News from the War

How are you handling it?

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

“It’s too beautiful to believe the war could come here.”

~ quote from a resident of Odesa on 3/20/22, via NPR journalist, Tim Mak

I’ve been able to do little else over the past 25 days but follow the horrifying news of war in Ukraine. It’s been bringing up scenes from my childhood with similar feelings — the pain of watching people suffer terribly, and the helplessness of not being able to do a thing about it.

As a 40 year student of A Course in Miracles, even when I’m immersed in the world around me, feeling whatever I’m feeling, lines from the book sometimes pop into my mind and ride alongside as I look at those scenes and feel the feelings they evoke.

Here’s the one that’s been coming to me the past few weeks:

Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God’s teachers.

To think that war and the suffering of people caught in it is only a dream seems blasphemous, cruel, and 100% ostrich.

And yet I can’t dismiss anything that comes from A Course in Miracles, because I’ve had experiences along that way that have demonstrated to me that these ideas are worth considering, and can bring surprising changes in situations over which I seem to have no control.

One of the main ideas in ACIM is that there is help available to every individual, in every circumstance, no exceptions. And the result of that help, if accepted, is to bring peace and healing to everyone involved in the situation. The Helper is called the Holy Spirit, but I call it Bob because the help available is not limited to those who favor Christian terminology.

“Don’t look away,” is a phrase often used on social media when someone is trying to call attention to injustice, cruelty, and the suffering of a group of people. That phrase has also been in the back of my mind as I scroll through photos of bloody bodies and blown up buildings. I don’t look away. Social media blocks gory photos and gives a warning so you have to click to see the image of a corpse. I click. Yesterday I saw a teenage Ukrainian girl lying in a hospital bed with a thickly bandaged stump of a leg. The caption says she refuses to eat. In another photo a hospital…