“Judgment is not an attribute of God.”
A Course in Miracles tells us that whenever we are contemplating attacking someone, it is as though we are holding a sword above their head. The sword, however, doesn’t fall on them but on us. Since all thought is thought about ourselves, then to condemn another is to condemn ourselves.
How do we escape judgment? Largely through a reinterpretation of what we’re judging. A Course in Miracles describes the difference between a sin and an error. ‘A sin would mean we did something so bad that God is angry at us.’ But since we can’t do anything that changes our essential nature, God has nothing to be angry at.
Only love is real. Nothing else exists. ‘The Son of God cannot sin. We can make mistakes,’ to be sure, and we obviously do. But God’s attitude toward error is a desire to heal us. Because we ourselves are angry and punishing, we have concocted the idea of an angry, punishing God. We are created in God’s image, however, and not the other way around.
As extensions of God, we are ourselves the spirit of compassion, and in our right minds, we don’t seek to judge but to heal. We do this through forgiveness. When someone has behaved unlovingly- when they yell at us, or lie about us, or steal from us-they have lost touch with their essence. They have forgotten who they are. But everything that someone does, says the Course, is either ‘love or a call for love.’ If someone treats us with love then of course love is the appropriate response. If they treat us with fear, we are to see their behavior as a call for love.
The American prison system illustrates the philosophical and practical difference between the choice to perceive sin or to perceive error. We see criminals as guilty and seek to punish them. But whatever we do to others, we are doing to ourselves.
Statistics painfully prove that our prisons are schools for crime; a vast number of crimes are committed by people who have already spent time in prison. In punishing others, we end up punishing ourselves. Does that mean we’re to forgive a rapist, tell him we know he just had a bad day and send him home? Of course not. We’re to ask for a miracle.
A miracle here would be a shift from perceiving prisons as houses of punishment to perceiving them as houses of rehabilitation. When we consciously change their purpose from fear to love, we release infinite possibilities of healing.
Forgiveness is like the martial arts of consciousness. In Aikido and other martial arts, we sidestep our attacker’s force rather than resisting it. The energy of the attack then boomerangs back in the direction. Forgiveness works in the same way. When we attack back, and defense is a form of attack, we initiate a war that no one can win. Since lovelessness is not real, we’re not at the effect of it in ourselves or others. The problem, of course, is that we think we are. In seeking a miracle, we don’t take part in life’s battles, but rather we are asking to be lifted above them. The Holy Spirit reminds us that the battle is not real.
“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” means “Relinquish the idea of vengeance.” God balances all wrong, but not through attack, judgment or punishment. Contrary to how it feels when we’re lost in the emotions that tempt us to judge, there’s no such thing as righteous anger. When I was a little girl, I would fight with my brother and sister, and when my mother came home she would be annoyed at us for arguing. One of us would always say, ‘They did it first.” It actually doesn’t matter who “did it first.”
Whether you’re attacking first or attacking back, you’re an instrument of attack and not of love.
Several years ago I was at a cocktail party where I got into a very heated debate about American foreign policy. Later that night, I had a kind of waking dream. A gentleman appeared to me and said, “Excuse me, Miss Williamson, but we thought we should tell you: In the cosmic roll call, you are considered a hawk, not a dove.”
I was incensed. “No way, “I said indignantly. “I’m totally for peace. I’m a dove all the way.”
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I’m looking on our charts, and it says very clearly right here: Marianne Williamson, warmonger. You’re at war with Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, the CIA, in fact the entire American defense establishment. No, I’m sorry. You’re definitely a hawk.”
I saw, of course, that he was right. I had just as many missiles in my head as Ronald Reagan had in his. I thought it was wrong for him to judge communists, but I thought it was okay for me to judge him. Why? Because I was right, of course!
I spent years as an angry left-winger before I realized that an angry generation can’t bring peace…Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. As Gandhi said, “We must be the change.” What the ego doesn’t want us to see is that the guns we need to get rid of first are the guns in our own head…”
excerpt from A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson
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