Together in Community: ACIM and Loving Our Enemies

Yesterday’s post over at Substack raises implicitly an important question: how do we live together in community? Especially with folks we really don’t want to live with?

Community is easy when we agree and are confident we can reasonably resolve conflict – when we trust everybody to put the community’s well-being ahead of their individual own. Most of us intentionally locate ourselves in situations like this, or as near as possible. But it’s not always.

Community is hard with folks who want to destroy us, or our way of life, or who will only accept us if we’re subject to diminished rights and freedoms.

The thing is, Jesus is not unclear about how we are to handle this problem.

You have heard that it used to be said ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, but I tell you, don’t resist the man who wants to harm you. If a man hits your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.

“If a man wants to sue you for your coat, let him have it and your overcoat as well. If anybody forces you to go a mile with him, do more—go two miles with him. Give to the man who asks anything from you, and don’t turn away from the man who wants to borrow.”

These practical examples support Jesus’s radical re-interpretation of a long-standing Jewish ethic.

“You have heard that it used to be said, ‘You shall love your neighbour’, and ‘hate your enemy’, but I tell you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Heavenly Father.

One thing I am trying to make clear in today’s post is that Jesus is still saying this, even in the clunky prose of ACIM. One way or the other, we have to figure out how to love the ones we don’t love, especially the ones we feel justified in not loving, would rather die than love.

And this “figuring out” isn’t an academic exercise – it has to sugar out in a practice in the world, with our so-called enemies.

Gert Theissen says that this teaching (if it’s going to become a practice) obligates us to renounce our power to rule over others. We have to surrender all our claims to status. We have to – in his terribly clarifying phrase – “self-stigmatize.”

The Son of God voluntarily accepts the role of the crucified one, which is despised in social morality, in order to win over God’s enemies to God. He seeks to change them by delivering himself over defenseless to human wickedness and violence (The Religion of the Earliest Churches 89).

The suggestion is that whatever community meant to Jesus and to his early followers, it meant adopting the posture of a servant, not as a performance or a ritual, but as an embodied living expression of God’s Love.

A Course in Miracles helps me understand and contextualize this suggestion, as follows.

My “enemies” are acting out of fear. Their fear means they are confused about God and love, and thus confused about their brothers and sisters, and the world we all share. Their insistence on separation – which often becomes murderous – protects them from their fear of God and love.

I, too, experience fear. I, too, experience an irrational desire to promote and sustain separation. I, too, know what it’s like to feel alien unto love, a stranger to God. I, too, use projection and denial to avoid looking at my fear of God.

For me, realizing that my so-called enemies suffer from the same fear I do – and use it justify dangerous attacks on our brothers and sisters – awakens the Christ in me. It awakens the Christ in us.

When the Christ in us awakens, our emphasis turns away from conflict (from taking sides) to healing. Suddenly we don’t have enemies – we have brothers and sisters who suffer from the same illness we do. And we know there is a way back to health – to wholeness and holiness – and we want to share it. Sharing is how we get to keep it.

When Christ awakens in us, our minds blaze with light and our hearts open like cathedrals and soup kitchens. The way is neither mysterious nor especially difficult. It is inherent in us. We are created in love to create in love.

Even in our present world crisis – and given the obvious work that remains to be done – we can glimpse this. We can taste this. And we can share this.

A big change for me came when I stopped being afraid of fear. When I was able to just sit with fear and look relatively calmly on it, I learned there was another way. Fear arises as an illusion of guilt and punishment. It is a defense against recognizing our innocence, which is shared.

When we are no longer afraid of fear, but know it can be healed, then our relationship with the world changes. The world is a fearful place; it is beset by evil. And yet we can – merely by giving attention to our experience of relationship – transform it to a site of peace, happiness and sharing. The possibility is always there.

On a personal note, all this often feels to me like swimming in deeper waters than is safe or familiar. The way is clear – indeed it has never been clearer – but I continue to doubt my right, capacity and even willingness to walk it. I have miles to go.

It is also increasingly clear to me that the only way to end doubt is in relationship – with the world through God, and with God though Jesus, and with you through the world. Nothing and nobody can be excluded from this potential for healing. That’s what I’m working through today. How do we allow God to create in and through and for us a just world? A world of peace? A world in which the difficult work of remembering our shared innocence and reclaiming our holiness can happen in natural, serious and supported ways?

There is no other work now, and who else will do it?