Advent Travels: Church Goes with You

What is clear at 4 a.m. is less so as the day goes on. It rained last night; I sat in the darkness and listened. Christmas is coming, plans are being made. I’m tired and I want to rest.

In Advent, in prayer, a lot opens up and a lot slips away.

I remember Elango all those years ago telling me outside the library in Burlington, it’s not intensity you lack but focus, which struck me as oddly backwards. This was around the time I told Andy I was going to wear my crucifix outside my shirt and he was visibly shocked. Pray on that, he said, and I did because of how it mattered to him.

I used to wake up Dan in the middle of the night, whatever floor or couch we’d fallen asleep on, and say things like, we have to drive to Boston. Or, we have to go into the woods. “My God you’re a fire,” he said once, forcing himself awake at two a.m. to drive us deep into the Northeast Kingdom. I was never happier than watching the sun rise over Lake Memphremagog that morning. The church goes with you or it’s not a church.

By dusk yesterday I realized the hypocrisy in yesterday’s writing: bragging how spiritually mature it was, not publicly engaging with my critic which was, of course, a way of publicly engaging with my critic, which neither surprised nor disappointed me. I’ve been walking in this direction a long time.

Separation is a way of thinking that produces behavior that makes us, singly and collectively, unhappy. We insist that something naturally unified must be held apart, and then expend tremendous energy keeping it apart. But what? What is being held apart?

In Advent, something hidden remains so. I have to accept it may always. I may not reach the manger. And honestly? It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

Yesterday I wrote this sentence to a friend:

It seems clear to me that your relationship with yourself as a writer – a creator, an artist, a free spirit – is somehow damaged and the damage lies in a domain signified primarily by gender and that you have hidden – protected, secured – the requisite healing in a version of Christianity you have yet to discover because you have yet to create it.

. . . and wished someone had written it to me. Like really wished it.

In those days – with Elango, Andy and Dan – I was still studying under Lorrie’s direction, even though we hadn’t talked in years. The reading list she’d left was vast – Derrida and Barthes, Mary Daly, Gertrude Stein. The curriculum was thrilling but private. Nobody knew what I was doing.

I read all the time, wrote as often as possible, and spent the rest of my days dragging men into various arguments that most of them didn’t realize were arguments. Or rather, didn’t realize how high I wanted the stakes to be.

Sawicki is less interested in a therapeutic model for its own sake because of the risk it will devolve into something merely personal, effacing the necessity of ecclesial reckoning. Whatever illusion resurrection penetrates, it must also takes with it the illusion of separate interests. Do you want to see the Lord or not?

My answer, not exactly on point: I don’t want to be seen doing this. Doing what? Writing this way.

Do you see what am I saying about separation? And projection? Do you see what I am not saying?

Dan and I fought exactly once, a terrible argument from which the relationship never recovered. Forty years later I am still baffled and hurt, wishing I could repair the damage. The rest of them it’s okay they’re memories. But I do miss Dan.

In Advent it rains. December softens growing darker. Each sentence this morning was a difficult pill. Who was the desert father who kept a stone in his mouth for thirty years in order to learn what silence was? I want to find his cell and take him in my arms. I want to say, “brother, spit out that rock, let’s talk.”

Eighteen / Twenty

Advent Travels: Under the Bookish Pedagogy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seventeen / Nineteen

Advent Travels: A Critter in Creation

Briefly.

What did you think Love would look like, when at last you realized or remembered it? What did you think oneness with God would feel like?

When our fundamental unity with all life is at last revealed, what will it be like to be you?

We cannot crave that which we do not know exists. We cannot long for a state that we have not in some way, however faintly, known.

I mean, theoretically we can. We can play very fancy word games; we can invent states like “enlightenment” or “awakening,” and project them into the future as ideals to pursue. We can build whole thought systems supporting that pursuit.

But in terms of our practice – in terms of how we support one another in a practice – it’s neither a mystery nor a secret. God sugars out on terms you know presently and through means with which you are already fluent.

Whatever God is, whatever Love is, it is trying to get to you as much as you are trying – or professing to be trying – to get to it.

The first time I asked these questions – put both mind and body into them – I realized that whatever Love was, it had to include this. Which this?

This one, right here. This this.

God’s love – whatever it is – has to be here now. I may not right away recognize it – I may even resist it (man do I resist it) – but it’s not being kept from me. It’s not being hidden at the end of a long journey.

God and love – whatever they are – are simple because they are given to everyone equally. It doesn’t matter how you pray or whether you pray or what you believe or what shitty things you’ve done.

The gift is given. It’s yours. It’s one size fits all. It’s really really simple.

So I began to look for love where I was – doing the dishes, weeding the garden, driving to work, talking to friends, reading and cooking.

Not in those activities – not dependent on those activities – but rather the light in which those activities could be known.

That practice taught me the specific way in which separation is an illusion and, in doing so, healed it.

Again, I mean this in an experiential sense. I wasn’t trying to understand any theology or master any metaphysics. It wasn’t about one-upping anybody on ACIM stuff. I was looking at experience and understanding as they were expressed – as they were offered – in the moment.

I looked at the offer, what was offered, the one offering and the one to whom it was offered.

There was no separation in any of it.

Sometimes we try to retrofit the experience into this or that religious language. I really like the Abhishiktananda writes about oneness with God, Tara Singh about A Course in Miracles, and Emily Dickinson about revelation.

All good! All helpful!

But those are pointers and what they pointed at was orders of magnitude simpler and clearer than they could ever be on their own.

The practice became: give attention.

The gift is attention.

If we just give attention – if we are present as fully as we can be in the moment – what is God? What is love?

I am saying, you already know. At a deep level – but not a secret or a hidden level – you know. We all do.

It was very helpful to see this and then to accept it. Wonderful things began to happen. The power to be happy and at peace began to assert itself. A kind of deep coherence – far beyond my ability to disturb or offend or manipulate – began to show itself.

It’s not hard to talk about, though finding a shared language to do so can be challenging. You can get lost a long time trying to police your or someone else’s language. Ask me how I know.

But if the problem is how to talk about God and the gift of God – or what language to use – then we haven’t yet found it. We’re like kids playing with wrapping paper, while the true gift – given and opened – goes ignored.

Here’s the thing. No decent parent makes their kid stop playing with wrapping paper. You want to play with wrapping paper and look at the gift tomorrow? Or in a week? That’s okay! The divine parent waits for us to to finish being distracted by the wapping and turn to the gift. There’s nothing left for them to do.

God waits on us, not the other way around.

Are these Advent posts playing with the paper? Or are they pointers to the gift?

I am saying that the gift is given. That’s what I want to say. The gift is here. Nobody has to go anywhere or do anything to get the gift. After you get it (that is, after you realize you’ve had it all along) your life circumstances might change. Why not? But the gift is not conditional on those circumstances, much less on their being other than they are presently.

Or, rather, the gift is conditional but on one thing: you being a Child of God, a critter in Creation, an extension of Love.

Which you are.

Sixteen / Eighteen

Advent Travels: The World as Eden

In Advent, no warning, the writing become disuptive. I forget that we are not in this together, and that my understanding of the illusion of separate interests cannot by force overcome that illusion in another. Why is this so hard?

Over the weekend I read Jane Yolen’s YA history of the Shakers. I have loved the Shakers for a long time, often feel in the presence of their art and texts that I am revisiting something vital and familiar. I know this somehow; I’ve been here somehow.

Mother Ann Lee suffered greatly in England, though not uncommonly. She was poor and illiterate, began working in brutal factory conditions at age ten. She hated marriage and hated sex. She had four kids and they all died.

Her religious fervor – pitched as it was it against the state religion and against the male prerogative – often landed her in jail.

Eventually, she realized that God was both male and female, and that as Jesus was the male image of the Lord, so she was the female. Her conviction was infectious. She led her scant band of believers to the North American colonies, where they settled.

When she preached in New England, she was beaten and mocked. Men held her down and removed her clothes to “prove she was a woman.” It’s impossible to rule out sexual violence.

Ann wanted out of the world. She wanted out of poverty, out of the emerging capitalist industrial complex, and out of the institution of marriage and family. Shakers were early pacifists and abolitionists. Ann re-envisioned the world as Eden, worked hard to make it so, and her vision survived her death.

Even now, in faint ways, her clarity about injustice – and her willingness to put her body on the line to undo it – informs our freedom. She is one of my spiritual ancestors, along with Anna White. Their invitation to radical simplicity is still being extended.

I am sitting quietly by the tree, trying to write, having failed to pray, and having failed to remember even the reason for prayer.

In Advent, without warning, the writing becomes disruptive. It joins me with others, some of whom do not want to join with me, or who find my way of languaging our union difficult or even wrong.

I forget this. I become happy and clear – Heaven is here, Jesus is here, it is all so obvious – and then I am brought back hard to separation and grief. I forget that nothing is clear and nothing is obvious except consensually.

We have to agree and our agreement has to arise from freedom. There is always another way.

As long as a single “slave” remains to walk the earth, your release is not complete. Complete restoration of the Sonship is the only goal of the miracle-minded (T-1.VII.3:13-14).

I’d reframe that: so long as even one brother or sister is outside the circle of your celebration of clarity and joy, then your celebration is a fantasy. It’s an illusion of freedom perpetuating separation.

Sawicki is clear that there is a way to know Jesus presently that is neither supernatural nor mystical but deeply practical, like buying groceries or driving your kid to school.

That, too, is an invitation, no?

All night I wandered in and out of sleep. I dreamed of a big stone church near a highway. I sat outside it a long time, wondering whether to enter or instead find the highway and join with a fellow traveler heading north.

When I entered the church – in the dream I don’t recall deciding to enter – where the altar would go was an enormous glass fountain that had not known water for a long time, possibly centuries.

You were on your knees polishing it. Someday water will flow again, you said. I want to be ready.

I didn’t know what to say or whether I should help. Nor did you notice my confusion.

That is the way I live: that is my experience of separation. “I didn’t know what to say or whether I should help / Nor did you notice my confusion.” All my loneliness lives in those two sentences, and all my cries for help.

In the dream I cried. I wept and wept for what seemed like ages. You neither spoke nor acknowledged my tears. Yet, when I moved to leave, you looked up and asked me stay.

In the window over your shoulder I could see cars on the highway driving north; everyone in them was happy. There was a party somewhere; somewhere there was a festival of happiness and light.

I asked why you wanted me to stay but you answered in a language I didn’t speak or know. Eventually I gave up and went outside.

The highway was empty and a noxious smoke filled the sky. Evil was afoot; indifference was afoot; separation wreaking its havoc was afoot. In a bush by the door a single male cardinal spoke. “She said there are not enough stars in the sky to illuminate either the depths or the nature of her love for you.”

I woke up then and came downstairs to write. The tree is pretty. The day already feels like a gauntlet. In winter, in Advent, I begin again. I refuse to take another step without you.

Fifteen / Seventeen

Advent Travels: A Footnote Almost

We put our tree up yesterday. Late Friday, C. drove with our daughters to a farm a couple town north, an old man with a meadow full of scraggly pines. You put twenty bucks in an envelope on the porch and then cut down a tree.

It’s a tall tree – at least seven feet. It stands in the living room bump-out where in the nineteenth century coffins rested (we live in the old parsonage where wakes were often held). While decorating, my youngest daughter stood on the back of the couch to hang an ornament. “Be safe” I said, to which she replied, “did Mary play it safe?”

We are working this out together, you see.

Part of what saved A Course in Miracles for me was that I fell in with Tara Singh’s books very early. Singh grew up in India; his cultural background and religious training were very amenable to nonduality. Plus he had been mentored by Krishnamurti. Mind/body dualism didn’t haunt him the same way it did Ken and Helen and Bill.

Singh easily correlated ACIM to service. Like Schucman, he considered Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun serving the poor in Calcutta, to be the world’s best living example of ACIM. He and his students were in sustained contact with MT and her order. There is a picture of him kneeling to hand her a copy of A Course in Miracles. He is radiant.

Set aside for a moment the complexity of Mother Teresa’s character and life (she is not an easy figure to understand), and consider that she was not – she was emphatically not – a mind/body dualist. Oh you’re Christian? Well, are you washing the feet of the poor? Are you holding the hand of the dying?

Theology entered only at the margins, and mostly as a declaration of love to strengthen one’s commitment to service.

I finished a third read-through of Sawicki on Friday night. Today I will begin Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her.

When I accepted for myself that mind/body dualism was an illusion, something clearly and instantly settled. Things that had been held apart rejoined; things that had been shaky grew still and grounded. The pressure to understand or get somewhere or do something dissipated. Nothing was missing; nothing was lacking. There was no separation anywhere.

It is a different way of living because it is a different way of being in relationship. You begin to understand that there is no such thing as separate interests.

In every moment, Life extends an invitation to us. If you are sensitive and give attention, you will see this. Life invites us to collaborate in bringing forth happiness and peace. It asks us to create with it – like dancing together, or reading and writing together, or feeding the poor, or decorating for the holidays.

I don’t know what life asks of you. The invitation sugars out in different ways. It may ask nothing more than that you sit quietly watching the moon rise while your wife and daughters bring home a Christmas tree.

It may also – the suggestion in the literature is at some point it will surely – invite you to a deeper relationship – a more radical commitment – to God.

In a sense, the Jesus story is really just an extension – a footnote almost – to the Mary story. We gloss over Mary because we want what we think is the good stuff – the manger, the donkey, the frankincense and the myrrh.

We love that story; we long for its promised ministry.

But in back of that – what makes all that possible – is a woman consenting to share in God’s salvational work through the medium of her body. What’s in front of you? What’s being asked of you? How can you help? In the story it’s a miracle but it points to something orders of magnitude more ordinary. You know what I mean.

The annunciation never happened. The annunciation always happens.

Here in the heart of Advent then, I remember her. My daughter leaps off the couch and grins at me. How clear it can be sometimes, and how lovely! My Teacher is here, teaching me. Are you ready, She asks.

Yes, I say. And I mean it: yes. I am ready. Yes.

Fourteen / Sixteen

Advent Travels: Be Mary

When I wrote Thursday’s post, the Advent travels ended. The writing will go on, of course. But I found what I was looking for. C texted mid-afternoon saying “I read it 4 times.” When you know, you know.

Jasper came by later and we stood on the front porch, sipping hot chocolate in the cold. To our left the hardware store, the post office, and the old, now empty, firehouse. To our right, the Congregational church and town offices.

U.S. flags everywhere, Christmas decorations almost everywhere.

Jasper said of Friday’s post – the one about dancing – “I don’t know man. You sounded a little desperate.”

Okay, I said. But what about Thursday’s post, the Mary Said Yes post.

Jasper shrugged. “What’s this new thing with starting your numbering at zero?”

We are old old friends.

A Course in Miracles advocates – rests upon, derives from – mind / body dualism, a deep and ancient fault-line in human consciousness. Mind / body dualism is an error, kind of like when people thought the earth was flat. It feels right, it looks right – the evidence is right in front of you – but it’s an illusion.

Sawicki doesn’t even consider mind / body dualism, much less its strange and loveless religion of “I get it and you don’t.” Of course she doesn’t. Jesus (like his mentor, John) was familiar with mind / body dualism and he rejected it.

Jesus taught something else about God and relationship. He taught that the Kingdom of Heaven was here, now, awaiting only our participation. Not our understanding only but our participation, our whole-hearted and open-minded collaboration with God for God.

Jesus imagined a world and a way of living in it together that was premised on a love so clear and simple that even to catch the faintest glimpse of it is to be turned around forever. Christ is contagious, indeed.

Sawicki writes that “the experience of grace grows out of the fundamental experience of one’s own createdness and of the creaturely status of all that is” (Seeing the Lord 323).

That cannot be squared – because it undoes – ACIM’s confused declaration that we either “see the flesh or recognize the spirit” (T-31.VI.1:1). There is so much separation in that sentence! There is so much cause for confusion and pain!

There is an easier – a gentler, a kinder, a happier – way.

Mind / body dualism is an error because its only reliable production is separation. When you say – as ACIM does – that we are not bodies and bodies are less valuable than minds, you open the door to all kinds of discrimination, from guilt for eating a Snickers to burning women at the stake because they have a mole on their thigh.

Nobody needs that world. Nobody needs that thought system.

Am I saying that it’s useless to study and practice A Course in Miracles? No! Not at all. I am saying that the course will bring you – sooner or later it will bring you – into direct contact with mind / body dualism and invite you to consider the efficacy and helpfulness of that dualism.

You cannot make the body the Holy Spirit’s temple, and it will never be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love’s condemnation (T-20.VI.6:1-2).

Is that your experience? Is it ours?

Not what does ACIM or anyone or anything else say but what do you say?

I admire Ken Wapnick because he bit the bullet on this issue. He saw the neo-Platonic mind / body dualism in the course and he accepted it totally. He devoted his life to the argument that mind / body dualism was the only correct way to understand and practice A Course in Miracles. He was a brave and committed teacher.

Ken didn’t need anybody to be a course student, but if you were a course student, there was only one way to understand and practice it.

Instead, I am suggesting that something happens when we accept – do not resist but accept – what Sawicki calls the “non-necessary gratuity of existence, its giftedness” (323). I am saying that when we accept that gift – when, like Mary, we say “yes” to it, when we take its fullness into our fullness – then we realize together “the unfathomable ‘Abba experience’ that Jesus enjoys with God” (323).

And this experience occurs naturally in and through and as our “own createdness” and the “creaturely status of all that is” (323).

Sawicki teaches a way to recognize Christ in one another – in community – that knows Jesus as a present reality but not in a supernatural way. We reconstruct Jesus through relationship, and in doing so, realize our intimate connection to both Creation and Creator.

There is no separation anywhere. Anywhere.

But when we buy into ACIM’s mind / body dualism we insist on separation. And we pretend that our insistence is happiness and freedom. Of course we do! But happiness and freedom do not need insistence, or any other kind of defense.

Do you know why we do that – accept mind / body dualism – as real? And defend it so ardently?

Because if the suffering of that homeless guy you occasionally pass is real – and if you love him as a brother – then you would neither ignore him nor throw a few bucks at him. You would be Mary unto him; you would be Jesus unto him. You would take him home. You would feed him. You would give him the best bed.

And that is too fucking terrifying. That is too fucking hard. Be real, right? The world isn’t the way it is because it’s an illusion but because we are too scared to be the Love that Jesus taught us – and still teaches us – we are.

Even more terrifying: if you really go into this – if you really allow Jesus to be reborn in you – then mercy and justice become all that matter. You will oppose unconditionally and nonviolently any and all systems that allow your daughter and sister, your son and brother, to go hungry and without shelter.

And that – that opposition to systems of oppression and injustice – pits you against men (it is mostly men, sorry) who are notorious for crucifying those who stand in their way. Easier to look the other way. Easier to rationalize looking the other way.

But remember: even if you avoid the cross, somebody’s going to get nailed to it. The solution isn’t avoid the cross; the solution is, fuck the cross. The solution is, find the crossless way and walk it and invite others to walk it with you.

There is a lot of space and camaraderie on the road that leads away from Golgotha.

We aren’t studying A Course in Miracles because we want to heal and be healed. We’re studying it because we are afraid to be healed. A Course in Miracles allows us to pretend we’re undoing separation all the while sustaining and reinforcing the comforting illusion – the mind / body dualism – upon which separation rests.

“I read it 4 times,” she said, and we did not talk of it again. Why would we? There was a meal to cook, a kitchen to clean, parents to check in on. There is a life that needs attending, relationships that need tending. There is mercy to extend, justice to enact. There is love to share, in all the ways it is shared.

There is one life and one relationship and we are it. I love you – I love us – so much.

Thirteen / Fifteen