A door has been reached, a threshold crossed. What your mind still would deny your heart cannot. A tiny glimmering of memory has returned to you and will not leave you to the chaos you seem to prefer. It will keep calling you to acknowledge it and let it grow. It will tug at your heart in the most gentle of ways. Its whisper will be heard within your thoughts. Its melody will play within your mind. “Come back, come back,” it will say to you. “Come home, come home,” it will sing. You will know there is a place within yourself where you are missed and longed for and safe and loved. A little peace has been made room for in the house of your insanity. C:10.32

Early Saturday morning, as my grandson Henry still slept, and I not far from sleep myself, a tidbit of A Course of Love jumped into my mind out of the blue. It came just before I went to my sunroom to write. It was this: “A door has been reached, a threshold crossed.”

It is from a favored quote, one I’ve felt drawn to recently and so shared in my most recent talk at Unity of Sedona and found appearing, through the inspiration of friends, in the material prepared for my upcoming visit to the Center for Contemporary Mysticism. (See https://contemporarymysticism.org/mariperron.asp)

Favorite quotes do this—begin to appear more and more, and to shed their place in the bigger scheme of things—existing apart from chapter and verse. They become not “favorite quotes” but captivating spoken-words that meet us where we are and fit our own context and mood. They are both personal and universal. They absorb us into them.

They are compelling communications, messages given, and received, and felt heart-to-heart.

Later, as I was in contemplation of this gift, Henry awoke and joined me. He crawled in next to me on the love seat where I was sitting with my feet up, and as I covered us with a blanket, he said, “Don’t you wish sometimes you could just lay in bed and look out the window at the snow?” And without another word, that was what we were doing, only not in bed. We sat in complete silence for maybe 15 minutes, the blinds open to the horizon and the first snow of the year. His body was perfectly comfortable in the crook of my arm, his head resting just above my heart.

And then he asked me if I was good (meaning, Do you feel okay?) and I said yes and asked him if he felt okay and we agreed we both had colds lingering and I said that was a good reason to get breakfast soon so that he could have his medicine, and that might have broken the spell a little but not fully, for we spent at least another five or ten minutes, at one point he twining his fingers with mine, and so I came aware of their shape, the length and slenderness, and the prayer,

Oh Lord … hold this boy close.

I know how blessed I am that my grandson is almost ten and still willing to be held close … by me. And I know that he is held close by Jesus. I know that I am held close too. And you. That each of us are held close by divine Love.

I have never, ever, been able to convey the fullness of the experience of the altered state that was receiving ACOL, or the immensity of the sweet, sweet love and acceptance for my imperfect self that was contained within it. But that door is love. That door is love’s sweetness in the form of a little boy, and in the mind-boggling reception of a sacred text, both of which are equally able to overwhelm with love, to leave you a puddle of love, to leave you with no more capacity to put up barriers to it.

This is A Course of Love.