[Please note: ACIM passages quoted in this article reference the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) Edition.]
I am doing a lesson I absolutely love today. Not that I am sticking with it all that well. But I still want to write a post about it, and maybe that will help me stick with it.
The lesson is 286, “The hush of Heaven holds my heart today.” I am particularly focusing on the prayer, one of my all-time favorites:
“Father, how still today! How quietly do all things fall in place. This is the day that has been chosen as the time in which I come to understand the lesson that there is no need that I do anything. In You is every choice already made. In You has every conflict been resolved. In You is everything I hope to find already given me. Your peace is mine. My heart is quiet and my mind at rest. Your Love is Heaven, and Your Love is mine.”
The basic message here is that I can have a day of stillness, a day in which everything falls in place, a day in which whatever my body is doing, in the most important sense I am doing nothing. And why can I have such a sublime day? Because I can be in God, and in God all the struggles I am having are already over. In God, everything that I will do is already done.
This prayer, then, becomes much more than a series of lovely sentiments. It becomes a satisfying application of the Course’s philosophy of the time, in which, in reality, the journey is already over. This prayer lets us experience the emotional benefits of that philosophy.
Imagine you are on an arduous journey. You are struggling along a windswept, rock-strewn, uphill road. Your shoes are worn and your feet hurt. You’ve got a heavy pack and a heavily laden donkey to boot. You not only have to push yourself forward, but you have to think about the donkey and its needs, as well as your own hunger and thirst. You have to worry what dangerous travelers you might meet along the road. You also occasionally encounter forks in the road and have to make crucial choices about which way to go, hoping to God you are right.
On such a journey, wouldn’t it be absolutely wonderful to get plucked up and, for just a half an hour, visit your destination? What if you could spend a brief time in the palace at the end of the road? Imagine that you could sink into one of its luxurious couches, having just showered, put your feet up, have a cool drink in one hand, bask in the love present in this place, and heave that big, long sigh of relief that you would surely do at this point. That is the best feeling—when you’ve reached the end and you can heave that sigh of relief. “It’s over now. I’ve done it. Aaaaaaaaahhhh!” What a great feeling!
Of course, then you’d have to go back to the journey. You can’t spend forever resting in the palace while there are still miles to cover. But if you could get teleported to that palace even for a little while, it would make the journey so much easier.
That is how I see this prayer. I am thick in the journey all day long. My days are really intense. They feel like a series of uphill climbs. It is so lovely to think there really is a palace at the end of the road, that palace being God. And I can visit that palace now. In that palace, I’m done. It’s all over. I’ve made all those hard choices, every single one. I never need to make them again. I’ve resolved all those thorny conflicts. I never need to resolve a single other conflict, not one. And I’ve found all that I was looking for along that long, hard road. All the love, all the peace, all joining, all the fulfillment—it’s all right here, in endless abundance, and I am just awash in it.
From the palace gate, if I grab a telescope, I can look down the mountainside, way, way down, and actually pick out that tiny figure trudging up the slope back in 2009. He is so in the middle of it. It’s all so hard. But from here in the palace, that was a long, long time ago. He eventually got past all those hard places and at last made it here, to his destination. Now I’m just sitting here, at the end of the road, kicking back, feeling unspeakably happy, and heaving that long, slow sigh.
I really need those times in the palace. Not that I really get all the way into the palace. But I get enough off the road that I zealously guard my meditation times in the morning. What I need to do, though, is see those times as not just pulling off the road for a little while (an apt image, since I meditate in the car—the only truly quiet place in the house), but as actual visits to the place where the journey is already over. If God is that place, and I can visit God now, then by connecting with God I am actually spending a little time in the palace at the end of the road.
