By Corrine Giacobbe
I was born and raised a Catholic in the 1950s. As a youngster, I was taught about Jesus and the Holy Ghost. Jesus was my friend and the Holy Ghost conjured up my favorite hero, Casper, the Friendly Ghost. With the bishop’s tap on my cheek during the sacrament of Confirmation, I felt a surge of intense heat as the Holy Ghost flooded me with His presence, guidance, and fruits. His warmth and peace would later comfort me during the years I served as a caregiver for my Alzheimer’s-impacted mother.
When I was very young, I was diagnosed with a serious illness and my parents prepared me for a long hospital visit involving scary-sounding surgery. To this point, their search for the appropriate specialist had been futile. One night when sad thoughts gripped me nonstop, a monk in full-dress mode quietly appeared to me without fuss or fanfare. “I came to check in on you,” he said, making me wonder if Catholics have special house-call privileges with heaven. I had been enrolled in a Catholic school joyously overrun by lighthearted friars belonging to the order of St. Francis of Assisi. “How could I not?” he chuckled. My initial response was to tell him, “You look much better in person.” The monk seemed to enjoy that impromptu critique on bad religious art. On a more serious note, he alerted me, “Your parents will soon find the ideal surgeon.” A few days later, they escorted me to the children’s unit of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center in New York City to meet the specialist they had just found. He was kind, unapologetically sure of himself in handling my rebuttals, and created trust. His name: Dr. Francis.
This was the first of many contacts initiated by St. Francis. The last was to comfort me during my beloved mother’s transition in 2006. While some biographies portray St. Francis as a meek, fragile, garden-variety sage, to me he exuded a non-negotiable certainty and strength.
At a Science of Mind class in 1985, I was introduced to a book with the strange-sounding name, A Course in Miracles (ACIM, the Course). I dallied with it for a week. Verdict: Not interested. A long convoluted spiritual journey ensued. At one point, I simultaneously found myself serving as a certified yoga teacher, a New Thought practitioner, and a parishioner at my local Catholic church. Friends accused me of dining at the spiritual smorgasbord. My ego retorted, “Spiritual smorgasbord? No way! I am a gourmet, dining only on the finest nuggets from the world’s spiritual paths.” But even as I said it, I gagged on the words. The truth was, I didn’t know what I was doing. In 2001, I purchased a copy of the Course from a thrift-store. Thus began my arduous, fickle journey with A Course in Miracles before truly taking it to heart in 2006. Committing and recommitting, that’s the story of my relationship with the Course.
At first, I yelled at my Course as the “Gospel of Gobbledygook.” But as I studied it more deeply, something iridescently beautiful started to occur: I began to unfold as a spiritual being. It may seem irrational, but I experienced ACIM, not as the rejection of my Catholic faith, but the very blossoming of it within the heart of eternal love. How wondrous it was to realize that my early-childhood experience of Jesus as my friend meshed beautifully with the essence of ACIM: Jesus as my caring elder brother. With each go round of the Workbook, I perceived more clearly that the lessons were my training wheels providing stabilizing support, error-eradication, re-positioning balance. Clarity, confidence, and courage grew via the exercises. ACIM was the natural progression of what began for me as a Catholic in the cradle.
Here are four examples of the impact that Catholicism-leading-to-ACIM has had on me:
- Oneness: ACIM has helped me realize how unified are ACIM and Christianity. Nullifying years of muddled mindlessness, the Workbook disciplined my thinking, incorporating the inspiration of the Christian-mystic tradition as well as the wisdom embedded in other paths. ACIM has become the way of Christianity without the guilt as the desert fathers experienced it and as St. John of the Cross was sustained by it through his long dark night. For me, the Course is not a replacement or a superior version to my Catholicism, it is a clarification and expansion of its concepts.
- Divine Grace: As a Catholic, I was taught about divine grace. ACIM has helped open me to what grace truly means: the unique gift of recognizing that life is a dream. I live in the dream, but the dream’s hypnotic power to lure and disappoint is losing its hold on me. I plod through it but no longer buy wholeheartedly into the sensory play around me. I keep refreshing myself at the ACIM oasis of truth that reveals that what my senses tell me is but an illusion. How worthwhile it is to “see,” not a frantic world, but the real one radiating miracles.
- The Holy Spirit: I marvel how similar my experience with ACIM is to the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation. Reading and reflecting on Course passages, I am flooded with the presence of the Holy Spirit (Whom we used to call “The Holy Ghost” in Catholic grade school), that same flood of energy I felt when the bishop tapped me on the cheek at age eight. Years ago, I was asked to write a poem for a Catholic multi-parish Pentecost service. The first two lines were inspired by Chapter 21 of the Course: “Come Holy Spirit / O Beauty ablaze.” To this day, I include those two lines in my prayer-walks; coordinating them with my breath and footsteps brings a feeling of deep calm.
- Role Models: Catholicism encouraged the world-weary faithful to petition designated saints to intercede in a myriad of issues. The Course prompts me to see with new eyes and recognize and feel nurtured by the many teachers of God whom I encounter every day.
In the Latin Mass of my childhood, after the celestial ringing of altar bells and just before communion, a powerful silence would pour down on the congregation like a healing balm, assuring us: “Fear not, for I am with you.” That same feeling arises when I come across a haunting passage in the Course, pulsing with the certainty that all is well and that I am swaddled and nurtured within the very heart of eternal love.
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