Advent Travels: When in Doubt

The furnace broke last night, coldest night of the year. We were up after midnight for hours seeing if we could jump-start it, and ended up just giving everybody extra blankets.

The house is very cold today. My fingers are numb typing. I stop every few sentences, grab the coffee mug with both hands, and shiver warming just enough to write another couple paragraphs.

At the last minute – around 4 a.m. – I pulled this morning’s substack post, realizing that I’d adopted the Advent posting style for it, and not feeling confident that tone works for that setting.

I’m also executing a familiar self-con in that post – venting poetically for attention, without sufficiently accounting for a solution. “Look at me,” is pretty much all the ego needs to say. I can get lost for days in that pleading.

“Nobody likes a whiner” – I heard this or some variation of it growing it up all the time but kids don’t just invent behavior: they learn it.

I’m not a tough guy; I’m not a stoic. I believe in looking at what’s not working – inside and out – and trying to find solutions with folks around you. Healing is honorable and obligates us to be humble and communal.

Here then, as the Advent writing wind down, let me try to find not so much the right voice (voice is easy and also the fun part) but the honesty that by necessity precedes healing.

I’m frustrated with my study and practice of A Course in Miracles. I’m scared I made a mistake by following its peculiar star. In the alternative, I’m scared that I made a wrong turn with the course many years ago, somewhere in the way I decided to approach Tara Singh’s work.

(Note to self: those are different fears – don’t conflate them).

I think the course is wrong in the way it relies on mind/body dualism. I think the material is wrong and I also think that the way Ken Wapnick taught and promulgated the material was wrong (but easier to understand – Ken’s fears and mine are entangled – but what we needed was to talk as equals, not write as teacher and student – we needed a dialogue that was less beholden to the interests of hierarchy).

(Note to self: remember Sawicki’s and Fiorenza’s emphasis on Jesus’s “discipleship of equals”).

I have a handful of folks I really care about who studied closely with Ken, and I’m sorry, but I think the gnostic fantasy he so rigorously developed arises not in love but fear and specialness.

I think the course makes it really easy to indulge magical thinking – Jesus wrote the course, there are ascended masters awaiting all of us, check out my light episode, et cetera.

I think that kind of thinking is inevitable when you frame mind/body dualism the way ACIM |does, but it also prevents a meaningful relationship with our capacity to heal and be healed.

The course is a cry for help framed as a solution to a nonexistent problem, and a lot of us who respond are doing so because we recognize the cry and it’s our cry.

But the course in that light is not designed to help us; it’s designed to keep us from looking at the actual problem. It subtly – so subtly it’s easy to miss – keeps us in conflict with one another through the material.

That is, our emphasis on the material keeps us separate from one another.

That’s my sense of it. And fine, right? Everybody’s got an opinion. If it’s time to move on to the next town or practice or manger, then do it. We’re free spirits, whose travels are circumscribed only by desire.

And yet.

There is also in me the sense that I am still not seeing something in the material. “Seeing” here refers to the matrix created by understanding, acceptance and application.

And that something is not hidden in understanding (I don’t think I’m wrong about the mind/body dualism, the magical thinking, the problem-not-solution thing) but rather in acceptance and application.

I am scared to accept some healing the course offers because fear exaggerates the potential negatives effects of application.

I am projecting a future I fear and thus frantically trying to control the present to avoid just that outcome.

And yet understanding teaches me that it’s precisely that outcome that will finally and fully heal me.

Say yes to God. Let it be done according to God’s Will. Be Mary. That’s been a big theme this season: Mary, Mary’s yes, and what happens to Mary next.

That means for me some accountability for my decision to give to much attention to A Course in Miracles. It means clarifying without personalizing or poeticizing a desired (but feared) practice.

It means entering into relationship with a way of being that I actively fear and am thus unable to enact as relationship.

I’m still playing the separation game. After all these years, and all this study, and all this writing and sharing . . .

I’m still locked into separation. And it’s way past time to pretend I don’t want it this way. At some level, I do want it this way.

So on second thought, I’m going to publish that Substack post, and this Advent post. So they’re messy, so I don’t feel fully in control of them, so what? I’m tired of being scared and I’m tired of the not-trusting that fuels the fear. Not trusting God, which means not trusting you, which really really means not trusting myself.

Ah well . . .

I remember years ago in a church basement an older man saying to me gently, “when in doubt, don’t.” But I learned another way, which is, when in doubt, do you best to minimize harm but then do. Don’t be afraid of fear, yours or anybody else’s.

Twenty-One / Twenty-Three