Advent Travels: Be Mary

When I wrote Thursday’s post, the Advent travels ended. The writing will go on, of course. But I found what I was looking for. C texted mid-afternoon saying “I read it 4 times.” When you know, you know.

Jasper came by later and we stood on the front porch, sipping hot chocolate in the cold. To our left the hardware store, the post office, and the old, now empty, firehouse. To our right, the Congregational church and town offices.

U.S. flags everywhere, Christmas decorations almost everywhere.

Jasper said of Friday’s post – the one about dancing – “I don’t know man. You sounded a little desperate.”

Okay, I said. But what about Thursday’s post, the Mary Said Yes post.

Jasper shrugged. “What’s this new thing with starting your numbering at zero?”

We are old old friends.

A Course in Miracles advocates – rests upon, derives from – mind / body dualism, a deep and ancient fault-line in human consciousness. Mind / body dualism is an error, kind of like when people thought the earth was flat. It feels right, it looks right – the evidence is right in front of you – but it’s an illusion.

Sawicki doesn’t even consider mind / body dualism, much less its strange and loveless religion of “I get it and you don’t.” Of course she doesn’t. Jesus (like his mentor, John) was familiar with mind / body dualism and he rejected it.

Jesus taught something else about God and relationship. He taught that the Kingdom of Heaven was here, now, awaiting only our participation. Not our understanding only but our participation, our whole-hearted and open-minded collaboration with God for God.

Jesus imagined a world and a way of living in it together that was premised on a love so clear and simple that even to catch the faintest glimpse of it is to be turned around forever. Christ is contagious, indeed.

Sawicki writes that “the experience of grace grows out of the fundamental experience of one’s own createdness and of the creaturely status of all that is” (Seeing the Lord 323).

That cannot be squared – because it undoes – ACIM’s confused declaration that we either “see the flesh or recognize the spirit” (T-31.VI.1:1). There is so much separation in that sentence! There is so much cause for confusion and pain!

There is an easier – a gentler, a kinder, a happier – way.

Mind / body dualism is an error because its only reliable production is separation. When you say – as ACIM does – that we are not bodies and bodies are less valuable than minds, you open the door to all kinds of discrimination, from guilt for eating a Snickers to burning women at the stake because they have a mole on their thigh.

Nobody needs that world. Nobody needs that thought system.

Am I saying that it’s useless to study and practice A Course in Miracles? No! Not at all. I am saying that the course will bring you – sooner or later it will bring you – into direct contact with mind / body dualism and invite you to consider the efficacy and helpfulness of that dualism.

You cannot make the body the Holy Spirit’s temple, and it will never be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love’s condemnation (T-20.VI.6:1-2).

Is that your experience? Is it ours?

Not what does ACIM or anyone or anything else say but what do you say?

I admire Ken Wapnick because he bit the bullet on this issue. He saw the neo-Platonic mind / body dualism in the course and he accepted it totally. He devoted his life to the argument that mind / body dualism was the only correct way to understand and practice A Course in Miracles. He was a brave and committed teacher.

Ken didn’t need anybody to be a course student, but if you were a course student, there was only one way to understand and practice it.

Instead, I am suggesting that something happens when we accept – do not resist but accept – what Sawicki calls the “non-necessary gratuity of existence, its giftedness” (323). I am saying that when we accept that gift – when, like Mary, we say “yes” to it, when we take its fullness into our fullness – then we realize together “the unfathomable ‘Abba experience’ that Jesus enjoys with God” (323).

And this experience occurs naturally in and through and as our “own createdness” and the “creaturely status of all that is” (323).

Sawicki teaches a way to recognize Christ in one another – in community – that knows Jesus as a present reality but not in a supernatural way. We reconstruct Jesus through relationship, and in doing so, realize our intimate connection to both Creation and Creator.

There is no separation anywhere. Anywhere.

But when we buy into ACIM’s mind / body dualism we insist on separation. And we pretend that our insistence is happiness and freedom. Of course we do! But happiness and freedom do not need insistence, or any other kind of defense.

Do you know why we do that – accept mind / body dualism – as real? And defend it so ardently?

Because if the suffering of that homeless guy you occasionally pass is real – and if you love him as a brother – then you would neither ignore him nor throw a few bucks at him. You would be Mary unto him; you would be Jesus unto him. You would take him home. You would feed him. You would give him the best bed.

And that is too fucking terrifying. That is too fucking hard. Be real, right? The world isn’t the way it is because it’s an illusion but because we are too scared to be the Love that Jesus taught us – and still teaches us – we are.

Even more terrifying: if you really go into this – if you really allow Jesus to be reborn in you – then mercy and justice become all that matter. You will oppose unconditionally and nonviolently any and all systems that allow your daughter and sister, your son and brother, to go hungry and without shelter.

And that – that opposition to systems of oppression and injustice – pits you against men (it is mostly men, sorry) who are notorious for crucifying those who stand in their way. Easier to look the other way. Easier to rationalize looking the other way.

But remember: even if you avoid the cross, somebody’s going to get nailed to it. The solution isn’t avoid the cross; the solution is, fuck the cross. The solution is, find the crossless way and walk it and invite others to walk it with you.

There is a lot of space and camaraderie on the road that leads away from Golgotha.

We aren’t studying A Course in Miracles because we want to heal and be healed. We’re studying it because we are afraid to be healed. A Course in Miracles allows us to pretend we’re undoing separation all the while sustaining and reinforcing the comforting illusion – the mind / body dualism – upon which separation rests.

“I read it 4 times,” she said, and we did not talk of it again. Why would we? There was a meal to cook, a kitchen to clean, parents to check in on. There is a life that needs attending, relationships that need tending. There is mercy to extend, justice to enact. There is love to share, in all the ways it is shared.

There is one life and one relationship and we are it. I love you – I love us – so much.

Thirteen / Fifteen