There is a line in A Course in Miracles that mentions our reaching up to hold Jesus’ hand and that “this is no idle fantasy.”
Yet at the same time, Jesus is simply a symbol for our right minds, our loving minds.
What gives? How do we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? If it’s just a word game, if it’s just ideas, why bother?
I think it’s more than just words, though. At the metaphysical level, the Course is rigidly uncompromising. We are not making contact with the historical Jesus who hovers somewhere in bodily form just waiting for the invitation to show up. On that level, it’s all mind and nothing but mind. It’s pure non-duality. God is all. There is nothing else.
Yet at the personal level – where most of us, including me, tend to live and work and study and pray – the Course meets us where we are. It uses the words that we know, the images with which we are familiar, to teach us a new way of experiencing God.
On that level, sure. Jesus is real precisely the way you need and/or want him to be.
The key, I think – or the way in which we can bridge the two levels – is to continue to practice forgiveness. This is simply the ongoing effort to see the world as unreal and to know at the same time that what is real – God, our perfection as God’s creations – cannot be harmed in any way.
To forgive is to experience the dream, the illusion – which is our moment to moment existence – with Jesus. We want to see it with his eyes. If we need to think of him as a big brother right there beside us, and if that helps, great.
And if we can accept that “with Jesus” is simply code for that part of our minds which remembers our fundamental connection to God, that’s cool too.
In either case, our relationship with Jesus hinges on our practice of forgiveness. The more we can bring the Course principles of forgiveness and atonement into our lives, the closer we will grow to him. That will take whatever form best suits us at a given time.
Ultimately, though, we are moving in the direction of an experience of pure Love, of God, and the Jesus who gets us there – who helps to bridge the gap – is already inside of us, already there.
It is, as they say, all in the mind.
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