03.02.25 "Happy Birthday to the Community Miracles Center"

38 years ago on March 1, 1987 a group of ACIM students gathered in a small office space in the Haight / Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco on a Sunday morning. Although these ACIM students and many others had been meeting in that space already several different times during the week to study ACIM for almost 2 years, that Sunday was different because that Sunday was the first time we were meeting as the CMC. Except only I (Rev. Tony) and our co-founder (Rev. Larry Bedini) knew about the change. (See picture of us above taken just a few months before.) For the others there, it was the regular Sunday morning meeting that had been going on for some time.

Before that Sunday morning in March a different legal church corporation had been in charge. The attendees didn’t see much difference because I had been the President of that first church organization too. However that church dissolved because the Board of Directors got hopelessly conflicted over the direction we should be headed. The lease to the office space was in my name so ... I just continued and formed a new organization to take the place of the one leaving. While we celebrate this as our birthday, it is really our continuing day. I like that because it matches a teaching in ACIM. "Real birth is not a beginning; it is a continuing. Everything that can continue has been born." (Tx.5.47) "Happy 38th Continuing Day to the CMC!”

I am blessed to have had the CMC in my life for the better part of 4 decades now. I am blessed by all the sisters and brothers who have participated and added their energy. Many have come and engaged for awhile and then moved along. There are a few who have come and stayed. If you are not one of the long standing ones, I invite you to consider becoming one with those who have stayed. All you have to do is … keep coming back.

Today I feel especially blessed and grateful for those few who have been around for decades with me. For me, they are what ACIM calls the 3rd level of teaching. "The third level of teaching occurs in relationships which, once they are formed, are lifelong. These are teaching-learning situations in which each person is given a chosen learning partner who presents him with unlimited opportunities for learning. These relationships are generally few." (Mn.3.5) You could also say these relationship are involved with 3rd level healing.

There is a willingness amongst these few to look at our lives together with honesty, and to support each other when apparent needs inevitably arise, and of course they do. When they do we have to look at them, and it is so much better to look at them with the help of “mighty companions.” That’s what you gain when you stick around a long time – "mighty companions." "The fear of healing arises, in the end, from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. Man is not willing to look on what he has done to himself." (Tx.2.69) These few who have stayed with the CMC for decades are willing to look at what they have done to themselves. They are those who have accepted healing is sometimes unequivocally necessary, and are thus unafraid to look, at those times, at what we have done to ourselves.

In other words, we have to able to look at ourselves and each other with a critical eye and a willingness to identify disfunction as disfunction. Until we do this healing will frighten us. And if we are frightened of healing we won't do it. People automatically back away from what frightens them. I am sure that some who participated with the CMC but then backed away were probably just frightened of the healing that would happen with sustained engagement. In short, committed relationships are scary. Hence, "These relationships are relatively few.” (Mn.3.5) Today, blessed be to those few. You know who you are. You all have a sacred place in my heart. And I have more open sacred places in my heart for our newer members. I hope they will fill them. Just keep coming back.

Happy Birthday to the CMC.

25 min.
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