Advent Travels: A Footnote Almost

We put our tree up yesterday. Late Friday, C. drove with our daughters to a farm a couple town north, an old man with a meadow full of scraggly pines. You put twenty bucks in an envelope on the porch and then cut down a tree.

It’s a tall tree – at least seven feet. It stands in the living room bump-out where in the nineteenth century coffins rested (we live in the old parsonage where wakes were often held). While decorating, my youngest daughter stood on the back of the couch to hang an ornament. “Be safe” I said, to which she replied, “did Mary play it safe?”

We are working this out together, you see.

Part of what saved A Course in Miracles for me was that I fell in with Tara Singh’s books very early. Singh grew up in India; his cultural background and religious training were very amenable to nonduality. Plus he had been mentored by Krishnamurti. Mind/body dualism didn’t haunt him the same way it did Ken and Helen and Bill.

Singh easily correlated ACIM to service. Like Schucman, he considered Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun serving the poor in Calcutta, to be the world’s best living example of ACIM. He and his students were in sustained contact with MT and her order. There is a picture of him kneeling to hand her a copy of A Course in Miracles. He is radiant.

Set aside for a moment the complexity of Mother Teresa’s character and life (she is not an easy figure to understand), and consider that she was not – she was emphatically not – a mind/body dualist. Oh you’re Christian? Well, are you washing the feet of the poor? Are you holding the hand of the dying?

Theology entered only at the margins, and mostly as a declaration of love to strengthen one’s commitment to service.

I finished a third read-through of Sawicki on Friday night. Today I will begin Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her.

When I accepted for myself that mind/body dualism was an illusion, something clearly and instantly settled. Things that had been held apart rejoined; things that had been shaky grew still and grounded. The pressure to understand or get somewhere or do something dissipated. Nothing was missing; nothing was lacking. There was no separation anywhere.

It is a different way of living because it is a different way of being in relationship. You begin to understand that there is no such thing as separate interests.

In every moment, Life extends an invitation to us. If you are sensitive and give attention, you will see this. Life invites us to collaborate in bringing forth happiness and peace. It asks us to create with it – like dancing together, or reading and writing together, or feeding the poor, or decorating for the holidays.

I don’t know what life asks of you. The invitation sugars out in different ways. It may ask nothing more than that you sit quietly watching the moon rise while your wife and daughters bring home a Christmas tree.

It may also – the suggestion in the literature is at some point it will surely – invite you to a deeper relationship – a more radical commitment – to God.

In a sense, the Jesus story is really just an extension – a footnote almost – to the Mary story. We gloss over Mary because we want what we think is the good stuff – the manger, the donkey, the frankincense and the myrrh.

We love that story; we long for its promised ministry.

But in back of that – what makes all that possible – is a woman consenting to share in God’s salvational work through the medium of her body. What’s in front of you? What’s being asked of you? How can you help? In the story it’s a miracle but it points to something orders of magnitude more ordinary. You know what I mean.

The annunciation never happened. The annunciation always happens.

Here in the heart of Advent then, I remember her. My daughter leaps off the couch and grins at me. How clear it can be sometimes, and how lovely! My Teacher is here, teaching me. Are you ready, She asks.

Yes, I say. And I mean it: yes. I am ready. Yes.

Fourteen / Sixteen