This Week in Course Companions: The Call for Help
The following is from the weekly message by Circle founder, Robert Perry, delivered each Thursday to Course Companions members. Course Companions is our global community of students and teachers walking through the Course, section-by-section and lesson-by-lesson, together as friends. For access to any classes, handouts, and additional commentaries referenced in these posts, we invite you to join Course Companions by visiting CourseCompanions.com. Please note that partial and full scholarships are available and no one is turned away from Circle of Atonement programming for an inability to pay.
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June 4, 2020
What a week it has been! If you are in the United States, you are probably struggling with and trying to process the nearly unprecedented civil unrest that has been sparked by the tragic death of George Floyd. And if you are not in the US, you too may be struggling with emotions as you see images of what is happening on American streets, and as you sense the place of the US in the world is changing.
As we watch all this, I think most of us feel great compassion for our black brothers and sisters who have all too often been marginalized in our society. We ache to see them treated with dignity and respect. We want to see them granted a full seat at the table at last. As students of A Course in Miracles, after all, we believe that everyone is equal. We believe in “the inestimable worth of every Son of God” (T-7.VI.8:3).
What we talked about in yesterday’s Text class, though, was the other side of the coin. The class was on the Course’s idea that attack is a call for love. As I explained to the class, the idea does not mean that when we attack, we didn’t mean to hurt anyone, that we were just trying to find love. The Course says beneath all our excuses, we were trying to hurt. Rather than calling for love, we were issuing a call to war. Yet underneath that, in a largely hidden part of our minds, we were observing our actions in deep pain. We were in distress over our error and calling out to God for help in being delivered from it, calling out for the healing balm of His love. That is the real concept of the call for love (usually termed “call for help”) in the Course.
What naturally came up in class was the actions of the police officer who killed George Floyd, and we had what I felt was a productive discussion about that. We need to trust, I said, that underneath a fatal attack there is a hidden part in his mind that is exactly as I described above—in deep distress over what he did and calling to his Creator for deliverance.
While our main focus is on those who have been devalued in our society—which is where it belongs—we also deeply need the Course’s concept of the call for help as our lens through which we see those who attack. With that concept, we can see them with compassion. We can see them as our brothers and as God’s Sons. Only then do we have a chance for a truly new world.
With love,
Robert