What is happening today is that there are millions of children who are not lifted up to the first rung of the ladder. Then they are condemned when they don't know how to climb from there.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.

First there was the word. A Course in Miracles says that prayer is the "medium of miracles." It's the realm of thought where we are aligned with the thought of God and therefore in a co- creative mode. It's where we surrender our minds to His mind and become empowered.

It can take years of tears to melt the hardness that develops in this world, covering our tender, gentler inner selves. Tears for every devastating loss, tears for every humiliating failure, tears for every repeated mistake. Those who honor those tears, and even honor them, are not failures at love but rather its true initiates. First the pain and then the power. First the heart breaks and then it soars.

Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.

All manifestation of fear is a reflection of the fact that humanity has forgotten its spiritual identity. In beginning to remember it, we put fear on notice that its days are numbered.

Forgiveness is the key to inner peace because it is the mental technique by which our thoughts are transformed from fear to love.