The End of Lonely Journeys

God is Justice because Love is Just. And Love is Just because it knows all Creation as one. It knows all life as equal, which undoes the grounds for different responses. What is one cannot be judged, for it cannot be divided into that which judges and that which is judged.

Thus, true Justice is not concerned with form – with the many appearances that appear as reality – but rather with the underlying content (e.g., T-14.X.7:1-6). It does not distinguish between a King and a beggar, a shepherd and a prophet, a river and the sea.

In our lives in the world – where appearances are a constant phenomenon, and judgment inevitable – to be just is to perceive in all things either love or the call for love and to know that the answer to both is the same: love.

Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer himself. Whatever the sickness, there is but one remedy. You will be made whole as you make whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health is to recognize in hatred the call for love. And to give a brother what he really wants is to offer it unto yourself, for your Father wills you to know your brother as yourself. Answer his call for love, and yours is answered (T-12.II.3:1-5).

When we seek justice – for ourselves or others, be they elephants, violets, migrants or the neighbor’s outdoor cat – we recognize implicitly the radical equality of all Creation. We embrace it; we welcome it. And as it is made welcome in us, it shows itself yet more to us. It makes us welcome in it. We are transformed by its presence, the way a landscape is transformed by moonlight.

Without exception, all that exists exists through and in – and is subject to – the Laws of Creation. Because all that exists shares the same Source, all that exists is Holy, and there are no degrees of holiness. What is Holy is equal unto all else that is Holy – that is how it is holy.

It is impossible to remember God in secret and alone. For remembering Him means you are not alone, and are willing to remember it (T-14.X.10:1-2).

To perceive the Holiness of Creation is to honor the condition of Justice, and to honor the condition of Justice is to know God as Love, which is to say, as Life itself.

Yet one can ask: but how? How do we perceive Holiness? How do we honor the condition of Justice? How do we know God as Love and Life itself?

In my living, which is all the living to which I can speak, the path to Holiness, Justice and Love is conjoined with the path of Understanding. Understanding is healed perception, where “healed” means “nothing is excluded via judgment.” An apple tree is a horse is a sunset is a kiss.

Everyone seeks for love as you do, but knows it not unless he joins with you in seeking it. If you undertake the search together, you bring with you a light so powerful that what you see is given meaning. The lonely journey fails because it has excluded what it find (T-14.X.10:5-7).

How does our living change when we refuse to take “the lonely journey” but instead accept one another as companions on a journey in which everything is perceived as the same?

This concept of perception is not the function of the body’s eyes or the body’s brain, both of which are rigid producers of distinction and difference and therefore judgment. To make contact with God through through Jesus, as I suggest is eminently and practically helpful, is to let go of the body’s function, which is done by relaxing our expectations and assumptions about the body’s function.

In other words, let the body do what bodies do, and let the spiritual chips fall where they may, which they always do anyway, perfectly. Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and smile when the spirit says smile.

When we begin to transition from the belief that an apple tree and a horse and a sunset and a kiss are altogether undeniably different things to “an apple tree is a horse is a sunset is a kiss,” we begin to give attention not to the appearance of distinctions but rather to the light in which all distinctions appear. What brings forth the many appearances? What brings forth our feelings about them? Our ideas? What brings forth the stories in which we weave the many disparate elements of our living together? Why are we – or who are we that we should be – so desperate for a meaningful narrative with a happy ending?

There is no single answer to these questions so much as there is a practice of living justly and happily with them. The questions are not answered so much as undone. It is like bringing all your problems to Jesus, prepared for a long healing dialogue, and he just makes you tea and goes on about how beautiful and wonderful apple trees, horses, sunsets and kisses are . . .

God has no secret communications, for everything of Him is perfectly open and freely accessible to all, being for all. Nothing lives in secret . . . (T-14.X.11:2-3).

As we give attention to our experience of being embodied with other bodies in a material world – as we partake of the apparent vast, vivid and intimate complexity that is those bodies in that world – can we notice too the Light in which all of it appears?

Some people call this Light “awareness” or “consciousness.” Some of us call it “Christ.” It doesn’t actually matter what you call it – it answers to many names, including some that you and I will never know. What matters is that we experience it. By experiencing (i.e., by knowing, sensing, intuiting, understanding) the Light in which all Creation appears, then all things that appear become Holy because of the light in which they appear.

This feels like a decision we make a thousand times a day, but in fact it can be a decision we can make but once for all time. We decide to see only holiness and then all we see is holiness. Our decision is the decision to heal by asking our Teacher to teach us we are the light (T-8.III.1:1-4).

I wandered so lonely
My Life filled with sin
I wouldn’t let
my dear savior in
Then Jesus came
like a stranger in the night
Praise the Lord
I saw the light

I do not say Hank Williams saw the light – we can only testify to our own experience, after all – but he clearly understood a particularly Christian way of talking about seeing the light.

Helen Schucman did, too.

God and His miracle are inseparable. How beautiful indeed are the Thoughts of God who live in His light! Your worth is beyond perception because it is beyond doubt. Do not perceive yourself in different lights. Know yourself in the One Light where the miracle that is you is perfectly clear (T-3.V.10:5-9).

For me, the way to practice Understanding (in order to correspondingly perceive Holiness, Justice and God as Love) is to study A Course in Miracles under the tutelage of Jesus in a very pragmatic and felt – in a very realized – way. By listening to His voice and accepting His guidance – which is to substitute my will as I understand it for Jesus’s will – I “learn to undo error and act to correct it” (T-1.III.1:6).

The power to work miracles belongs to you. I will provide the opportunities to do them, but you must be ready and willing. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability, because conviction comes through accomplishment. The ability is the potential, the achievement is its expression, and the Atonement, which is the natural profession of the children of God, is the purpose (T-1.III.1:7-10).

The “opportunities” are our everyday lives and the challenges and upsets and struggles that appear to comprise them. The work, so to speak, is simply to practice living in the light of Christ – the One Light in which the miracle we are is perfectly clear.

How can we be helpful? Patient? Gentle? Kind? Non-dramatic?

The apparent enormity of this inner and outer work – and the promise of peace that is its promised outcome – can make it seem like we are scaling a thousand Mount Everests blindfolded, hands tied and without oxygen. Thus, it seems to require magic solutions – the suspension of natural laws, the operation of divine power, the presence of ascended masters, et cetera.

Yet healing – and living in a healed way with our brothers and sisters – is not so dramatic. It looks dramatic and difficult when one is looking out from need, but when we look together from Love . . .

That is a different vista altogether.

The Kingdom of Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God, who left not his Father and dwells not apart from Him. Heaven is not a place or a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this Oneness and nothing else within (T-18.VI.1:4-6).

The secret (there is no secret save for those of us who believe there is a secret) is that we need do nothing (T-18.VII.5:7). The less we do, the more Christ does, and the more Christ does, the more we see that the Atonement is finished and we are simply catching up with God.

This is another way of saying that we are finished with attack – we are no longer asserting our own limited understanding of life against life. We are letting life be. To attack a sister or brother is to interpret them according to our needs and desires. But to perceive them with the eyes of Christ – to see them in Love – in the One Light that establishes our identity in and as Christ – is salvation itself. For we do not see a separate world, but our own self projected outward. All our kindness and gentleness, however meager, is always healing, and the healing never omits us.

Justice is of Christ because it heals the confused ideas and hateful images that are born of attack. When we are unsure of what we are, we project that uncertainty, and hate what it produces. Yet when we consent to know ourselves as God knows us – which is to be just unto ourselves, as God is just in Creation – then what is projected is peace, and peace becomes us.

Perception can make whatever picture the mind desires to see. Remember this. In this lies either Heaven or hell, as you elect. God’s justice points to Heaven just because it is entirely impartial. It accepts all evidence that is brought before it, omitting nothing and assessing nothing as separate and apart from all the rest . . . Here all attack and condemnation becomes meaningless and indefensible. Perception rests, the mind is still, and light returns again. Vision is now restored (M-19.5:2-6, 8-10).

Our happiness is not of the world, because there is no world, and we are not bodies. Yet our happiness is shared and constructs a world in which – for a while yet – such sharing is possible. I give thanks for a merciful God whose Light restores to Understanding our radical equality and underlying oneness, and I give thanks for you, in whom God’s Justice becomes our reality.