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In Christmas Time: The Authority of Love

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

1

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?

2

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.

3

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?

4

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.

5

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.”

6

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.

7

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.

After Easter: What Did You See?

Early on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb while it was still dark and saw that the stone had been taken away. She ran to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and cried, “They have taken my Lord from the tomb, and I do not know where they have put Him” (John 20:1-2).

Mary’s cry is not merely an Easter morning cry. We are all seeking an encounter with Jesus. We are all trying to find the one whose proximity to God can compensate for our own separation . . .

So did you see him? On Easter? Did you – as Mariannne Sawicki would put it – see the Lord?

Sometimes, looking obscures the very thing it aims to see. Sometimes, looking is a distraction – a way of not seeing what is obvious and present.

And sometimes seeking – sincere, well-intentioned, even disciplined and informed – reveals nothing. It’s like fishing, maybe. Sometimes you catch something, and sometimes you don’t.

Abhiskhiktananda, who lived without compromise in a torment nexus between Christianity and Advaita, and whose record of his passage there is so beautifully vulnerable, says that recognition of Jesus as a living presence requires us to “pass into” the other.

Jesus is perceived existentially in the call of the other in the greatest depth of my being; whether this other is the final mystery or my personal mystery which is drawing me into the desert, or the brother who outside calls me to God in himself (Ascent to the Depth of the Heart 265).

Abhi understood the dissolution of the self as relational – it involved the other because we can only know ourselves as separate by virtue of the other. It takes two to forget – and thus remember – they are one. He called on folks to practice “the social crystallization of the Love that Jesus had come to spread, intended to transform the whole, like yeast in the dough” (254).

Who loves? Who loves totally? And as long as Love is not total, it is not Love. Who does not seek himself instead of God and the other? (254)

These were not rhetorical questions for Abhi! He considered Jesus to have failed in his mission of Love, largely because we – yes, you and I but also Abhi himself – were not ready to hear and be transformed by what we heard, i.e., to love totally by seeking not our own self but God and the other.

Easter is hard sometimes. For me it can be. It was busy this year; we traveled further than usual. I had hoped to do a small retreat between Good Friday and Easter, but there was a death in the family, one of the kids had to work, et cetera.

Life happens, and goes on happening, no matter what I do or don’t do. It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

Jesus’s presence is typically experienced first as desire – as a longing to see the invisible or partake of the supernatural. Jesus is considered a kind of super-human whose transcendence of time and space evokes in us a combination of naive mysticism and magical thinking. I spent decades in that space.

It is good to penetrate that longing, and to reach the deeper currents of loneliness, anger, guilt and fear which give rise to the longing for big solutions, one-and-done fixes, like Jesus on clouds or some other ascended master taking a personal interest in our day-to-day lives. Those deep-down currents are personal but they also open out into family and community, culture and world. They’re not secret but cosmic.

At some point in that interior seeking, that opening out, there may be a flash of insight: Jesus did this, too, once upon a time. And Buddha. And Anandamayi Ma and Ramana and Eckhart Tolle and all the rest of them. They came up hard against the interior darkness – the emptiness, the sinfulness, the demons and the ghosts – and discovered something about love and freedom.

I know, I know. They were spiritual geniuses and we’re a couple rungs down the ladder.

But honestly? Sometimes – sitting with coffee in the dark or watching crows or listening to snow fall – I see in a clear and direct way that it is my very humanness, its frailty and creativity, that is my connection to God. What else do I have? The clarity and peace in those moments are outside time and cannot be forgotten.

So the question is not really did you see Jesus. See him or don’t see him. There’s a reason Buddhists say that if you meet the Buddha, you should kill him. The better question is – the more helpful question is – do you see the other? Hear their cry? Mary Magdalyn is speaking to you now. That cry, said Abhi, is Jesus. Or, better, our response to that cry is Jesus – Jesus acting through us and the other, rendering them one. In our relationship – our sharing – especially when we pass through the appearance of separation and difference – we remember that together we are Christ.

This is why A Course in Miracles teaches us that “a journey from yourself does not exist” (T-31.IV.10:5).

For this – and so much more – alleluia.

Easter 2025: The End of Darkness and Death

Easter is about our relationship with Jesus, who is risen from the dead. It is about our participation in resurrection, which began but does not end with Jesus.

Thus, Easter is also about the potential for all our relationships to be transformed from egocentric, survival-based relationships to holy relationships, whose premise is ensuring that all our brothers and sisters can participate in shared freedom, creativity and joy.

Resurrection can be theorized, and the theory can guide our seeking, but it is fundamentally an experience that occurs prior to language. We are not its author. It’s important to remember that.

Most of us are okay with resurrection if it’s a matter of theory (e.g., “your resurrection is your reawakening” (T-6.I.2:7) or symbolic value (e.g., “the resurrection is the symbol of sharing” (T-6.I.12:1). As long as everyone agrees resurrection is not meant to be taken literally, we’re cool.

And yet.

Marianne Sawicki says that resurrection is a human competence for “recognizing what God has done with Jesus” and, also, “the competence for allowing God to have done it and to persist in doing it.”

That is, resurrection is about a recognition of our potential for ongoing and sustainable collaboration with Love, which cannot be constrained by time or space, and of which death is not – despite appearances to the contrary – master.

After all, it’s death that limits the time that we have with one another, and death that closes the door on experience. I’m not walking my dog Jake up Mount Ascutney anymore. One day I won’t walk it anymore either.

But to know resurrection (to practice resurrection), suggests Sawicki, is to gracefully release that kind of thinking in favor of something orders of magnitude more accepting and nurturing. But we are not its author! Resurrection is not a thing we do or make or interpret or explain but a process already underway that we can recognize and cooperate with.

The resurrection of Jesus is a bodily competence that is still happening to us and still making us make it happen . . . the resurrection isn’t over yet, and the Risen Lord still walks through locked doors (Seeing the Lord viii-ix).

Sawicki invites us to consider resurrection not as a historical event that happened to Jesus, one and one, but rather as a collective transformation of fear into love, which God does – is doing – through us now.

A Course in Miracles is equally clear.

I am your resurrection and your life. You live in me because you live in God. And everyone lives in you, as you live in everyone (T-11.VI.4:1-3).

That my not yet be true for us but it can be. Or rather, we have not yet recognized this truth, and been transformed by the recognition into Christ.

But we can be.

That is the promise of Easter, and it is not limited to an annual holiday any more than it was limited to one man long ago.

Resurrection is both personal and communal. The personal is the flash of recognition – he lives! – which enables us to intentionally enter into an actual personal relationship with Jesus because he lives.

And that relationship informs and sustains our relationship with one another, across the whole earth, including the earth and the cosmos, thus enabling the creation of communities (hardly limited to human beings) collectively devoted to love, peace, nonviolence and sharing.

Therefore, be still and grateful today. Give attention to everything: subtle inflections in tones of voice, sunlight streaming through tree limbs, the smell of fresh-cooked bread or casserole, the way lilies feel when you trail your fingers across them.

Feel your happiness and the loneliness to which it is an antidote. Recognize the happiness and loneliness of others. Feel the tidal sway of your desire for Love; feel your confusion and shame in the face of that desire.

Exclude nothing from the gift of your attention. Bear witness that there is no separation anywhere.

In all of this, the welter of all this experience, look for the one whose “part in the Atonement is not complete until you join it and give it away” (T-5.IV.6:3), the one who welcomes even Judas the betrayer as a brother (T-6.I.15:8), and the one forever reminding you of God’s “open arms” and “open Mind” (T-9.VI.7:2).

He is here, awaiting recognition. Can you notice him?

He lives in you, and in me, and in us, as a real presence we can presently recognize and relate to.

Our recognition of Jesus is our recognition of our own self, as we are in Creation. And when we remember what we are, then we remember what all our brothers and sisters are as well.

The answer to all prayers lies in them. You will be answered as you hear the answer in everyone (T-9.II.7:6-7).

But remember: recognizing Jesus is an experience, just like those other experiences – hearing others, seeing sunlight, smelling food, touching grass. Resurrection is reality presently-experienced, without the egoic judgment that it be something other than what it is. Resurrection is a form of honesty; it is a form of our willingness to be honest and to exclude nothing.

Today, in Easter, as Easter, let us open our own arms and mind. Let us welcome the one who makes clear the way to happiness and peace. No more idle fantasies! No more half-assed bargaining. Half measures avail us nothing. We know this.

Let us see Him then, our brother and, in Him, the light that makes all seeing possible, unto the end of darkness and death.

Alleluia, alleluia.

Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter

Holy Saturday 2025: Empty Roads and A Course in Miracles

I think often of the disciples for whom he really was dead. The ones who’d eaten with him the day before and never would again. The ones who had heard him laugh and teach earlier in the week and never would again.

They did not know yet that Easter was coming. The ruined body of Jesus was eaten by dogs, scavenged by crows. Those disciples didn’t have a body to bury, let alone a tomb from which it could rise.

Jesus was dead and gone, and they were alone.

The invitation the Lenten narrative extends is to give attention to their grief. To imagine it, explore it, even recreate it. Jesus is dead and gone and we are bereft. Now what?

Good Friday is trauma – the recognition of the scale of our ignorance and violence (we crucified him after all, we consented to his crucifixion). Good Friday includes – it must include if it is going to be healing and not merely additional immiseration – our willingness not to deny or project this grave error but to sit with it, become responsible for it.

On Saturday, we ask what is possible given that error. What remains for us to do? What can we do?

The value of those questions is granted by the depth of our willingness on Friday. How close to the error did we get? Did we deny and flee, like Peter?

Or, like Mary Magdalyn, did we attend the dying? Did we face the cross? Did we witness the horror?

Two things arise on Saturday, both of which made Easter possible, and both remain possibilities – really, callings – in our own lives.

First, a story, dear to my heart.

Two disciples leave Jerusalem after the crucifixion. They are bound for Emmaus. As they walk, they come upon a stranger who shares the road. He asks about their obvious grief and they tell him about Jesus and how he died.

The stranger responds by talking about scripture. He points out threads in Daniel and Isaiah, Genesis and Jeremiah, and the Psalms, all of which account for – make sense of, give meaning to – Jesus’s death.

It’s not a solution of course – Jesus is still dead – but it helps.

At day’s end, still shy of Emmaus, the disciples pause to rest. They invited the stranger to stay with them, offering to share their meager bread. He consents and prays over the meal.

And in that moment – that offer of shared food, that blessing and prayer – they recognize Jesus. Is it clear? They do not recognize a body but a practice – a practice that any body can do, even you and me.

I said a moment ago that the early disciples lost Jesus and the question was, now what?

The answer was: do what he taught us to do. Welcome the stranger, give rest to the weary, feed the hungry. Make peace, not war. Open the gate, don’t close and bar it.

I think it’s clear this is what those disciples did. They left Jerusalem heartbroken and terrified but some of them – Mary Magdalyn-like – did not betray their teacher. They remembered what he taught them about communion and love and they kept on practicing.

They loved their neighbor as their own self or – if you prefer an ACIM frame – they continued to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10).

And that first thing – a practice – led to a critical insight: when they practiced love in Jesus’ name, Jesus actually appeared and lived among them, albeit in a new form. It turns out that when we seek only to love our neighbor, our neighbor becomes Christ.

If you see glimpses of the face of Christ behind the veil, looking between the snow-white petals of the lilies you have received and given as your gift, you will behold your brother’s face and recognize it. I was a stranger and you took me in, not knowing who I was (T-20.I.4:2-3).

This is an old old story.

Those disciples learned that Jesus’s death was not an end, but an extension of his mission because now he was longer contained by space and time. And there was a practice – a way of being – by which they could experience and share this truth.

Easter is a creative act in which we participate; resurrection is a creative process that is outside of history and impossible to contain – in one person’s body, in one church’s body, in one country’s body.

It begins in our willingness to serve our brothers and sisters, and to be nonviolent as God is nonviolent.

Saturday is when we say well, he’s gone, but I am here, and so I will love the way he loved. I will share the way he shared. I will to the best of my ability emulate his lovingkindness.

Saturday is about what we do with the body. On Friday the body is ruined; the individual life is destroyed. The law of the state, which is the law of men, is brutally and efficiently enforced. Death is the end. The empire, not God, decides.

On Saturday, we don’t deny this, we simply resolve to respond to it with love. We will follow him, even though he died on a cross. On Saturday, without in any way glorifying sacrifice or idolizing suffering, we simply refuse the cross as the end of the story.

Saturday is when we say to one another, there is another way. Together we will find it.

Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter

Good Friday 2025: The Cross and A Course in Miracles

In the morning after prayer I go outside with my coffee. I greet the lilies springing up through crumbling soil. I bless the robins flying away. It’s Good Friday, and my heart is happy, my mind at range. Easter is near; the evidence is everywhere.

And yet.

Before we remember the grace of Easter, we must face the ruination of Golgotha. Before we participate in the joyful creativity of resurrection, we must recognize fully the brutality of crucifixion. This is the mandate of the Lenten journey – you have to face the whole of it.

Alone in the half-light of morning I open my free hand and imagine you taking it. We will do this together. There is no other way.

Good Friday has both a political and a personal dimension. The two can be distinguished, but they cannot be separated. When we face the cross, we are looking at something both within and without us. Our response touches and is touched by both.

The political dimension of Good Friday is that Jesus is executed by the State for nonviolently resisting its claim to sole authority and power. Jesus is saying, the earth and the fullness thereof belong to the Lord, and God wills that it be shared equally among all people, without exception. No more hunger, no more loneliness, no more war.

In reply, Rome says (all empires say), we are the Lord – or our Gods are the Lord, if you prefer a religious frame – and we are going to publicly execute you for even thinking otherwise.

It’s clear the early followers of Jesus understood that following him meant coming into conflict with a way of being in the world that is unjust, unloving and unkind, and nonviolently demonstrating – teaching and sharing – an alternative.

That is our work, too. The political dimension of the cross asks us what we want to be true of the world, and how we will work with others to make that truth manifest. Politics is about relationship, and all relationship is local and united.

The personal dimension of Good Friday is that we have to die to the separate – the egoic – self. As Saint Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

Obviously Paul is using metaphorical language. We are not called to strangle to death on a cross. Rather, we are called to no longer hold a private self at the center of our shared lives. An anxious self, a defensive self, a deceitful self . . . all these must be brought to the Place of the Skull and left there.

The cross symbolizes our willingness to be transformed so that we are no longer bound to and by the egoic self. We give it all up; we let is all go. The cross represents total surrender. It represents our total willingness to have nothing in our heart or mind – nothing in our living – that is not of God (e.g. T-1.II.3:11).

Jesus was not merely committed to a vision of personal happiness and peace. He wanted that for us, yes. That is our inheritance, yes. But he understood that in order to remember that, to manifest that, one has to radically rethink their relationship to the earth and to one another. And that radical revision of relationship – which is political – requires a personal transformation at scales we cannot manage single-handedly.

A lot of us in the ACIM community think that caring about politics – or economics or whatever – is to somehow violate the tenet that the world is not real. We worry that if we take sides then we’re stuck in illusions forever. But remember: the reason the world is not real is because it does not reflect the will of God (W-pI.166.2:2).

What would a world that does reflect God’s will look like? And how will we help create it?

The first question is political, the second is personal and neither can be answered apart from the other.

Before the illusion of the world and the separate self are undone our dreams of fear are changed to dreams of happiness (e.g..T-18.II.6:3). This is ACIM’s happy dream, and it happens to these bodies in this world. We learn there is no separation anywhere and it changes everything.

How holy is the smallest grain of sand, when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of God’s Son . . . For the whole is in each one (T-28.IV.9:4,6).

Nor does the illusion of separation dissolve for us alone. Happy dreams take the form of our brother and sister’s “perfect health” and “perfect freedom from all forms of lack” and “safety from disaster of all kinds” (T-30.VIII.2:5). It doesn’t matter what we feel. If anyone is afraid or lonely, if anyone is hungry or in pain, then “we” are not happy.

Jesus is saying that we have to learn how to love our brothers and sisters in a way that is not of this world, that is often actively opposed by this world. The cross is not theoretical. It calls for – it accepts nothing less than – the total transformation of the individual and the world.

This work is not easy. I have not solved it in some way that you have not. Good Friday is about recognizing that we have failed in our function to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10). The evidence is all around us.

But failure is not the end.

Therefore, let us not deny this failure but accept it. Easter is coming – we know this – but today, let us rest together in the part of the journey that scares us, the part that we resist. And let us do it together. Together is “yes” to God because it refuses the lie of separation.

Is it dark? Yes. Getting darker? Also yes. But we know something the darkness doesn’t. Before this morning’s lilies and robins – before the horrors of Golgotha – there is this love and it does not die. Failure is not the end.

Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter

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?