Accepting Our Savior

. . . even when we'd rather not

Give attention to your projections. Who do you really dislike? Who triggers you? Who would you cast off the island? Who would you not cast off in a thousand years, no matter what they say or do?

The way we see others is our responsibility, because it reflects our judgment. It's not just what they do, it's the meaning we assign to what they do, and the value we assign to the meaning. We think the way we see the world is the way the world is, and we get defensive when someone suggests otherwise.

Can you see your brothers and sisters apart from your judgment about your brothers and sisters? Can you see them without assigning any meaning at all to them - their actions, their relationships, their decisions, their lives?

It is very hard to do this, especially when the other is an antagonist, an oppressor, a bad guy.

Yet it turns out that all the qualities we despise in others "out there" are in fact our very own qualities "in here." Ego looks within expecting to find a rationale for murder and hate and instead finds itself shadow-boxing an empty mirror. We are doing this - we are doing all of this.

This is a painful realization - just take a gander at the headlines - but it's also a worthy crossroads. Here is an opportunity to go beyond the "laws you think you must obey . . . the limits under which you live, and all the changes that you think are part of human destiny" (W-pI.127.5:4).

We try but we never seem to reach the juncture where the suffering world - its concentration camps, its wars, its rising seas - is not real. We talk about "I am not a body" and "there is no world." We flirt with the idea it's all an illusion. But deep down, we believe in the world. We believe in suffering. It feels right to divide it up into right sides and wrong, winners and losers, good guys and bad.

Some of us - the truly desperate perhaps - ask if there's another way to look at this. Like, maybe the world was made to "hide love's meaning" (W-pI.127.5:2). Maybe it is true that "there can never be a difference in what you really are and what love is" (W-pI.127.4:1). And maybe - maybe - "Love is not found in darkness and in death" (W-pI.127.6:2).

This becomes our daily bread:

I am here only to be truly helpful.
I am here to represent Him Who sent me.
I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, because He Who sent me will direct me.
I am to content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me.
I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal (T-2.V.A.18.8:2-6).

This is the prayer of one who is willing to become responsible for projection by turning their mind over to the Holy Spirit and submitting gladly to its teaching. When we pray this prayer, we see in the violence of the world - perpetrator and victim alike - our own self crying out for love. We recognize our brother and sister on both sides of conflict and respond to them all with the same love, full-hearted and life-giving. How else will peace and happiness be remembered?

In this way, our lives become an affirmative answer to the following question posed in the ACIM Workbook: Will you become willing to see your brother exactly as yourself, and thus as your savior, in obedience to the law that "we cannot leave a part of us outside our love if we would know our Self?" (W-pI.127.12:1).

Beyond the primal, fear-filled violence of ego - me, my and mine - is the gentle confidence of the Holy Spirit reminding us endlessly I Am. It excludes nothing. It welcomes all. There is no mouth it will not feed, no war it will not end, no anguish it will not comfort.

Find that voice. Listen to it. It has something specific to tell you about how to love all your brothers and sisters, especially the ones you would hold apart from the whole. When you hear its message - and make its inclusiveness the law of your living - then "the barriers to Heaven will disappear before your holy sight" (T-19.III.10:6) and you will know peace.

We are here to save each other by remembering that salvation, like love, can have no exceptions.

Thank you, as always, for welcoming me.

~ Sean