Calmness that We Have Never Known Before

“This is your conundrum. When you have never known what is you have never been able to be certain. You have no experience with certainty other than—and this is a crucial other than—your certainty of your own identity, the very identity this Course has disproved. This identity has been seen as your personal self. Thus your personal self is the only place in which you have experience that can now be used for a new purpose.

“Even while this experience is experience of an ego-self, it is still an expe¬rience as near to certainty as you have been capable, simply because you could not exist without an identity.” (ACOL, T3:21.10 – 21.11)

We are moving into a new identity now, an identity that is shorn of the ego. This will make all the difference, though we have not fully left the patterns of the egoic self behind. Our personal self will continue to survive only as a non-egoic self that we present to others, our brothers and sisters. We won’t dip into egotism when we show ourselves to our brothers and sisters, though. We will live with heads high, representing our inner Christ Self with an outer self that is the “personal” self.

We need to accept our new identity with a certainty that we lacked when we were controlled by the ego. This will take some doing. Our ability to be certain of anything has been sadly lacking. But now we can truly and completely accept our new self, a new personal self honed by the new tenets that the Christ-Self has learned through A Course of Love. We can live better for the first time in our lives.

What does this mean? What does “living better” really mean? We have left our fears behind, left them because fears are egoic in nature. We know a calmness that we have never known before. Sure, the feeling still comes and goes. But the calmness is real. And in our better moments, we know that we are living closer to God than we ever have before.

Let the part of our identity that is the Christ-Self, a part of God, speak to us today. Let the calmness that is in our heart overtake our personality, our persona, and give us the grace to live well.

Prayer

It behooves me to “walk my talk,” and calmness is something that I am reaching for today. Help me to feel it. Indeed, thank You for the greater calmness that has developed for me over this morning. Thank You for being there for me.

Your love is palpable to me today. I sense that Your concern is real, that You know what my concern is, and that You reach out to me in comfort. I am blessed to feel Your warmth.

Thank You.

Amen.