A Course
In Miracles

Authorized Online Edition
Workbook For Students

 
 

13.

What Is a Miracle?

1. 1A miracle is a correction. 2It does not create, nor really change at all. 3It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false. 4It undoes error, but does not attempt to go beyond perception, nor exceed the function of forgiveness. 5Thus it stays within time’s limits. 6Yet it paves the way for the return of timelessness and love’s awakening, for fear must slip away under the gentle remedy it brings.

2. 1A miracle contains the gift of grace, for it is given and received as one. 2And thus it illustrates the law of truth the world does not obey, because it fails entirely to understand its ways. 3A miracle inverts perception which was upside down before, and thus it ends the strange distortions that were manifest. 4Now is perception open to the truth. 5Now is forgiveness seen as justified.

3. 1Forgiveness is the home of miracles. 2The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. 3Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. 4Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. 5And each is laid before the Word of God, upon the universal altar to Creator and creation in the light of perfect purity and endless joy.

4. 1The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. 2Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. 3And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there.

5. 1Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. 2Now they have water. 3Now the world is green. 4And every­where the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality.