Cameo 9 – Mrs. Albert, Miracle Worker
January 27, 2021
The material in this essay provides a snapshot of what a miracle worker looks like, what it means to come under Jesus’ direction. Helen and Bill were urged to take Mrs. Albert as a model. We know little about Mrs. Albert, other than she and Helen are both friends of Dave Diamond, a man that is in the hospital with a terminal illness (we’ll learn more about Dave in Cameo 10).
Jesus tells Helen that she forgets people’s names not out of indifference or hostility, but rather as a way to hold them at a distance and protect them from her projections. We are learning that projection is a form of sticking other people with our own internal conflict or judgements. So you can see how Helen or anyone might devise a strategy to protect people from what is being “hurled” at them by our projections. In Helen’s case, the strategy is to forget their name.
Helen commented that the strategy was more than just avoiding projection. Her insight (which she had written in an earlier note, prior to the Course dictation) was that forgetting names allowed her to avoid situations where “one is getting and the other losing.” She wanted to avoid any interaction of domination or subservience between herself and others. Jesus likens the strategy to a phobia, where a person tries to isolate their fear to one object, person or idea.
An example Jesus provides is how Helen becomes furious at her husband, Louis, for leaving things laying around the home. Helen was isolating her anger around one particular issue in order to protect Louis from her awareness that she does not love him the way she should.
Can you think of an example in your own life of how you become irrationally angry at a person you love over a trivial issue?
Helen had made her misnaming error with Mrs. Albert at the bedside of Dave Diamond. She called her Mrs. Andrews, and was corrected. The correction from Mrs. Albert came without any hostility.
“She is not afraid, because she knows she is protected.”
Mrs. Albert was unembarrassed by Helen’s error, and merely corrected the fact, not focused on the error.
“She was also quite unembarrassed when she told you that everything should be done to preserve life, because you never can tell when God may come and say ‘Get up, Dave,’ and then he will…She did not ask what you believed first, and afterwards merely added, ‘and it’s true, too.’
Here we can see what conviction offers the miracle worker. Mrs. Albert believed in the first principle of miracles: there is no order of difficulty among them. Dave may be on his death bed with a poor prognosis, but Mrs. Albert knows that all things are possible with God and He may very well tell Dave to get up out of the bed. She had pure conviction. This is something that is still lacking in Helen and Bill.
Jesus explains that this statement from Mrs. Albert meets his definition of a miracle.
Here are a few principles that we can apply to both Mrs. Albert’s witnessing for God and Jesus to Helen; but also principles that are inferred by her conviction in God’s ability to heal:
- #1 – no order of difficulty. God can always step in and heal.
- #7 – they are a form of healing. In this case, Helen was being healed by the conviction demonstrated to her by Mrs. Albert. That was the miracle Jesus pointed out. But you can also that Mrs. Albert was affirming the concept that God could heal Dave.
- #9 – they reverse the physical order. Dave’s medical diagnosis is inconsequential.
- #15 – each day should be devoted to miracles. Jesus tells us that Mrs. Albert is “working miracles every day.”
- #22 – miracles affirm your acceptance of God’s forgiveness by extending it to others. This is exactly what Mrs. Albert did by overlooking Helen’s error with her name. Her overlooking was total forgiveness.
- #39 – Truth is always abundant. Mrs. Albert came from a place of total conviction and abundance of light, she was thus quick to dissolve error and dispel darkness. She had “abandoned deprivation in favor of the abundance [she] had learned belong to [her].”
I agree with Robert Perry that there are clues that Mrs. Albert was a Christian, most obvious being that Jesus tells Helen that Mrs. Albert is witnessing for him. We should take away from this cameo an appreciation of the power of conviction and belief in God. If this was a daily habit for Mrs. Albert, then we can assume that she was driven by her strong faith in God every single day. This faith lifted her out of the mundane habits and beliefs of this world and put her in a constant state of “ready” to perform miracles, to witness to Jesus, and to always accept the possibility that God will step in in miraculous ways.
Practice Suggestion
Today, I accept the abundance of light and spirit that belongs to me.