A Book You Can’t Buy from Me: A Course in Miracles (Volume I, Text)
Author: Helen Schucman
Date: 1975
Publisher: Foundation for Inner Peace
ISBN: 0-9606388-0-6
Length: 622 pages
Quote: “The head of my department...announced that he was tired of the angry and aggressive feelings our attitudes reflected, and concluded that, ‘there must be another way.’...I agreed to help him find it...Bill suggested that I write down the highly symbolic dreams and descriptions of the strange images that were coming to me.”
If Schucman had held that thought, “These are some very Jungian dreams in which I’m receiving huge masses of soothing, hypnotic, abstract words to help Bill Thetford” (the colleague who transcribed her words) “and me and our co-workers sound less hostile at the office,” her Course in Miracles would have represented an emotional breakthrough. Schucman’s angry atheism mellowed into a bland New Age spirituality. Evidently it worked enough of a “miracle” for her and her co-workers that people encouraged her and Thetford to have the whole ream of transformational thoughts printed.
But no. She had the temerity to present these dreams of hers in the form of a sort of Third Testament in which she claims that Jesus reappears, retracts the Law and the Prophets, and gives humankind a whole new set of spiritual teachings that happen to sound just like Buddhism.
I received a copy of this book. The cover was moldy but the pages within were clean. I read about half the words Schucman utters as if they were new words from Jesus Christ, and decided that, although I could have resold them if Schucman had represented the same words as coming from herself during a process of reconciliation with the faith of her ancestors, in good conscience, I can’t resell them as they are. They are the rambling thoughts of a deeply troubled soul at the very beginning of this process of reconciliation. They might have some psychological value, especially if anyone had known Schucman well enough to pin them to any real-world experiences she had had and was having at the time. They do not have spiritual value; they are not the words of Christ, as they pretend to be.
I sell all kinds of books by people who understand the Bible in different ways, some of which I believe are mistaken. If asked, and usually I’m not asked, I tell people that I believe those of us who sincerely practice what we understand of Christ’s teachings will find out who was right about the interpretation of this or that Scripture in Heaven.
I sell books by people who reject the Bible, also. If they write from within other traditions, what they have to say can be very enlightening for Christians. What (in alphabetical order) Buddhists, Communists, Hindus, Humanists, Jains, Jews, Muslims, Neo-Pagans, and agnostic-scientific Rationalists have to say, where they agree and disagree with Christians and why, is worth knowing. And in fact, although as a Christian I believe we should always heed the Bible over the non-Christian world, I also observe that the non-Christian world has historically presented serious opposition to Christianity when Christianity needed some correction. Nature-worshipping groups would not need to rebel against Christianity (in which most of those individuals were brought up) if Christians practiced stewardship of the Earth. Islam would not be making converts in Christian countries if Christians sincerely practiced their faith through daily prayer and obedience to the Bible. Worship of an atheistic totalitarian government, which has to be one of the most unattractive religions ever promulgated, might exist today if Christians applied their religious beliefs to their secular business, but Karl Marx’s books would have interested only his psychiatrist. Radical Christianity listens to all of these people, and prays for them.
And if Schucman had said things, throughout this book, like “Then the voice in my (Helen’s) dream said...” I’d sell her book too. But she doesn’t. She continually speaks in the voice of a false Christ who says things that are opposite to what the real Christ actually said. Her false Christ is contemporary, sexist, and also proof that the Internet was not necessary to allow people to ramble endlessly without ever making a specific point. Her verbiage all sounds pleasant enough, recalling memories of the teachings of all the world’s religions, mostly in blank verse though it was printed as space-saving prose, and as such it may well have worked to soothe the inner mental conflict that was apparently making Schucman a center of psychological tension at the office—but when it means anything, most of what it means is false to Christ’s teachings and false to what life teaches each of us about the real world.
If I’d had Volume II, Workbook instead of Volume I, Text I might have a clearer mental picture of Helen Schucman’s emotional transformation. I don’t. All I have, or rather had, was Text. And I’ve recycled it, because I refuse to participate in blasphemy. My advice to readers is, if you read Schucman’s work at all, constantly remind yourself that this is a very generalized, privacy-protecting, ego-defending record of the first stage of a neurotic atheist’s inner healing.
When she says “that all the attack you perceive is in your own mind and nowhere else,” for example, she is not dispensing sound advice for the world, but she was reporting sound advice for herself and her co-workers at a specific time. One can easily picture the lone token woman in a department full of men perceiving her co-workers as subtly attacking her, and being perceived by them as subtly attacking them, when “all the attacks they perceived were in their own minds and nowhere else,” simply because in 1975 men and women had heard a lot of misleading messages about how to communicate with each other. Differences in socioeconomic background or temperament could easily produce similar levels of tension today, because, unlike differences in gender and ethnic background, they have not been talked about and are still sore spots for many people.
And what sort of “miracles” does applying this misguidance work in real life? Well, picture a junior worker or a token minority or female worker, who is resented because person’s competence makes others feel that they look bad. Picture the senior co-workers feeling far too insecure just to say to the junior or token, “If you keep working as efficiently as you do, we’re all afraid that we’ll be chosen for downsizing rather than promotions or merit raises.” They just want this person to go away, at any cost. So, depending on how sophisticated they are, they might opt for a “hazing” campaign—orders are not relayed to the victim, dirty food wrappers are stuffed into the victim’s coat pockets, the outhouse is pushed over when the victim is in it—or just a perpetual whine, “But nobody liiikes Tracy.” Office managers would be more useful to companies if they were trained to look for superior performance as the real reason why “nobody liiikes Tracy,” but they’re not, so only the ones who’ve been in that situation themselves are likely to interpret it correctly: “In the absence of valid objective concerns about things Tracy does that actually affect the company, co-workers’ not liiiking Tracy can only mean that the co-workers are insecure about their own performance, and will place those co-workers on the short list for downsizing. Co-workers who want to keep their jobs will learn to get along with Tracy.”
But picture the more typical office manager whose preparation for her job consisted of studying things cranked out by labor unions led by those less-competent types, such that she blames Tracy for some sort of vaguely defined “lack of soft skills.” What those “soft skills” are is never explained and there’s no way, however charming or attractive or even genuinely kind Tracy may be, that Tracy will ever be considered to have added them to that horrid ability to work more efficiently than the others do. What Tracy really needs is a job with more interpersonal distance built into it. Suppose that no such job becomes available. Tracy feels a need for a miracle. Tracy buys A Course in Miracles and resolves unilaterally to do what worked for Schucman, Thetford, and the others collectively. “I will not use anything I learned in the past. I will myself to believe that I am God, or am ‘one with’ God, and have the power to confer a spiritual rebirth on people without their knowing it. I will myself to believe that nobody has ever attacked me in any way.” (After all, the misunderstandings in Schucman’s office started with misinterpretation of innocuous behavior as attacks, so Schucman’s false Christ is telling the world that all behavior is innocuous.) Suppose that, being very young and naive, Tracy actually tries treating hostile co-workers as if they weren’t hostile. What happens next?
Duh. Now the co-workers have what they want—a “reason” not to liiike Tracy. Obviously, Tracy is stupid! Amidst escalating hostilities the co-workers sweetly ask the management whether the company doesn’t need more drug tests. Tracy’s behavior is so weird...
I think the reason why so many expensively produced copies of A Course in Miracles have been sold is that few people actually slog through enough of Schucman’s pious verbiage to realize how harmful her counsel can be to people whose situations are different from hers—e.g. where there is real resentment of the token woman in the department, as distinct from lack of experience of cross-gender (or cross-cultural or inter-generational) collegiality. And, of the people who read this book, most are probably old enough to read between the lines and recognize this book as the baby-babble of a halfway converted, uninstructed infant-in-the-faith. Schucman was a teacher, channelling this guidance to teachers, at a prestigious university, and was expected to speak in the tone of authority. But I treated myself to the experience of reading this book critically while rereading the Christian nonfiction of Dorothy Sayers, and the difference between baby-Christian-babble and the works of a real Doctor of the Faith is overwhelming.
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