When we talk to people about A Passover Ritual for Students of A Course in Miracles©, the first question is always the same, "What are you going to do about the language?"

Not, "How are you going to deal with the concept of Jesus as an Elder Brother in a Jewish Ritual?" But rather, a question focused on either the masculine terminology for God (i.e. Father, Brother, Sons), or a question on the unnatural way that the course uses "Shakespearian English" and the double negatives.

Most Students of the Course have a story about throwing away their first copy because the language was so annoying. We have come to believe that the Course deliberately uses inflammatory language (including Christ and Jesus) to encourage us to look at our reactions and to ask for help seeing things differently.

The Course says that as you go along this path, bodies becoming less persistent in your mind, until they are like a cloud around a person's essence. As we have worked with and internalized these words,

Our personal experience is that gender, disabilities and sexual orientation become less important as an identifiers. Nothing in the world has changed, but the amount of energy we have around these traits has diminished greatly. Over time, the heavy-handed use of masculine language has become unimportant and has ceased to annoy us.

That said, it is not our role to annoy or provoke a negative reaction in the participants of this ritual. So, we have paraphrased most references to the Course into contemporary American English and have listed the reference to the original passages in the Appendix. Our goal is to have a smooth flowing ritual accessible to Students and non-Students.

A Course in Miracles© is very clear that it is a self-study program. It makes no reference to study groups, yet the material is dense and challenging and people naturally gather to share in the study process.

We see this ritual as another step in this very human desire to share our process and our spiritual growth. This ritual is completely fabricated and we encourage you to change it to make it come alive for you, your family and your community.

At our website, there is a bulletin board (CHAG or Creative Haggadahs = Attentive Guests) where you can access this ritual as a word document. This will facilitate your personalizing it and/or creating your own ritual.

If you are unfamiliar with the concepts behind A Course in Miracles©, the most challenging idea is probably our non-dualistic understanding of God.

The best parable about non-dualism comes from Eli Jaxon-Bear. He relates a story about the waves near a beach. The waves run back and forth, rolling and crashing, coming together, pulling back, regrouping and rushing towards the beach endlessly. Each wave is aware of its uniqueness: its height, strength and speed.

One day, a small seeker wave sees a large, old wave coming towards shore from far away. The small wave rushes out to greet the old wave and asks, "You have traveled far and seen much. Maybe you can tell me, is there such a thing as an ocean?"

The old wave smiled and replied, "I have heard of the ocean, but I myself have never actually seen it."

Non-Duality is the ocean of Oneness, which we are prone to forget as we focus on our "Specialness" like the waves. Our bodies constantly demand attention, focusing our minds on that which makes us separate and unique.

The Course teaches that there is a part of us that remembers the Oneness and can help us be more aware of the Oneness of ourselves, the Divine and everyone else. (This is referred to as Atonement. Some Students say, "At One Ment," but this is not really a Course term.) In this Haggadah, we use words like Indwelling Presence, God-Within, Divine Consciousness, as well as the Course's preferred term, Holy Spirit.

In this Haggadah, we use these terms: Indwelling Presence, God-Within, Divine Consciousness, as well as the Course's preferred term, Holy Spirit.

We have also leaned heavily on the very similar non-duality concepts of the Jewish mystics, favoring less familiar Hebrew names of God such as Atzilut (No Limits/Boundaries) or Ayn Sof (Infinite).

The Course, in the Introduction to the Clarification of Terms section explicitly says: "This is not a course in philosophical speculation, nor is it concerned with precise terminology. ... All terms are potentially controversial, and those seeking controversy will find it ..."

Do not get hung up on the words: words are symbols of symbols that fail to capture the true nature of the Divine. Our understanding of the Unknowable is, by definition, limited. So, like the blind men trying to describe an elephant, the best we can do is use a variety of words for Hashem, the traditional Jewish term for God, literally The Name. If any make you uncomfortable, please substitute another one.

Adonai Indwelling Presence Transformative Force Light Holy Spirit That Which Allows Being to Be Source Shadai (Almighty) Hashem (The Name) Beingness

Eheyeh asher eheyeh (I am that I am) Oneness God-Within Divine Consciousness Creative Force of the Universe Harachaman (All Merciful) Ribono Shel Olam (Master of the World) Shekhina (Feminine aspect of the Eternal One) Ayn Sof (Without End ­ There is nothing but God, it all flows from God)

A final thought on words and vocabulary. Some of the Hebrew transliteration will feel familiar, as it has come from traditional prayer books. The rest of the Hebrew prayers come from a Feminist Haggadah (identified with a and have feminine pronouns and gender-neutral or feminine names for Hashem.

There is an inherent inconsistency in using a feminized version of prayers that have been traditionally masculine and the prayer that begins I am not a body. Furthermore, the quotations selected from the Hebrew version of ACIM, use the word Creator/Feminine, for God, making the feminized prayers even more unnecessary. Finally, the whole idea of That Which Allows Being to Be having a gender is absurd.

Yet as much as I try to cultivate what Buddhists call Beginner's Mind (or the Course's Accepting that I do not Know what Anything is For in order to let go of assumptions and beliefs about the world), I carry my own personal history.

In our home, we started focusing seriously on Passover after receiving a Feminist Haggadah from a friend in the early 1990's. The feminist version of these prayers is our tradition. This Haggadah is a descendent of the 1980's radical feminist versions of the Passover Ritual, although I doubt that any of those writers would recognize it. Those Haggadahs, in turn, were descendents of Rabbi Arthur Waskow's Freedom Seder which was widely circulated in the 1970's.