If you’ve followed your reading of A Course of Love with “Mirari,” you may have been surprised at the difference between the two. It might have been disconcerting at first, as it was to me. The hardest part of getting “Memoria,” the second book of Mary ready for publication, has been wanting to edit myself out and feeling like I left too much in. I would go back and forth with it. It felt more like the writing I share in “The Jesus Chronicles,” than like A Course of Love. If I was writing “to” Jesus as well as receiving “from” Jesus, I would share my life along with my questions. 

After I’d submitted “Memoria” for editing and design, I took a little more “of me” out. I would have taken a lot more out except that it was getting expensive. I basically didn’t want to get it “wrong,” and there were a dozen ways in which I could do that.

As I was contemplating this, I remembered this section from “Mirari,” that is exactly about that worry of getting “it” (whatever that “it” may be) “wrong.” 

The resistance to being “wrong” is a more powerful resistance than you can imagine, a maker of history on earth. You have felt it often enough to know its power to make you cling to “rightness.” And you know now that you have also clung to it when the time for it has passed. That you have humility is one of the qualities that make you available to a new way of viewing the whole field of right and wrong. And in your humility, I know you have suffered many blows inflicted by benevolent arrogance.

We accept these blows for you now and transmute them into humble strength that does not deny the truth. We will do this for all willing to accept “that we can”—that we are the great transmuters. Are you willing? Are you willing to accept that we can really change things? That you can really change in ways that will not leave you as undefended as you have been? Ways that will find you being able to be bolder than you have thought yourself to be? And do you know why I have asked?

I’m sure there’s a reason.

I have asked because you have already been undefended and bold. You just have not realized it. This is why you are so humble but also why you lack confidence. You can be both—humble and confident—by simply seeing yourself as you already are, without your old image of who you are. So, so many of your sisters are the same way. Undefended and bold is perfect. Humble and confident—is perfect!

It’s really a commentary on realization! Even revelation! When I find out something new about myself, it is always sort of insanely obscure, and obvious . . . at the same time.

I leave you with these questions, questions that you could apply to anything that may make you less confident than you would like to be . . . or . . . make you feel less confident than you actually are!

Are you willing?

Are you willing to accept that we can really change things?

That you can really change in ways that will not leave you as undefended as you have been? Ways that will find you being able to be bolder than you have thought yourself to be?

And I would add a few more: 

Are you willing to change your mind about how you have been? 

Are you willing to realize that you may already have been bold and willing (or fill in your own words) and just not realized it? 

Is changing our “idea” of who we are one of our most necessary changes as we enter The New?

Mirari: The Way of the Marys, 168-69