A Course of Love: An Overview

Note: A Course of Love: An Overview is available from Amazon for $3.95 (print; ebook). It is often helpful as an introduction to A Course of Love. The following excerpt is the preface to the booklet:

PREFACE

            The year was 2004, three years after Mari Perron had published the first part of f A Course of Love (also known by its acronym, ACOL) with New World Library.  Like Mari, I was living in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.  And, like Mari, I was a seeker.

            Some time had gone by since I had purchased and read the New World edition.  But I found myself  interested in having a conversation with Mari about A Course of Love, in part about the assertion I had read that Jesus had channeled this new work.   We met over coffee.  She was charming and articulate, but unassuming, just a “regular” person.  We were deep in conversation for over an hour.

            Mari’s daughter Mia came over to greet us.  Mari lamented that A Course of Love had not “taken off” the way that she would have liked.  Mia said something prophetic:  She said that it took a while for A Course in Miracles to take off, and that it would just take some time for A Course of Love to become known as well. 

As our conversation continued, Mari said, “I have been praying that someone would come to me to help me get the word out about A Course of Love.” 

I was stunned.  Mari thought that I was an answer to her prayer.

I thought she had the wrong person.  I was A Course in Miracles enthusiast, and I thought that she needed a younger generation to come along and help her. 

Now, twelve years later and seven years into writing a blog on both A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, I think Mari might have been right all along.  Right about a mission for me, right about Jesus as the one who channeled to her.    

Now many others are drawn to ACOL, due largely to Glenn Hovemann’s Take Heart Publications and the new combined volume.  Yes, Jesus’s professed “continuation” of A Course in Miracles has an ever-widening and increasingly enthusiastic audience.

To my mind Jesus had “unfinished business” with us after A Course in Miracles.  A Course of Love answers many of the questions that we have had after reading A Course in Miracles.  Now Jesus not only takes us by the hand and leads us beyond the ego, but he tells us how to establish a new identity—in this body but beyond this body, the “elevated Self of form.”

We are on the threshold of a newly created world.  The Voice that Mari heard as “thoughts she did not ‘think,” (D:12.11)  now made available to us in A Course of Love, counsels us to transform ourselves and our world.

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             This journey for me of writing this small book about A Course of Love would not have been possible without the assistance of Mari Perron, ACOL scribe, and Glenn Hovemann, ACOL publisher.  I thank Mari for her prayers and insight, and Glenn was his ever-supportive demeanor and editorial direction, as well as substantial contributions to the chapter, “Frequently Asked Questions / FAQ.”  And, finally, my heartfelt thanks to my husband Paul for everything.  He expressed his interest early in this project by telling me that he wanted to read what I was writing.  And he has.

–Celia Hales