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

Advent Travels: What Dancing Looks and Feels Like

Sawicki says that whatever Christ is, it is contagious (Seeing the Lord 327). What does this mean?

When you say “whatever Christ is” you are tacitly saying you don’t know what Christ is.

But when you say “Christ is contagious” you are boldly claiming a deep understanding of the experience of Christ.

In a sense you are contradicting yourself. You are admitting to ignorance and experience about the same thing.

But in another sense, you are just being honest. Sawicki is saying, I don’t have all the answers but I can tell you that Christ is contagious. She’s like laying down a marker for the ones who come after, who are us.

Sawicki is suggesting that this is a journey completed in lifetimes, only one of which is ours and that this is not a crisis.

Last Fall I wrote a long essay called Christ is a Collective, by which I meant, Christ is relationship. Christ is where our subjectivity is brought to heel through a commitment to service, to loving the other.

That was a not-very-subtle homage to Helen Titchen Beeth, whose intelligence, open-mindedness and commitment to peace and healing through dialogue restore me to a deep, actionable and sustainble optimism.

But Sawicki lives and thinks in another domain. It’s a different challenge, a different invitation.

Christ is contagious. Writing prompt: Do you read that as a warning or a promise?

Because “contagious” is a funny word here, right? Most of us steer clear of contagions like mumps or the flu. “Contagion” means danger, vulnerability, undoing –

– Oh. Oh.

Because also, we like Christ. We want to be Christ. So we steer towards Christ. But Christ is also our dissolution, our end. Christ is the formal undoing of specialness in favor of holiness.

Notice how we are in the space of contradiction again, this time between “contagion” and “Christ.” A moment ago, the contradiction was between ignorance and experience. Now it’s in the words “contagion” and “Christ.”

Sawicki’s phrase – “whatever Christ is, Christ is contagious” both pulls us in and pushes us away. It invites us and rejects us.

In a sense, Sawicki is saying, you have to find out for yourself what Christ is (and, if you can, leave notes for those coming after).

That’s the part I was scared of – finding out for myself. I thought it meant being alone. I thought it was kin to climbing a gallows.

But it was more like when you’re scared to dance but choose to dance anyway. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience? You are watching the dancers, you are feeling the music but . . .

. . . it’s hard. I love dancing but I’m scared of dancing. A long long time ago a friend said to me, if you want to know what somebody is like in bed, watch them dance. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong but I can say that it made dancing feel like way higher stakes than was helpful.

Here, by the way, is what dancing looks and feels like to me on the inside. Also, this is pretty much the sum total of my moves. But the smile, right? And the way everyone consents to be drawn in . . .

Dancing is pretty contagious but not because it’s a secret (and sometimes not so secret, I guess) audition for sex partners. It’s contagious because it’s fun and communal. Even if I’m alone in my room dancing, somebody wrote the song to which I’m dancing, and somebody performed it. It’s in my head because we are in my head.

We are never alone when we dance, kind of like how we are never alone when we open up to Christ.

I began writing this post last night. I would start it, get about five paragraphs in and get blocked. We get blocked for lots of reasons writing but for me the block was I was straying from my thesis.

When you’re blocked that way, you go back to the beginning, retrace your steps and find out where you went awry, and begin again there. Rinse and repeat.

Right now there are twenty-seven paragraph below this one. I have been blocked a lot on this post. A lot. The stuff about dancing is unexpected – that’s all from this morning. I’d delete it and go back (Sawicki is not interested in my weird ideas and pathologies around dancing) but it reminds me of this post and this post, so I’m wondering if I’m onto something, albeit something I can’t see.

Can you? Because I’m out of time and can’t say.

In Advent – happier than I’ve been in a long time, deeply committed to a world in which that happiness can be shared, but still a little shaky at the margins – I find myself wondering if all of this is orders of magnitude simpler than I’ve been making it. I’m wondering if the journey ended a long time ago. I’m wondering if there isn’t even a journey. Do you know?

If you know, tell me. I’ve been dancing – I’ve been Christing – alone for a long time. I don’t want to do that anymore.

Twelve / Fourteen

Advent Travels: Mary Said It

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I cannot figure out if Marianne Sawicki is holding my hand or slapping me awake from a nightmare. How could I choose? Summarizing aspects of Edward Schillbeeckx’s thinking she casually shreds the past fifteen years of my life. Nothing matters but this.

The experience of grace grows out of the fundamental experience of one’s own createdness and of the creaturely status of all that is. The non-necessary gratuity of existence, its giftedness, is the matrix . . . for the unfathomable “Abba experience” that Jesus enjoys with God (Seeing the Lord 323).

Why do I insist on making this so difficult?

God could not be more the world; God could not be more the self. God is so much the world and the self that both are undone in God, leaving only God, endlessly experienced as a self, in a world. There is only this: this this.

Happiness is a natural effect of being present to all that is without discriminating amongst it. When we penetrate the illusion of separate interests, the gift of our attention is happiness.

Which means, of course, that Sawicki is right. Happiness restores to our awareness a “symbolic utopian vision in light of which Christian emancipatory action can be taken” (324).

1

In a dream we are walking
down an unfamiliar road.
The night is heavy and still –
no stars, no moon.
After a while I ask,
“what if we arrive early?”

You don’t answer at first.
You’ve been silent a long time.
I almost forget the question.
But then you stop, remove your hood
and turn to me. “What if
we are already there,” you say.

Your voice is softer
than I remember. I can’t quite
make out your face.
You could be anyone
who turns into light
and loves for the sake of love.

2

Sawicki again: “The word that became flesh was yes and Mary said it” (326).

Eleven / Thirteen

Advent Travels: Snakes and Hotel Windows

In the fourth dialogue in Dialogues on A Course in Miracles, Tara Singh asks a good question: what did you do today in which there were no illusions?

Some people say, “the wilderness” is a symbol, a metaphor, a word being a word. The real question is to what does it point?

I can’t decide which paragraph is the opening paragraph.

In the fourth dialogue, every answer someone gives to the question, Tara Singh easily undoes. Students always want to please their teacher. You and I want each other to know we’re serious spiritual people. Insecurity begets a kind of dishonesty; we confuse “ideals” with what’s actually happening.

The wilderness points to something – a work, an undoing, a relationship – that most of us can’t or won’t undertake. It points to something outside the world that we construct together – our hierarchies, our violence, our passivity, our emphasis on differences.

But most of us don’t see that it that way. We’re diligent and serious spiritual people. We write every day. We’ve got opinions about spiritual bypassing and eighties era feminist theologians. We run marathons, we don’t eat meat, we didn’t vote for Trump.

The point is not that those things are bad any more than that they’re good. If they arise from illusions – if they arise from the confusion of what we are in truth – then they’re illusions themselves. That’s all.

What will you do today that has no illusion in it? How will you know?

Tara Singh suggests that if we are honest, then we will recognize that the answer is: nothing. Everything I do is touched by illusion, originates in illusion, grounds out in illusion.

The crisis is not that we’re confused and bound up in the world’s opinions and ideals – i.e., socially-approved expressions of self, other and relationship. The crisis is that we don’t see the confusion or, upon seeing it, immediately fall back into the illusion of self-improvement. I’ll pray more, I’ll take up yoga, I’ll write a daily Advent journal.

It’s hard to just sit with the problem and not do anything.

Is not the actual, for us, the deception of lack, the illusions of insecurity and unfulfillment? That is our actuality. It is something we made. And therefore we can do something about it (Singh 108-09).

What will I do today that has no illusion in it?

If I am honest, and can say “nothing – everything I will today will have some illusions in it, in some way,” then something interesting happens. If I can really humble myself enough to see the problem clearly, then . . .

. . . then I can ask a new question. I can ask a question that doesn’t automatically reinforce the confusion it was meant to repair: in what way is it possible for a Child of God who is separated from Creation to be in a true relationship with their Creator?

Tara Singh is pointing at something helpful – nothing happens until we can be honest with ourselves about the separation. Everything else is just opinions and ideals.

“I’m not in a true relationship with my Creator” – who among us wants to say that? But if it’s our truth – right here, right now – then what else could we say? It’s a myth that truth makes us happy – being honest is hard. It’s scary. The truth liberates us – but freedom . . .

. . . freedom terrifies us.

Sometimes when I’m invested in symbolism and metaphor – and friends I am always invested in symbolism and metaphor – I feel like a mouse frantically cleaning itself while the snake unfurls on the far side of the cage.

I am sorry for the mouse but facts are facts. The snake is going to eat you either way. If we are free, and accept our freedom and the responsibility it imposes, it would create a different response, wouldn’t it?

Forgive us our illusions, Father,
and help us to accept
our true relationship with You,
in which there are no illusions,
and where none can ever enter.
Our holiness is Yours (T-16.VII.12:1-2).

It’s just words. They’re easy to repeat and even easier to interpret in ways that assure us we’re okay, it’s all okay, the snake isn’t unfurling, et cetera. But all they “point” to is more words, more insecurity, more lack.

Which fine. But what are we supposed to do?

Tara Singh said, become responsible for separation. Find out why you are separate from your Creator – who said you were? Why did you believe them? If they’re wrong, how do you know? When we can answer those questions, then we will know how to heal the separation. We are doing this to ourselves – we can undo it as well.

It won’t be easy – snakes and hotel windows abound, Advent journaling abounds – but it can be done. That was Tara Singh’s promise – it isn’t easy but you can do it. It’s not up to me, it’s up to you, but you can do it.

All I can add is that doing this work in community matters. At this point, it may be all that matters. I don’t know what I will do today that will have no illusion in it – probably nothing – but I’m grateful that you won’t leave me because of it. I promise I won’t leave you.

I’m glad you’re here and I won’t leave. That’s where I begin.

Ten / Twelve