From Guilt to the Gift of Miracles: A Memoir of Mistakes Mended

By Frank West

Frank West courageously tackles one of the most important issues in A Course in Miraclesdealing with the ego mind. He is wonderfully open in sharing his intimate life experiences and dreams with us, modeling effective ways of not letting the ego block his return to Love. His authentic and well-written book will be a source of inspiration to many.
Henry Grayson, PhD, Author of Mindful Loving and The New Physics of Love

.....a remarkable memoir of lessons learned, of growth from illusionary ego-living to fulfillment and well-being where Peace and Love abide. ....a fascinating first book, Frank writes with great sensitivity and vulnerability that teaches without teaching. I commend it to all on the Journey.
Nan C. Merrill, author, Psalms for Praying

In Frank Wests beautiful memoir From Guilt to the Gift of Miracles, we find the journey of a
soul leading progressively through illusion, unhappiness and nightmares to a purging of darkness and the realization that; it is only as we learn to forgive and let go of illusion (i.e. nothing) that we can be healed ourselves and thereby have the opportunity of help others.

Jon Mundy Ph.D.
The Institute for Personal Religion - Publisher of Miracles magazine



In From Guilt to the Gift of Miracles, psychotherapist Frank West gives us an intimate and moving memoir of his lifes journey of over eighty yearsfrom his growing up poor in a Pennsylvania coal town during the Depression, through his war experiences during World War II, to his postwar search for inner peace and true contact with the miraculous. His search led him first to the Christian ministry, then to a career as a psychotherapist and family counselor, and finally to his discovery of the remarkable spiritual path known as A Course in Miracles. Frank offers the reader the opportunity to benefit in a very real way from the personal experiences he recounts here, for it is Franks belief that the way the therapist heals his patientand by extension, all his brothers and sistersis by doing the long, careful, and ultimately holy work of healing himself. That is the healing Frank offers us in this remarkable book. That, and his unmovable faith that each and every one of us has already in his own mind the Love that is his true home, and that, together, we will find it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 26, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469103952

Frank West

In “From Guilt to the Gift of Miracles”, psychotherapist Frank West gives us an intimate and moving memoir of his life’s journey of over eighty years—from his growing up poor in a Pennsylvania coal town during the Depression, through his war experiences during World War II, to his postwar search for inner peace and true contact with the miraculous. His search led him fi rst to the Christian ministry, then to a career as a psychotherapist and family counselor, and fi nally to his discovery of the remarkable spiritual path known as A Course in Miracles. Frank offers the reader the opportunity to benefi t in a very real way from the personal experiences he recounts here, for it is Frank’s belief that the way the therapist heals his patient—and by extension, all his “brothers and sisters”—is by doing the long, careful, and ultimately holy work of healing himself. That is the healing Frank offers us in this remarkable book. That, and his unmovable faith that each and every one of us has already in his own mind the Love that is his true home, and that, together, we will fi nd it.

Book preview

Copyright © 2008 by Frank West.

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Contents

A Note on Annotations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Preface

I     

Childhood

II     

Age Six

III     

Age Ten

IV     

Growing Up

V     

Devastation⁴

VI     

A Healing of a Belief in Deprivation and Loss

VII     

Healing the Need to Control Outcome

VIII     

Choosing Ministry

IX     

From the Army to the Ministry

X     

Three Rural Churches

XI     

Psychoanalysis

XII     

Love and Miracles: A Spiritual Path

XIII     

Love: Seek and Do Not Find

XIV     

The Affair: Awakening from the Dream of Guilt

XV     

The Affair in Retrospect

XVI     

Beyond This World

XVII     

The Fall

XVIII     

Unhappiness

XIX     

Two Body Shop Experiences

XX     

Choosing Life

XXI     

Two Gifts

XXII     

Healing the Nightmare

XXIII     

Purging of the Darkness

XXIV     

Purging of the Darkness—Continued

XXV     

The Parent-Child Special Relationship

XXVI     

The Holy Child Within

XXVII     

The Scream and the Miracle

XXVIII     

In Defenselessness Is My Strength

XXIX     

On Being Open to Listening

XXX     

Listening to the Voice Within

XXXI     

The Ego Speaks First—and a Correction Made

XXXII     

Reflections on the Body: A Limit on Communication

XXXIII     

Yearning for the Great Rays

XXXIV     

My Life in Retrospect: A Shifting of Purpose

Appendix

About The Author

A Note on Annotations

Most of the references and quotations in From Guilt to the Gift of Miracles are taken from A Course in Miracles. The Course consists of a Text, a Workbook for Students, a Manual for Teachers, and two supplemental pamphlets—Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process and Practice and The Song of Prayer.

Abbreviations are used as follows:

T:   Text         Intro:   Introduction

W:   Workbook for Students   P:   Psychotherapy: Purpose,

Process and Practice

M:   Manual for Teachers   S:   The Song of Prayer

Taking (T-26.IV.4:7) as an example of an annotation referencing A Course in Miracles, T stands for Text, 26 is the chapter number, the roman numeral IV is the section within the chapter, 4 is the paragraph number of that section, and 7 is the sentence number within the paragraph.

In some of the quotations, I have taken the liberty of changing pronouns at editors’ requests.

Every mistake must be a call for Love . . . . In justice, then, does Love correct mistakes, but not in vengeance. For that would be unjust to innocence.

All our mistakes we give to You, that we may be absolved from all effects our errors seem to have.

—A Course in Miracles

Dedication

It is with deepest gratitude that I dedicate this book to Kenneth Wapnick, PhD, who has dedicated his life to the teaching of A Course in Miracles via his Foundation for a Course in Miracles. Ken has been my mentor and beloved friend; it was he who first suggested I write something. And when I said, What on earth would I write about? he replied, Your life. So trusting his love, I decided to do so.

Acknowledgments

The form this book has taken was made possible only by the contributions of two people whom I have had the great privilege of helping in their journey toward discovering Love’s presence in themselves. One is Nan Merrill, a woman of great heart, a spiritual writer, lecturer, and healer, who has edited this work. The other is Chad Hardin, composer and musician, whose gentle compassion shines in his musical creations and in his own writing ability. This book could not have come to be without their continued devotion and steady encouragement.

Introduction

In our journey through life, we are bound to meet fear face-to-face. And myriad are the varieties and degrees of fear’s many faces! Sooner or later, we usually find that we are carrying much unneeded baggage, the residue of fears that have not been faced and which have moved into our psyche. So getting from misery to miracles is a process of undoing our learned misperceptions and recognizing our true Being: love, peace, joy. Blessings and grace abound for those individuals who experience a sudden internal shift, an instant metanoia, an unbidden conversion of the mind. But for most of us, a much-longer, step-by-step process of facing our fears until they are transformed into love seems to be the norm—a road often filled with detours and delays, regressions and retreats.

Much of my life has been fraught with fear, sometimes even terror, with the suffering, pain, mistakes, and ego illusions that follow. Mending my mistakes has become a life-giving pilgrimage over the past twenty-plus years, so now in my eighties, I live in relative peace; I have moved from misery to miracles, from terror to trust. To share my journey through fear is to become vulnerable. Yet I have chosen to do so with the hope that others may garner some insights for their own journey through life. My chosen path toward peace has been A Course in Miracles. Of course, the paths that lead to the One Source are myriad, and we are free to choose one that resonates in our hearts and minds as appropriate for us.¹ For each of us yearn at the deepest level to awaken and connect to the divine, to peace, love, and joy as we wend our way Home.

Some of us find our most relevant path early in life. Others, like myself, try one form after the other, each failing in some way to satisfy that persistent inner call to return to Love. Thus, I spent considerable time following what I thought was the Christian path while never really being satisfied intellectually or spiritually. Despite long years of study of biblical literature, exegesis of Greek and Hebrew texts, and a study of systematic theology leading to ordination as a minister, something crucial always seemed to be missing.

Part of the process of preparation for parish ministry required two summers of clinical training in either a mental hospital, general hospital, prison, or reform school. I chose to intern as a chaplain in a mental hospital in Washington DC and later in a boys’ reform school in St. Charles, Illinois. Both of these experiences led me to the study of psychoanalysis, to experience psychoanalysis itself, and later to enter training as a psychotherapist, all of which I thought would bring me a sense of inner completion. In the course of all this, I discovered the necessity for examining the repressed unconscious horrors of my mind that were the source of my life of misery and pain. I saw the freedom I experienced when I exposed these hidden dark thoughts to the light of day and acknowledged the insanity of them. One might say I am a slow learner, for I spent twenty-five years on that path. And it was exceedingly helpful, for it convinced me that the source of my unhappiness lay within my own distorted mind and not in the people or events in the world I was tempted to blame.

Yet as helpful as all this was, something was still missing. I just couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. All I knew was that I still had that sense of unfulfillment. Then about twenty-five years ago, I was introduced to a unique spiritual path that provided the missing piece—forgiveness. But it was forgiveness of a different kind than I had heretofore known, for it was based on the radical idea that there is nothing to forgive. Should the reader be troubled by this notion, be assured I will later do my best to explain how this idea can be understood.

My wife, Martha, brought this gift to me shortly after we made a major move from New York to Connecticut. Martha made a new friend who introduced her to a group that was studying a book with an unusual title, A Course in Miracles. She bought the book, began reading it, and joined the group. Not long after that, she said to me, Frank, I think you would find this book interesting. I demurred, thinking in my usual arrogant manner that I knew all there was to know. Also, I was suspicious of the idea of miracles. Fortunately, being aware of my stubbornness, Martha persisted. Wishing to put an end to her persistence, I acquiesced and decided to at least take a look at it. I was immediately hooked! Here was the only spiritual path I knew that was nondualistic, psychologically sophisticated, intellectually challenging, and directed to the Western mind. Finally, it satisfied that deep inner longing that had dominated all my life.

As I studied the Course, I had that warm internal feeling of at last coming home. Not that I understood what I had read—more of that came later—but a sure and certain awareness that there was something about the writing that aroused an instant yes from within the deepest part of me. Many passages moved me deeply; their beauty and gentle truth—their fullness—were so intense! Other passages were annoying, puzzling, troubling; and I wanted to skip over them, ignore them, and I often did so. Yet I was drawn to this book and instantly decided to devote the rest of my life to the study of it. In essence, it made sense and gave meaning to my quest for life . . . Life.

Here I had thought the motive for our move from New York was to be near our two young grandchildren and their parents in Connecticut. That was indeed so, but in retrospect, it now seems the superficial geographical change rather resulted in a profound internal change for both Martha and me.

In the chapters that follow, I aim to illustrate how I have come to interpret the events of my own life in the light of this profound internal change. I present them with the fervent hope that they may in some measure inspire some readers to seek to find the same peace that I have found as a consequence of my devotion to the study of the ideas to be found in A Course in Miracles.

To help the reader who may know nothing of the Course, let me sketch some of its ideas and explain how it came to be written.

A Course in Miracles began when Helen Schucman and William Thetford, both professors of medical psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, decided to join in a common goal. In the words of Helen:

Psychologist, educator, conservative in theory and atheistic in belief, I was working in a prestigious and highly academic setting. And then something happened that triggered a chain of events I could never have predicted. The head of my department unexpectedly announced that he was tired of the angry and aggressive feelings our attitudes reflected, and concluded that, there must be another way. As if on cue I agreed to help him find it. Apparently this Course is the other way. (T-Preface.2)

To paraphrase what happened next: For three startling months preceding the actual writing, Bill had suggested that Helen write down the highly symbolic dreams and descriptions of the strange images that she was experiencing. Although she had become fairly accustomed to the unexpected by that time, she was still surprised the day she wrote, This is a course in miracles (her introduction to the Voice). Though she heard no outer sound, Helen began to receive a kind of rapid, inner dictation, which she wrote and saved in a shorthand notebook. The writing was never automatic, for she could be interrupted at any time and later listen to the Voice again at will. Though it felt strange and very uncomfortable, Helen never seriously felt any need to stop as if it were a special assignment that she had somehow, somewhere, agreed to complete. The long collaborative venture that ensued between Bill and Helen became a strong and significant part of the whole project. Helen would take down the words of the Voice, read it to Bill the next day, and then he would type it out as he would any dictation. Each of them seemed to have been given this special assignment—for without Bill’s encouragement, support, and their mutual perseverance, Helen could easily have given up this unbidden work of