By Hans Hallundbaek
I’ve traveled a long road in this life of mine, striving to discover my function, but the twists and turns I’ve taken never really led me there until I discovered A Course in Miracles. According to ACIM, the definition of our function in this world is “…to extend love and healing to other minds, using our body as an instrument of this extension” (see glossary of terms.) It is not without shame that I admit to passing midlife before seriously exploring this vital truth.
Born in 1935 on the poor, windswept west coast of Denmark, my childhood experiences, besides the loneliness of being the last and late child, were darkened by the great recession of the nineteen thirties, followed by five years of Nazi occupation during the Second World War, all salted down with dark and foreboding Sunday morning sermons by an old school Lutheran pastor. For this lonely young child, all seemed dark and gloomy with no hope in sight. As Marianne Williamson once expressed it, “I thought I would have to wear gray for the rest of my life”.
Thankfully, God in these formative years sent me one glimmer of hope through the biblical commandment of the Great Commission, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation” (Mark 16:18). Admittedly, at this early age I did not understand the meaning of “good news,” therefore naively the key message for this commandment for me was a golden opportunity of escaping into a big, exciting world out there. After the war, when my family moved to a nearby town for better schools, my priorities became foreign languages, geography, history, literature, and devouring books on travel and world exploration.
World War II ended in May of 1945, and thankfully, my country was spared the scourge of active fighting, while much of central Europe was in ruins. Soon, the US-initiated Marshall Plan brought rebuilding into full swing. It was a time of new hope, and I was in my early teenage years searching for my function. Too young to go abroad, I discovered a substitute in short-wave radio. I became an eager listener to news and information broadcasts from Europe, Canada and the Voice of America. The world was reaching out to me. Soon, I discovered that short-wave is also the world of amateur radio operators, and with youthful enthusiasm, I built my own ham radio station. I was now in regular contact with ham radio operators in many European countries as well as in Africa and the Middle East. I was communicating with the world. It was exciting, but the information exchanged was mainly on reporting signal strength, transmission quality, and the like. When I realized that “going into all the world” through ham radio was more like a hobby, I managed to enter college and later earn a degree in engineering. I was now ready to seek a function and earn a living to raise a family.
For the next twenty years, I was employed in my home country and was eventually assigned a position as overseas director of a leading American consumer products company. Three years later, my childhood hope of immigrating to the US was finally fulfilled, and so was my dream of self-employment. Along with my wife, Katherine, we developed our own international marketing consultancy. Our mission statement was clear: service, quality, profitability, and timeliness. With this objective in practice over the next twelve years, our business met the mission and in worldly terms was successful, even though the “good news” of the biblical great commission was relegated to a secondary role. My quest to find my true function continued.
In my early fifties, the lure of a fast business life, constant travel, and a search for the next high began to take a turn towards reflections on life’s deeper meaning and eventually resulted in a full-blown midlife correction; I entered seminary for theological training. Upon graduation, my function in life had completely changed, and I rejoiced in becoming a teacher of liberation theology to incarcerated men at maximum-security Sing Sing Prison forty miles north of New York City. Here I learned the Great Commission’s admonition to “go into all the world” is not just relating to exotic locations in far-away places, but more importantly, about bringing “the good news to all creation,” including those incarcerated in our often more punitive than reformative prison systems. Had I found my true function?
In the 1990s, a minister friend of mine introduced me to A Course in Miracles. This book contained three sections: text, workbook, and manual for teachers, all considered to be the truth and wisdom of Jesus as channeled through a psychologist named Helen Schucman. I struggled with this version released from the Foundation for Inner Peace, even though I knew the material might bring me to the truth of our existence. When the Complete and Annotated Edition, or CE as it is known, came out some years later, I was better able to understand the many gifts the Course delivered. With daily practice and devotion, I was able to fully embrace and share the teachings of forgiveness, the shedding of guilt and fear, and the great joy of an eternal love-based relationship with God, our Creator.
Teaching in Sing Sing, and later in several other prisons, including female facilities, became a wonderful gift in my mature years. Today, my circle of friends includes many former students. That they are successfully back in society suggests these teaching efforts paid off. Compared to teaching in college, teaching in prison has been highly rewarding. Incarcerated students are motivated by realizing that education is key to surviving upon release.
Prison work also has its memorable moments, like three months into the first semester at Sing Sing on the teachings of Jesus, a student stood up and asked, “Professor, have you sold your house and given the money to the poor?” He certainly got the holy message, while twenty years later, I still am pondering an appropriate answer to the student’s question. In another situation, I received a precious backward compliment when my African American teaching assistant introduced me to a new class of thirty black and brown male students by saying, “This is Hans, and he is not a white devil.”
The fact that the course’s definition of function is worded differently than the Bible’s Great Commission is of no concern to me. The words of Jesus are behind both statements. Interestingly, the Course goes even a step further than the biblical Great Commandment by advising us that, “…the lonely ones are those who see no function for them to fulfill.” (CE T-25. VI.3:6) Working for the last 30 years with incarcerated men and women in America and several countries abroad has replaced my childhood loneliness with richness and deep gratitude for life in all its beautiful variations when finally, my true function to serve is clear. For this I am grateful to God and to A Course in Miracles.
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There is a course for every teacher of God. The form of the course varies greatly. So do the particular teaching aids involved. But the content of the course never changes. Its central theme is always “God’s Son is guiltless, and in his innocence is his salvation.” … It does not matter who the teacher was before he heard the Call. He has become a savior by his answering. He has seen someone else as himself. He has therefore found his own salvation and the salvation of the world. In his rebirth is the world reborn. [CE M-1.3]
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