Advent Travels: Under the Bookish Pedagogy

Often, at night when I am most with Jesus and the Holy Spirit in prayer, I draw the curtains. Privacy, seclusion, minimal distractions. I am not of this world but another.

But last night I let the curtains be. The moon was right outside the window, spectral and thin, and I was in the mood for ghosts.

But no ghost came. Or rather, the tired ghost of argument came, propping himself in the corner. My ghosts always say the same thing when summoned: me again? Who is haunting who here?

Yesterday, someone used the phrase “according to Jesus,” with respect to A Course in Miracles, as evidence I was wrong. It used to bother me terribly, that sort of thing. Citing Jesus as an authority and then arguing from that authority to support your interpretation of ACIM. It’s an understandable rhetorical move – trust me I get it – but it’s an error, a nontrivial one.

I took it all to Sawicki who laughed gently at my angst. They’ve been doing that with Jesus since before he was nailed to the cross, she says. Getting worked up about it just reinforces the error.

There is, she says, Bill Thetford-like, another way.

Tara Singh called this particular error “the lovelessness of ‘I get it and you don’t,'” and he raised it often enough in his writing that I can’t forget or ignore it. He saw it as a real problem, and it is. It’s my problem.

I mention this to the ghost, who nods tiredly. He’s dozing in the corner, letting Sawicki take point. Sawicki doesn’t fight, she guides. It’s a different kind of relationship.

The moonlight is blue, as snow is when moonlight touches it, and my heart softens, so much so it’s like a pool of bright water or a chalice in danger of spilling.

Yes . . . a chalice in danger of spilling, as if what is sacred is that which cannot be contained. Christ is contagious.

I have been here before. I have been to the well.

Sawicki waits patiently while I work it out. She was at the well once too, long ago. No lesson is lost on her.

Sawicki is serenely confident that one can be taught how to see the Lord – can, in fact, become so competent at seeing the Lord that they can teach others how to see the Lord as well. Her confidence is infectious; I submit to it totally.

For Sawicki, “seeing the Lord” means knowing Jesus which means being in relationship with resurrection – both the word and that to which it was made to point.

Whatever you defend, you attack. True safety is found in nonviolence and nonresistance. And those words and that to which they point mean nothing if you won’t put your body into it.

Putting your body into it is how your mind remembers what it is and what matters. Knowing Jesus now – a perfectly reasonable possibility – means knowing exactly what a body is and does and what it is for. There is nothing to fight; there is nothing to fight for.

A Course in Miracles was helpful to me not because it was an answer, much less a “way” or a “path” (I have big amends to make for that latter error) but because it exposed the underlying confusion in me that made Jesus both a spiritual ideal and a cheap con.

I was less interested in knowing Jesus than in you knowing that I knew Jesus.

The ghost gives a gentle snore. My thinking slows and quietens so as not to wake him. Sawicki taught me once and for all that if you need to protect or defend or save Jesus than you haven’t met Jesus.

The simplicity of that insight liberated me. Nor was it separate from my long and devout study of A Course in Miracles under the bookish pedagogy of Tara Singh and the half-assed lineage he cobbled together with Krishnamurti and Helen Schucman, nor from the Catholic Worker before that, nor the pantheistic idyll that was childhood, nor the void from which childhood emerges, perfectly innocent and free.

When my brother said I was wrong about the course, and used Jesus to buttress the argument, I wanted to push back. I wanted to defend Jesus.

But in the end, I just wrote “thank you.”

The ghost of argument left without me noticing. I am glad he can rest; I hope I can let him rest a long time. Sawicki would like to leave as well but she is a Teacher (not an arguer) and I am her student. It is the most sacred form of relationship I know. She will not leave until I am ready, and I will not be ready until she does.

The paradox is exquisite and by necessity arises in a text that you and I create together.

The moonlight was lovely, shifting in hue and intensity as the moon floated away to the west. You were there, and you asked me for help. Later I will try to help. But for now I am writing, this, because I want you to know you are not alone, because you cannot be.

You taught me this lifetimes ago. I am ready now to remember.

Seventeen / Nineteen