Easter and Me – and You, Too

I hope each of you had a wonderful Easter, which was celebrated while I was away.

A Course In Miracles (ACIM)’s Lesson 106 in the Workbook for Students is titled: Let me be still and listen to the truth.

I believe this is the quiet whisper you’ve heard me write about if you’ve gotten my messages before. (If this is your first message, go to my website www.DonODell.com and subscribe. There are no advertisements and it is easy to unsubscribe.) Hearing these whispers is what it means to me to truly understand that I am an already-loved eternal spirit having a human experience rather than being a human body that has housed, somewhere, an eternal soul.

I believe this passage is related to the resurrection. In the vernacular the resurrection is about the rising of Jesus’ body, which proved to believers He was divine. In ACIM, however, Jesus says it is about the rising of the mind from the ego’s dream of frailty, pain, fear and death to the awareness of eternal life or from the insanity of the ego to a perfectly healed perception. In this healed state I will perceive everything as acts of love or calls for love. Jesus’ resurrection was the proof, not of his divinity, but of the indestructibility of true, spirit-filled Life. His bodily reappearance was a symbol of the fact that true resurrection is of the mind and, thus, it is about the disappearance of the body as a real thing – rather than a magical reappearance.

When I touch base in quietness with my true Self – that innermost part of me – I am in the presence of my already-loved spirit: the real me. From that place I understand there is that place in you, as well. In that place we are One. The separateness we think is so real has vanished into thin air! The peace and serenity I feel is palpable and quite overwhelming. In that instant, there is no time, nor space. That is the reality of the Love of God. That is who I really am. However, I sense it only briefly. It is not a once-and-done exercise. I have also had similar experiences in AA, feeling absolutely connected, on a spiritual level, to all in the room.

Wherever I experience it, it is wonderful!

Lesson 106 states: “1 If you will lay aside the ego's voice, however loudly it may seem to call; if you will not accept its petty gifts that give you nothing that you really want; if you will listen with an open mind, that has not told you what salvation is; then you will hear the mighty Voice of truth, quiet in power, strong in stillness, and completely certain in Its messages.

2 Listen, and hear your Father speak to you through His appointed Voice, which silences the thunder of the meaningless, and shows the way to peace to those who cannot see. Be still today and listen to the truth. Be not deceived by voices of the dead, which tell you they have found the source of life and offer it to you for your belief. Attend them not, but listen to the truth.

3 Be not afraid to circumvent the voices of the world. Walk lightly past their meaningless persuasion. Hear them not. Be still today and listen to the truth. Go past all things which do not speak of Him Who holds your happiness within His Hand, held out to you in welcome and in love. Hear only Him today, and do not wait to reach Him longer. Hear one Voice today.

4 … His miracles are true. They will not fade when dreaming ends. They end the dream instead; and last forever, for they come from God to His dear Son, whose other name is you….

From my book, How the Bible became the Bible, p. 82-3: The Prophet Elijah [circa 9th century b.c.e.]. “Known as Elijah, the Tishbite from the northern kingdom…. He lived during the time when Ahab, King of the northern kingdom (Israel) married Jezebel, a Phoenician and worshipper of Baal….

“Elijah was known throughout his life as a champion of the “little people.” In the narrative of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21) we can visualize Elijah standing strongly against Ahab and all the subtle (and not so subtle) messages of the king’s wife, Jezebel—shrewd and calculating as the emissary of the Phoenician god Baal. When Ahab comes to take the vineyard, Elijah confronts him with the terrible word of doom from Yahweh. Elijah is supporting this common peasant against a king. His passion for fearless support of the “little man” is deeply rooted in the religion of Yahweh—very similar to Nathan’s condemnation of King David over his theft of Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11–12).

“Secondly, of course, is Elijah’s challenge to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Elijah, with Yahweh on his side, challenged Phoenician priests, with their god Baal on their side, to a “duel of the gods.” For Elijah this was a “fall on your sword” issue….

“However, an interesting and touching note: Following this highly dramatic pyrotechnic confrontation, Jezebel, the queen, threatened Elijah. He feared for his life and hid in the mountains looking for the Lord to protect him. He looked in an earthquake, in mighty winds, in fire. He finally heard the “… still, small voice …” of the Lord (1 Kings 19: 9–14).” This, of course, is also reminiscent of Psalm 46:10 – “Be still and know that I am God.”

All I need to de is be truly willing to see things differently and ask the Holy Spirit (the voice for God in ACIM) to help me develop a different perception, I just need to be willing and to be still and listen, not to the loud voices of my ego, but to the quiet whispers of the Lord. Just like Elijah. Just like the Psalmist.

As I’ve stated before, “I have to understand, on a visceral level, who the “Me” or “I” really is when I am speaking or thinking. The “I” that says to myself, “I really need a newer, more reliable car” is a different “I” than the one that says to Spirit, “I can’t do this anymore; help me perceive things the way You see them.”

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening to me and getting to know me – warts and all. As always, feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#2 Apr 2017

Copyright 2017

Atonement, Forgiveness, and Me

About 3 years into my recovery, I ran across a great little book by Earnie Larsen entitled Stage II Recovery – Life Beyond Addiction (Harper & Row, 1985). In it he had this wonderful quote (page 30) that I thought was right on the money. I have never forgotten it. “What you live with you learn. What you learn you practice. What you practice you become. What you become has consequences.” Later, he also wrote a companion book called Stage II Relationships that was also very helpful to me.

But his quote is such a simple and profound truism for me. It explained so much about my life and all my failed relationships. I remember when I did my 5^th Step with my sponsor, a major portion of which was trying to dissect all these unsatisfactory relationships. Ken asked me what I thought the common denominator was to all these relationships. I thought for a while and began reciting common physical similarities in the women with whom I was smitten: Kissable lips, pouty mouths, short and stacked, pretty and sensual. He kept shaking his head. Then I went to the emotional similarities: Rather needy, modestly insecure, wanting to be dominated in bed, thrilled at my spontaneity (which I had planned), and so on.

“No!” My sponsor told me. “The common denominator throughout all your relationships has been you.”

I cannot really remember, but I believe I replied with something absolutely profound. I think what I said was “Duuhh. Oooohhh. Yeah.”

What I had become had had consequences resulting in my failed relationships. What I had become had had consequences in all the glorious trips to my Pity Pot that led to a series of very demeaning (especially to my children) decisions, That led, eventually, to an increase in my drinking, that allowed my drinking to get out of control, that finally ended with my abject fear of the agony of alcohol withdrawal – whose only “fix” was more alcohol. It was the vicious cycle of addiction.

How did I begin turning my life around 25 years ago? Well, I didn’t actually. Working AA’s suggested program of recovery took care of that. Doing what I was told, I didn’t drink, I went to meetings, I got a sponsor, I shared, I prayed, I worked the Steps, I did service work. In short, I began practicing all sorts of new behaviors. So, with the considerable help and guidance of AA, I had begun reversing Larsen’s quote: What I lived with I learned. What I was learning in the Program I was beginning to try to practice on a daily basis. What I was now practicing was changing who I was becoming. What I was now becoming was beginning to have new (and better) consequences.

That process is still underway and will stay underway until my body stops breathing.

This is not rocket science. However, the most difficult issue for me was a 4 or 5-year period after several years of sobriety when my new practices were becoming more “natural.” I found I was no longer who I was, but I had not yet become who I was going to be. I was in a “no man’s land.” In between – for me it was a horrible place of confusion, frustration, anxiety and disappointment.

Throughout this same 4-5 years, a second, complicating issue for me was my confounding expectations. I just couldn’t help it. My steel-trap of a mind would begin anticipating that my getting better would result in X. When X didn’t materialize I would be frustrated, angry, and bitter – so much so that the benefits that were happening to me as a result of my “becoming” someone better went unrecognized.

I remember thinking about one of the promises made in Chapter Six of the Big Book while discussing the 9^th Step: “We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.” When was this intuition going to happen to me? I had imagined (code name: Expectations) that I would suddenly be able to spout great wisdom in my company’s conference rooms while discussing sticky complications with clients, or I would be able to handle delicate issues within my relationships with women or with my immediate family. When I mentioned this frustration to my sponsor, he reminded me that quite often I had shared in meetings that, in doing nothing, most of my “baffling situations” seemed to dissolve all by themselves. “Well, that’s right,” I replied. He asked: “Wasn’t that ‘…intuitively knowing how to handle situations?’” Again, my profound response: “Duuhh. Oooohhh. Yeah.”

This 20 year-old continuing process of reversing Larsen’s adage has been taken to a whole new level with my involvement in A Course in Miracles (ACIM). It is a very similar message to AA’s, but on a very spiritual level. While AA has taught me (and supported, accepted and nurtured me) to grow as a responsible human being in society, ACIM has taught me that my true nature is a spirit. Although I am currently a human in a body (and AA is still helping me be a more responsible one), I am really an already-loved spirit, currently having a dreamlike human experience, and I am destined to play a significant role in the Atonement by continually forgiving myself and others. By constantly forgiving I am allowing my light to shine. The Holy Spirit does the rest.

This profound reality of ACIM has led me to offer these weekly posts I share with you. These posts keep the reality of my on-going transformation very vivid for me, which also keeps the Now of the Christmas Gospel in my focus.

Although these messages are mostly for me, thanks for listening. As always – feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#2 December, 2012

Copyright, 2012

The Blessings and Curses of Being Honest

Several weeks ago I received an email from a subscriber who wrote, in part: “… Some of your thought processes are not very pretty and sometimes conflicting. Why do you share on such an intimate level? ...”

It’s a good question and those of you that are subscribing to this free weekly message deserve to know a little more about me. It may help you interpret or integrate these messages into your own life. Conversely, it may cause you to decide to run for your life!

I am a recovering alcoholic with over 25 years of sobriety. I used to be an active Presbyterian minister. Today, I remain very spiritual, but not very religious. Those who have read my book and/or listened to my Audio CD already know this.

Several years into AA’s program of recovery, where the acceptance I found transformed my life and accomplished what all the religious dogma and biblical studies never did, I relived a repressed memory from my days in high school. A girl became rather sweet on me and, during a band trip, shared how much she both respected and liked me. All the time she was telling me this, I remembered thinking to myself: “The me she believes she’s talking to isn’t the real me.” Exploring this memory, I discovered that that experience was a classic symptom of toxic shame – a phrase coined by John Bradshaw in his book Healing the Shame that Binds You. 1988.

It was a very, very sick feeling – believing that my “me” that you responded to wasn’t really me. And if it was not really me, then who was it? Who was I? I had no earthly idea, other than knowing I had this hollow empty feeling deep inside that I was living a lie and was a very incomplete person. Unlike you.

In AA meetings I heard many different people describe this same feeling as “…having a hole in your soul.” Very apt, I believe. How do I fill that hole? Honesty – real honesty. I found honesty in meetings, with my sponsor, working the steps, making amends.

In AA meetings for the first time in my life, I experienced the ability to be really me, nothing held back, and still feel supported and accepted. That totally transformed me. I will never be able to repay the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous for that tremendous gift of Grace God gave me – speaking through the voices in those rooms.

In personal computing there is a term used in conjunction with printer technology called WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”). That’s exactly what I want to be in my life. That’s the only way I can feed the real me and starve the feeling that I have a hole in my soul.

So I want to restate the concluding paragraphs from an anonymous author who published, through the Hazelden Foundation Press, a booklet entitled Shame: Understanding and Coping, 1981, pp. 61-62 [ISBN: 0-89486-131-X]. This author says, much better than I, what I’m trying to communicate.

“…I would like to share with you in [the] conclusion [of this pamphlet], and out of gratitude, something that I came across recently. Its author called it ‘an alcoholic’s meditation on honesty, pain, and shame’:

“Honesty involves exposure: the exposure of self-as-feared that leads to the discovery of self-as-is. Both of these selves are essentially vulnerable: to be is to be able to hurt and to be hurt. But something tells us that we should not hurt: that we should neither hurt others nor hurt within ourselves. Yet we do – both hurt and hurt, both cause and feel pain.

“When we cause pain, we experience guilt; when we feel pain, we suffer shame. The pain, the hurt, the guilt of the first is overt: it exists outside of us, ‘objectively.’ The pain, the hurt, the shame of the second is hidden: it gnaws within, it is ‘subjective.’ Neither can be healed without confronting the other. A bridge is needed – a connection between the hurt that we cause and the hurt that we are. 

“That bridge cannot be built alone. The honesty that is its foundation must be shared. A bridge cannot have only one end. Without sharing, there can be no bridge. But a bridge needs a span as well as foundations. The bridge’s span is vulnerability – the capacity to be wounded, the ability to know hurt. ‘I need’ because ‘I hurt.’ – if deepest need is honest. What I need is another’s hurt, another’s need. Such a need on my part would be ‘sick’ – if the other had not the same need of me, of my hurt and my need. Because we share hurt, we can share healing. Because we know need, we can heal each other.

“Our mutual healing will be not the healing of curing, but the healing of caring. To heal is to make whole. Curing makes whole from the outside: it is good healing but it cannot touch my deepest need, my deepest hurt – my shame, the dread of myself I harbor within. Caring makes me whole from within: it reconciles me to myself-as-I-am: not-God, beast-angel, human. Caring enables me to touch the joy of living that is the other side of my shame, of my not-God-ness, of my humanity.

“But I can care, can become whole, only if you care enough – need enough – to share your shame with me.”

I share with you as intimately as I dare because I have to. That’s who I am. That is the road to my salvation and to my humanity. Honesty. Exposing who I am. Risking the vulnerability that entails. I do this because the alternative – living a lie, projecting a “self” that is not truly me – is no longer an option if I want to be alive.

Thanks for listening, and – as always – feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#5 September, 2012

Copyright, 2012

Part 2 - My Desire To Be “Right” Or Have The “Right” Ideas Leads Me Off My Spiritual Path

Continued from Part 1 - 

It is hard for me most of the time to remember that. After all, trusting my perceptions and believing in my perceived reality comes so naturally to me. A Course in Miracles (ACIM) states that we are very lax in controlling our thoughts, and gently reminds us that the Course is, in short, a course in mind training.

As the Monsignor observed about the Roman Catholic Church – “…the majority of [the Church’s] teachings were directly related to its own interests….” I can say the same thing about Protestant teachings, Jewish dogma, Evangelical beliefs, out-of-context literal Bible interpretations, and – most importantly – my own perceptions and beliefs.

As the political conventions and the partisan speeches unfold, it is always very interesting for me to try to spot all the things that remain unsaid. All speakers are putting their spin on a remembrance and, in so doing, attempting to create their own version of reality and then sell that version as Truth.

Do I question the reality I create? Yes. However, I use ACIM and Jesus’ message, as recorded in the New Testament, as reality checks. In the New Testament I concentrate on Jesus’ parables, his one-liners, and the Sermon on the Mount. If I use other parts of the Bible, I find myself selecting texts based on my desire to prove that my version of reality is the “correct” one. That’s very dangerous for me.

It might be dangerous for you, too.

That’s why I began this message with a quote from a recent email from Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor Tikkun Magazine and Chair, the Interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives. It just might be the case that your perceptions and beliefs are held dearly because they simply bolster your perceived reality.

Thanks for listening, and – as always – feel free to forward this message to your friends, family, and those accompanying you on your spiritual journey.

Don

#1 September, 2012

Copyright, 2012

Postscript:

I’m pleased to announce that you can now get an eBook version of my book, How the Bible became the Bible, for a Kindle or Nook Tablet. You can also get the abridged version of my book, as an audio CD. It is titled The Gospel of Transformation, at CD Baby. The prices are cheaper than purchasing through my publisher.

An eBook for a Kindle Tablet: http://www.amazon.com/How-Bible-became-ebook/dp/B008MOT54S/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

An eBook for a Nook Tablet: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-the-bible-became-the-bible-donald-l-odell/1028962987?ean=2940014686969

For an audio CD: http://cdbaby.com/cd/donaldodell2

Thanks for all your support.