Mari’s Blog
The graces of life
We go beyond what can be symbolized to what can only be known within. It is to this state of grace that I call you now, today: The state of grace of the newly identified child of God. Open your heart, for the one who dwells there in union with all will emerge from this opening. What was once a tiny pinprick of light becomes a beacon as you open your heart and allow your true identity to be what is, even within your form. You are in grace and union with the Source and Cause of unity. Be no longer causeless. You and your Source are one. D1:12-13
Sunday morning and I feel limp and groggy in that way I do “after” things, this time the “thing” being the interview with Rick Archer of Buddha at the Gas Pump. It was the interview, the gift of a song, crying over the song, my dad, Mary helping me get ready, and all the kind people—all the graces of life. That’s how it came to me.
The graces of life.
Let me share what happened. There was this interview…yesterday. Before that, there was the build-up to the interview. I received these wonderful instructions from BatGap about how to do the best interview possible—technically and, in a way—physically: The kind of lighting, the right setting, the best position for sitting, the right clothes, and above all, the proper equipment. I honestly thought this was wonderfully kind. They cared. And so for about two weeks, Mary Love and I were ordering equipment, running to Best Buy and Radio Shack when the equipment didn’t work as planned, testing and retesting with each other, and then with Jerry who volunteers with 
BatGap and does sound checks from Utah, then Rick himself in Iowa. At the same time people were hearing about it and sending me encouragement and suggestions and I heard from some of those who had suggested that I be a guest. Word spread. Anticipation spread.
Then the day came.
Another test run with the amazing Jerry. A test run with Rick and another volunteer whose name I’ve forgotten but who I believe was in Canada. Mary came over one more time to be sure it was all working. (I’m not very technical, you see.)
Everyone was so nice to me.
Luckily all was working. Mary let herself out and Rick and I settled in. https://batgap.com/ I haven’t re-listened to the interview yet (it will likely be up tomorrow) and it’s all a blur at the moment, but I think the question Rick asked that got me talking about my dad was “Do you see Jesus as a person?” Isn’t that an interesting question!
And so there I was, saying “Yes,” and talking about how so many of us commune in one way or another with those who have physically left the world. And how you can tell a visitation of one passed-on person from another because of relationship. I told Rick of this song I heard right after my dad died—heard in my head in that way you do where it keeps playing so continually you want nothing more than for it to leave you alone. Over and over it played and I wasn’t even listening. Maybe at first I was hearing melody without words. But at some point, I stopped and actually “heard” it. It was a Beatles song. What had been repeating and repeating was “If there’s anything that you want. If there’s anything that you need. Just call on me, and I’ll send it along, with love from me to you. I have arms that long to hold you, and keep you by my side…” well anyway, that sounded so like my dad. I suddenly knew Dad had planted the song in me. Knew it in that way you do.
People have far more profound messages from life after death. But this song that alerted me that Dad was still near was what came to me, in that moment, to share.
This morning I had an email from Rick with a message line of “From me to you.” I thought it was an early copy of the interview. I opened it. And there it was. The Beatles song. I couldn’t believe it. Again, what a grace! As I listened to it, my nose tingled and my eyes teared up and I felt such remembrance of Dad and so in awe that after one conversation this professional interviewer had thought to do something so, so dear.
And so I began to think of grace.
I remembered the beginning of the Dialogues, the invitation to abide in a State of Grace. I love that phrase as much as I love the phrase, “follow your heart.” There is something about it.
Mary, Julie & Mari, 2016
I often call my years just prior to ACOL (mid-90’s) “the time of Grace.” These were my years of nearly daily connection with my friends Mary Love and Julieanne Carver. The days when they were pregnant together. The days after their babies were born and Mary’s daughter Grace clung fragiley to life. The days after Grace’s death when we held each other tenderly and began to explore the big questions of life and death, of Grace and grace.
My friends and I co-authored our story of the time into the book, Love. Then, after reading the journal Mary kept while she was pregnant, as her daughter lived, and after she died, I encouraged our publisher to see it. Then Mary encouraged me to share my writing with the angel, Peace. And so came about the original publication of The Grace Trilogy (1997). I gave the three books to Glenn Hovemann when (having read ACOL) he came to St. Paul to meet me, and when, in a surprising move—surprising to both of us—I asked him if he wanted to publish A Course of Love (leading to our current Combined Volume and a tremendous sharing of it around the world).
The connection of that “time of Grace” to the coming of A Course of Love had never felt to me like one that others
would see or feel. But Glenn saw it, and felt it was quite significant. Eventually, he asked if we’d like to republish the now out-of-print trilogy as well. https://acourseoflove.org/maris-other-books/
And so, the 24 hours that began the morning of the interview, and concluded this morning with the finding of the song . . . became a period of grace, an extension of all that began, all those years ago.
I believe in our mutual state of grace!
To believe you are in concert with the universe is to believe that you have no need for struggle, to believe you have no lack, to believe in your state of grace. C:25.12
Connecting joy
I’m second from the left, Mary Love is on the far right
This Course requires no thought and no effort. There is no prolonged study and the few specific exercises are not required. This Course has succeeded in ways you do not yet understand and have no need to understand. These words have entered your heart and sealed the rift between your mind and heart. (C:32.4)
It’s six o’clock on a Sunday night and I wonder where the word “o’clock” came from. Such are the things that run through my mind after a long day.
This was an unusual Sunday.
On most Sundays, I wander out to the cabin for an hour or two and often come in from it with inspiration for a blog. For a year or more I wrote these blogs each Sunday without fail, the only exceptions being when I was on the road. When I’d get done with the blog I’d post it to Facebook and visit and respond to the ACOL Facebook group. But I haven’t been regular with this since the new year began and I didn’t even alert anyone that I was not going to be being regular. Highly unusual.
Today was unusual because I visited with the community at Unity of the Valley in Savage, Minnesota, about a half hour from my home. It’s the first time I’ve delivered a message during a Unity service here in my home state or been invited to stay for conversation. My friend and colleague Mary Love went with me, arriving at my house at 8:45 to find me raring to go and my car warming up in the driveway.
When we got back it was nearly 3:00 and, although the church supplied a potluck, neither of us had eaten and so had stopped on the way home for coffee and cookies to tide us over. “I can’t have coffee now,” I’d told her in the morning, “I might spill.” She told me of a trick she’d learned at the U of M where we once worked together. A speaker had spilled all over the front of her shirt, she said, and they just turned it around. I didn’t mention that I was in a dress.
On our return, Mary came in to take a look at the package I’d received the night before, equipment necessary for my BatGap interview this coming Saturday. She’s been helping me get ready for the technical side of things before a fellow named Jerry will Skype with me to check out how everything is working. The long Ethernet cable was perfect, but the external apparatus that would connect it to my computer wasn’t right. “I’ll go to Best Buy now,” I said. “Once I sit back down I won’t get up again.” She said felt the same but would go with me anyway and we trundled off.
Both of us still looked pretty good. I for sure looked better than on my average trip to Best Buy where I might change out of my sweats into jeans, but might not. It garnered me better service than I’ve ever gotten and Mary and I were both in a great mood with getting in and out of there in ten minutes. After checking that this new piece of equipment would fit the task, she took off, and I got out of my dress. As I did I realized a trip to the dry cleaners would be good (even though I hadn’t spilled), and folded the clothes into a pile to sit on the table at the foot of my bed. There was already a shirt there, folded for a Good Will stack I had going in the basement. Since I was going to the basement, I collected hangers, left them on the clothesline there, and on my way back up brought up the hangers hung with clean clothes.
Mary and I have always agreed that creative times are messy. After having a sandwich and taking a bit of a rest, I began to wander through the house, picking up the water glasses of two days and emptying them into the plants I usually water on Monday. Then I disposed of the paper cups we’d brought in from the car, and set the boxes we unpacked by the door for recycling. I hung up my coat, unpacked the bag with my copy of ACOL and other whatnot items, filled in the blank I’d written on my Unity of the Valley file with the mileage, then filing the receipt from Best Buy, realized I needed a new 2017 file and started that.
I include these “wandering around the house details” because this is what I do when in a fog. I move from one thing to another, with what my eyes fall on becoming the thing of the moment.
Order restored (somewhat), I checked my e-mail, and found that Terrie, one of the women from Unity, had sent me the photos she’d taken. Only then did the day start to come back, to push through the fog that such events always seem to immediately become, as if the joy of them is too much to take.
This was a beautiful church, an inspiring service, and the folks who joined me afterwards for a Q & A were ordinary and beautiful and thoughtful and full of good questions and hopes for more such visits. As we wrapped up and people came to have me sign their books, Mary held court with a small group of women in a corner of the room, their voices and laughter rippling while I had quiet conversations with those whose books I signed.
On the way out we started taking pictures. There were only women left by then and we were acting like old friends, talking and goofing around, full of that “connecting” joy.
As we got in the car, Mary said, “Wait a minute,” and ran through the parking lot toward where the women who’d walked out with us were getting into their cars, took off her beret, and threw it into the air like our fake Twin Cities sister, Mary Tyler Moore.
And then she caught it.
I said, “I wish I’d gotten a picture of that.” I wish I’d gotten a picture of that because it would have said it all. There was a freeing feeling about the joy of connection that matched the freeing feeling of allowing myself the greater ease that I’ve had since the new year began. Mary being with me today helped me sustain that feeling of ease. I told those assembled that in the conversations she and I share, with one thing leading to another and another, there’s something that happens. Mary elaborated, saying it’s always a matter of creating a shared “something,” that becomes more than what it starts out to be through relationship.
I’m paraphrasing terribly because the fog is still messing with my recollection of the day. But not the feeling of it. Connecting is a thing of joy.
“With this Combined Volume, A Course of Love ends its relative obscurity. . . . Its time has come because so many yearn for connectivity of the heart and are bursting with passion to be who they really are.” Glenn Hovemann (from the Foreword)
The YouTube Channel for Saturday’s Buddha at the Gas Pump (BatGap) interview is
https://www.youtube.com/user/BuddhaAtTheGasPump/
Less fear more love
Turn not to your thoughts but to your feelings and go where they lead. And everywhere they lead you, remember one thing only. Remember to embrace your power. The power of love is the cause and effect that will change the world by returning you, and all your brothers and sisters, to who they are in truth.
The Dialogues, Day 10 (10.33)
Yesterday was the Women’s March on Washington, with sister marches all over the country, including here. I regret deeply not being part of it.
I regret, as well, having to admit to being uninformed. I didn’t know about the march until Friday when I saw a small article on the second page of Thursday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, and by then it was “too late”—too late for my psychological makeup or my soulful being—not enough time to prepare myself–inside. And too late to rearrange Henry’s arrival and a usual weekend already planned, of boys and baths and bringing dinner to Mom.
Most of my news comes from the newspaper, paltry as it is these days, because it’s the only form of “news” that doesn’t grate on my nerves. The television was on all day on the 20th, but mainly on mute. I’d walk by and if anything interesting appeared to be going on, I’d unmute for a minute. Would I have heard mention of the upcoming Women’s March if it weren’t for the mute button? Would that have been soon enough? Over a million marched worldwide. 90,000 marched in St. Paul. Many chanted, “Less fear more love.”
In 2008 I attended a large (20,000+) “Change We Can Believe In” rally for Obama, (my daughter Mia, Mom Madeline, and me got to be among the 20,000 “inside,” basically because we got close enough, that Mom’s age made us shoe-ins). Mia and I marched with 10,000 during the Republican National Convention the same year, to protest the war in Iraq. I get the meaning of crowds, the necessity of movements, the sense of community, support, and courage that comes of “joining in.” I remember the hope Obama inspired.
I would have been proud of taking part in the Women’s March—for the rest of my life. It’s the kind of thing I’d tell and repeat to the grandkids. But what can I do now? Now I can only be grateful. Grateful for those whose way it is to be informed, and to respond, and to be radical for the cause of love in whatever ways they do.
I am also grateful that ACOL’s community, is a community radical for love.
As I move into the next thing and the next with A Course of Love, I’m living radically new adventures in a world where love can be shown to be more active than fear and hate, where love is seen as the active force that enlivens the world and each individual life. My approach to being with each Course of Love community varies based on feeling. There was a feeling that led to my visit in Santa Fe that was different than the one that led to Sedona, and different from what’s next—my upcoming days in community: here in Minnesota this coming weekend, two events in Philadelphia next month, https://acourseoflove.org/events/ and an interview with Rick Archer on Buddha at the Gas Pump, February 4. https://batgap.com/ There’s a different “feel” to each, and responding to that “feeling” is what I do.
While I may not have an appreciation or apprehension of all that’s in the news, I have an appreciation for the feelings that move it . . . and the feelings that the news rarely acknowledges. Feelings, and the brilliance of feelings brought to voice, have the ability to connect across distance, across differences. They shed light on our ways of knowing and on who we know ourselves to be.
I’ll say again, I’m grateful. I’m grateful for every way of knowing and being that brings more love into the world. I’m thankful for the thrill of the feminine rising! Appreciative for all who participated (women, men, and children) in such inspirited and visual demonstrations of love across the world. And I am also wistful. I wish I had been there.
Maybe, I tell myself, I could start watching PBS NewsHour once again!
All the issues that those you would call spiritual leaders are called to champion or censor have their roots in timeless and universal spiritual truths. It is the timeless and universal that you are called, in unity, to respond to and with. But this response will not be generated without the feelings that precede them! . . . When speaking of the many issues facing your world in this time, we are speaking of situations that would seem to be extreme and to call for extreme measures. The only extreme measure called for now is the same extreme measure that I called for during my life. It is the call to embrace your power.
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, turn your thoughts not to ideals of social activism, to causes, or to championing any one side over another. Turn not to your thoughts but to your feelings and go where they lead. And everywhere they lead you, remember one thing only. Remember to embrace your power. The power of love is the cause and effect that will change the world by returning you, and all your brothers and sisters, to who they are in truth. This cannot be done from without but must be done from within. It is the transformation that is caused within that will affect the world without.
The power you must come to rely upon is the power of your own Self to create and express the cause and effect that is the power of love. D:Day10.32-34
Forgetting . . . and The Embrace
Within the embrace you can let all thought go. Within the embrace, you can quit thinking even of holy things, holy men and women, and even divine beings, even the one God. Is not the embrace itself holy? Is not the sunrise and sunset? Is not the least of the birds of the air as holy as the mighty eagle? The blade of grass, the fleck of sand, the wind and air, the ocean and her surf, all live by the universal heartbeat and exist within the embrace. Is not all you can imagine holy when you imagine with love? Is not all you cannot imagine holier still?
Sanctity is all that exists within the embrace. How could you be less than sacred? You exist in holiness.
The first step in remembering this holiness is forgetting. Let yourself forget that you do not feel holy and that the world does not appear to be sacred. Let your heart remember that you are holy and that the world is sacred. A thousand things can pull you from your remembrance. Forgetting “things” can free you to remember. (C:21-23)
As I look out on the beauty of winter’s sparseness, I know this beauty is true of the mind too. Our minds can rest, quietly alive in their new sparseness.
In A Course of Love we hear of both remembering and forgetting. Last week I spoke some of remembering. This week, I find myself intrigued by the idea of forgetting. There is a sort of existential idea of forgetting that relates to who we are. This is the idea that you and I, that humanity, has forgotten the truth or who we are. Now there’s a need to remember “the truth” of who we are and to forget “the illusion” of who we are. (T3:17.5) There’s even an “exercise in forgetting” included in “A Treatises on the Personal Self.”
I’ve always held an interest in the ways of “forgetting” because I do not have much recall of this Course. This forgetfulness has to do with our new way of knowing rather than our identity. At one time, this lack of recall felt, to me, like a failing, a curse, like a lack that was preventing me from engaging with others—even like a fear. I once asked myself, “How can I share A Course of Love when I can’t remember what it says?”
Well, I do this now by admitting I don’t remember when I don’t remember. What a relief!
Over time I’ve realized this is not a failing but part of the new way of knowing, and I realized this because I dared to talk about it. That’s how I found out how common it is. It is common to forget what was said in A Course of Love. You can finish a chapter that just knocked your socks off, and then suddenly question, with great surprise, how it is that you don’t remember the content of the chapter at all!
When you or I “forget,” it is not that we don’t “know!”
When you or I forget, it’s not that we don’t know! It’s almost like forgetting “how” we know, but not the knowing. What’s been forgotten is the words as chapter and verse. To realize this is to realize that you know these words in some other way—as if they are part of you and even more—living words. Words that move into you and me and come back out “as” you and me. And this is the whole reason necessitating our movement beyond learning.
While this letting go is a funny thing to feel and to begin to see as the new way, it’s a letting go of the ties that bind us to thinking, to teaching, and to learning. In this way of union and relationship, we come to know through the union and relationship offered by these living words. You and I share by sharing who we are in union and relationship as all we’ve received takes up residence in us and extends from us to our companions and from our companions to us.
The way of the past has been a knowing based on … shall we say … reiteration? On an idea that you don’t “know” unless you can pass the test that proves that you’ve committed to memory the “answer” to the question, that you can prove you have the knowledge in a prescribed way, or can demonstrate that you can teach the content of what is there.
How magnificent that Jesus spares us from this kind of knowing! How awesome for the mind and its ability to be in quiet…at least once it accepts our new way of knowing. Until it does, it can chatter away, plagued by all it doesn’t “think” it knows.
I invite you to welcome this sparseness of mind in which there is not some “thing” to know, and no division between the knowing of mind and heart.
Forgetting “things” can free you to remember. Remembering can free you to forget.
Concepts have been used to order your world and to assist your mind in keeping track of all that is in it. Your mind does not need this assistance. To begin to conceptualize in ways that touch your heart will free your mind of its reliance on thought concepts, thus allowing heart and mind to speak the same language or to be communicated with in the same way. C:21.4
The embrace can now be likened to the starting point of a shared language, a language shared by mind and heart and by all people. It is a language of images and concepts that touch the one heart and serve the one mind. C:21.6
Memory and Imagination
Close your eyes and begin to see with an imagination that is beyond thought and words. C:20.2
You have no capabilities that do not serve you, because they were created to serve you. The ability to imagine is such a capability, freely and equally given to all. Imagination is linked to true vision, for it exercises the combined capabilities of mind and heart. C23.18
I talk to Jesus. Do you? I talk to him a lot in my journal. New Year’s Eve morning I wrote:
“I feel, my brother, like I’ve let myself be tossed like your trees. I could make a thousand different pictures of them. And they’re just—“Yours”—and also being what they are.”
I sit inside now—looking out. Even my sun-room is too chilly early in the morning, and I make perches for myself where I can. Today I’m in the dining room sitting at a piano table crowded with plants. The table sits before a broad window looking out on the cabin and a view nearly the same as the one from there.
The table was my grandmothers, made of black walnut. My grandmother, my mom’s mom, had many of these
rather ornate tables and at some point she painted them all black. I ponder things like this. Why would she do that?
My first husband refinished this larger one. Two more sit in my basement but they’re both side-tables, fragile and unsteady. One is partially re-finished, the other…. I’m thinking it’s time to throw it away. I have a basement like this. It is probably the curse of basements and attics. We store things for “later” and then sometimes decades go by before we know it. These tables have been in the basement 20 years now. I’ve wondered if I could lose the spindly, unsteady legs and keep the ornate tops. Perhaps these I could refinish with less effort and hang as art.
Two doors from a kitchen cabinet belonging to my other grandma hang on the wall behind my bed. This was the kind of “cupboard” that came before built-ins.
Why do we save? Why do we decorate, and decorate again for the seasons? Why is one person prone to such sentimentality and another not? Is it the veracity of memory? When my mom moved out of my childhood home I took pictures of the heat grates. They were heavy, wrought iron, intricate, and I knew them with my childhood senses, as I knew one grandmother’s cabinet and another’s tables. It is this “knowing” that I believe makes them retain their appeal.
I also, even though I had my own manger set by the time Mom moved out of her home of 40 years, took the one she was ready to let go. I could remember the trips to the basement to get it out of the storage room so clearly. Then the unwrapping. It is a very cheap set. One of the figures looks more like a cowboy than a shepherd. He has a bald head and holds his hat in hand. I remembered this head in fine detail.
This manger set has been sitting in my basement too. Mom didn’t decorate her place at all this year, so I decided to bring the old manger scene over and put it on her mantle. How surprised I was when she said, “I don’t remember that.” It wasn’t a matter of senility. She said, “I have a better one in storage. You can have it.”
She doesn’t share my memories, the way my child-like consciousness felt as I viewed these figures, as I felt them with young fingers, as I saw them with eyes that were fascinated still, by shape, color, texture and a pre-meaning sense of meaning. It also came, I know, from the familiarity of days when my home was my world…all I had to explore…and enough. Days when the big root of the cottonwood tree that protruded from the grass in our back yard, doubled as an alligator.
The heart’s way calls us back to memory and imagination and I don’t think it’s all that dissimilar to memories of childhood. Mom can recall every neighbor on the street on which she grew up. Maybe you can too. Do they matter, these memories, in and of themselves, or is our ability to recall with such clarity a reminder of a way of knowing that we lost and are returning to? A memory that travels, at times, even beyond childhood to a consciousness that was already alive and more vast than we allow ourselves to imagine now? Do we catch glimpses of this knowing when we return to pre-language memories? Or to those days of actual belief in Santa Clause or the innocence with which we prayed to be watched over as we slept?
My grandson Henry went to church with me Christmas Eve. He hasn’t been in a while. He asked if we could light candles. And so we arrived early and left our seats, bowed before the altar, and made our way to the statue of Mary. Henry put his own money in the slot, lit his own candle, knelt on the kneeler, closed his eyes, and joined his hands in prayer. I haven’t seen anything more beautiful than that this Christmas—maybe this whole year.
No matter what it was, or how short our times of living with the wonder of it all, they can call us to embrace wonder again…with remembrance and imagination. As I begin to put the decorations away, I know that looking forward without remembrance of the past is not—“for me,” a choice, a fault, or a virtue. It just is. Whatever it is “for you” that reminds you of wonder and inspires your imagination, is what I wish for you in this New Year.
Thoughts joined in unity can be likened to thinking without thought.
They can be likened to imagination. They can be likened to love. (T2:1.12)
