The Mrs. Albert way

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I wrote about in my recent editorial, that in the early dictation, miracles are mainly characterized as simple acts of kindness. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that my personal process has been focused on it as well.

I have been calling this “the Mrs. Albert way” of understanding the Course. This is based on a discussion that Jesus has with Helen about a woman by this name. He tells Helen and Bill that they need “considerable clarification” about how to be a channel of miracles. Then he says, “Look carefully at Mrs. Albert. She is working miracles every day because she knows who she is.” I don’t know of anyone else who comes in for such high praise from Jesus. Then follows an extended contrast between Helen’s way of being and that of Mrs. Albert. I have loved this discussion for years, and thought I understood it. But I have been working with it recently and now realize that I understood about a fifth of it.

Jesus’ description of Helen’s way of being is long, but it boils down to the fact that she has a “fear of involvement” that really stems from a deep-level embarrassment, from a sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with her. As a result, she keeps her distance from others, mainly to shield them from contact with this wrongness in her, almost like trying to keep people from being infected by her germs. This, for instance, is why Helen is always getting people’s names wrong (she calls her husband Jonathan and inadvertently calls Mrs. Albert “Mrs. Andrews”). Calling them by the wrong name produces a certain amount of distance, just enough (Helen thinks) that the destructive impulses in her mind can’t hurt them.

Mrs. Albert is the polar opposite. She is the very picture of security, a security that seems to come from her connection with God. “She is not afraid,” Jesus says, “because she knows she is protected” clearly, by God. In this security, she is able to express herself freely, without the issue of embarrassment even occurring to her. She and Helen are apparently by the bedside of Dave, a friend of Helen’s who is dying, and who Jesus has already mentioned to Helen in the context of the first principle of miracles (that there is no order of difficulty among them). While by Dave’s bedside, Mrs. Albert says something that Jesus accords great importance. Here is his report of it:

She was also quite unembarrassed when she told you that everything has to be done to preserve life, because you never can tell when God may come and say “Get up, Dave,” and then he will. She did not ask what you believed first, and afterwards merely added, “and it’s true, too.”

Jesus goes on and on about this statement of hers. In short, he says that it was an act of witnessing to the authority that Mrs. Albert believes in. If she had asked Helen what she believed first, that would have implied that she would say only what Helen approved of, which would mean that Helen was her authority. But since she spoke about God without embarrassment, she was witnessing to Him and to the fact that He is her Authority.

What really got me was that Jesus clearly called her statement a miracle. He talked about it as an act of witnessing for him, and then said “Those who witness for Me are expressing, through their miracles…” This clearly implied that Mrs. Albert’s statement was in fact a miracle.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. So something you say to someone in conversation, something abstract like, “If God comes and says ‘Get up, terminally ill guy,’ he will”-that can be a miracle. As I thought about it, I realized that a number of the examples of miracles in this early dictation are verbal communications. They were just something that someone said. In other words, we can say things that are miracles. We can speak miracles. With our words, we are constantly either giving miracles or attacking, blessing or cursing.

I also realized that it made sense that Jesus considered this a miracle. After all, Jesus had already applied the first principle of miracles to Dave. When Helen was worried about thinking about her husband’s hernia and Dave’s terminal illness (I think cancer) in the same thought, Jesus said, “Remember point 1 and reread now.” Now Mrs. Albert was essentially making the same point, that no matter how terminal Dave appeared to be, if God came and said, “Get up, Dave,” he would. No wonder Jesus likes what Mrs. Albert said!

Now if someone said to you that God could heal anything, even this terminal person in the bed right there, and said it in complete innocence and complete conviction, without embarrassment and (as Jesus also points out) without hostility, wouldn’t you feel lifted? Wouldn’t you feel your perception on things shift a little? Wouldn’t the landscape look just a little different, so that new vistas could be seen and new possibilities opened up?

That’s why it was a miracle.