Sean Reagan

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

Yesterday it snowed a little as the sun set: prismatic flurries tracing faded planes of light down western hills slowly darkening.

I stood shivering on the front porch, breathless and grateful, now and then remembering to take a sip of coffee. I cannot bear the loveliness sometimes; I cannot compass the love the loveliness reflects.

Elizabeth Fiorenza invites us to set free “the emancipatory power of the Christian community which is theologically rooted neither in spiritual-sexual dimorphism nor in patriarchal ecclesial dominance, but in an egalitarian vision and in altruistic social relationships that may not be ‘genderized'” (In Memory of Her 92).

Everyone gets a seat at the table; everyone takes turns cooking, serving and eating. All power belongs to God; everything else is shared.

All day – coffee and writing, driving with C. to buy grain for the horses, dinner with friends and family – I kept coming back to that sentence of Fiorenza’s. It called and called but apparently I am still learning how to respond.

Yet later, laying in bed, on the horizon of sleep, something softened in the neural matrix, and I got it.

Fiorenza is clear about something I hadn’t noticed in Sawicki, but which is there, and which I cannot now unsee: those women are not interested in Jesus so much as they are interested in the wisdom movement that birthed and then resurrected him.

They’re not opposed to Jesus – not at all. They’re just not buying the whole “special guy who saved the world” schtick. That’s the order that he helps undo. It’s not about him; it never was.

They want to get to what it’s about – healing, comforting, feeding, sheltering, nursing.

Their work decenters Jesus by shifting focus to his program, his mission, and being clear that it’s meant to be lived now, in whatever context is given to us. It’s meant to be enacted here. Peace, happiness, fulfillment, love – all that follows the interior “yes” which activates our cooperation with God in and through Creation.

(Tara Singh often wrote how Helen Schucman told him the course was meant to be lived, and pointed at Mother Teresa as the premier example).

So Fiorenza is “ecclesial” – it takes a village, a community, a collective. Call it a church or whatever you like; it takes at least two to manifest the Lord. And as Lynice Pinkard says, it’s okay to be messy in community. It’s okay to be beginners when it comes to holy relationship.

There are no blueprints. And there is no space of purity from which to act. We must begin imperfectly from within the messiness, in ways that respond to and engage with our concrete and particular contexts and circumstances (Revolutionary Suicide).

I got distracted for a long time by oneness. I got distracted by my own personal “special guy who saved the world” schtick. I objectified myself as a spiritual hero in at least two religious traditions and resisted anything that suggested I was not.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been holding apart – a fantasy of spiritual accomplishment and the reality of how hurt I am and how needful of spiritual help.

But Sawicki and Fiorenza (and Pinkard, too) would say, you’re still keeping the focus on yourself, Sean. You’re still indulging the fantasy of going it alone, being a saint, a monk, whatever. Self-improvement is always an ego project. You’re making it personal. That’s the problem, they’d say. That’s what keeps you separate from the help you need and want.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post called Christ is a Collective, a kind of homage to Helen Beeth, whose writing and teaching feel so liberating to me. It felt like a deep interior cleansing, writing that post. It felt like coming to coherence. But also, I was concerned. Is this my reality or is it a fantasy? Am I hiding behind writing?

But now I see those questions aren’t real. Sometimes what we write isn’t our reality now, but can still function as a light making clear the next step or two. Just keep swimming. Don’t stop sharing.

So at last, I am beginning to piece together a practice – one that harmonizes with my eclectic study and innate wordiness, and liberates me from the confusion wrought by obedience unto men and orders of men who are often sincere but nearly always deeply confused. There is indeed another way and it is being revealed. Nor can I find it without you.

Yesterday Susan asked how am I keeping the Christ-embodied Mary outside of my heart, and my own heart briefly caught fire. Yes! That is the inquiry. But then everything slipped back into its familiar groove with one tiny exception: I knew I was not alone. And I thought then of Emily Dickinson, who wasn’t alone either, and yet still managed a vast and fertile solitude. She wrote these lines in I think 1870, after the “white heat” had passed and she was ordinary again.

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside –

How I wish I could have heard her read her own work! Can you imagine it? In the quiet seclusion of her bedroom after dark – moonlight and a lantern – and the world at her window leaning in?

Healing and attention are intimately connected. Admitting the wound is the way the wound heals, because the admission beckons the healers, in the same way a light calls weary travelers off the road.

I cry out and you are here, as if you always were. You lift me and ask am I ready – not to travel but to be home. Or am I lifting you? And does the distinction matter?

We begin again, again, companionate.

Twenty / Twenty-Two

Reading Humberto Maturana taught me that love was not a feeling but a state of being, a way of giving attention to life that was creative and nurturing, that was, in and of itself, life-giving.

Through Maturana I discovered that love was inherent and fear alien, and that it was possible to be happy in a deeply serious way (which is different from being happy in a deeply serious way – that’s an effect of a practice).

In love – in this new understanding of love – I was born again, and the world was born again with me. I was instantly intimately related to everyone and everything, without qualification or condition. Human beings, deer ticks, shooting stars and viruses . . . – I gave – not paid, gave – attention to all of it. I was devoted to the gift of attention. I gave and received in perfect measure, and the peace that resulted was not subject to analysis. Judgment was not mine but the Lord’s, and the Lord was radical because He excluded nothing and accepted no less of me.

. . . in the relational domain of love the other is not asked and is not expected to justify his or her existence . . . Love is unidirectional, and occurs as a spontaneous happening of accepting the legitimacy of the other as a matter of course without expecting retribution (Maturana 273).

More colloquially, love is the relationship – itself comprised of relationships – by which we come into being and know ourselves as Love Itself. Knowing ourself is to know the other; no other knowledge is possible.

Love is a process of mutual recognition, in which we come to see each other as unique and valuable beings. It is a process of creating a shared world, in which we can experience intimacy and connection (Maturana & Varela The Tree of Life).

But creating is active. It is enacted. Understanding matters but application does too, perhaps more. Tara Singh knew. And he also knew that application in the fullest sense required a relationship of – or with, perhaps – the highest order we know. On our own it cannot be done.

If you want to bring the Course to application, know that you have His divine presence with you. Knowing that He is with you inspires a quality of love and reverence. How would you then sit in His presence? (Commentaries on A Course in Miracles 38)

I began and for a long time transitioned through projections of God. God the judge, God the father, God in Heaven, God-as-Love. But then I realized that god was everywhere in all things, far upstream of language, concept and even behavior.

Jeremiah heard God say, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you.” God is outside of time and space altogether, so must be his Creation.

We are discovering this; we are remembering it, together.

I began to see the wisdom of making all thing a gift unto God. If you believed you were in the presence of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, of God, what would you do? As Tara Singh wrote, how would sit in the presence of God? It’s not a criticism – it’s an invitation.

For me, I cannot answer that question alone. That is where I am at now – I have the pieces, I’ve made the puzzle – but the finished puzzle is not the answer. I thought it would be but it is not.

In yesterday’s Advent writing I wrote the phrase “eccesial reckoning,” and felt a deep call to go into it. Sawicki is clear that post-resurrection Jesus communities were ecclesial. Church matters. But I hate church, and always have.

This morning I woke up thinking about Maturana, who invites a more radical communion than the formality and dogma of church. Or does he imply an even older way of churching? A simpler way?

What needs to be organized in my life? What needs a new rule to remember what it is?

Outside this morning it was cold and overcast. I shivered with my coffee. You make this harder than it has to be, says Jesus

Not always, I answer, and he nods in agreement. Not always. Often, yes. But not always.

We are quiet then, behind the barn, the world waking up. I wander down to the raspberries and wonder again if I should cut them back. I’ve been here before; I don’t want to be anywhere else. The homestead calls to me and In that call Jesus dissolves. Specialness dissolves.

I come inside then to write. I sit quietly by the Christmas tree and write. Neither sad nor happy, neither asleep nor awake. When it will be enough asks a familiar angel, and for the millionth time since this difficult journey began, I say not yet. Not yet.