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    Six Miracle Essays
    Six Miracle Essays
    Six Miracle Essays
    Ebook109 pages3 hours

    Six Miracle Essays

    By D. Patrick Miller

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    About this ebook

    A compilation of the "6 Miracle Essays" series, combining in one volume BACK TO THE REAL WORLD; CLIMBING THE STONE FACE OF FEAR; HOMELESS; A BRUTAL SADNESS: Capital Punishment and the Politics of Vengeance; ENDING MY RELIGION, and MIRACLES OVER THE LONG HAUL. This collection offers in-depth insights about the spiritual path known as "A Course in Miracles."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherD. Patrick Miller
    Release dateSep 24, 2011
    ISBN9781466009912
    Six Miracle Essays
    Author

    D. Patrick Miller

    Patrick D. Miller is Charles T. Haley Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the author of numerous books, including The Religion of Ancient Israel. He is coeditor of the Interpretation commentary series and the Westminster Bible Companion series. In 1998, he served as President of the Society of Biblical Literature. He was also editor of Theology Today for twenty years.

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      Book preview

      Six Miracle Essays - D. Patrick Miller

      6 MIRACLE ESSAYS

      by D. Patrick Miller

      © 2019 by D. Patrick Miller

      All Rights Reserved

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Back to the Real World

      Climbing the Stone Face of Fear

      Homeless

      A Brutal Sadness: Capital Punishment and the Politics of Vengeance

      Ending My Religion

      Miracles Over the Long Haul

      MIRACLE ESSAYS #1

      Originally published in THE SUN, August 1988

      ______________________________________

      Back to the Real World

      "I loose the world from all I thought it was."

      -- Workbook Lesson 132, A COURSE IN MIRACLES

      I HAVE lately been recalling a time in my life when everything in the world felt unreal to me. The sensation took hold in my early teens, held almost complete sway over my consciousness by age twenty, then gradually declined over the following five years. The feeling was at once so subtle and pervasive that it seemed impossible to discuss with anyone; to do so would have meant questioning my own sanity (which I was far more defensive about than I am today). So the sensation that nothing was real became a secret, as private as it was powerful.

      I felt a numbing gap between the things in the world and my experience of them, between my relationships and my emotions, and especially between my private thoughts and my effects in the world. It was as if my daily awareness were a cataract, a clouded lens that could not be cleaned or replaced. Frequently I had the troubling thought, I am not living my real life, and would subsequently experience a palpable fear that I might spend the rest of my days in this state, while the opportunity for a real life – whatever that might be – slipped farther and farther away. Thoreau’s observation that most men lead lives of quiet desperation held great significance for me. I felt poised upon the brink of a career in desperation, and I so admired my father’s stoic ways that I was likely to keep quiet about it forever.

      From a psychological perspective, I can diagnose this period as a kind of adolescent shock, which may be inevitable along the road from childhood naiveté to adult autonomy. It’s the shock that results from our so-called loss of innocence, as the perception of our parents as perfect and all-powerful protectors diminishes and is replaced by a need to make it on our own. It is difficult to imagine this transition taking place without deep emotional crises and some scarring. It may in fact be the toughest transition anyone makes; plentiful evidence exists that many people never complete it entirely, translating resentments against their parents into seemingly insoluble and repetitive arguments with friends, lovers, spouses and, all too often, their own children.

      Current psychotherapeutic treatment often consists of counselors’ helping clients come to terms with childhood and adolescent crises that have never ended, whose repercussions still shock them and distort their lives. Thus, maturity is arrested wherever pain lingers. Adult children of alcoholics is an apt label for the human condition that results from growing up caught in that particular web of woe. And anyone who cannot transcend the wounds of growing up remains, to some extent, an adult child.

      I now believe – as do many therapists – that true adulthood arrives with the capacity to forgive. By forgiveness, however, I do not mean the willingness to excuse someone else’s obvious or assumed guilt for the sake of magnanimity or simply to get past the past. Mature forgiveness is primarily an act of surrender, that is, the willingness to relinquish our most cherished and defensive beliefs about reality itself. That forgiveness may include releasing others from blame – and the emotional catharsis that brings – but it spreads far beyond that, as it calls out one’s own ego-based definitions of how things and people really are.

      For people unused to considering philosophical questions – and who consequently accept the version of reality passed on by society and advertised by its media – this forgiveness can be doubly difficult. It first requires accepting responsibility for one’s own perceptions and admitting that we do not all see the world the same way; a particular person’s view of the world at any moment is significantly colored by transitory emotions, recalcitrant prejudices, and deep complexes from personal traumas. For many, this realization would be a major philosophical achievement, requiring a degree of introspection that our society generally finds suspect. But the second step into real forgiveness – the willingness to surrender our most fundamental prejudices – is a great challenge indeed.

      This level of forgiveness can be reached meditatively through the Course in Miracles lesson, I loose the world from all I thought it was. In my experience, this more sophisticated forgiveness brings an unexpected result: joyful glimpses of a world of innocence, which I thought had disappeared forever with childhood. The real world is attained simply by the complete forgiveness of the old, suggests the Course Text in Chapter 16 – the world you see without forgiveness.

      Recalling the Confidence of Innocence

      The state of childhood innocence, which I would further define as consciousness undivided by fear, was poetically described by Wordsworth in Ode: Intimations of Immortality:

      There was a time when meadow, grove and stream

      The earth and every common sight

      Did seem to me

      Appareled in celestial light

      The glory and the freshness of a dream.

      My earliest memories come from such a world, where I ran through viney woods too fast to look where I was going, trusting that I could not be injured or get lost in natural surroundings that usually felt more comfortable than human company. My experience of the outdoors was instinctively shamanistic; I saw all things, stones as well as snakes, as beings with some kind of spiritual if unspoken intelligence, on equal footing with me. Only gradually did I become embarrassed about conversing with trees and animals – an embarrassment that no doubt increased in direct proportion to my desire to be grown-up.

      When my father told me that thunder resulted from God rolling a wheelbarrow over a great wooden bridge, that idea seemed both awesome and reassuring. But even at the age of five, I did not take the story literally, nor did I imagine a heaven physically placed in the universe where such a bridge could exist. I was aware even than that there could be other explanations for thunder; I was willing for more than one idea to be true without it negating another. I’m happy to say that I’ve recently regained at least a fragment of this innocent consciousness which, in allowing for a plurality of truths – mythic, emotional, poetic, and empirical – is actually more sophisticated than a narrowly scientific or religious state of mind. I think the fear of being seen as childish or crazy severely limits our enjoyment of the world around us, thus inducing a state of boredom that in turn gives rise to much of the stupidity and meanness that often seem to characterize the human condition. In fact, these ills signify that the dues we pay for adult respectability are too high, and bring some benefits of questionable value.

      Perhaps the most damaging sacrifice we make on the altar of adulthood is that of forgetting how to learn. We think it is natural that our capacity to learn decreases over time, and that the refinement of our senses and intellect requires a narrowing of interests. But we can see from watching infants that they are learning about everything all at once and all the time. It often appears to me that we take this great inborn learning capacity and gradually convert it to worry – a function of dubious usefulness that is nonetheless considered mature and inevitable, if not indispensable.

      What we lose thereby is what the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, in Think on These Things, called the confidence of innocence, the confidence of a child who is so completely innocent he will try anything. Krishnamurti clearly distinguished this inborn attitude from self-confidence, which he described as always colored by this arrogance of the self, the feeling ‘It is I who do it.’ He maintained that the development of self-confidence – an attitude highly valued in Western society – actually serves to keep our beliefs and behavior within the confines of societal expectations, and seriously blunts our true potential. It is innocent confidence that will bring about a new civilization, Krishnamurti suggested, but this innocent confidence cannot come into being as long as you remain within the societal pattern.

      Accepting the Defeat of Childhood

      I first read these thoughts of Krishnamurti during my adolescence – when my sense of unreality was coming on strong – and I found them at once absorbing, encouraging, disorienting, and aggravating. I mistook much of what he said about breaking free of social patterns as supportive of my youthful urge to rebel, and many years were to

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