By R.H.
My parents were Christian missionaries, and I was born and raised in Kenya. When I turned 14, I moved to the United States to go to high school. After high school, I went to Texas Tech University to study international business. It was my intention to return to Africa as a missionary to help people improve their financial situation and quality of life. As I was growing up, my parents handed me a very gracious understanding of the Christian faith, though I internalized their message as exclusive: “We are in, and they are out.” This created a sense of internal conflict at an early age. In my early college years, I didn’t stray, but later I began to expand outside “traditional Christian lines,” studying hermetic philosophy, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta and meditation. While the expansion of thought and practice was liberating, it brought some anxiety, as I wasn’t always able to synthesize my early learning with the growing experience and understanding. After graduating with a degree in international business, I spent some time studying microfinancing at the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Then I returned to Kenya where I met my wife who was also a missionary. Later we moved to Malawi to continue the work.
Undoing guilt is an important part of this story. I had returned to Africa to preach traditional Christianity as well as perform community development work, motivated by the guilt I carried for having grown up in Kenya with so much wealth when everyone else had so little. A lot of the projects I was involved with had to do with the holistic well-being of individuals and communities, and I was attempting to alleviate the guilt by being of service.
There was an enormous contradiction between my actions and my thoughts: I was a Christian only in my theoretical cognitive beliefs; my way of being and feeling didn’t align with the truths that I knew. Yet, out of a need to be right and feel of value, I tried to convince people that their thought system was wrong (or at least more wrong than mine). At the same time, I was living the fear that I wouldn’t amount to anything and that I was not worthy of God’s love; even though I knew cognitively the Good News that God loved me, I didn’t experience it. With so much internal tension and anger, the gap between what I knew and the life I was living got so bad that I had a breakdown and was unable to work.
The first thing I did was immerse myself in the literature of near-death-experiences (NDEs). I read it nonstop. NDE research revealed a whole new series of data points for me to triangulate what I thought I knew, theologically speaking, of the awareness of who I was and what the world was all about. Sensing that something big was shifting in me, I moved on to the Christian mystics, whose gnostic understanding of Christianity had a massive impact on me. Then I came across a podcast of Gary Renard talking about A Course in Miracles (the Course). I’d heard about the Course, but I never felt it was worth picking up. Reading Renard’s Disappearance of the Universe opened my mind. “Okay,” I said to myself, “now I need to read the Course itself.” I bought the Course along with Michael Sanford’s book, Mystical Christianity. As I still had some resistance to reading the Course, I started reading Sanford’s book first. One of the first citations in his book is from A Course in Miracles. I got the message: I put down Mystical Christianity and picked up the Course.
Nothing shocking happened when I started reading the Course, because it felt like the teachings had always been in my mind. Part of my conditioning had been to ignore my inner voice, relying instead on the external authority of books and teachers, yet no other book I’d read articulated the truth in such a way that everything in it rang true. I keep a list of all the books I’ve read and was prompted to go through the list to determine the silver thread that connected them all. Here’s what I came up with: We are safe in God. When I discovered that this is also a central teaching in the Course, I realized that I’ve always known this to be true and grateful for the affirmation to value my inner voice.
Post-Course, I could now see the disconnect between my belief system as a Christian and my actions. What has become important to me is to act from a place of being rather than trying to attain a place of being. The Course put me in touch with feelings I had denied for my entire life: the immense amount of fear I had of God, the distrust of the voice within, and my self-hatred. The Course gave me the key to fit all the puzzle pieces together. I now find no incompatibility whatsoever between my Christian understanding and my Course understanding.
My Malawian colleagues were very conservative, and I had held resentment towards them for the way that they were acting and believing, even though I knew it was not their fault for that was the version of Christianity that they had been taught. My most important shift was how I came to view my Christian colleagues: The Holy Spirit began to give me actual experiences of what it was like to minister and preach without projecting judgment.
One event occurred in a church in Malawi when I was preaching from Luke 15, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, one of my favorites. I had this overwhelming feeling that I loved all the people in the congregation in the same way that God loved them, or rather that God was loving these people through me. I didn’t need to convince anyone of anything; all I needed to do was let them know, “You are loved.” I felt it was the Holy Spirit Who gave those words to me. When several people came up to me afterwards and confirmed the experience, I felt affirmed that the Holy Spirit had actually done something significant in that moment.
Another important event happened at our Discipleship Training Institute in Malawi. We were in the midst of a 10-week course, and I was feeling a lot of frustration towards my students. They weren’t listening to me and were so closed minded I couldn’t get through to them. After Class 8, burdened with angst, I went on a bike ride in the mountains. On the bike ride, the entirety of my resentment suddenly came to me with blinding clarity, along with these words: “R., your anger towards your students is anger towards yourself. If you were to let it go, your relationship with your students would improve in ways that you could never imagine.” At that moment, my anger just dropped away, and I was flooded with joy. Riding a bike in the mountains while experiencing intense joy was very difficult (and dangerous), so I had to get off my bike to allow myself to fully experience the moment. The next week, before I walked into the classroom, I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to extend love to all my students and to see us all as of one mind. To this day, I don’t quite know what happened next, but in the following two classes, my students went from not wanting to listen, to an experience of total unity. So joined were our minds and actions, that I could say anything and they were with me, and they could say anything and I was with them. From then on, you can be sure that’s how I prepared for every class.
Four months ago, my wife, our three daughters and I returned to the United States. What is my life like now? I still work for the same Christian organization as I did in Africa, but I’ve been given a chance to see the nature of my helping profession differently. For the last couple of years, it has become clear to me that part of my role is to work with Christian and post-Christian individuals who are struggling with their understanding of Christianity as to how to bridge to a more expansive, more inclusive way of living. Whether they’re walking towards the Course or some other way of seeing things, I feel like I’m here to shepherd them. Recently, friends have been opening to me out of the blue; for example, a friend from fifteen years ago reached out to me saying, “I want to chat with you about what it would look like to extend my faith in different ways. I came to you because I didn’t have anyone else to talk to.”
There’s more: My father heads up a theological training institute and has asked me to redo the entire curriculum in a way that makes a bridge for people frustrated with the traditional church. I now see myself as in the Christian world, but not of the Christian world and so I can move freely between those worlds. Paul of the Scriptures said, “I can be all things to all people” because he knew who he was at the deepest level. I don’t have to label myself or others, and, as a result, feel an immense amount of freedom.
It is my experience that many Christians are not very satisfied with what they understand, what they know and how it all fits together. The Holy Spirit has been very gracious to me to have been a theologian before I became a Course student because I now can speak theologically to Christians in their language while talking about Course themes and miracles. For example, if I were to walk up to a Christian and say, “By the way, God did not create the world, we made it,” they would have a hard time with that. But if I meet people on the level of my testimony, how my life has shifted and how I understand things differently now, I find such a willingness. They tolerate the outlandish things that they hear me saying, because they see how my experience of life has completely shifted since I started studying the Course.
Most of my peers are not aware that I am A Course in Miracles student. My wife has suggested that, for the time being, I be careful how I present myself, specifically to my work colleagues for the tension it might create. I think that’s a wise course of action. I haven’t yet felt any prompting to tell my boss, for example. However, in some strategic circumstances where I know I will be accepted and it won’t generate a lot of resistance, I’m able to talk about the Course, even with some of my Christian peers.
Right now, my primary focus is on practising the Course, making sure that the teachings and the way I live are consistent. Second, as a theological professor, I am focused on creating courses and spaces where thought and practice can bridge a traditional Christian understanding with a Course understanding. I am so grateful for the way in which the Holy Spirit has guided me thus far and am confident that He is utilizing everything in my life to weave together a tapestry of miracles.
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