Sean Reagan

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In Christmas Time: The Authority of Love

I am feeling my way towards something here. Please be patient. You know what I’ve forgotten, and the trail is growing faint.

Lately I’ve been riding the insomnia train again. Do you know it? I mean insomnia like, it’s three a.m., you haven’t slept for twenty some odd hours and you have to get up at six and go to work.

Insomnia always sucks but at the margins it becomes toxic. It hinders judgment, upsets the mind/body connection, and fast-tracks descent into depression. I wish it on no one.

One of the tricks I play to try and sleep is, I become a hobo. I wander around the house with a blanket looking for any open surface. Sometimes it’s a rocking chair, sometimes the floor beneath the dining room table, sometimes the back porch.

Sometimes I just wander.

The other night – huddled on the living room couch, shivering and floating on nightmares through fitful sleep – a question occurred.

To what are you clinging, Sean?

Earlier this summer, I walked with Jesus to the river out back, knelt by a clump of Forget-Me-Nots, and begged him to heal me.

He trailed his fingers over the tiny blue flowers and didn’t answer right away. The sun was bright; the river a low hum to our left. In the distance, sheep bleated.

It reminded me of the time he intervened to save a woman accused of adultery. Do you remember? He knelt between the woman and those prepared to murder her with stones and traced circles in the dust with his finger. We talk about it now as if it were a neat and tidy wisdom lesson: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

But it wasn’t that. In that moment he was angry. And when he spoke, it wasn’t the words that made folks put their stones down. It was the fire in his eyes and voice. His was the authority of Love. He could’ve said anything.

“Sean,” he said gently, there by the river. “Forgiveness is the end of suffering. No one who clings to even one illusion will remember himself as sinless because he still cherishes this one error. He calls it unforgivable and makes it a sin.”

We tossed stones in the river then, lost in our thoughts. The afternoon passed in silence. He always liked that. I do, too.

What, in the end, can you not let go?

Down in depths I cannot risk without the Holy Spirit (and even then, man, even then) the answer is: life itself.

I do not want to die. I want to live.

Beyond the drama and mundanity of my day-to-day existence, there is this drive to live. It eclipses everything.

Everything – what I eat, how I pray, who I love, who I will not in a million years love – is subsumed by – is forced to serve – the survival instinct.

And for which, in a nontrivial sense, God bless! I love this life. I love moonlight and grandmother stories. I love the sound of the river at night in summer. I love conversations that last lifetimes, and walking with you in the forest, and watching you turn towards me in certain shades of light. I love apple pie and fresh-baked bread. I love spider webs at dawn. I love kisses and Marianne Sawicki and hot coffee. I love being wordy and I love the silence that makes wordiness possible.

“And you would defend all of it to the death,” he says quietly, from the interior bower where he often rests.

Is that so bad? I ask at last. I hate disappointing him but like all good teachers he cherishes honesty. There is no helpful pedagogy without it.

“If you can cling to it it’s not love,” he says, and then goes silent for days, as if giving me time to get clear on – or remember maybe – a lesson he taught us lifetimes ago. Why am I so forgetful? What grief or loss do I insist on worshipping instead of Love?

Why is healing so fucking hard?

Here is the truth.

I was not one of the disciples. Nor was I one of the ones with stones. I was the one telling the ones with the stones they were right. I was the one saying, she deserves to die for what she did.

I was the one saying, throw the fucking stones.

Sister, I was the one he confronted. I was the one whose confusion he so brutally and perfectly corrected.

I couldn’t sleep that night. All I saw was the fire in his eyes; all I heard was his clear and fearless voice. His was the authority of Love. For days I did not sleep or eat. Demons came, and devils with swords and spears of fire. Gehenna opened its gaping maw and bid me enter.

And knowing I deserved nothing but Gehenna, I fell to my knees and cried out from the ashen ruins of my heart, please don’t let me die. Please let me live.

Sometimes when I am lost in the insomniac trials, you touch my shoulder and murmur, Sean, there is another way. Most times I don’t hear, but sometimes it echoes just so and I remember. You said it two thousand years ago as well.

“There is another way,” you said, and knowing exactly what you meant, I joined you and we followed it together. We gave up everything to follow him. And when we found him, a handful of villages down the road, I dropped into the dirt like a dog and begged him to forgive me.

And he laughed! Do you remember? He laughed. He laughed, lifted me to my feet, and kissed me on the mouth. “My brother,” he said. “Of course you are forgiven. Of course you are.”

The personal existence passes. Life does not. The body and its stories pass. Creation does not. The earth will pass and the sun will collapse into itself and creation will go on.

We are creatures (critters, Donna Haraway says) of creation, inseparable from the cosmos which is our Creator and to which we bear witness in love, which is our creativity – our potential to be kind to one another, to feed and be fed by one another, to play together and walk together, to come in from the rain together, to laugh together and cry together.

To say to one another, Bill Thetford-like, there is another way.

“I don’t want to let all that go” arises from the mistaken idea that I am holding any of it in the first place. And that mistaken idea arises from the even more mistaken idea that I am something other than Creation.

I am a part of what I fear I am apart from. I can’t be let go. There is nothing to let go. Including – as you know – this personal existence.

This summer, when we turned to go home, I picked two Forget-Me-Nots and offered one to Jesus, who cradled it in his hands. The other I carried home to you. This is it.

Born Again in Love

A Brief Talk on Rebirth as a Symbol of Awakening in A Course in Miracles

Thank you for being here and sharing with me. I am grateful for your presence. It is a gift to teach and learn together, to remember our innocence together, and to bond with one another in gentleness and love.

Yesterday we talked about Lesson twenty-seven from the ACIM Workbook. Lesson twenty-seven is a meditation on the intensity and depth of our devotion to our study and practice of A Course in Miracles. It’s a meditation and an inquiry. How badly do we want to awaken? With the intensity of a drowning person longing for air? Or what?

Lesson twenty-eight repeats the basic idea from Lesson twenty-seven (“I am determined to see”) but with specificity (“I am determined to see differently“). And it uses an interesting term – “commitment.” It links “seeing” to a commitment to actually see things differently.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the writing of which ACIM is comprised is embarrassingly overwrought and melodramatic but its lexical choices are more often than not unerring. “Commitment” is not an accident. It has a specific function; it points in a specific way.

So yesterday we were asked, just how badly do you really want this awakening thing? Today we are asked to make a commitment to our seeing. The course assumes we have reflected on our ACIM practice – we took the measure of our desire – and we are now ready to make a commitment. We want a new way of seeing and we are committed to bringing it forth. We’re going to actually do it.

So one thing is, if we have not done that, then let’s not fake it. Let’s do it and then go forward. And if we can’t do it – if it really feels like the wrong move or an impossible move – then let’s shake the dust off our sandals and head on to the next village. Nobody has to study and practice A Course in Miracles.

Oddly, in Lesson twenty-eight – somewhat unlike Lesson twenty-seven – the point is not whether we actually keep the commitment but that we just get started. The commitment is what matters. Success or failure are not really our business.

I point this out because it is helpful sometimes to see that notwithstanding its rigor and intensity A Course in Miracles is actually very forgiving with respect to its application. Honestly, we just need to show up. The Holy Spirit does the rest. As the course says, we are not in charge of the Happy Dream because we “cannot distinguish between advance and retreat.” We often judge our successes as failures and our failures as success (e.g., T-18.V.1:5-6). We really don’t know!

So what is the specific commitment we are asked to make? What are we being asked to do?

We are asked to “withdraw our preconcieved ideas about a table and to open our minds to what it is and what it is for” (W-pI.28.3:1). In other words, we are not bringing the past into our perception or understanding of the table. We are effectively “asking” what the table what it is, rather than insisting that we already know because we’ve “seen” tables before, we’ve “used” them before, we know formica from maple and so forth.

In other words, we are not making the object personal by “binding” it to our “tiny experience” and our “personal thoughts.”

I want to pause to emphasize just how significant and radical that commitment is. Because it generalizes – it’s not just about the table. It’s about our house and car, it’s about our dog and our kids. We have to begin again with literally everything – withdrawing our assumptions and biases and all of that to try and really see what this thing is and what it is for. It is the literal undoing of all that we believe we know and, thus, all that we believe we are. It goes right to the heart of our conditioning – in the family, in the culture, in the cosmos. Its aim is to undo everything.

When you and I were born – long before we had any say in the matter – we learned to differentiate between “objects” based on perception and to evaluate “objects” based on those differences. This is a face, this is another face, but this face is Mom’s face. Before we can possibly decide if this is a good or helpful way to live we are making distinctions and accepting them at face value. They matter.

Differences and distinctions are related to needs – we believe that something in our lives is missing. We have this sense of lack. Mom’s face is here and now it’s not. I’m fed but now I’m not. The suggestion the course makes is that these needs – which, we note, are physical in nature – are illusory. The arise from a distorted perception of what God is, what Creation is and what we are (e.g. T-1.VI.2:1-2).

A Course in Miracles has a word for this and the word is “separation.”

Just by virtue of birth into the human frame, we take the frame’s perception literally, value our capacity to judge its many perceptions deeply, and then rely on those distinctions to survive, over and against our brothers and sisters.

It’s a grim picture. It really is.

Over the course of our lifetimes we constantly refine those skills of distinction and judgment, just as – over the course of our species’ existence – those skills were refined by the pressures of natural selection.

And, unless we are very very lucky in our families or communities, we do not seriously begin to investigate this whole process – which is separation – until well into adulthood. And there is a lot of water under the bridge by then.

We are not to blame for this! These skills – differentiation and judgement, whose combined effects are the separation – evolved over “millions of years” (T-2.VIII.2:5). That is a lot of conditioning! The body and the brain are like the frothy tip of an enormous wave that has been building for eons. We are – to borrow the lingo of another healing tradition – powerless. No wonder our lives are unmanageable.

A Course in Miracles comes along and says, all of that – that way of seeing, that way of thinking, that way of being – is an error. And there is another way. This is very radical! It is as radical as the nonviolence that Jesus advocated and practiced two thousand some odd years ago. It invites us to ignore – to forget about – literally everything our bodies, including our brains, and the families and cultures in which we are embedded, tell us.

In my experience, when we face that call directly, it confounds us. Then it annoys us.

And then – when we realize the scale of the calling – it terrifies us.

This fear represents a kind of existential crisis that is not unique to the human religious and philosophical tradition. For some of us, some variation of it appears to be inevitable. A Course in Miracles is not really designed for the casual student. Only after I considered a thousand times a thousand other ways to be happy, joyous and free – driven to my knees not in obedience but defeat – did I finally say, okay. Show me the way, Jesus. Show me how to learn to forgive from the Holy Spirit illuminating the mind that we all share.

I am not saying that you have to humbled in this deep and irrevocable way. It’s possible I’m just a slow and stubborn learner. But maybe you do! For me, until I was broken, I tended towards surface changes, like changing outfits or wearing a mask. I was busy but not effective, intense but in a drifting kind of way.

It took me a long time to realize the futility of self-improvement in its myriad forms and, on that basis, put it aside forever.

That is why I love the phrase “born again” and feel sad that it’s been more or less coopted by certain branches of the Christian tree. Because born again is what we are called to do! That is what awakening from the sleep of forgetfulness is! We are born again, which is what it means to remember what we were in the first place – Creations of God in creation, creating like unto our Creator. We are new. We are not improved versions of the old self but a new self.

What we call this experience – this answer to God’s call – does not matter. The experience is just the experience, and the word is just a pointer. But “rebirth” does make clear the precisely radical and fundamental nature of the calling that ACIM makes unto us. What does it mean to be born again, since it is not literally possible? To what does the phrase point? How do you know?

You can’t answer in words! It can’t be said at all. But note that you understand what I am saying; you know what I mean when I use words to say that words are useless here. How can that be if we are not – here, now – reborn in love?

Notes on Prayer

I. Introduction

Last month, when it seemed like winter would never come, somebody asked me to clarify an earlier reference to prayer, and I began writing instantly and intensely.

But I didn’t answer their question. I didn’t even try.

Sometimes it’s like that. The Holy Spirit gives you an assignment and you respond with all your heart. Nothing else matters.

What I wrote follows, mostly unedited. It speaks as clearly as I can at this juncture about how prayer functions in my life. It bears witness to the cry for help that underlies all my study and practice, and to the response to that cry.

II. Silence is More Than the Absence of Sound

My prayer life has changed this past year in two significant ways. The changes are fundamental to the peace and happiness currently expanding and stabilizing my experience. There is more clarification and less confusion.

I am incredibly grateful.

The first (and most significant) change has to do with silence. Tara Singh spent a year in silence before he encountered A Course in Miracles. He writes that during this time, while out walking, he would occasionally be asked by folks for directions here or there and he would do it.

How do you observe a vow of silence and talk? This bothered me for years. Tara Singh was (still is, really) the only person whose understanding and practice of ACIM made sense to me but this approach to silence felt hypocritical. I couldn’t square it.

It took me a long time but I learned that Tara Singh was right. You can be silent while speaking. It has to do with understanding what silence actually is – it is not merely the absence of sound – and how helpfulness is itself a form of silence.

Somewhat paradoxically, silence is a form of relationship. It’s a way of being in relationship that gathers into itself all the many forms of relationship, so what sugars out is awareness of the One Relationship, which is what we are.

When I give attention to silence, I find a stillness which is creative and alive. It holds everything. It gathers what falls and nurtures what rises. It’s closer to me than my mind or my body. I am in it the way light fills a prism, like a nun in her cell, whose prayer flows easily through the cosmos.

At the beginning of the day and at its end I sit quietly in darkness, legs folded, on a chair with a good back and offer myself to God. I offer myself and the space to God, to whatever end He sees fit.

I’ve done various forms of this for a long time – zazen, Transcendental Meditation, MBSR – but it’s only the past year that I have figured out how to get sufficiently out of the way enough for God to actually enter and heal me. Which He does, reliably.

In this space I am an observer and not a judge. The observer can’t be let go but the judge can be (this is a subtle but important distinction I think a lot of folks gloss over or neglect entirely). That’s what I mean by getting out of the way. The observer stays but the judge goes. When we no longer judge, then it doesn’t matter what happens; what happens is what God wants to happen. It’s another way of living, one that’s easier and happier for all of us.

It doesn’t matter what I think or feel in that space; what matters is making the offer of myself, in a sincere way, to God for healing. When I do this, the healing comes. It always comes.

This is a very natural, intuitive and human way of being still. It’s okay to push past the rules and traditions and find your own way in it. With practice, we begin to recognize God and give welcome to the healing that God’s presence is. And that recognition and welcome transform the prayer. It is no longer a space of struggling with ego, with expectation and judgment, with grief and confusion. It is a space of joyful sharing with God, unhindered by all the ways “Sean” can be a block to sharing.

The word I use for this experience of prayer is communion. I used to use contemplation – and what I am talking about does neatly fit into a Christian contemplative prayer model – but communion feels more accurate because it reveals the underlying relationship which is based on communication. Something nurturing and empowering is exchanged, and the exchange enlarges our hearts and minds.

How this happens is very intimate and hard to talk about. In part it’s hard to talk about because from inside the experience it’s crystal clear that the specifics necessarily vary, and it’s easy to confuse the specifics with the generalized tenor of the relationship. What matters is the willingness and the offer. What matters is our availability.

Maybe it’s like falling in love? It’s natural and easy; it’s part of the human experience. But the form changes from person to person, culture to culture, and age to age. No two love stories are the same, and yet the experience of the story is ubiquitous.

So I think the safest thing to say is that this form of prayer involves simply making oneself available – in whatever way seems reasonable and accessible – to God for God. He has already heard our cry, and He has already responded. Prayer, as I am describing it here, is consenting to realize this truth about God, and our self, through the medium of silent relationship with our brothers and sisters.

That’s the first thing that has changed.

III. Pray as You were Taught to Pray

The second thing I am learning is “pray as you were taught to pray.” As summer was ending, I stood outside on the porch, well after midnight. The village was asleep; you could hear the river murmuring beyond the pasture. I was watching clouds pass the yellow moon and without thinking said aloud, “God I love you so much – thank you for sharing this moment with me.”

And I was heard. God heard me.

I hate saying that because it is not defensible in worldly terms, and most people hearing it either ignore it or demand it be defended and both responses, while understandable, arise from the same confusion. The phrase “God heard me” arises from – while speaking into being – a form of prayer that is as natural and familiar as breathing. You become as a child.

I don’t know what “pray as you were taught” means for you. I was raised by relatively liberal but devout Catholics; they taught me about a God who actually hears your prayers and really wants you to share everything with Him. All you had to do was open up and talk, like with a grandparent or a friend. I prayed regularly in this way as a child; it was not a burden or a duty.

As I grew older, I moved away from this kind of prayer. It washed away with the whole, “when I was a child I spoke as a child but now I am a man I speak as a man” idea. I studied meditation, read broadly in nonduality. I drove to remote monasteries for mass and retreats.

But what I have learned is that the mode of prayer I was given as a child remains – of course it remains! – intimately bound to my conception of God. Indeed, it gives life to that conception. Using it as an adult evokes the innocence and purity of childhood in ways that are not sentimental but powerfully healing.

Praying in this simple direct way also calls on a community of elders – parents and grandparents – who taught me this way of praying. It calls on their parents and grandparents, all the way back to ancestors I cannot name but whose practice and study inform my simple prayer even now. My innocent awareness of God as a close friend, a good listener and a trustworthy parent is a living connection with all life. It is an illusion that we are separate. Prayer makes this beautifully clear and plain.

IV. Sweeping Up the Threshing Floor

Prayer is a form of opening and offering myself to God. It is a form of vulnerability that hinges on consent. I have to say yes but more than that, my yes has to be authentic. It can’t be faked. It’s good to want to get to yes but wanting to get to yes isn’t yes. Not yet.

The yes really matters because God cannot come join with us until we are totally willing. He will draw near, sure. He will send guides and companions like teachers, angels, prophets and healers. But in the end, it has to be our yes, and it has to come from a space in our living signified by the heart, not the mind.

In other words, this yes is not verbal. Nor is it even conceptual. It’s not a product of reason but of love – not the special love predicated on differences – but a holy love in which the gaps between become fire and light.

. . . it is to Love you go in prayer. Prayer is an offering; a giving up of yourself to be at one with Love. There is nothing to ask because there is nothing left to want. That nothingness becomes the altar of God. It disappears in Him (S-1.I.5:4-8).

That yes – and the holiness which creates it, and which it reflects – are found in silence. It’s not personal; it can neither attack nor be attacked. Disciples and saints visit, undoing the bonds of time and space, helping me understand how to pray even more deeply, simply and openly.

The thing about prayer is, it eventually takes over our lives. It becomes a way of living. The prayer originates outside time and space and is not subject to them. It has no need at all for personality. It calls to us; it restores to us a memory of God and Love which are our real home.

Be still an instant . . . My Arms are open to the Son I love, who does not understand that he is healed, and that his prayers have never ceased to sing his joyful thanks in unison with all creation, in the holiness of Love (S-3.IV.7:4, 3).

When I listen in and to silence in this way I do hear the Song of Love. I say “song;” it is more like a note – or a note deep within another note – whose gentle pulse is the cosmos.

Now there are no distinctions. Differences have disappeared and Love looks on Itself (M-28.4:8–5:2).

When we pray as we were taught to pray, and when we also make consistent time to be open and available to God, we are gently made aware of deeper levels of being and sharing which A Course in Miracles analogizes to “song.”

For me, I hear and share this song especially at night outside. In the quiet and stillness – the moonlight and stars, the wind in the hills, the river out back, the horses passing back and forth – I sense a vibration. There is a note – beneath the sounds, beneath the silence – and I feel it vibrating. It transcends the duality of mind and matter or, better, it unifies them – which alleviates a lot of the anxiety around what to call it or am I making a mistake.

I find it possible to align with that vibration – to be at home in the impossibly vast cosmos, which is the mind of God, which is Love. When I harmonize with this note (this OM) – when I bring my whole self into harmony with it – the joy is so deep and clear.

Really there is nothing for us to do but make ourselves available to God, call it what you will. God waits on us to complete Him.

V. Calling

Do you know what I am talking about?

The Easy Peace of Relationship

Every relationship in which we find ourselves is an aspect of the One Relationship, which is God’s relationship to Creation in Creation as Creation. Therefore, every relationship is an opportunity to remember our shared innocence and to become happy together in a way that invites God to “take the last step” (e.g., T-17.II.4:5).

We perceive each apparent relationship – with a co-worker, a friend, a neighbor, a writer we admire – as personal and local. We’re in it! And yet, seen clearly, the relationship also invokes the whole cosmos and all reality. The sun and the rain, the roads and the cities, the past and the future. Every relationship touches everything else in the cosmos and everything in the cosmos touches it.

In a holy relationship, all we want for the other is the freedom to remember their own self as they are – as we all are – in Creation. We trust the relationship to reveal precisely what we need to teach and learn at any given time. There is no pressure; there is nothing to control. We simply give attention.

In my study and practice, in my experience, one way to approach creating and living in a relationship that is harmonious with holiness and the Will of God, is to focus on making the relationship as easy as possible for the other. Focusing on the other – their needs, their modes, their expression – is an opening through which holiness can flow.

If we both do this – if I try to make things easy for you and you try to make things easy for me – then a new space opens. The relationship expands. It opens up into a calm space, a quiet space and also a living space. In it, something happens that saves us and the world. We realize there is no separation anywhere.

I am not personally very good at this! I am good at talking about it. I am good with the theory, but the theory has to sugar out in application, in practice, and that’s harder. Tara Singh studied closely with Helen Schucman and she said over and over to him, the course is meant to be lived.

So a big part of our practice is keeping a critical focus on the thought patterns and belief systems that make it hard for us to make things easier for one another. Assumptions, biases, desires, secrets, fears, fantasies. All of it. That stuff happens naturally but the course invites us to go beyond it. Is there a way to be in relationship that is not contingent on the body and the brain? On society? A Course in Miracles suggests there is. The course reimagines our humanness at a deep – even a radical – level, beyond the body, beyond the brain and beyond the world.

The commitment to bringing forth holiness means bringing the relationship to a happy place, which means an equitable place, a balanced place. It’s not about perfection but presence. It’s about giving attention in order to enable the grounding threads of service and mutual aid. We want to help each other, in the exact way the other needs our help. No more and no less.

When our relationship is in a happy place, we remember what we are in truth. We remember that we are extensions of Creation, in Whom Creation completes Itself as Love. Together we are Christ; that was always Jesus’s message and the focus of his program. Let us remember we are Christ; let us be the light by which we all remember together that we are Christ.

Really, “Christ” is a word we use to indicate a state of openness and receptivity. In the state we name “Christ,” there are no strangers. The binds that yoke us to a lifetime of social and physical conditioning loosen and soften. Separation is seen as an error that can be corrected.

Simplicity clarifies the way of correction. That is my experience. We are easily distracted. Shiny objects, exotic ideas, feelings of comfort and bliss. None of these things are bad in and of themselves but they’re also not the way, the truth and the light. They are distractions, drawing our attention away from our intention and practice of remembering Christ. They keep us entangled with separation rather than relationship.

In simplicity, beyond the reach of preference and privilege, we perceive the fundamental neutrality of all things. We understand that meaning is given by either ego or the Holy Spirit and that it’s up to us which one to listen to. The secret to salvation is that we are doing this to our selves, and can choose another way.

Distance, differences and conflict are the hallmarks of listening to ego. But the Holy Spirit teaches us how to recognize ourselves, and recognize the will we share with one another, and through each other, with God. It teaches us that separation (distance, differences and conflict) is an appearance born of a confused sense of self-identity and that there is another way.

When we remember God’s Love, and remember that we are loved by God, here and now, the other way naturally shows itself. It is given.

Love is natural. Creation happens. Holiness is contagious.

In my practice, I did not know what Love was until I made a firm commitment to nonviolence. Jesus was clear about this. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also” (Luke 6:27-29). When his disciples utilize violence, they are rebuked (Luke 9:22).

Nonviolence was a countercultural teaching then and it remains one today. We are not called to love some of our enemies but all of them. We are not called to be mostly peaceable but entirely peaceful, even unto death on a cross. Nobody believes that; nobody wants to believe that.

But I did not know what Love was until I made the commitment to living nonviolently. I was awful at it and in many ways I still am. But I was given more than I gave up. Even just trying to live nonviolently taught me how to let go of anger and hatred, guilt and fear. I came into direct contact with those feelings, and the belief systems that sustain them, and was shown a way to be liberated from the toxicity of all of them.

The truth is, I am responsible for peace and justice and happiness. But also, responsibility is a collaborative process and only works when we each accept and fulfill our role in relationship. So when we are making things easier for one another, we are also practicing nonviolence with one another.

I wish I could say that I was more graceful with respect to all of this. Nonviolence is difficult – shockingly so sometimes. But, for me, it is the way. At least knowing that – knowing I’ve found the means – allows me to stop seeking other paths or practices. I can commit. Commitment is a limitation in a sense – it closes doors – but it does allow us to dwell in new possibility. We can focus differently. I am grateful for that.

This is not necessarily about big and dramatic actions; it is not about brag-worthy accomplishments. The world is not saved by individual heroes but by folks who choose to work cooperatively for sustainable happiness and peace, and a modest abundance that excludes nobody. Separation is a practical problem with a spiritual solution.

This means I am responsible for bringing every relationship to holiness. And, again, a really effective way to do that is to devote myself to making the relationship easier for you. Maybe that means we need to give each other space, maybe it means I need to go to therapy, maybe it means you need to do the dishes more often. I don’t know. The form adjusts to the specific teaching and learning need being expressed.

I know that if I ask the Holy Spirit how to help, I will be answered, and the answer will be clear. It will not be subject to debate. When you know, you know. The Holy Spirit does not increase confusion or passivity. The Holy Spirit is about clarity and application. The course is meant to be lived.

That’s the work, then. I want to be present to the relationship where it is in order to perceive its potential for happiness and peace. The call to service is inherent in us. Our brothers and sisters always tell us what they need. But we have to ask: we have to give attention. We have to be present.

“We have to be present.” In the end, that is the simplest and clearest way to make things easier for one another: simply be present. Open eyes and hands, open mind and heart. We say yes to the invitation to heal and together are made holy.

Reading the ACIM Manual for Teachers: Introduction

A Course in Miracles reframes traditional concepts of teaching and learning (and thus of student and teacher), with an eye toward bringing us to responsibility for healing in all our relationships.

In the traditional view, teaching is a profession, a 9-to-5 type of gig – you train, get certified, find a job, develop professionally. Teachers and learners are separate – e.g., students sit at desks facing the teacher who stands up front. Most significantly, the teacher has something the student does not – some knowledge or information, some skill – and “teaching” means sharing that something with the student.

But the Manural for Teachers of A Course in Miracles suggests that “to teach is to learn,” which means that “teacher and learner are the same” (M-in.1:5), and that teaching is “a constant process” that continues even as we sleep (M-in.1:6).

On this view, we are all students and teachers; we are all teaching and learning, all the time.

But what are we learning? What are we teaching?

The course suggests there are only two thought systems. The first – the most common, the one from which we are awakening – is ego. Ego is a fear and trauma-based understanding of self and other. When we teach and learn under this thought system, we bring forth a world and a way of living in which everyone suffers to some degree or other. In this system, there is hope of recovery or healing, and there may even be glimpses or hints of recovery and healing, but nothing actually changes in a sustainable way. There is no transformation.

For most of us, that is the world in which we live, and to which we contribute, through passivity, denial and confusion. We mean well but somehow we never quite reach a meaningful conversion, individually or collectively.

The other thought system – the alternative to the egoic system – is that of the Holy Spirit, symbolized by Jesus, in which we commit to a form of healing that involves recognizing that our actual identity is grounded in love, gentleness, open-mindedness and grace. When we teach and learn with the Holy Spirit and Jesus, we bring forth a world characterized by cooperation rather than competition, inclusivity rather than exclusion and mutuality rather than individualism.

The world and way of living brought forth under the Holy Spirit’s tutelage are the foundation of the Happy Dream, “from which awaking is so easy and so natural” (T-18.II.9:4).

In all situations, in all our relationships, what we teach and what we learn reflects which of those two systems we believe is true. Are we fearful critters bereft of love and beholden to conflict? Or are we creations of love, bent on remembering in relationship the beneficent nature and intention of creation?

Teaching is always a demonstration. Our behavior – the words we use and the actions we take – testify to others, and through them, to our self, what we believe we are. Teaching and learning are an opportunity to clarify our thinking in order to bring forth peace in all our relationships and thus to the world (which is relationship).

Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself . . . This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach (M-in.3:7, 9-10).

Given to ego, and the world ego brings forth, our teaching and learning is hopelessly redundant, forever recycling through the same errors of guilt, fear and powerlessness. That is what ego wants, and so that is what the world does (M-in.4:5).

God’s teachers – those who are devoted to changing their minds about who and what they are, through their relationship with Jesus and shared connection with the Holy Spirit – are the antidote to this “hopeless and closed learning situation” (M-in.4:7). They teach God’s “joy and hope” because that is what they want to learn, and their demonstration of God’s love – offered and received in the world – completes their learning (M-in.4:8).

That is our shared goal: to teach together and learn together what love is, what creation is, and what we are – together – in truth.

Teachers of God are not perfect, nor are they apart from the conditions of separation which they teach are unreal (M-in.5:5). We are all called to be teachers of God, and we all are teachers of God. A Course in Miracles is one way of reaching this state of helpful and dialogic creativity. The Manual for Teachers – following the Text and Workbook – is designed to help us realize our calling and respond to it in clear and helpful ways.

But what does this look like in practice? That’s always the important question in A Course in Miracles, right? Our study has to sugar out in a sustainable and transformative practice.

How does this new configuration of teaching and learning fit into that?

The curriculum of A Course in Miracles arises out of an underlying spiritual identity crisis. It arises from our confusion about what we are in order to help us undo that confusion and come to clarity.

Therefore, the ACIM curriculum is literally the life before us, with all its challenges and joys, disappointments and cruelties, ecstasies and everydayness. It all fits; it all belongs. We couldn’t exclude it if we wanted to.

To teach is to demonstrate (M-in.2:1). Helen was a perfectionist and a skilled writer by the time she began working on the Manual. “Demonstrate” is not an accident, which means that its range of meaning – including, significantly, behavior – is intentional.

Our words and our behavior – the living that our belief system brings forth – is perceptible to others. We demonstrate it for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters. They do the same. It is an intelligible shared performance. We teach other how to see us and they teach us how to see them. All our behavior, all the time, is a testament to what we believe we are and what we believe others are.

A Course in Miracles suggests that its purpose to “provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn (M-in.2:5). If we are unhappy in a relationship for any reason at all, it is an invitation not to assign blame but rather to deepen our commitment to “[t]each only love, for that is what you are” (T-6.I.13:2).

This requires us to be in relationship with one another. Since nobody can be excluded from the teaching/learning dynamic, the classroom goes with us everywhere. We are always the student and always the teacher. Nothing required to facilitate our shared education in love is kept from us. Everything is given in every moment. Understanding this liberates us from our mistaken identity – and the mistakes that identity calls forth. All healing is an awareness of God’s presence to us now.

Critically, when ACIM refactors the teaching/learning relationship, it makes an important statement about our relationship with fear. If the classroom is literally the life before us – without qualification or condition – then fear is also a part of the curriculum. Fear, too, has a place at the table.

In other words, we don’t have to be afraid anymore. In particular, we no longer have to be afraid of fear. There is nothing left to fear, including fear.

This is a deeply liberating understanding. It means that whatever comes up is okay to look at – it means that whatever comes up for us is supposed to come up. If we need to talk about family history, it’s okay. If we need to go out and be politically active, it’s okay. You want to go to therapy? Get sober? Take guitar lessons? Go to India? Quit ACIM altogether?

It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

“There’s nothing to fear” means there is no longer any reason for us to judge. We can let the Holy Spirit take that function over. Fear and judgment are related, and when we no longer fear fear, we begin to see how shallow and misguided our judgment is. We don’t want to hold onto it; all it brings us is grief. We want the other way; we are ready for it.

Thus, everything in our lives becomes a joyful lesson in what it means to love – to be remembered in love, recognized in love, held in love, offered up in love, gazed at in love and celebrated in love. We become happy together in natural, serious and sustainable ways.

In a sense, “teaching and learning” in a devoted ACIM practice are simply about giving attention to our lives and participating in them as gently and lovingly as possible. The function of the Manual for Teachers is to nurture this participation, strengthen our commitment to it, and helpfully contextualize its effects.

In Christmas Time: Vast Rivers of Healing

I’ve spent a lot of time in this life with the cross, and somewhat less time with resurrection. The one makes the other necessary – a kind of grim cycle I wish on nobody. Yet recently, another way has shown itself. Late, but not too late, I am called back into the desert where it all began, and you are going too.

A big part of my “story” is that I have not always been a good guy. Today I am a good guy, or at least an okay guy committed to minimizing harm. But not always. And even so, things still go sideways sometimes.

I am the predictable result of a genetic predisposition to addiction and a culture that celebrates enduring suffering as a sign of strength, violence as the only valid means of conflict resolution, and shame as a religion.

Hell, not Heaven, is my mode, my location and my journey’s singular goal.

Nor am I alone. A long line of fathers, uncles and brothers stand behind me – ancestors who died in jail, died drunk on winter streets, died alone in hospitals in strange cities. When my great-grandfather was able to move his parents’ bodies to a private plot overlooking the Taunton River, he only moved his mother.

I understand why he did that.

And I understand that part of his heart – and mine – remains in that unmarked – that unforgiven and unforgiving – grave.

I have committed crimes. I have hurt people’s bodies and minds with my words and my fists. I have practiced a brutal indifference to all this – I have refused accountability – leaving me lonely, sad, and angrier at God than I can say.

And yet.

It’s the “and yet” that gets us, right? No matter how bad it gets – and it gets bad, it can get really really bad – there is always some undercurrent of light, some thread of hope, some interior glimmer of goodness and love that calls us away from the cross and the empty tomb.

Marianne Sawicki and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza are clear: Follow Jesus or don’t, but if you are going to follow him, then accept responsibility for creating anew and sustaining now his discipleship of equals.

The new kinship of the discipleship of equals . . . is sustained by the gracious goodness of God . . . The “father” God is invoked here not to justify patriarchal structures and relationships in the community of disciples but precisely to reject all such claims, powers and structures . . . The woman-identified man, Jesus, called forth a discipleship of equals that still needs to be discovered and realized by women and men today (Fiorenza In Memory of Her 150, 154).

No more going it alone, no more refusing to console or be consoled, no more willful embrace of physical and psychological pain, and no more indifference to the well-being of any brother or sister anywhere.

Now is the time of becoming familiar with Christ by becoming family to one another, but familial in a sense that transcends the limitations of both biology and culture. It’s new, right? Familiar but new.

Critically, this new family does not include a father. As Fiorenza makes clear, this is neither an accident nor an insult. It merely reflects the corrective impulse of Jesus. Patriarchal rigidity – man as the locus of power – is gently set aside. In its place is God, Who is Love, and the only locus of power anybody needs.

Are you ready for that? Am I? Is anyone, ever?

There was a terrible storm on the day I met her. I stood on the steps of the law school library, happier than I’d been in a long time, her phone number tucked in my pocket, and watched dark clouds sweep across the sky. Wind whipped and howled, driving leaves from the trees; rain fell in heavy sheets, drenching everything.

I don’t remember how long it lasted. Ten minutes? Twenty?

I stood there and watched. I stood there and witnessed.

My life had changed in a matter of minutes and I knew it. I don’t think I have ever felt with such clarity and precision the graceful movement of God. I had been brought into a relationship that refused the rubric of suffering, the pedagogy of hate and the ontology of fear. In it, seeking ended and creation began.

My heart was joined with another who would not forsake me but rather teach me – in time, in the world – how to not forsake others, including my own self.

I remember later driving to the store to buy lunch. I wandered up and down the fruit and vegetable aisles, admiring the colors, amazed at how happy I was, how alive. Everything was full of light. Vast rivers of healing rose through the earth into my body and from there flowed out into the cosmos, filling it with the energy of creation.

I left without buying anything; of course I did. I needed nothing; I had been given everything.

And yes. That moment, like the storm before it, passed. But the gift did not. It remained in me as the potential for healing, and the possibility of joy. The relationship itself was beautiful and difficult, like crossing a desert. In it, an ancient prayer was answered yet again. An even more ancient love took form – yet again – in the world. What else did I expect?

Emily Dickinson knew. The Divine finds us in relationship, and in relationship we learn from one another how to be divine.

With thee, in the Desert —
With thee in the thirst —
With thee in the Tamarind wood —
Leopard breathes — at last!

In relationship, we realize that the only power is that of Love. Everything else is subsumed in it. Creation alone is. In the desert, we remember our fundamental poverty and thus reclaim our identity in Creation. We are dependent and relational. Grace is a matrix whose output is love and we are it.

There’s a reason I like writing that, that way, and a reason you like reading it. The leopard – my God this love – draws yet another breath.

Fiorenza again, same text: “Structures of domination should not be tolerated in the discipleship of equals” (148).

I hear you. I see you. I will not take another step without you.