What Does ACIM Miracle Principle 18 Really Say About Homosexuality? (A Course in Miracles)

Описание: Here at the Circle we get a lot of questions about the reference to homosexuality that appears in Chapter 1 of the Text (under Miracle Principle 18) in A Course in Miracles. This reference is frequently misunderstood and so, in this video, Circle of Atonement executive director Emily Bennington shares our understanding of the principle's true message. For convenience, a transcript is posted below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone! Happy Pride.

On behalf of all of us at the Circle, it’s my great pleasure to celebrate and support our friends and students in the LGBTQ community.

You may know that the primary goal of the Course is to lead us to a place where we have the inward ability to see God’s holiness in all things. From a Course perspective we are all holy, all equal, and we all have the same eternal dignity and worth. In the Course, every month is Pride.

But as we take this time to honor our LGBTQ community, it feels important to us to also take a moment and clear up a fairly common misperception of material that appears near the beginning of the Course.

In the first chapter of the Text, under Miracle Principle 18, there is a line that says “Homosexuality is lacking in love only to the extent it is based on the principle of exclusion."

This line creates a lot of confusion and so I want to unpack it a bit. For starters, we know even at this early point in the Course that a miracle is primarily defined as an expression of love – and Miracle Principle 18 begins by stating that to love each other, to offer a miracle, is the maximal service one person render to another. It’s a way of recognizing their infinite value and our own at the same time.

But if we withhold our love from someone else, then both their worth and our own is limited in our eyes. And so when Miracle Principle 18 says "Homosexuality is lacking in love only to the extent it is based on the principle of exclusion” that’s a massive statement because what’s being said here is that there is nothing wrong except that if you only love your own gender then you are excluding others and so it’s not universal love.

That’s it. As the principle goes on to say, "Everybody should love everybody."

And in the following sentence, where the Course says "It is wrong to deny the beauty of some souls because of body structures of which you are afraid”, this is not a judgement against same sex relationships. Bill Thetford – co-scribe of the Course – was gay and Jesus never condemned him for that. What this sentence means is that so often we make judgements based on how people look - what we like about their body and what we don’t - but we’re being called to something much higher.

The interesting thing about all the sex material in the Course is that Jesus is basically saying everyone is getting it wrong because we're all doing the same thing. We’re all constantly taking our true will to express love and distorting it into sexual impulses.

So in the next paragraph where the Course says “Heterosexual attitudes can be similarly distorted but do contain a more natural potential”, what he’s saying here is that heterosexual attitudes are also distorted because they exclude people from love too, but they contain a more natural potential for bearing children, which is not a statement of preference, it's a statement of biology. Heterosexual relations have the physical ability to produce children and the paragraph continues on to say that "Sex relations are intended for having children," much to our collective disappointment I’m sure.

But the Course isn’t just being puritan. It’s saying that viewing each other through the lens of sexual impulse isn’t the highest rung on the spiritual ladder. As I mentioned before, we’re being led on this path to see through the lens of universal love. To see God’s holiness in all beings. To see with vision.

We have so much work to do to get there, but it’s wonderful that we can also take moment to celebrate the work that has already been done thanks to the efforts of so many LGBTQ friends and supporters.

We love you and we hope you have a wonderful Pride. 🏳️‍🌈

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