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?