MIRACLE
ESSAYS #2
Originally
published in THE SUN, July 1989. See end of article
for more
information about A
Course in Miracles.
Climbing
the Stone
Face of Fear
by
D.
Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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“There
is nothing to fear.”
--Workbook
Lesson 48, A
Course in Miracles
For
about an hour
I had maintained the professional distance that is the boon or bane
of journalism, depending on how you look at it. Calling from
Berkeley, CA, I was interviewing Dean Halverson of International
Students, Inc., an evangelical Christian organization in Colorado
Springs, CO. Halverson and I have both conducted exhaustive research
into the spiritual document known as A
Course in Miracles (ACIM),
although from significantly different viewpoints. I called Halverson
for some background on his writing about the Course in recent years
for the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, a Berkeley-based organization
devoted to examining Eastern religions and New Age spirituality from
a Christian perspective.
While I acknowledged to Halverson at the outset that I was a serious student of the Course and was also researching it as a journalist, I was careful not to challenge his published interpretation of the purpose and true origins of ACIM: that it is essentially an elaborate satanic strategy of deception. My sole intent for the interview was to update Halvorsen’s two-year-old public statements, and my best tool seemed to be the cool professionalism of the reporter, who must deliberately suspend his personal reactions in order to procure the maximum information – without getting snagged in sticky arguments. As useful as this sort of “objectivity” can be, I’m never entirely comfortable with the kind of withholding it entails.
Halverson was on to me, however. When I thanked him for his time and cooperation, promising that if I quoted him he would receive a preview draft of the manuscript, he said, “You mean that’s all?”
“Well, yes. That’s all I need to know at the present time.”
In a tone that was somehow both contentious and companionable, Halverson asked, “you mean we aren’t going to get into it?”
So we got into it, and the ensuing two hours of much more personal discussion were at turns truly exploratory and maddeningly circular. Halverson – who prefers not to be labeled a “fundamentalist” because of the word’s “anti-intellectual connotations in the popular media” – returned again and again to the Bible as his standard against which all ideas and beliefs must be judged. I once accused him of tautological thinking: “You keep saying that the Bible is true because it’s true.”
“No,” he countered, “it’s true because it fits reality.”
Since I can claim no significant degree of Biblical scholarship, I had no effective counterargument save the observation that the Bible has inspired a vast array of Christian practices, which obviously do not reflect a whole and seamless picture of reality. Halverson himself agrees with the Spiritual Counterfeit Project’s characterization of Christian Science, Mormonism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses as “mainline cults” that distort the Gospel. These distortions arise, he contends, from Christians misinterpreting the Word. I then told Halverson that I had the feeling other kinds of Christians might say the same thing about his perspective, leaving the innocent observer with the question: Which Christian am I to believe?
For his part, Halverson seemed genuinely concerned that I had no infallible sense of truth. He sounded almost sad when he asked, “You mean to tell me that you’re never really sure of what’s true?”
“Not absolutely,” I responded. I told him I had some pretty solid assumptions by which I live every day. But my experience as a spiritually-inclined journalist has convinced me that all my assumptions are vulnerable to new information. To me it seems dishonest to assert absolute certainty. Faith, I argued, is the practical extension of one’s spiritual assumptions in the face of an uncertain and possibly illusory world. For Halverson, it was clear that faith meant defense of the Gospel as he understands it, and stewardship of a very real world as it plainly appears. So much uncertainty on my part could only be the symptom of a mind that has not accepted Christ as its savior.
For me, the most poignant moment of our dialogue came as we were discussing the efficacy of A Course in Miracles as a problem-solving stratagem. Surprisingly, Halverson admitted that a Course student and a Bible student might come to similarly ethical decisions about moral dilemmas in the short term, but that the Course students would be misled in the long run – because, he explained, “the Bible tells us that Satan will present himself disguised as an angel of light.” I replied that I thought the “long run” is eventually the sum of short-term events and decisions, each of which can be judged by the dictum, “By their fruits shall ye know them” – which appears in both the Bible and the Course.
I added that I thought the unique value of the Course is its experiential approach to the application of very big and difficult metaphysical concepts in our everyday life and consciousness. “The Course repeatedly suggests that there are only two emotions: love and fear,” I told Halverson, “and that one of them is useless and not even real. Are you willing to consider the possibility that, ultimately speaking, ‘there is nothing to fear’?”
Halverson’s reply was a quite serious warning about the agent of evil he believes to be loose in our world. “Are you willing to consider,” he replied, “that there most certainly is?”