Forgiving "A Course in Miracles"
ACIM 184: Looking past the gender-exclusive words to see the one Word.
Welcome to Daily Miracles, a running commentary on the 365 lessons of A Course in Miracles, an influential spiritual text from the 1970s. I am James Leroy Wilson and I invite you to join me as I go through this material for the first time.
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Lesson 184
The Name of God is my inheritance. (ACIM, W-184)
The human world is built on symbols. Symbols create an inner, non-physical world like the world of math. From that non-physical world comes the knowledge to build new things in the physical world. Likewise, words create ideas that create new words which evoke feelings and then misunderstandings.
For instance, one of the difficult things about these lessons is that they were written when masculine pronouns applied not only to males, but to all humans where gender was irrelevant. In reference to any "person on the street," he/his would be used.
Also, the Course uses the "Father-Son" metaphor of a relationship with the divine that has no gender.
But the words themselves - he, his, Father, Son - can't help but imply that maleness, and traits associated with masculinity, are the norm or the standard and the feminine is "lesser." Especially considering that women also had far fewer rights than men during most of history. The bias toward the masculine probably wasn't so much a defect in language as a reinforcement of patriarchy.
The masculine language of the Course is, or could be, a potentially hurtful reminder of that patriarchy. The Course didn't intend that, and was just using the normal usage of the time, but even as a man I find it annoying.
And that's just something I must forgive. This lesson, and all these lessons, are an example of what it's talking about. There is just one word, and it's not "Father," and it's not "His will." And we must look past all the other words to that one word that is both singular and infinite.
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