Today our theme will be gratitude since Thanksgiving is coming up in a few days. Gratitude is a
major theme of the Course. Most of you are familiar with Lesson 195, "Love is the way
I walk in gratitude." And gratitude goes hand in hand with humility which is another
theme of the Course, frequently contrasted with arrogance. When we really feel grateful,
there's a sense of humility, meaning that someone has helped us or someone has taught
us something or someone has given us something that we feel grateful for. And above all,
in "A Course in Miracles," I think we should feel grateful to the Course itself,
having been mired in the ego's den of pain and suffering and death, like the common feelings
of hopelessness and despair, all of a sudden a ray of light comes into our lives. And the
Course for so many of us is that ray of light along with its teacher, Jesus. And our gratitude
is that somehow we could have never gotten out of this morass of guilt and fear and pain
without help that comes to us ostensibly from outside of us. In the end, of course, we recognize
that the true person we should be grateful for is ourselves - "It can be but my gratitude
I earn," the workbook says. And that gratitude is for our right-minded self or our decision-making
self that chooses to be right minded and to learn the lessons of forgiveness, to choose
the pathway of the miracle that will lead us home. And "A Course in Miracles" of
course is that symbol of that pathway. It is that body of teaching that helps us learn
to distinguish between our wrong and right minds; in fact, to help us realize that we
do have a mind so we can make a different choice. But this gratitude extends far beyond
the Course itself, because one of the key principles of "A Course in Miracles" is
that we should be grateful for every living thing. Because it's the world and the objects,
the situations, the events and above all, our relationships in the world onto which
we project our unconscious guilt. And if we are not aware of our guilt, then we have no
opportunities for forgiving it and changing our minds about it. But when people come into
our lives who bring out seemingly the very worst in ourselves - I say seemingly bring
out, because in truth it's already in us - but they bring it out because we project
this guilt onto them. And when we see it flashed across the screens of our lives, we now can
say, oh, this is what I'm upset about. And then our inner teacher, Jesus, to whom we
are also grateful for of course then shows us that what we think we're upset about
externally is simply an outside picture of the inward condition of our decision-making
mind. And this recalls the projection, brings our attention back to the mind so that we
can choose again.
So anything in this world that serves as the vehicle or serves as a classroom for returning
our attention to the mind so we can choose again, is something we should be deeply grateful
for. And during this season of gratitude, Thanksgiving, in addition to spending time
with our family, friends, and having a sumptuous dinner, it should really be a time that recalls
to us that it is this humble feeling of gratitude that is the way that we would walk home. We
cannot truly learn how to love without first having this sense of gratitude for the lessons
that will teach us how to love and remind us that not only do we love, but we are love
itself - love having created us like itself. So this attitude of gratitude, this attitude
of humility is what would govern everything during our waking days, day in and day out,
week in, month in, year in and year out, that we learn to see everything as a classroom,
which helps us change our minds, shift our purpose from having the world serve us to
now having it be a place which helps us change our thinking so that where heretofore we felt
hopelessly despairing and sought for all the special relationships in our lives as a means
of undoing that despair and that feeling of emptiness, now that whole series of feelings
and thoughts are transformed to this feeling of gratitude for what the world can teach
us; namely, that it is not the world that is the source of our pain or of our happiness,
but our right and wrong minds. And so again we feel this sense of gratitude to "A Course
in Miracles" and to Jesus as our teacher for instructing us on how we can find the
way home when before having thought the way was forever closed to us. What else could
we be grateful for except the opportunity to remember who we are and who our Source is?