On Guilt and Time and Inner Peace

A Course in Miracles teaches that the separation from God occurred over “millions of years” (T-2.VIII.2:5). Yet the separation lives in and acts through us with our consent now. As we become aware of the through process known as separation, we naturally orient towards dissolving it, which is simultaneously a movement towards inner peace.

Speeding up this dissolution – for it is possible to end the separation and experience inner peace now – is enhanced if we understand the relationship between guilt and time. As A Course in Miracles puts it, “[g]uilt feelings are the preservers of time” (T-5.VI.2:1).

Two principles underlie the relationship between guilt and time. The first is that anyone who perceives that they are dissociated from God – and who believes that dissociation reflects reality – will naturally feel guilt. They will assume they are responsible for the separation.

Second, those who are guilty make time in order to facilitate the expiation of their guilt. The thinking goes something like this: I am guilty now because of what I did in the past but I will be absolved (or punished) in the future.

In this way, time and guilt go hand in hand. The undoing of one is the undoing of the other.

It is not especially helpful to seek a moment in our past when we “chose” separation. It is not that such a search will necessarily be fruitless, but rather that we never have to look beyond the so-called “here and now” to see the separation. Why make our learning harder than it has to be?

Taking note of separation-based thinking now is what enables us – with considerable assistance from Jesus and the Holy Spirit – to end it now. And that is our goal. We don’t want to understand the problem; we want to solve it – or, better, we want to see that is is already solved. That is the beautiful and never-not-helpful essence of lesson 79 and lesson 80.

So what does the separation look like right now? Its form changes from student to student. Perhaps it is the blue jays harassing our beloved chickadees at the feeder. Perhaps it is the neighbor running his lawn mower or leaf blower when what we’d prefer is a monastic silence. Perhaps it is our fear of going to dinner with new friends later who might find us boring. Perhaps it is a diagnosis of cancer, or anger at this or that politician, or our fear of dying.

All of those examples are formal (literally having a form) reflections of an underlying belief that we are separated from God. Do you see how they all make our happiness and peace contingent on ideal external circumstances? If the blue jays leave, then our chickadees will be safe. If the neighbor pipes down, then we will be able to pray and know peace. If our new friends don’t respond with gushing praise and admiration, then we’ll be miserable.

And so forth.

When we set the world up this way, we are separating various parts from what is whole – what is God – and then assigning value to the various pieces. And then we ask those pieces to become responsible for our inner peace and joy.

Basically, we ask the divisions we have made to take the place of God.

If you seek to separate out certain aspects of the totality and look to them to meet your imagined needs, you are attempting to use separation to save you. How, then, could guilt not enter? For separation is the source of guilt and to appeal to it for salvation is to believe you are alone (T-15.V.2:3-5).

Another way to say this is simply that in each moment, when we project onto something external (be it a person, a place, an event, a piece of food, the weather, etc.), we are effectively confirming that we believe we are separate from God. As a result, something other than God – with whom we are joined – becomes responsible for my happiness and peace or lack thereof.

Regardless of whatever temporary respite projection and the external world provide (and they do provide some), guilt is always the only sure result of using separation to try and fix the problem of separation.

Guilt is intolerable. Of course, we have a sad gift for bearing a lot of it over long periods of time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s desirable. Or helpful. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we don’t have another choice in this regard. There is always another way.

Unfortunately, we have used our creative powers of healing not to turn inward with God – which is the only solution to the problem of guilt – but rather to make time and then wait for a solution that cannot come because it is not in time.

This is basically a trick of the ego. On the one hand, we get to assure ourselves that we’re working on the problem of guilt because we aren’t ignoring guilt (we’re making time after all – a not-insignificant project) but on the other hand, we are never going to actually end guilt because – like the horizon itself – its “end” is always a frozen image in the illusory realms of tomorrow where (as Shakespeare so poignantly noted), lies only dusty death.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

So much for the helpfulness of time.

It is important to be clear and level-headed about this. If we perceive ourselves as guilty now then it can only be in the future – be it the next five minutes, five weeks, five years or five lifetimes – that we will no longer be guilty. In a way, that seems very logical and reasonable. But – and this is critical to our understanding and practice of A Course in Miracles – it does not work.

This is one of the blessings – and by blessing I mean both opportunity and pain-in-the-ass – available to us as ACIM students. In a calm and collected way, we are able to make contact with the simple truth that the way our thinking (which is to say, our egos) try to solve the problem of guilt doesn’t work. We have to try something else.

And what else shall we try? That which has no opposite – that which cannot be other or else because it is All – God.

God knows you now. He remembers nothing, having always known you exactly as He knows you now. The holy instant reflects His knowing . . . in the holy instant, free of the past, you see that love is in you, and you have no need to look without and snatch love guiltily away from where you thought it was (T-15.V.9:1-3, 7).

What does this mean in a practical way?

Attention given to the wholeness of the present moment is a most effective tool of healing because it reflects an invitation to the Holy Spirit which is “the Christ Mind which is aware of the knowledge that lies beyond perception” (T-5.I.5:1).

Thus, to use an example from earlier, we can watch the bird feeder and be aware of the totality of the moment: the color of the Blue Jays in sunlight, the dance of chickadees on the new-fallen snow, our identification with the smaller birds as victims of the larger, more aggressive birds, the language we use to describe the experience . . . all of it.

If we can observe all this without judgment (so much as possible – this is not necessarily easy), then we are effectively deferring to the Holy Spirit who sees and perceives as the egoic self does, yet maintains the essential connection to knowledge, or truth, or God (which the ego emphatically does not do).

In other words, the Holy Spirit is aware of the ego’s activity and bias yet doesn’t fall for it, being simultaneously perfectly at home in Christ, and concerned only with healing the mind that still believes in the separation.

The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed (T-5.II.1:2).

It should come as no surprise that this healing reflects an “alteration of the time sequence” (T-5.II.1:3) because it is a letting go of the separation now (T-5.II.1:4), and thus ends altogether the time structures that guilt relies on for its existence.

In a way, everything always leads us back to a present experience of God – an awareness that right now, without condition, qualification or impediment – we remain precisely and perfectly as God created us. Because it is not possible to leave God, guilt is not a justified response to anything. Time is not required at all.

We can talk about this intellectually – there is a place for that, of course – but we are also called by our interior experience of Jesus and God, as mediated by A Course in Miracles, to go beyond mere ideas and into actual experience itself. Heaven is here and now. Find out what that means so you can share it with your brothers and sisters. What else is there?

Learning Love Through Service

There is value in thinking about kindness – general, simple ordinary kindness. Helping shovel the walk, listening carefully to other people’s stories and questions, paying for lunch, offering up compliments, sharing experience. Doing this is a form of service to our brothers and sisters and to our own self. We learn love through service.

“Thinking” in this context means thought, feeling, plans, memories, actions and so forth – the whole external movement of the egoic self. When we give attention to others, we ease up on that self-concept with its endless conceits for getting (materially, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically) at the expense of others.

A good rule of thumb seems to be: play nice and don’t worry so much about winners and losers. Miracles are not zero-sum games. Love does not function by degrees.

The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by giving. Those who accept love of you become your willing witnesses to the love you gave them, and it is they who hold it out to you (T-13.VI.12:2-3).

The question is not whether this is a central teaching of A Course in Miracles. Or whether we are able to manifest that level of selfless now now. Very few of us are ready to make enormous metaphysical leaps into Heaven. Instead, we catch glimpses of it here and there and savor its crumbs here in the world we call home. And while we believe we’re here, we have to do something.

People sometimes say “how do we wake up? How do we let go of thought? How do we experience Christ outside of the brain’s buzzing?”

There really is no single or ultimate answer. We can’t force insight. When we make awakening a goal it becomes like the horizon which remains ever in the distance, dooming us to endless repetitive travel. Instead, we have to come to an intensity that is more passive than active, and to an awareness that is not reflecting back on itself (look at me!). If this seems altogether too vague and abstract, that’s because it really makes no sense to the ego. The ego wants to do; spirit is content to be.

So the capacity for passive intensity and non-self-reflective awareness is in the nature of a gift (given both universally and unconditionally). It is not an accomplishment. If at any level we perceive it as a spiritual badge of honor accruing to us and not all of us then we are missing it.

What we can do here in these bodies in this world is be kind, preferably without making a big holy deal of it. In my experience there is always someone around me who could use some help. When I am willing to help others – and keep the willingness simple (and keep the focus on them) – then the others show up and ask for help. It’s all very natural and straightforward. Service is fun. We want to help.

Does this mean there is no relationship between acts of kindness and awakening? Can these little gestures in the separated world of illusion help stir us from the sleep of forgetfulness?

In at least one way – a tangential way – yes.

Taking care of other people tends to quiet the brain which in turns allows for the voice of the Holy Spirit to come through more clearly and consistently. Stillness is Spirit’s stage. And while a certain Bodhisattva inclination is not the only way to achieve this – forest walks before dawn, long drives, cutting wood, gazing through prisms and writing are all effective – it is a reliably helpful way.

And putting us into sustained helpful contact with our teacher is a central goal of A Course in Miracles. So in that sense, yes, service is helpful.

I say all this to remind myself what matters. It is possible to get so wrapped up in the course or so involved in ideals of awakening or so invested in religious and philosophical literature that our spiritual sleep only deepens and the ego’s stranglehold tightens. Sometimes the best way to learn about Love is to simply get out there and show a little of it to our brothers and sisters.

Giving Attention to Kindness and Starlight

And yet kindness matters – continues to matter. Those actions taken through the body for another – thoughtful letters, hugs, fresh-baked bread, attentive listening and so forth. I can’t forget this. Won’t forget it.

I stood for a few minutes this morning beneath the dogwood tree out back. Each twig and branch is encased in ice through which starlight sparkled like a thousand times a thousand little prisms. I was breathless, thoughtless, joyful.

It is important to give serious attention to what is happening in thought – to the specific form of practice the Holy Spirit extends to (and through) us. Only our attention and willingness will undo our insistence there be a world filled with bodies from which to derive temporary satisfaction, briefly staving off the horrors of death.

We want to know this as a fact – not an idea that we read about or somebody smart talked about or somebody holy preached about.

When we make contact with the eternity in which both time and thought happen, we begin to intuit the Truth of what we are. We begin to make contact with God, outside the familiar bounds of physicality and language. That is discomforting at first but we are still drawn to it – still yearn for the loss of egoic self that greater space, that nothingness that is Everything implies.

We pass through the gateless gate and fall weeping with joy. We step back outside it and indulge in analysis and judgment. It’s okay. The gate is never not there and we are never not welcome beyond it. Seek the reminders of its presence: the kind stranger, the answered prayer, the prismatic stars before dawn. They are not real anymore than our brains and eyes and tongues are real but they will serve for a little while to remind us of the Glory that is ours and waits – eternally patient, eternally giving – just outside the walls of perception.

The Undoing of Time

It is important to remember that chronological time is contained within eternity, which is to say, within timelessness. It is a distinction, like the distinction of the self, upon which the appearance of the cosmos depends.

Another way to say this is that the present contains the past and the future because both are projections (one apparently forward, one apparently backward) that can only ever happen in the present moment.

Chronological time has value in the same way a fork or a spade does. It’s a useful tool according to context, but we have so thoroughly conflated it with psychological time that it has become a sort of enemy, obstructing the very insights it might otherwise facilitate.

Chronological time is a form of segmentation. Most of us divide our lives into decades, the decades into years, the years into months, the months into weeks, the weeks into days, the days into hours, the hours into minutes and the minutes into seconds.

Given this distinction, which appears to us as not as a distinction but as reality, clocks and calendars become virtual idols. We attend to them as if they were gods, or tools which measure the activity of gods. Who among us can stop time? Who among us is not subject to its steady march?

Time is helpful when it allows you and I to have tea at 4 p.m. or meet at the library in an hour. It is helpful when we use it to bring forth love. It is less helpful when we perceive ourselves as victims trapped in and by its ceaseless progression. Then we begin to resist it: we get angry at it. We stop using it as a tool and allow it to use us. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we make time and then lose control of it. The result is terrifying and murderous.

In terms of A Course in Miracles, the egoic mind uses time to remind us of our impending physical death and, to the extent it allows for eternity, hell (T-15.I.3:3-5). Time is suffering, nothing else.

Yet there is – there is always – another way.

The other way in this case is to give attention to time and in particular to the way that we relate to it. How do we make use of it? What do we believe about it? For example, it can be helpful to see in a deep and sustainable way that we are always relying on the past to “tell us” what we are seeing in the present.

Noone really sees anything. He sees only his thoughts projected outward. The mind’s preoccupation with the past is the cause of the misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything (W-pI.8.1:2-6).

In A Gift for All Mankind Tara Singh said something interesting about the eighth daily lesson of A Course in Miracles. He said that our minds are bored and listless and easily distracted. But if they can become interested in something – understanding the truth of “my mind is preoccupied with past thoughts,” for example – then they became dynamic and alive. “Interest and attention,” he said, “are essential first steps to bring you to a creative action where you can extend the Will of God.”

If your interest is in something meaningful, you will awaken wisdom and the real abilities that you brought with you at birth to express. You will extend your God-nature upon the earth. Your interest and its energy will bring you to the present and to meaningful, intrinsic expression. You were born with a purpose and a function. You are part of the One Awareness in which minds are joined (169).

A Course in Miracles does not deny the existence of what it calls “the temporal sequence (T-1.II.6:10). It does, however, suggest that miracles – shifts in perception – can undo time, and that they function within the temporal sequence (T-1.II.6:5) and, finally, outside of it (T-15.I.8:1-3). The Holy Spirit is the means by which this undoing is made possible (T-1.I.38:1).

It is my experience that what the course calls the Holy Spirit is never not operative in what we call our lives. What we are in truth is forever working its way to the surface of awareness. God wants to be remembered. It is also my experience that this process of awakening – of remembering what we are in Love – can be sped up (within the temporal sequence) through what Singh calls “interest and attention.” When our desire to wake up outweighs our desire to sleep, then awakening is the sure and natural result and it happens independent – outside – of chronological time.

This makes sense when we accept that neither God nor the Holy Spirit are separate from us in any meaningful way. You could call them “interest” and “attention” and not diminish either. It is not necessary to understand this intellectually. It doesn’t have to make sense anymore than understanding how electricity works is necessary in order to flick a switch and have the room fill with light.

Nothing is required to access God and the Holy Spirit, other than genuine willingness. I say “genuine” because it is always possible to say we are willing when we are not. It behooves us to be honest in this regard. If we are not ready to know God, and if we say that gently and clearly and without worry, then we will discover that our unreadiness has been undone for us. There is tremendous power is honesty. It, too, is the Holy Spirit.

The only thing we need to do with respect to chronological time is not get hung up on it. We need to use it according to the purpose of awakening, which is to say, to remembering that we are not apart from God. Time can be put to learning. When I need to clear deadwood I use a chainsaw. I don’t head into the forest with a spoon. The saw does what I ask it to do, which is why and how it was made. I don’t pretend it has a mind of its own.

Thoreau understood this.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

Thus, chronological time is a tool that can be used within eternity to remember eternity. It can be used helpfully or unhelpfully. We can project onto it qualities it does not have. It can gently facilitate awakening or impede it altogether. The choice is ours.

On Outcomes, Equines and A Course in Miracles

I would like to write a bit about outcomes – our inclination to project a future that accommodates our ideas about happiness and satisfaction and peace. To think this way is an egoic habit and so can feel natural but in truth it is deeply unnatural and impedes our recognition that we are already awakened in God’s Kingdom.

Think not that you can find salvation in your own way and have it. Give over every plan you have made for your salvation in exchange for God’s. His will content you, and nothing else can bring you peace (T-15.IV.2:5-7).

I’ll reference a couple of personal experiences from the past month – one ostensibly joyful, the other negative to the point of heartbreak. It has been given to me to see both experiences as essentially the same, and to learn that our perceived separation from God is based not on what happens externally but rather on outcome-based thinking.

In a way, outcomes are like goals – they reflect preferred results. They obliterate the present by keeping our attention on the future. The future is by definition an illusion: it is not happening. The greater our investment in or attachment to the future is, the greater our perceived distance from God.

Of course we cannot really be distant from God, but we can believe we can be distant, and so for all intents and purposes, we are distant. The belief functions as illusory distance. If you want to know how powerful your mind is, consider that it is has convincingly made a world in which you believe  you are irretrievably separated from Love, which is your natural inheritance (T-in.1:7).

This talk about outcomes is not to say that we can’t make plans for a chronological future – I’ll meet you for coffee in an hour, I’m going to see Bob Dylan in December, our tax bill is due in January and so forth. Rather, we want to be aware of the psychological future we continually project: the deep conviction that our joy and peace are contingent on specific outcomes at least partially under our control. But happiness is now and it is given unconditionally. Anything else is a lie.

I wrote in a recent newsletter that Chrisoula and I recently became owners of a relatively large piece of land. In a way, it is a dream come true for us – it allows us to expand our homesteading lifestyle. Our gardening space will quadruple, we will be able to cut our own firewood, tap our own maple trees, and raise more animals for meat. We will have a hayfield and an apple orchard.

As it became clear that we were going to receive this gift, I got nervous. I began to think of all the things that could go wrong and we would not get the land. This was my dream: therefore, it had to be God’s will. There was really only one acceptable outcome: I get the land. Anything else fell short.

It is important to understand that I was fully prepared to live with whatever happened. Had the deal fallen through, I wasn’t going to lose myself in a whiskey bottle. I am sure I would have prayed and talked and worked it through. And in my inartful and stumbling way, I would have eventually been fine.

But that isn’t my point here: my point is be clear that I had chosen a desirable outcome. I had taken a stand where no stand was needed. As soon as I did that, my happiness and peace were compromised. It didn’t matter what happened. I could get or not get it; I could be graceful or not. The fact that I was invested in a given outcome meant that I had substituted my will for God’s. And once that happens, the game is over.

This is a subtle but important point: as soon as we judge an outcome in any way, we have abandoned the Holy Instant – the present moment – and stepped into illusion. The effect is perceived distance from God and all the grief that flows therefrom.

Every allegiance to a plan of salvation apart from Him diminishes the value of His Will for you in your own mind. And yet it is your mind that is the host to Him (T-15.IV.3:6-7).

That is why A Course in Miracles teaches us that true peace is always of God – there is no other source (T-15.IV.2:8). Nothing that happens in the world can affect us unless we want to be distracted from the Love that we have because it is what we are.

The ego is happy to let us live gracefully with disappointment. “I wanted this and I didn’t get it but that’s okay – I trust God.” The ego is delighted with that logic because a) it keeps us focused on externals (the possibility that something outside of us will bring us peace, at least eventually) and b) it keeps us focused on the future (where God is not because the future is not).

When we get what we want, what happens? When the land was “mine,” what was different? What had changed?

Nothing.

I quickly discovered that I was still invested in projection: I had the land, now I wanted a particular solar-powered house and a two-story barn. I needed to post the land so that hunters only used it with my consent and only during certain seasons. I had to meet with a logger to begin putting together a forest management plan and so on and so forth.

Do you see? Outcome-based thinking never ends. It doesn’t matter in the least what happens. There is always another future, always another outcome. There is always another condition.

We can be distracted from love forever.

I had made the land a condition: when I get this, I will be a new man. I will know God and I will know peace. These conditions were very subtle and hidden, of course, because I’m so spiritual and so gifted with A Course in Miracles and all that but it was there. It was operative. And when it happened – when I had the land – I just kept right on projecting. When it comes to avoiding the present, we’re like the proverbial dog with a bone. We don’t stop.

Why does this happen?

It happens because despite all our good intentions, we don’t really want the peace of God. We want our version of God. We want to be the authority. Faced with Sartre’s God-shaped hole, we hoist the ego’s shovel and go to work filling it.

It is good to see this happen. In a way it sucks because it seems so negative: we’re still resisting God; we’re still turning our back on Heaven. But it’s actually positive because when we see it – and see its effects – we can make another choice. We can choose again. In a way, that is all A Course in Miracles wants for us: that is all it wants to give us: a chance to choose again (T-31.VIII.1:5).

I reflected on this as the weeks passed. In a deep way, I felt as if this lesson from the land was critical to my spiritual growth. I’d been speaking and writing for years about how the external cannot satisfy our desire to know God and how the past and future impair our experience of God as a present Love. Now I was being given a chance to experience it: to bring it into application, as Tara Singh would say.

I began to perceive that outcomes – what happens – all happen within the Holy Instant. The Holy Instant is what happens: it excludes nothing. Birth, death, morning runs, winter blues, homemade cider and Emily Dickinson poems – all are contained within the Holy Instant. To believe otherwise is to believe that we contribute in a creative and meaningful way to the Holy Instant – and we emphatically do not. It is always there – always present, always available – because God is always ready to give it to us (T-15.IX.1:7).

Thus, it is not a question of growing spiritually, or finding a better spiritual path, or practicing ACIM more intensely, or going to church, or doing yoga, or finding a better partner or a new teacher or anything. Nothing is missing. Everything is given. And when we’re ready, we’ll settle into the gift that is always given.

Each time I felt myself pulled towards outcomes, I gently reminded myself they were simply distractions from God. It didn’t matter if I was teaching, writing, parenting, walking or cooking dinner. When my mind drifted, I brought it back. I gave it back. It was easy: and it was lovely.

And then my fourteen year old daughter’s horse died.

Mac went down in the cold rain. The regular vet couldn’t help so we transported him three hours to an equine hospital in New York. We stood vigil while Mac grew sicker and sicker. As the sun rose Monday morning, he went into surgery. An hour into the operation, he died. Mac – the Haflinger quarter horse cross around which my daughter’s life revolved – was gone.

Throughout that experience, I was held and supported – and knew I was held and supported because  I could feel it – by Christ and by Love. These were not abstractions! They were the love manifest by every one who cared for us, helped us, invited us to lean on them, and so forth. Every time someone mentioned the word “outcome” – and it seemed to come up at least once every fifteen minutes – I remembered that there are no outcomes: there is only this moment. And someone was there to remind me it was okay to remember that.

I chose to be faithful to that truth: I chose to stay with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And I was not made bereft. Instead, I was given peace and the gift of service. In truth they are not separate.

In the Holy Instant we remember that what we are in truth is one with God. It is that memory that renders us capable of true service: when you want for nothing, it is easy to give everything. It just happens. It is natural in the deepest sense of the word.

Thus, I could see with great clarity when Sophia needed me and when she needed to be alone with Mac. I could give attention to thorny issues about the surgery without giving space to either anger or impatience – with the vets, with how to pay for it, with other voices that wanted to weigh in. I knew that what was happening was not about me. When I was hungry, I remembered to eat. I remembered to feed others. I remembered to ask for help and to accept it when it was offered.

This is not to say that there were not times when I felt sorrow – great waves of it. My brain did not stop pumping out ideas and images and stories. I sobbed. I stepped out into the rain, peered into dark clouds and cried out to God for mercy for my daughter and her horse. I begged Jesus to stay close to me, and close to my daughter, and close to Mac. I said thank you over and over, often without any clear sense of what I was grateful for. A little language to remind us that life is in better hands than ours is a good thing, a peaceful thing. It helps. Trust what is helpful. The Holy Spirit is never not speaking to us.

In the Holy Instant, we remain focused on what is: not on what would distract us from what is. Does that make sense? Things that seem to be good will happen in life and things that seem to be bad will happen too. They are the same. All that matters is God. We are not quitting or giving up or abandoning anybody when we make God the singular fact of our lives. Indeed, it is the only way to know – and extend – peace.

*

In a dream the other night I walked a dark road through stone and brier. Rain and wind beset me. For a long time I walked with my head down, studying my bloody feet. When at last I looked up, a faint light beckoned. I walked quicker towards it. Time passed. I crested a hill and at its peak saw that the light was a lantern and that I held it. That which I sought was already given – it was already here. And when I looked closer I saw that my hand wasn’t the only hand holding the light. Yours was there, too, and we were home.

Right, Wrong and A Course in Miracles

I think often of my early experience with A Course in Miracles: my investment in being right about it, in taking the right stands, siding with the right wave of opinion, and so forth.

That’s natural enough, in the sense that it’s judgmental and harsh, which is how we have learned to perceive and function. And really, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are quite indifferent to what we think of them and their assorted curricula. Their patience is infinite. A lifetime is as a second.

In time I learned that right and wrong are not helpful. They don’t move me towards peace and kindness and love. They keep me fractured. They are always tacit endorsements of our separation from God. What works for you? What pries open your spiteful heart and lets a little light in and – most importantly – allows a little light out?

Trust that. It is Christ in you leading you away from the world of bodies and time and into eternity, into Love. Be like a child willing to be led by a loving parent. No more is asked of us. You know where the light is: you know how to be loving. It is – beyond all the drama and drudgery and anguish of existence – the singular fact of which you are composed.

Find it: stay with it: extend it.