:4). Because that is
true, happiness or joy must also be everywhere, just as God is. So God is
happiness, as well as love.

The denial of happiness, then, is the denial of God. As a matter of fact the
Text says something very much like that in Chapter 10, when it says that
depression is blasphemy (T-10.V.12:3,4). Careful, though; the point of
saying this is not to make us guilty about being sad or depressed. The
Course's point is to <undo> guilt, not create it. It is pointing out the
cause of our sadness and depression to us. It is saying, "You're hurting
because you are turning your back on God, on love, on Happiness Itself. It
isn't something outside of you, out of your control, that is doing this to
you. You have the power to change this, to choose again and lift that
depression."

We are sad and depressed because we think that what we have made is real
(2:1). We think there are "gaps in love," that it is not everywhere and
always. We are sad because we believe we are, to some degree at least,
outside of God's love, beyond its "limits." And we are not; we cannot be
outside of His Love. If we knew that in the core of our being, we could
never be unhappy.

Because I believe love has limits, I have come to be afraid of it: afraid it
will be withdrawn, afraid of its conditions, afraid that what seems to be
love is only a tease, a tantalizing promise that threatens to disappear if I
misbehave. That fear, that constant anxiety over love's potential for
disappearance is the source of my lack of joy. How can I be joyful, even
when things are "good," if love may be withdrawn at any moment? This is the
error of our minds we are practicing to uncover, bring to the light, and let
go of.

Right now, this moment, I am encircled by His embrace. Right now, without a
single thing changing, the Love of God radiates to me without limit and
without reservation or question. To know this is happiness, and it is this I
seek today.