By Bettya Saleh
Today I woke up to something painfully frightening. In the early hours of the morning, Israel attacked Iran, my homeland. When violence touches our homeland and the people we love, it shakes everything… body, mind, and spirit. My sister told me she jumped out of bed thinking it was an earthquake. The ground itself felt unsafe. And then today’s Workbook lesson arrives like a paradox: “Now are we one with Him Who is our Source.” [CE W-164:1]
How are we supposed to believe, let alone feel, our oneness with God, our innocence, our safety, our unity, when the world feels shattered, divided, and cruel?
And yet maybe this is exactly why this lesson appears today. Not to deny what is happening in form, but to offer the only refuge that is real. The ego’s world never stops offering war. If not bombs, then judgment. If not fear for our homeland, then fear for the body, for the future, for those we hold dear.
The Course does not ask us to ignore suffering. It asks us to bring our pain to the light, to look at it with Him.
So maybe my practice today is not about trying to feel peaceful. Maybe it is simply this: “Holy Spirit, I cannot understand this. I cannot find peace here. But I am willing to give you all of this, my fear, my sorrow, my rage, my heartbreak, and ask that you look on it with me. I want to learn to see as you see.”
I am not expected to bypass the human experience. I am held within it. And in that holding, slowly and gently, we are taught to see through the eyes of Christ.
I do not have to feel oneness today. I only need a tiny willingness to say:
“Even here, I choose not to go alone.”
And now I have read the many responses from my ACIM friends who have heard my anguished soul and sent blessed love. They have said things like:
“Thank you for allowing us to stand with you in the light, even as the world feels so dark with violence and chaos…”
“I thank you for being willing to ask what is true, real, and eternal even in the midst of a barrage of illusions that can seem so convincing…”
“Loving you and sending you and all of our brothers in pain LOVE and LIGHT.”
My ACIM friends have carried so much love to me that they shifted something in my heart. They have helped me stay centered and begin to see what’s happening in my country through a different lens. Love travels without limit, and I have felt it deeply. Thank you.
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You have been called, together, to the most holy function that this world contains. It is the only one that has no limits, and that reaches out to every broken fragment of the Sonship with healing and uniting comfort. [CE T-18.I.14:1-2]
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