A storybook in 7 pages
A 1976 book of spiritual instruction that presents itself as taken down, not authored, by a Columbia psychologist over seven years — and reached its widest audience only in 1992, through another writer's bestseller about it.
In 1965, Helen Schucman and William Thetford were psychologists at Columbia University's medical center, worn down by tension in their own department. As later accounts describe it, Thetford told Schucman there had to be another way of working together — and, half to her own surprise, she agreed to try to find it.
That October, Schucman told Thetford she had begun hearing an inner voice, which she said identified itself as Jesus, telling her: “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.” Unsettled, she called him for advice. He encouraged her to write down what she heard, and she did.
From 1965 to 1972, Schucman dictated what she heard and Thetford typed it, in sessions fitted around their working lives. Neither publicised it while it was happening. The resulting manuscript ran to well over a thousand pages, later organized into a Text, a Workbook, and a Manual for Teachers.
The Foundation for Inner Peace published A Course in Miracles in 1976, in the same three-part shape Schucman and Thetford had arrived at: a theoretical Text, a 365-lesson Workbook, and a short Manual for Teachers. It found readers slowly at first, mostly by word of mouth.
Students of the Course work through the Workbook's 365 numbered lessons, roughly one a day, each built around a single idea to hold in mind through the day's ordinary moments — an argument, a traffic jam, a hard thought about yourself. The Text explains; the Workbook is meant to be practiced.
In 1992, Marianne Williamson published A Return to Love, her own reflections on the Course, and discussed it on Oprah Winfrey’s show. The book became a bestseller, introducing far more readers to the Course than it had reached in its first sixteen years.
Christian theologians have said the Course redefines their own vocabulary — sin, salvation, Jesus — into something they don't recognize as Christian, and reject it on those grounds. And whether the voice Schucman described was what she said it was, no one after her can verify. The Workbook asks to be practised, not believed.
It is yours. Touch the chain.