Sean Reagan

In the morning after prayer I go outside with my coffee. I greet the lilies springing up through crumbling soil. I bless the robins flying away. It’s Good Friday, and my heart is happy, my mind at range. Easter is near; the evidence is everywhere.

And yet.

Before we remember the grace of Easter, we must face the ruination of Golgotha. Before we participate in the joyful creativity of resurrection, we must recognize fully the brutality of crucifixion. This is the mandate of the Lenten journey – you have to face the whole of it.

Alone in the half-light of morning I open my free hand and imagine you taking it. We will do this together. There is no other way.

Good Friday has both a political and a personal dimension. The two can be distinguished, but they cannot be separated. When we face the cross, we are looking at something both within and without us. Our response touches and is touched by both.

The political dimension of Good Friday is that Jesus is executed by the State for nonviolently resisting its claim to sole authority and power. Jesus is saying, the earth and the fullness thereof belong to the Lord, and God wills that it be shared equally among all people, without exception. No more hunger, no more loneliness, no more war.

In reply, Rome says (all empires say), we are the Lord – or our Gods are the Lord, if you prefer a religious frame – and we are going to publicly execute you for even thinking otherwise.

It’s clear the early followers of Jesus understood that following him meant coming into conflict with a way of being in the world that is unjust, unloving and unkind, and nonviolently demonstrating – teaching and sharing – an alternative.

That is our work, too. The political dimension of the cross asks us what we want to be true of the world, and how we will work with others to make that truth manifest. Politics is about relationship, and all relationship is local and united.

The personal dimension of Good Friday is that we have to die to the separate – the egoic – self. As Saint Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

Obviously Paul is using metaphorical language. We are not called to strangle to death on a cross. Rather, we are called to no longer hold a private self at the center of our shared lives. An anxious self, a defensive self, a deceitful self . . . all these must be brought to the Place of the Skull and left there.

The cross symbolizes our willingness to be transformed so that we are no longer bound to and by the egoic self. We give it all up; we let is all go. The cross represents total surrender. It represents our total willingness to have nothing in our heart or mind – nothing in our living – that is not of God (e.g. T-1.II.3:11).

Jesus was not merely committed to a vision of personal happiness and peace. He wanted that for us, yes. That is our inheritance, yes. But he understood that in order to remember that, to manifest that, one has to radically rethink their relationship to the earth and to one another. And that radical revision of relationship – which is political – requires a personal transformation at scales we cannot manage single-handedly.

A lot of us in the ACIM community think that caring about politics – or economics or whatever – is to somehow violate the tenet that the world is not real. We worry that if we take sides then we’re stuck in illusions forever. But remember: the reason the world is not real is because it does not reflect the will of God (W-pI.166.2:2).

What would a world that does reflect God’s will look like? And how will we help create it?

The first question is political, the second is personal and neither can be answered apart from the other.

Before the illusion of the world and the separate self are undone our dreams of fear are changed to dreams of happiness (e.g..T-18.II.6:3). This is ACIM’s happy dream, and it happens to these bodies in this world. We learn there is no separation anywhere and it changes everything.

How holy is the smallest grain of sand, when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of God’s Son . . . For the whole is in each one (T-28.IV.9:4,6).

Nor does the illusion of separation dissolve for us alone. Happy dreams take the form of our brother and sister’s “perfect health” and “perfect freedom from all forms of lack” and “safety from disaster of all kinds” (T-30.VIII.2:5). It doesn’t matter what we feel. If anyone is afraid or lonely, if anyone is hungry or in pain, then “we” are not happy.

Jesus is saying that we have to learn how to love our brothers and sisters in a way that is not of this world, that is often actively opposed by this world. The cross is not theoretical. It calls for – it accepts nothing less than – the total transformation of the individual and the world.

This work is not easy. I have not solved it in some way that you have not. Good Friday is about recognizing that we have failed in our function to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10). The evidence is all around us.

But failure is not the end.

Therefore, let us not deny this failure but accept it. Easter is coming – we know this – but today, let us rest together in the part of the journey that scares us, the part that we resist. And let us do it together. Together is “yes” to God because it refuses the lie of separation.

Is it dark? Yes. Getting darker? Also yes. But we know something the darkness doesn’t. Before this morning’s lilies and robins – before the horrors of Golgotha – there is this love and it does not die. Failure is not the end.

Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter

A Brief Talk on Rebirth as a Symbol of Awakening in A Course in Miracles

Thank you for being here and sharing with me. I am grateful for your presence. It is a gift to teach and learn together, to remember our innocence together, and to bond with one another in gentleness and love.

Yesterday we talked about Lesson twenty-seven from the ACIM Workbook. Lesson twenty-seven is a meditation on the intensity and depth of our devotion to our study and practice of A Course in Miracles. It’s a meditation and an inquiry. How badly do we want to awaken? With the intensity of a drowning person longing for air? Or what?

Lesson twenty-eight repeats the basic idea from Lesson twenty-seven (“I am determined to see”) but with specificity (“I am determined to see differently“). And it uses an interesting term – “commitment.” It links “seeing” to a commitment to actually see things differently.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the writing of which ACIM is comprised is embarrassingly overwrought and melodramatic but its lexical choices are more often than not unerring. “Commitment” is not an accident. It has a specific function; it points in a specific way.

So yesterday we were asked, just how badly do you really want this awakening thing? Today we are asked to make a commitment to our seeing. The course assumes we have reflected on our ACIM practice – we took the measure of our desire – and we are now ready to make a commitment. We want a new way of seeing and we are committed to bringing it forth. We’re going to actually do it.

So one thing is, if we have not done that, then let’s not fake it. Let’s do it and then go forward. And if we can’t do it – if it really feels like the wrong move or an impossible move – then let’s shake the dust off our sandals and head on to the next village. Nobody has to study and practice A Course in Miracles.

Oddly, in Lesson twenty-eight – somewhat unlike Lesson twenty-seven – the point is not whether we actually keep the commitment but that we just get started. The commitment is what matters. Success or failure are not really our business.

I point this out because it is helpful sometimes to see that notwithstanding its rigor and intensity A Course in Miracles is actually very forgiving with respect to its application. Honestly, we just need to show up. The Holy Spirit does the rest. As the course says, we are not in charge of the Happy Dream because we “cannot distinguish between advance and retreat.” We often judge our successes as failures and our failures as success (e.g., T-18.V.1:5-6). We really don’t know!

So what is the specific commitment we are asked to make? What are we being asked to do?

We are asked to “withdraw our preconcieved ideas about a table and to open our minds to what it is and what it is for” (W-pI.28.3:1). In other words, we are not bringing the past into our perception or understanding of the table. We are effectively “asking” what the table what it is, rather than insisting that we already know because we’ve “seen” tables before, we’ve “used” them before, we know formica from maple and so forth.

In other words, we are not making the object personal by “binding” it to our “tiny experience” and our “personal thoughts.”

I want to pause to emphasize just how significant and radical that commitment is. Because it generalizes – it’s not just about the table. It’s about our house and car, it’s about our dog and our kids. We have to begin again with literally everything – withdrawing our assumptions and biases and all of that to try and really see what this thing is and what it is for. It is the literal undoing of all that we believe we know and, thus, all that we believe we are. It goes right to the heart of our conditioning – in the family, in the culture, in the cosmos. Its aim is to undo everything.

When you and I were born – long before we had any say in the matter – we learned to differentiate between “objects” based on perception and to evaluate “objects” based on those differences. This is a face, this is another face, but this face is Mom’s face. Before we can possibly decide if this is a good or helpful way to live we are making distinctions and accepting them at face value. They matter.

Differences and distinctions are related to needs – we believe that something in our lives is missing. We have this sense of lack. Mom’s face is here and now it’s not. I’m fed but now I’m not. The suggestion the course makes is that these needs – which, we note, are physical in nature – are illusory. The arise from a distorted perception of what God is, what Creation is and what we are (e.g. T-1.VI.2:1-2).

A Course in Miracles has a word for this and the word is “separation.”

Just by virtue of birth into the human frame, we take the frame’s perception literally, value our capacity to judge its many perceptions deeply, and then rely on those distinctions to survive, over and against our brothers and sisters.

It’s a grim picture. It really is.

Over the course of our lifetimes we constantly refine those skills of distinction and judgment, just as – over the course of our species’ existence – those skills were refined by the pressures of natural selection.

And, unless we are very very lucky in our families or communities, we do not seriously begin to investigate this whole process – which is separation – until well into adulthood. And there is a lot of water under the bridge by then.

We are not to blame for this! These skills – differentiation and judgement, whose combined effects are the separation – evolved over “millions of years” (T-2.VIII.2:5). That is a lot of conditioning! The body and the brain are like the frothy tip of an enormous wave that has been building for eons. We are – to borrow the lingo of another healing tradition – powerless. No wonder our lives are unmanageable.

A Course in Miracles comes along and says, all of that – that way of seeing, that way of thinking, that way of being – is an error. And there is another way. This is very radical! It is as radical as the nonviolence that Jesus advocated and practiced two thousand some odd years ago. It invites us to ignore – to forget about – literally everything our bodies, including our brains, and the families and cultures in which we are embedded, tell us.

In my experience, when we face that call directly, it confounds us. Then it annoys us.

And then – when we realize the scale of the calling – it terrifies us.

This fear represents a kind of existential crisis that is not unique to the human religious and philosophical tradition. For some of us, some variation of it appears to be inevitable. A Course in Miracles is not really designed for the casual student. Only after I considered a thousand times a thousand other ways to be happy, joyous and free – driven to my knees not in obedience but defeat – did I finally say, okay. Show me the way, Jesus. Show me how to learn to forgive from the Holy Spirit illuminating the mind that we all share.

I am not saying that you have to humbled in this deep and irrevocable way. It’s possible I’m just a slow and stubborn learner. But maybe you do! For me, until I was broken, I tended towards surface changes, like changing outfits or wearing a mask. I was busy but not effective, intense but in a drifting kind of way.

It took me a long time to realize the futility of self-improvement in its myriad forms and, on that basis, put it aside forever.

That is why I love the phrase “born again” and feel sad that it’s been more or less coopted by certain branches of the Christian tree. Because born again is what we are called to do! That is what awakening from the sleep of forgetfulness is! We are born again, which is what it means to remember what we were in the first place – Creations of God in creation, creating like unto our Creator. We are new. We are not improved versions of the old self but a new self.

What we call this experience – this answer to God’s call – does not matter. The experience is just the experience, and the word is just a pointer. But “rebirth” does make clear the precisely radical and fundamental nature of the calling that ACIM makes unto us. What does it mean to be born again, since it is not literally possible? To what does the phrase point? How do you know?

You can’t answer in words! It can’t be said at all. But note that you understand what I am saying; you know what I mean when I use words to say that words are useless here. How can that be if we are not – here, now – reborn in love?