The Easy Peace of Relationship

Every relationship in which we find ourselves is an aspect of the One Relationship, which is God’s relationship to Creation in Creation as Creation. Therefore, every relationship is an opportunity to remember our shared innocence and to become happy together in a way that invites God to “take the last step” (e.g., T-17.II.4:5).

We perceive each apparent relationship – with a co-worker, a friend, a neighbor, a writer we admire – as personal and local. We’re in it! And yet, seen clearly, the relationship also invokes the whole cosmos and all reality. The sun and the rain, the roads and the cities, the past and the future. Every relationship touches everything else in the cosmos and everything in the cosmos touches it.

In a holy relationship, all we want for the other is the freedom to remember their own self as they are – as we all are – in Creation. We trust the relationship to reveal precisely what we need to teach and learn at any given time. There is no pressure; there is nothing to control. We simply give attention.

In my study and practice, in my experience, one way to approach creating and living in a relationship that is harmonious with holiness and the Will of God, is to focus on making the relationship as easy as possible for the other. Focusing on the other – their needs, their modes, their expression – is an opening through which holiness can flow.

If we both do this – if I try to make things easy for you and you try to make things easy for me – then a new space opens. The relationship expands. It opens up into a calm space, a quiet space and also a living space. In it, something happens that saves us and the world. We realize there is no separation anywhere.

I am not personally very good at this! I am good at talking about it. I am good with the theory, but the theory has to sugar out in application, in practice, and that’s harder. Tara Singh studied closely with Helen Schucman and she said over and over to him, the course is meant to be lived.

So a big part of our practice is keeping a critical focus on the thought patterns and belief systems that make it hard for us to make things easier for one another. Assumptions, biases, desires, secrets, fears, fantasies. All of it. That stuff happens naturally but the course invites us to go beyond it. Is there a way to be in relationship that is not contingent on the body and the brain? On society? A Course in Miracles suggests there is. The course reimagines our humanness at a deep – even a radical – level, beyond the body, beyond the brain and beyond the world.

The commitment to bringing forth holiness means bringing the relationship to a happy place, which means an equitable place, a balanced place. It’s not about perfection but presence. It’s about giving attention in order to enable the grounding threads of service and mutual aid. We want to help each other, in the exact way the other needs our help. No more and no less.

When our relationship is in a happy place, we remember what we are in truth. We remember that we are extensions of Creation, in Whom Creation completes Itself as Love. Together we are Christ; that was always Jesus’s message and the focus of his program. Let us remember we are Christ; let us be the light by which we all remember together that we are Christ.

Really, “Christ” is a word we use to indicate a state of openness and receptivity. In the state we name “Christ,” there are no strangers. The binds that yoke us to a lifetime of social and physical conditioning loosen and soften. Separation is seen as an error that can be corrected.

Simplicity clarifies the way of correction. That is my experience. We are easily distracted. Shiny objects, exotic ideas, feelings of comfort and bliss. None of these things are bad in and of themselves but they’re also not the way, the truth and the light. They are distractions, drawing our attention away from our intention and practice of remembering Christ. They keep us entangled with separation rather than relationship.

In simplicity, beyond the reach of preference and privilege, we perceive the fundamental neutrality of all things. We understand that meaning is given by either ego or the Holy Spirit and that it’s up to us which one to listen to. The secret to salvation is that we are doing this to our selves, and can choose another way.

Distance, differences and conflict are the hallmarks of listening to ego. But the Holy Spirit teaches us how to recognize ourselves, and recognize the will we share with one another, and through each other, with God. It teaches us that separation (distance, differences and conflict) is an appearance born of a confused sense of self-identity and that there is another way.

When we remember God’s Love, and remember that we are loved by God, here and now, the other way naturally shows itself. It is given.

Love is natural. Creation happens. Holiness is contagious.

In my practice, I did not know what Love was until I made a firm commitment to nonviolence. Jesus was clear about this. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also” (Luke 6:27-29). When his disciples utilize violence, they are rebuked (Luke 9:22).

Nonviolence was a countercultural teaching then and it remains one today. We are not called to love some of our enemies but all of them. We are not called to be mostly peaceable but entirely peaceful, even unto death on a cross. Nobody believes that; nobody wants to believe that.

But I did not know what Love was until I made the commitment to living nonviolently. I was awful at it and in many ways I still am. But I was given more than I gave up. Even just trying to live nonviolently taught me how to let go of anger and hatred, guilt and fear. I came into direct contact with those feelings, and the belief systems that sustain them, and was shown a way to be liberated from the toxicity of all of them.

The truth is, I am responsible for peace and justice and happiness. But also, responsibility is a collaborative process and only works when we each accept and fulfill our role in relationship. So when we are making things easier for one another, we are also practicing nonviolence with one another.

I wish I could say that I was more graceful with respect to all of this. Nonviolence is difficult – shockingly so sometimes. But, for me, it is the way. At least knowing that – knowing I’ve found the means – allows me to stop seeking other paths or practices. I can commit. Commitment is a limitation in a sense – it closes doors – but it does allow us to dwell in new possibility. We can focus differently. I am grateful for that.

This is not necessarily about big and dramatic actions; it is not about brag-worthy accomplishments. The world is not saved by individual heroes but by folks who choose to work cooperatively for sustainable happiness and peace, and a modest abundance that excludes nobody. Separation is a practical problem with a spiritual solution.

This means I am responsible for bringing every relationship to holiness. And, again, a really effective way to do that is to devote myself to making the relationship easier for you. Maybe that means we need to give each other space, maybe it means I need to go to therapy, maybe it means you need to do the dishes more often. I don’t know. The form adjusts to the specific teaching and learning need being expressed.

I know that if I ask the Holy Spirit how to help, I will be answered, and the answer will be clear. It will not be subject to debate. When you know, you know. The Holy Spirit does not increase confusion or passivity. The Holy Spirit is about clarity and application. The course is meant to be lived.

That’s the work, then. I want to be present to the relationship where it is in order to perceive its potential for happiness and peace. The call to service is inherent in us. Our brothers and sisters always tell us what they need. But we have to ask: we have to give attention. We have to be present.

“We have to be present.” In the end, that is the simplest and clearest way to make things easier for one another: simply be present. Open eyes and hands, open mind and heart. We say yes to the invitation to heal and together are made holy.

Reading the ACIM Manual for Teachers: Introduction

A Course in Miracles reframes traditional concepts of teaching and learning (and thus of student and teacher), with an eye toward bringing us to responsibility for healing in all our relationships.

In the traditional view, teaching is a profession, a 9-to-5 type of gig – you train, get certified, find a job, develop professionally. Teachers and learners are separate – e.g., students sit at desks facing the teacher who stands up front. Most significantly, the teacher has something the student does not – some knowledge or information, some skill – and “teaching” means sharing that something with the student.

But the Manural for Teachers of A Course in Miracles suggests that “to teach is to learn,” which means that “teacher and learner are the same” (M-in.1:5), and that teaching is “a constant process” that continues even as we sleep (M-in.1:6).

On this view, we are all students and teachers; we are all teaching and learning, all the time.

But what are we learning? What are we teaching?

The course suggests there are only two thought systems. The first – the most common, the one from which we are awakening – is ego. Ego is a fear and trauma-based understanding of self and other. When we teach and learn under this thought system, we bring forth a world and a way of living in which everyone suffers to some degree or other. In this system, there is hope of recovery or healing, and there may even be glimpses or hints of recovery and healing, but nothing actually changes in a sustainable way. There is no transformation.

For most of us, that is the world in which we live, and to which we contribute, through passivity, denial and confusion. We mean well but somehow we never quite reach a meaningful conversion, individually or collectively.

The other thought system – the alternative to the egoic system – is that of the Holy Spirit, symbolized by Jesus, in which we commit to a form of healing that involves recognizing that our actual identity is grounded in love, gentleness, open-mindedness and grace. When we teach and learn with the Holy Spirit and Jesus, we bring forth a world characterized by cooperation rather than competition, inclusivity rather than exclusion and mutuality rather than individualism.

The world and way of living brought forth under the Holy Spirit’s tutelage are the foundation of the Happy Dream, “from which awaking is so easy and so natural” (T-18.II.9:4).

In all situations, in all our relationships, what we teach and what we learn reflects which of those two systems we believe is true. Are we fearful critters bereft of love and beholden to conflict? Or are we creations of love, bent on remembering in relationship the beneficent nature and intention of creation?

Teaching is always a demonstration. Our behavior – the words we use and the actions we take – testify to others, and through them, to our self, what we believe we are. Teaching and learning are an opportunity to clarify our thinking in order to bring forth peace in all our relationships and thus to the world (which is relationship).

Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself . . . This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach (M-in.3:7, 9-10).

Given to ego, and the world ego brings forth, our teaching and learning is hopelessly redundant, forever recycling through the same errors of guilt, fear and powerlessness. That is what ego wants, and so that is what the world does (M-in.4:5).

God’s teachers – those who are devoted to changing their minds about who and what they are, through their relationship with Jesus and shared connection with the Holy Spirit – are the antidote to this “hopeless and closed learning situation” (M-in.4:7). They teach God’s “joy and hope” because that is what they want to learn, and their demonstration of God’s love – offered and received in the world – completes their learning (M-in.4:8).

That is our shared goal: to teach together and learn together what love is, what creation is, and what we are – together – in truth.

Teachers of God are not perfect, nor are they apart from the conditions of separation which they teach are unreal (M-in.5:5). We are all called to be teachers of God, and we all are teachers of God. A Course in Miracles is one way of reaching this state of helpful and dialogic creativity. The Manual for Teachers – following the Text and Workbook – is designed to help us realize our calling and respond to it in clear and helpful ways.

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But what does this look like in practice? That’s always the important question in A Course in Miracles, right? Our study has to sugar out in a sustainable and transformative practice.

How does this new configuration of teaching and learning fit into that?

The curriculum of A Course in Miracles arises out of an underlying spiritual identity crisis. It arises from our confusion about what we are in order to help us undo that confusion and come to clarity.

Therefore, the ACIM curriculum is literally the life before us, with all its challenges and joys, disappointments and cruelties, ecstasies and everydayness. It all fits; it all belongs. We couldn’t exclude it if we wanted to.

To teach is to demonstrate (M-in.2:1). Helen was a perfectionist and a skilled writer by the time she began working on the Manual. “Demonstrate” is not an accident, which means that its range of meaning – including, significantly, behavior – is intentional.

Our words and our behavior – the living that our belief system brings forth – is perceptible to others. We demonstrate it for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters. They do the same. It is an intelligible shared performance. We teach other how to see us and they teach us how to see them. All our behavior, all the time, is a testament to what we believe we are and what we believe others are.

A Course in Miracles suggests that its purpose to “provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn (M-in.2:5). If we are unhappy in a relationship for any reason at all, it is an invitation not to assign blame but rather to deepen our commitment to “[t]each only love, for that is what you are” (T-6.I.13:2).

This requires us to be in relationship with one another. Since nobody can be excluded from the teaching/learning dynamic, the classroom goes with us everywhere. We are always the student and always the teacher. Nothing required to facilitate our shared education in love is kept from us. Everything is given in every moment. Understanding this liberates us from our mistaken identity – and the mistakes that identity calls forth. All healing is an awareness of God’s presence to us now.

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Critically, when ACIM refactors the teaching/learning relationship, it makes an important statement about our relationship with fear. If the classroom is literally the life before us – without qualification or condition – then fear is also a part of the curriculum. Fear, too, has a place at the table.

In other words, we don’t have to be afraid anymore. In particular, we no longer have to be afraid of fear. There is nothing left to fear, including fear.

This is a deeply liberating understanding. It means that whatever comes up is okay to look at – it means that whatever comes up for us is supposed to come up. If we need to talk about family history, it’s okay. If we need to go out and be politically active, it’s okay. You want to go to therapy? Get sober? Take guitar lessons? Go to India? Quit ACIM altogether?

It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

“There’s nothing to fear” means there is no longer any reason for us to judge. We can let the Holy Spirit take that function over. Fear and judgment are related, and when we no longer fear fear, we begin to see how shallow and misguided our judgment is. We don’t want to hold onto it; all it brings us is grief. We want the other way; we are ready for it.

Thus, everything in our lives becomes a joyful lesson in what it means to love – to be remembered in love, recognized in love, held in love, offered up in love, gazed at in love and celebrated in love. We become happy together in natural, serious and sustainable ways.

In a sense, “teaching and learning” in a devoted ACIM practice are simply about giving attention to our lives and participating in them as gently and lovingly as possible. The function of the Manual for Teachers is to nurture this participation, strengthen our commitment to it, and helpfully contextualize its effects.

In Christmas Time: The Authority of Love

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I am feeling my way towards something here. Please be patient. You know what I’ve forgotten, and the trail is growing faint.

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Lately I’ve been riding the insomnia train again. Do you know it? I mean insomnia like, it’s three a.m., you haven’t slept for twenty some odd hours and you have to get up at six and go to work.

Insomnia always sucks but at the margins it becomes toxic. It hinders judgment, upsets the mind/body connection, and fast-tracks descent into depression. I wish it on no one.

One of the tricks I play to try and sleep is, I become a hobo. I wander around the house with a blanket looking for any open surface. Sometimes it’s a rocking chair, sometimes the floor beneath the dining room table, sometimes the back porch.

Sometimes I just wander.

The other night – huddled on the living room couch, shivering and floating on nightmares through fitful sleep – a question occurred.

To what are you clinging, Sean?

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Earlier this summer, I walked with Jesus to the river out back, knelt by a clump of Forget-Me-Nots, and begged him to heal me.

He trailed his fingers over the tiny blue flowers and didn’t answer right away. The sun was bright; the river a low hum to our left. In the distance, sheep bleated.

It reminded me of the time he intervened to save a woman accused of adultery. Do you remember? He knelt between the woman and those prepared to murder her with stones and traced circles in the dust with his finger. We talk about it now as if it were a neat and tidy wisdom lesson: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

But it wasn’t that. In that moment he was angry. And when he spoke, it wasn’t the words that made folks put their stones down. It was the fire in his eyes and voice. His was the authority of Love. He could’ve said anything.

“Sean,” he said gently, there by the river. “Forgiveness is the end of suffering. No one who clings to even one illusion will remember himself as sinless because he still cherishes this one error. He calls it unforgivable and makes it a sin.”

We tossed stones in the river then, lost in our thoughts. The afternoon passed in silence. He always liked that. I do, too.

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What, in the end, can you not let go?

Down in depths I cannot risk without the Holy Spirit (and even then, man, even then) the answer is: life itself.

I do not want to die. I want to live.

Beyond the drama and mundanity of my day-to-day existence, there is this drive to live. It eclipses everything.

Everything – what I eat, how I pray, who I love, who I will not in a million years love – is subsumed by – is forced to serve – the survival instinct.

And for which, in a nontrivial sense, God bless! I love this life. I love moonlight and grandmother stories. I love the sound of the river at night in summer. I love conversations that last lifetimes, and walking with you in the forest, and watching you turn towards me in certain shades of light. I love apple pie and fresh-baked bread. I love spider webs at dawn. I love kisses and Marianne Sawicki and hot coffee. I love being wordy and I love the silence that makes wordiness possible.

“And you would defend all of it to the death,” he says quietly, from the interior bower where he often rests.

Is that so bad? I ask at last. I hate disappointing him but like all good teachers he cherishes honesty. There is no helpful pedagogy without it.

“If you can cling to it it’s not love,” he says, and then goes silent for days, as if giving me time to get clear on – or remember maybe – a lesson he taught us lifetimes ago. Why am I so forgetful? What grief or loss do I insist on worshipping instead of Love?

Why is healing so fucking hard?

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Here is the truth.

I was not one of the disciples. Nor was I one of the ones with stones. I was the one telling the ones with the stones they were right. I was the one saying, she deserves to die for what she did.

I was the one saying, throw the fucking stones.

Sister, I was the one he confronted. I was the one whose confusion he so brutally and perfectly corrected.

I couldn’t sleep that night. All I saw was the fire in his eyes; all I heard was his clear and fearless voice. His was the authority of Love. For days I did not sleep or eat. Demons came, and devils with swords and spears of fire. Gehenna opened its gaping maw and bid me enter.

And knowing I deserved nothing but Gehenna, I fell to my knees and cried out from the ashen ruins of my heart, please don’t let me die. Please let me live.

5

Sometimes when I am lost in the insomniac trials, you touch my shoulder and murmur, Sean, there is another way. Most times I don’t hear, but sometimes it echoes just so and I remember. You said it two thousand years ago as well.

“There is another way,” you said, and knowing exactly what you meant, I joined you and we followed it together. We gave up everything to follow him. And when we found him, a handful of villages down the road, I dropped into the dirt like a dog and begged him to forgive me.

And he laughed! Do you remember? He laughed. He laughed, lifted me to my feet, and kissed me on the mouth. “My brother,” he said. “Of course you are forgiven. Of course you are.”

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The personal existence passes. Life does not. The body and its stories pass. Creation does not. The earth will pass and the sun will collapse into itself and creation will go on.

We are creatures (critters, Donna Haraway says) of creation, inseparable from the cosmos which is our Creator and to which we bear witness in love, which is our creativity – our potential to be kind to one another, to feed and be fed by one another, to play together and walk together, to come in from the rain together, to laugh together and cry together.

To say to one another, Bill Thetford-like, there is another way.

“I don’t want to let all that go” arises from the mistaken idea that I am holding any of it in the first place. And that mistaken idea arises from the even more mistaken idea that I am something other than Creation.

I am a part of what I fear I am apart from. I can’t be let go. There is nothing to let go. Including – as you know – this personal existence.

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This summer, when we turned to go home, I picked two Forget-Me-Nots and offered one to Jesus, who cradled it in his hands. The other I carried home to you. This is it.

In Christmas Time: Vast Rivers of Healing

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I’ve spent a lot of time in this life with the cross, and somewhat less time with resurrection. The one makes the other necessary – a kind of grim cycle I wish on nobody. Yet recently, another way has shown itself. Late, but not too late, I am called back into the desert where it all began, and you are going too.

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A big part of my “story” is that I have not always been a good guy. Today I am a good guy, or at least an okay guy committed to minimizing harm. But not always. And even so, things still go sideways sometimes.

I am the predictable result of a genetic predisposition to addiction and a culture that celebrates enduring suffering as a sign of strength, violence as the only valid means of conflict resolution, and shame as a religion.

Hell, not Heaven, is my mode, my location and my journey’s singular goal.

Nor am I alone. A long line of fathers, uncles and brothers stand behind me – ancestors who died in jail, died drunk on winter streets, died alone in hospitals in strange cities. When my great-grandfather was able to move his parents’ bodies to a private plot overlooking the Taunton River, he only moved his mother.

I understand why he did that.

And I understand that part of his heart – and mine – remains in that unmarked – that unforgiven and unforgiving – grave.

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I have committed crimes. I have hurt people’s bodies and minds with my words and my fists. I have practiced a brutal indifference to all this – I have refused accountability – leaving me lonely, sad, and angrier at God than I can say.

And yet.

It’s the “and yet” that gets us, right? No matter how bad it gets – and it gets bad, it can get really really bad – there is always some undercurrent of light, some thread of hope, some interior glimmer of goodness and love that calls us away from the cross and the empty tomb.

Marianne Sawicki and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza are clear: Follow Jesus or don’t, but if you are going to follow him, then accept responsibility for creating anew and sustaining now his discipleship of equals.

The new kinship of the discipleship of equals . . . is sustained by the gracious goodness of God . . . The “father” God is invoked here not to justify patriarchal structures and relationships in the community of disciples but precisely to reject all such claims, powers and structures . . . The woman-identified man, Jesus, called forth a discipleship of equals that still needs to be discovered and realized by women and men today (Fiorenza In Memory of Her 150, 154).

No more going it alone, no more refusing to console or be consoled, no more willful embrace of physical and psychological pain, and no more indifference to the well-being of any brother or sister anywhere.

Now is the time of becoming familiar with Christ by becoming family to one another, but familial in a sense that transcends the limitations of both biology and culture. It’s new, right? Familiar but new.

Critically, this new family does not include a father. As Fiorenza makes clear, this is neither an accident nor an insult. It merely reflects the corrective impulse of Jesus. Patriarchal rigidity – man as the locus of power – is gently set aside. In its place is God, Who is Love, and the only locus of power anybody needs.

Are you ready for that? Am I? Is anyone, ever?

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There was a terrible storm on the day I met her. I stood on the steps of the law school library, happier than I’d been in a long time, her phone number tucked in my pocket, and watched dark clouds sweep across the sky. Wind whipped and howled, driving leaves from the trees; rain fell in heavy sheets, drenching everything.

I don’t remember how long it lasted. Ten minutes? Twenty?

I stood there and watched. I stood there and witnessed.

My life had changed in a matter of minutes and I knew it. I don’t think I have ever felt with such clarity and precision the graceful movement of God. I had been brought into a relationship that refused the rubric of suffering, the pedagogy of hate and the ontology of fear. In it, seeking ended and creation began.

My heart was joined with another who would not forsake me but rather teach me – in time, in the world – how to not forsake others, including my own self.

I remember later driving to the store to buy lunch. I wandered up and down the fruit and vegetable aisles, admiring the colors, amazed at how happy I was, how alive. Everything was full of light. Vast rivers of healing rose through the earth into my body and from there flowed out into the cosmos, filling it with the energy of creation.

I left without buying anything; of course I did. I needed nothing; I had been given everything.

And yes. That moment, like the storm before it, passed. But the gift did not. It remained in me as the potential for healing, and the possibility of joy. The relationship itself was beautiful and difficult, like crossing a desert. In it, an ancient prayer was answered yet again. An even more ancient love took form – yet again – in the world. What else did I expect?

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Emily Dickinson knew. The Divine finds us in relationship, and in relationship we learn from one another how to be divine.

With thee, in the Desert —
With thee in the thirst —
With thee in the Tamarind wood —
Leopard breathes — at last!

In relationship, we realize that the only power is that of Love. Everything else is subsumed in it. Creation alone is. In the desert, we remember our fundamental poverty and thus reclaim our identity in Creation. We are dependent and relational. Grace is a matrix whose output is love and we are it.

There’s a reason I like writing that, that way, and a reason you like reading it. The leopard – my God this love – draws yet another breath.

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Fiorenza again, same text: “Structures of domination should not be tolerated in the discipleship of equals” (148).

I hear you. I see you. I will not take another step without you.

In Christmas Time

And so the journey ends. So the Advent season – always an abstraction, always a projection – ends. The long night ends and a new day begins. The manger was always a symbol. Shall we be born again in our shared heart? Can we even begin to understand what that means? Do we need to?

In the church of my childhood, when Advent ends, the time of Christmas begins, which lasts until January 12, when “ordinary time” begins.

So we are in Christmas Time now. The sign has changed; our attention is called differently. It’s a feeling – do you feel it?

In Christmas Time, I will not make altars unto sadness and grief nor give assent to the works of injustice and fear. I will remember that God is not a God of guilt and retribution but of love and mercy, peace and joy. I will love God, Whose happiness in my happiness, and Whose will for creation I share.

And I will share. And share and share.

And, probably, I will fail. Sometimes I will fail. Some sorrow will catch me unaware; some memory of some difficult loss will come and I won’t have the heart to drive it away. It’s okay. We cannot be forsaken. Another secret to salvation, as hidden as the others, is that it’s not actually possible to make a mistake. There are no errors.

It takes a lot of faith to use reason in service of love. It takes a kind of wisdom one only finds in the collective. You have to want to let go of blame entirely.

The Advent writing was helpful. Mary’s presence was a surprise and a blessing – it took me to a new place in the story. It opened up new possibilities in the form of my life. Christmas is not the goal, it’s the effect. The important part was always Mary’s. Jesus isn’t special but holy. That distinction – between specialness and holiness – is the only one that still seems to matter.

I mentioned the broken furnace. By mid-day on the 23rd the house was in the low forties. We couldn’t get anybody to come fix it. We were frustrated and scared. So I prayed. I went upstairs, got on my knees and prayed. My prayer was: Jesus, help me figure out how to not make this worse and, if there are steps I can take to be helpful that I’m not seeing, could you help me see them? Please and thank you.

I sat quietly (shivering) to see if any answers or tips or intuitions came but nothing did.

So I went back downstairs cold and uncertain to find C sitting on a radiator with a puzzled look on her face. “The furnace just went on,” she said. And indeed it had.

Interpret that as you will.

In Christmas Time we are allowed to remember who the Adult is; we are allowed to remember the Child. We are allowed to receive God’s Gift (which, for me, was remembering that innocence is recollected in relationship). We are allowed to play and be happy together; we are MEANT to play and be happy. Together is what matters, everything else sugars out.

So for a little while, I’m taking off the Hat of the Seeker and putting on the Hat of the Celebrant. Setting aside the traveler’s lantern and turning on the householder’s mirror ball. It’s Christmas Time. Jesus is here, God is alive and together we are Christ. Alleluia alleluia alleluia.

Twenty-Three

Advent Travels: Out of Bethlehem and Into the Desert

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In a dream last night, we reached Bethlehem. There were pilgrims everywhere. Do you know which Inn? Are we too late? Some of us had gifts, some of us were hoping to get a gift. The vibe was happy mostly, mostly festive. It was chaotic but in a family reunion kind of way. Everybody wanted the same thing.

In the dream, I lead us up and down the busy roads. I am focused and intent; I refuse to be distracted. We will find Him – we will! But then – suddenly – I realize I’ve lost you. Somewhere in the flocking streams I lost you.

I begin to call your name. I shove through hordes of seekers to find you. Nothing else matters. For the first time since we began this journey, I am scared. What if you are gone?

I realize that finding Jesus means nothing if you are not there with me.

A minute later, I realize what this means for my search for Jesus. It wasn’t about him at all. It was about connecting with you. It was always about you. Always.

And you are gone.

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The last post of a sustained writing project is always the hardest. The temptation to conclude is strong in us. We want to stick the landing, resolve the plot, put a big red bow on it.

But at the end of Advent, I can’t do that. Neither my psyche nor my writing are prone to finishing. They thrive on stories that are bigger than they are. They love disappearing in gospel mythologies, telling and retelling familiar tales at the fire.

Every relationship in which I share is an aspect of the One Relationship, which is that of God with Creation. I can’t compass that relationship in ways that resolve neatly, like a finely-made clock or O’Henry’s Gift of the Magi. There has to be something on the other side of language. Silence isn’t just the absence of sound.

I’m not the maker of our relationship, much less the One Relationship. When I consent to enter either fully, both enter me. I’m not “I” then, I’m “us,” with you. It’s open and open-ended, this thing of ours. It’s outside the bounds of “right/wrong,” “either/or” and even “both/and.”

It’s beyond “/”. It’s even beyond ” “.

Our relationship is a glittering star in the vast firmanent of God’s Delight. This was the light we followed; this is the light we always follow. It’s us. We’re the love.

2

In the dream, I am defeated. I cannot find you. I sink to my knees in the dirt; nobody notices. Nobody cares. It’s over. Loss and lack are all I know.

But then somebody kicks me, and then kicks me again, and when I turn to see who it is, it’s you. It was always you.

“Get off your knees,” you say, extending a hand. I want to say you’re luminous – I want to say you couldn’t be more Christ – but I don’t. I’m just happy you found me. And there has to be something on the other side of words. I take your hand. Of course I take it. What else were my own hands made for but this?

3

When I was a little boy, I fell in love a lot, and everything I loved was killed or sold or abandoned. Dogs, cats, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, deer, trout, pheasants, grouse, bears. My best friend and first girlfriend moved to Kentucky. Shit happens.

Shit happens but also, life goes on. I learned that lesson early too. Everything died but life went on. No matter how much pain there was in this moment, in another would be joy. I didn’t like it but I couldn’t deny it.

So I kept coming back. You know what I mean? My heart would break, I’d mourn, and then . . . find somebody or something else to love again. Even a dandelion in sunlight, just so, was sufficient. I was always falling to my knees; I was always being offered a hand.

In childhood, among other things, I learned how to hope. I learned that hope was justified.

And look. I agree with Krishnamurti: hope is just the flip side of despair. It’s “/” all over again. We fear hell so we hope for Heaven. It’s a cycle, a trick of ego, and its only function is to keep us from ever seeing that we are doing this to ourselves, and that there is another way.

But also, hope was how I survived a difficult part of the journey. And it’s hard to let something go that served so well for so long.

Of course I’m scared. What did I think was going to happen here? What did you think was going to happen?

4

When I was a child I had a recurring dream of Mary. She was standing on the Charles M. Braga bridge in light rain, staring sadly at the city of Fall River, the ancestral city of both sides of my family. The mist was a shroud hiding every other body but ours. Mary’s grief was enormous; her vulnerability obvious. Somebody had to help her. I had to help her. But something invisible separated us and I was only allowed to observe. Eventually the dream stopped being a dream and became a memory. But of what exactly? And why am I telling you? You were there.

5

In the dream you take my hand and lead me – against the flowing crowd entering Bethelehem – out of Bethlehem and into the desert where it all began so long ago. I’m scared still but differently. Where are we going, I ask. But you only smile and say trust me. I will, I say. And I do. I do.

Twenty-Two / Twenty-Four