Lesson 195 from A Course in Miracles which says, “Love is the way I walk in gratitude,” challenges the way we typically experience gratitude by providing a more holistic alternative approach involving God’s love.
As is often the case case for me, I come to the different lessons very often. I have the ones I'm very comfortable with and very familiar with but I come to some of these lessons a bit. mystified I'm not sure at first what the lesson is really getting at, even though I've looked at it several times before. But to teach it in this forum and to coach on it, I find myself initially at a bit of a loss that there is supposed to be a way I walk in gratitude and I don't fully get what that is. So in preparation, I’ll read, study, and meditate in order to pray and think, and then I'll make an outline for coaching on the topic.
Essentially what this lesson is getting at, (which is just my take on it, not the “end all be all”) is to combine the power of love inside of us together now with gratitude. Cultivating gratitude and then being careful not to lapse into what the course in other places refers to as “specialness.” I'm going to use the first paragraph to explain this. Paragraph one says the following,
“Gratitude is a lesson hard to learn for those who look upon the world amiss. The most that they can do is see themselves as better off than others, and they try to be content because another seems to suffer more than they. How pitiful and deprecating are such thoughts for who has caused for thanks while others have less cause and who could suffer less because he sees another suffer more. Your gratitude is due to Him alone, who made all cause of sorrow disappear throughout the world.”
If we unpack that first paragraph, we get a deeper understanding of what is driving it. When it says, “Love is the way I walk in gratitude,” first of all, we have this idea that we're being called out. For most people, their sense of gratitude revolves around the thought that a bad thing happened to someone else and not themselves and they are glad it didn’t happen to them. Whether somebody's been diagnosed with cancer, gone to prison, had a long term relationship which ended, or had a failure in business, this is what the lesson is saying we should not derive our gratitude from, though this is what constitutes a sense of gratitude for most people. It's saying here that as long as somebody else is suffering, that can't really be true gratitude.
The place to focus our gratitude is on the fact that Higher Power / Source / God has provided a plan for everybody to escape from all suffering forever. Love is the source of our sense of gratitude and the application of it in this situation: the thing that makes us really grateful is that everybody is saved or rescued together, no one's left behind, and that's where our gratitude really be focused. That's an initial simple overview. The application is a process of training the mind not to make these comparisons in which one says, “I'm glad that I didn't get hit by that bus, or experience something undesired.”
As I usually do, I'm going to invoke the “Prodigal Child” story here. In that story, we've got the parent whose younger child leaves, demands their inheritance and leaves and wastes it. Then after struggling, he comes back in a state of devastation, desperately looking for shelter primarily. The older brother is quite upset with what he considers the “special treatment” that this useless excuse for a brother is being given by the father or the parent.
So how does this apply to what this lesson, I think, is trying to encourage us to do at a deeper dive?
Well, the lesson is trying to help us maintain the same kind of impartiality that the father maintained in that story. Even though the son had wasted resources in some ways, has humiliated the family, and has come back in disgrace, the father puts all of that to the side and lovingly welcomes this child back as if nothing had happened - and actually is full of gratitude that this son is alive and home to be restored.
Meanwhile the older brother, who was good, faithful, and loyal didn't partake any of these disgraces, so he's upset. He things, “You didn't have a party for me. You didn't celebrate me. Why are you doing it for this useless son whom I almost can’t even call my brother anymore?” The point being that the father then responds and says it doesn't really matter how badly he screwed up or how great a job you've been doing. Your birthright, for both of you, is that you're my children, you're sourced in me and you have all the prerogatives of my kingdom, always, not based on performance. The only thing that your performance will do is take you out of enjoying what I've prepared for you as my children. But if you come back after having fallen away, then I want you to have everything again. You've always had everything and you'll continue to have everything. Because he is back we are just reminding him that he's entitled to everything as he always was. So in a sense, what this lesson is trying to tell instructors, coaches, teach us to do is to maintain a sense of connection to this divine love which is equally available to everybody.
When we see people suffering temporarily, that's an illusion. Therefore we should not use that as the basis for feeling superior to other people. Rather we should consider that the love that I have available to me, that's protecting me and guiding me, is the same love that's available to everyone else. That's where my mind should pivot. That headline then becomes this about the synthesis not to lapse into this partiality thinking I'm being treated better, I'm lucky, I'm fortunate, and somebody else is less fortunate. God's universal love is the default stage for everyone to take advantage of.
Paragraph two in the beginning says, “It is insane to offer thanks because of suffering. In other words, to be thankful of the fact that I'm all good and somebody else is suffering. But it is equally insane to fail in gratitude to the one who offers you the certain means whereby all pain is healed and suffering replaced with laughter and with happiness.” The lesson is encouraging us to stay plugged into that source of love which can heal our pain and heal other people's pain faster.
Paragraph eight says, “Walk then, in gratitude, the way of love for hatred is forgotten when we lay comparisons aside.” In the story of the “Prodigal Child,” the older brother was beginning to veer into hatred toward the younger brother who came back as well as hatred for the father who was giving him preparation for treatment. This story is a reminder to constantly bring your mind back from the edge of the brink of hatred back to gratitude. God's plan is that everybody is treated with the maximum level of love that God has for all of us. He doesn't have favorites.
Finally, paragraph nine says, “Today we learn to think of gratitude in place of anger, malice and revenge. We have been given everything.” So this is, again, back to this idea of the kingdom, the Prodigal story, where a father/parent is so lavishly resourced, and when we're working with the father in the kingdom, all those resources are ours. How could we possibly get distracted by somebody else's suffering into either kicking them when they're down and saying, You're an idiot because you're not enjoying the benefits” or, “It's really annoying me that you get the benefits even though you don't perform.” When in reality, why should that affect me if I have everything to the fullest extent?
So, again, the opportunity here is the pivot into a really positive mindset more and more consistently, which is absent of hatred and malice and things like that. This love that we can tap into is truly unlimited, and so there isn't a limit or competition or scarcity of opportunities and miracles.
A practical application that we've done before many times, is pretty simple here. I see frequently that there is a kind of a malicious thought amongst leaders and CEOs that my subsidiaries are incompetent, they're malingering, they're not performing like I want them to. Then usually what that leads to is the type of behavior as the jerk who's pushing and policing everyone, putting the fear of God into people and having temper tantrums. I actually used to be like that a lot. But the bottom line here, very simply, that it's a real epiphany for my clients to finally understand that the best place for me to be is in a peaceful, loving state of mind about everyone, everything, and anything all the time. They may realize that it's not required of his or her job to come down hard on people
It is unfortunate to observe how much of the corporate world is built on aggression. But one of the things I'm really grateful for is that there is a plan to escape the toxicity of a lot of what goes on in the world. As I listen to the news day in and day out from all different directions, the thing that I'm reminded about constantly is that there's very little in what you hear day to day in any of the news about this plan for people to get out of suffering, which makes me double down with even more gratitude about the plan that we keep discussing.
And again, without falling into the trap of saying, “oh, I'm glad that I'm not subjected to the malice of this world because I'm better than that,” I want to remind you that we are all in this together. Everybody deserves to escape from whatever suffering they are experiencing. All of us together at the highest level, through the unlimited power of Source and this love we are referring to. So the practical application would be to lean into your Walk of Love as you lead your organizations and your life.
