Advent Journal: Now and Then Singing

I woke up all at once, under a great pressure: decide. But for what? What was the problem I was solving? Or the choice I was making?

It was raining when I fell asleep close to midnight, but while I slept, the rain turned to snow, a light dusting of which spackled the world while I went about my chores in the dim light of six a.m..

Driving to the transfer station, I pulled over by a field that becomes a marsh, abutting low hills off Flat Iron Road. This is where I go to visit red-winged blackbirds but they are gone for the winter. Yet a gold light spilled over the hills, radiating across the already-thinning veil of fallen snow. Nothing is missing; nothing is really gone. You can see it that way.

Choose God, actually. Decide for God, actually.

Chapter Five, Section Seven of A Course in Miracles – The Decision for God – is a kind of mini-Rules for Decision. Ken Wapnick thought the repetition in the material was kin to Beethoven’s evolving thematic emphasis across the duration of a symphony, but for me it mostly reflects a mind that wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it, and was learning as it went. The material which comprises ACIM is an exploration of a certain relationship, and an attempt to bring that relationship to coherence. In nontrivial ways we are bystanders to the course! But also, there are no accidents and everything is shared.

. . . the first step in the undoing is to recognize that you actively decided wrongly, but can as actively decide otherwise. Be very firm with yourself in this, and keep yourself fully aware that the undoing process, which does not come from you, is nevertheless within you because God placed it there (T-5.VII.6:3-4).

We experience separation because we choose to experience separation. But we can choose a different experience – we can choose to remember to God, and God’s Love, and the perfect joy and peace that abide there, awaiting our remembrance. Doing so is our will because it’s God’s Will. (There is no separation anywhere).

But we have to go slowly. This is not a questions of having a different experience – a new partner, a new path, a new perspective. The suggestion A Course in Miracles makes is that our thinking rests on an error and happiness and peace – ours and the world’s – depends on healing that error. We have to see – really see – that we “chose” suffering because we believe something is true that is in fact not true. That’s what we need to see – that’s where we need to be – in order to meaningfully choose again. This is what the course means when it says that our “part” in the Atonement is “merely to return your thinking to the point at which the error was made, and give it over to the Atonement in peace” (T-5.VII.6:5).

For me, the “error” that gave rise to separation was my belief that mind and body are separate, and that this division reflects something unconditionally true about reality. But when I saw that there was no separation anywhere, my understanding of reality shifted in a structurally deep way: it became possible to become responsible for projection and denial. It became possible to love in a way that was not contingent on anything personal or private.

Being responsible for projection and denial is another way of saying that we must become responsible for our feelings and behavior, and not blame anyone or anything else for the way we think and act. There is no blame anywhere in the system; thinking and acting like there is upset and agitates all of us. It pits us against one another in a winner-take-all competition in which even the winners lose eventually.

For me, the solution – there is no separation anywhere – came when I realized that I wanted the peace of God more than I wanted conflict and accepted that I had no earthly idea how to make that happen. But “no separation anywhere” brought me – like in a whale to the shores of Ninevah – into the terrifying simplicity of relationship with Jesus.

As you share my unwillingness to accept error in yourself and others, you must join the great crusade to correct it; listen to my voice, learn to undo error and act to correct it. The power to work miracles belongs to you (T-1.III.1:6-7).

The problem isn’t that we see sin and error in the world – everybody does. The problem is the underlying – deep and hard to see – conviction that sin and error are natural, right even, and just the way things are. Accommodation, not resistance, is the answer. We might be a little more generous, a little slower to judge. But we’re not challenging the whole underlying structure.

Yet that is precisely the work to which A Course in Miracles call us. That is the work to which Jesus calls us. And it is the only work the Holy Spirit can actually help us with. We are “the work of God,”, Whose work is “wholly lovable and wholly loving” (T-1.III.2:3). Why not act like it? How else will we teach one another what we are in truth?

I still get scared sometimes. Sometimes I stumble. No red-winged blackbirds this morning, but on a bent cattail I saw a junco, puffed up against the cold, now and then singing. More than anything I wanted to share it with you. Or were you sharing it with me? Truly, what would the difference even be?