Just Like Him

"Whenever you question your value, say: God HimSelf is incomplete without me." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 9, Section VII, 8:1-2

When we meet someone's children, it's very common for us to comment on how much like the parents the children are. "Oh, he's just like his father," we like to say. We find no cause for surprise in this... it's expected. And yet we base our religions on how unlike God we are... we're expected to focus on the litany of our shortcomings and sins, and to accept that we'll always fall short of the glory of God. We're expected to bow and recite and genuflect to this parent that we are nothing like... it's like being the ultimate foster child with a very stern, dysfunctional parent. It makes no sense at all.

The Reality of God isn't father or mother... God is Infinite Mind, Infinite Awareness, the Ocean of Consciousness in which we live and move and have our being. We speak of God as He only because we don't have a gender neutral pronoun in our language. I often use Self, because it describes most accurately our very Real relationship with this Infinite Awareness that we are. All our self-created individual identities veil this relationship, but do not and cannot sever it.

Our individuality was never meant to be separate... simply a current in the larger Awareness of Self, like a current in the ocean. The current is still ocean, and is completely dependent on the ocean to be at all. The current has all the qualities of ocean. Through the act of clinging to separate identities as autonomous and finite, we seem to lose our memory of the infinite nature of Self. But thank God our memory remains, unnoticed, like something so familiar and obvious that we no longer pay attention to it. And when our attention returns, when we forgive and release our stories of a separate self even temporarily, in that sacred stillness we discover our very own Self... closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet.

So the gist of all this is that we can have no real qualities or attributes that we don't share with God. We share the Wholeness, the Wisdom, the Peace, the Joy, the all-encompassing Love. God is All-Inclusive. And we (every living thing) are currents in the Mind of God, reflections of the Infinite nature of our True Self. We are chips off the proverbial block, the spitting image of our Source. We are just like Him.

"No attribute of His remains unshared by everything that lives." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 156, 3:2