As usual I stumble through the days, bleary but sincere. The hours pass like water and the river never seems to get anywhere. At 4 a.m. the light is darker, wetter. I walk the dogs tired, my thoughts angling slowly towards work. Teaching, writing . . . what I am doing? Who is paying attention?
And yet I keep going, as if matters. As if it does. I wrote that somewhere, a poem maybe? I find myself wishing the older dog could let go, just cross over. He sleeps fitfully by the bed, groaning and wheezing. He trembles when trying to stand and then stands staring at the wall as if looking for . . . what? Even writing it so simply makes me want to just bawl. The other day, I did.
Tomorrow I meet J. by the lake to walk and talk. Said goodby to M. the other day, the two of us walking in the rain and looking for Monarch Butterfly eggs. He seemed tall to me, perhaps because most of our meetings have been seated at tables, writing spread in front of us between coffee mugs. How lucky I have been in my friends, and yet they always seem to be leaving.
I told C. yesterday that I feel like a yo yo while sitting. I keep bouncing off the zafu with big ideas – a plot, a poem, a plan. I feel like a cart with big ideas, that doesn’t know how much depends on the horse which is still in the barn.
When I was little, all the Catholic kids got to leave school after lunch once a week and take Catechism classes in the town hall across the street.
I liked the walk over and the brief sense of freedom it offered. I have never been entirely comfortable inside any building – school or otherwise. The sky filled with clouds, the robins hopping through the tall grass alongside the road, the lilac bushes that stood on either side of the town hall door . . .
I always entered that place a little lifted, for no other reason than the two minute walk that led up to it.
Catechism itself wasn’t such a big deal. Mostly it was boring. I tried to sit where I had a good view out the window. Being able to see the outdoors meant I could entertain myself with day dreams.
One lesson I remember getting quite clearly however was the so-called Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The English version of this ancient ethic can be found in the Gospel according to Matthew. Whether the historical Jesus ever uttered it, I don’t know.
It has always struck me as being fundamentally sound.
It has – for this student anyway – at least one corollary in A Course In Miracles. Lesson 245 always makes me think of the Golden Rule, the way in which it can be applied.
The truth about the Workbook for Students is that some of the lessons feel dry to me. Some go right over my head. Still others annoy me and I end up perched on my zafu arguing with Jesus or Helen Shucman or Ken Wapnick or whoever.
I don’t let that stop me, by the way. The Course is clear that I don’t have to be a member of the ACIM Glee Club in order to learn from it. I just have to show up consistently.
But some lessons – Lesson 193 is another example – demand that I linger over them. I think all ACIM students have have Lessons like that – ones that seem to speak to us specifically, to answer deep-rooted questions, dissolve the intense illusions. They arrive like benedictions, like cool splashes of baptismal water.
Lesson 245 is one of those lessons for me. “Your peace is with me, Father. I am safe.”
It goes on to explain that God’s peace follows me – wherever I go, God’s peace is there as well. It touches everyone I meet, independent of any activity on my part. In fact, the prayer contained in that lesson beseeches God to send to me “those who suffer pain, or grieve for loss, or think they are bereft of hope and happiness” in order that I may extend his peace.
It is a lesson of service, a lesson of giving.
What appeals to me in it is its essentially radical passivity. It doesn’t tell me to walk around asking people, “Hey, how are you feeling today? Want a hug?” It doesn’t direct me in the specific way I will give God’s peace. There are no rules or regulations.
If I have the “little willingness” then it will be done. My job is mostly to be available.
The brief text accompanying the prayer makes clear that we are simply giving the same message of peace and hope and grace and Love that we received. No more, no less. I don’t have to build a church, or print and pass out a pamphlet, or be sure that every act is accompanied by some evangelical caveat – “This act of kindness was brought to you by Jesus Christ, courtesy of A Course In Miracles.”
This is the Peace that has no opposite, that underlies all of our efforts to dim it with illusions and appetites and personality and activity. The Course reminds me that when I withdraw fear all that remains is love, because Love is all there is.
So simple that I have made it trite over the years. But when I really hunker down and try to practice it, I catch glimpses of something real and absolute, fluid and electric. “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.”
Lesson 245 is a Course equivalent of the Golden Rule for the simple reason that I long for the peace it promises. I want to look into the face of all my brothers and sisters and see reflected there a Love that transcends what I can imagine, what I can create alone with the ego.
The Course assures me that notwithstanding my crazy perceptions, there is no gap between me and what I see as so many other separate bodies. If we are one, when I extend God’s peace, I extend it only to myself. Can there be any other gift?
I always liked that Don Henley song – “Heart of the Matter.”
I’m trying to get down
to the heart of the matter.
But my will gets weak
and my thoughts to seem to scatter
but I think it’s about forgiveness.
Henley is singing about a relationship that comes to a close and how to make peace with that. But the words resonate at a deeper level for me. It took quite a while before I realized that the Course was teaching me that forgiveness is my only function here.
In my life, forgiveness has always followed what I think of as a traditional Christian form. It’s a blend of love and faith with a great big dose of self-righteousness. You have done a bad thing to me, but because I love Jesus and he loves me and I aim to love you, I’m going to forgive you for doing that bad thing.
Notice the role that the bad thing plays in that form. It’s like a big old bookend – right there at the beginning and right there at the end. It’s the most important part of the equation.
A Course In Miracles tosses that notion out the window. Even at its most artful and sincere, that method of forgiveness is doomed because it is permanently focused on the perceived error. In effect, by keeping the error front and center, it makes the error real.
The Course teaches that the only forgiveness that matters is that which overlooks the error entirely. It’s not there. It never happened. All the reality it has, it has because I gave it.
Period.
How crazy and upside down that is!
Yet if I can allow for even the possibility that it might be true, then I create a tiny space in which Jesus – or the Holy Spirit or the Right Mind – can enter and function.
Sometimes when I sit quietly in the morning I imagine angels with mops and brooms working in my mind, knocking down cobwebs, sweeping up dust, polishing windows. And I remind myself that the light doesn’t have to enter all at once. It’s okay to let it in one small ray at a time.
Forgiveness, then, is not seeing the error. It is a way of looking at the world that perceives only the Love that permeates all of it. Think of all the breaths being drawn at a given time – that kind of power! Forgiveness is the eyes of One who does not believe in sin, does not believe in anything at all except Love.
I often go through each day thinking, Here’s another forgiveness opportunity. It doesn’t matter what my perception is – this thing is good, that thing is bad. Those are judgments that I am not qualified to make. Can I accept that? Truly accept that? Forgiveness is letting judgment go – or, better, giving it to Jesus or the Holy Spirit. “Here, take this. I don’t have a clue what to do with it.”
Do I get it right all the time? No. Not hardly. The kids don’t respect that I’m working and I get impatient and snappy. The neighbor is mowing is lawn when I’m trying to read. I’m feeling tired and lonely, so I want a potato chip to fill the void and end up eating the whole bag.
It’s like the world – everything I perceive as my life – is nothing more than a big stage on which the Forgiveness drama is being enacted.
When I remember that – when I accept my role and play it with gusto – then the energy and the light flow better. A natural and quiet joy enters. There is peace.
And when I forget? Well, then there’s something new to forgive.
As usual I stumble through the days, bleary but sincere. The hours pass like water and the river never seems to get anywhere. At 4 a.m. the light is darker, wetter. I walk the dogs tired, my thoughts angling slowly towards work. Teaching, writing . . . what I am doing? Who is paying attention?