The Order of Service

Excerpt from
A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles
by Marianne Williamson
Read by Barbara Schuderer
Noel's Stepmother

In the enlightened world, we will still drop the body.  But death will be experienced very differently.  It is written in "The Song of Prayer," an extension of A Course in Miracles:

This is what death should be; a quiet choice, made joyfully and with a sense of peace, because the body has been kindly used to help the Son of God along the way he goes to God.  We thank the body then, for all the service it has given us.  But we are thankful, too, the need is done to walk the world of limits, and to reach the Christ in hidden form and clearly seen at most in lovely flashes.  Now we can behold Him without blinders, in the light that we have learned to look upon again.

We call it death, but it is liberty.  It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release.  If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended.  Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us.  For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His voice, the word of God, more certainly our own.

This gentle passage to a higher prayer, a kind forgiveness of the ways of earth, can only be received with thankfulness.

Life is much more than the life of the body; it is an infinite expanse of energy, a continuum of love in countless dimensions, a psychological and spiritual experience independent of physical form.  We have been alive forever.  We will be alive for evermore.