Becoming the Manger

Advent Travel Notes

Advent begins on Sunday, December 1.

A Course in Miracles is not liturgical. It mentions Christmas and Easter but it is not seasonal. It really is a course - a curriculum. It helps sometimes to remember that. Curriculums don't beget churches but classrooms. It's a different kind of practice.

And yet.

For me, Advent for is a season of longing that a certain interior promise may at last be kept. It is a journey towards our rebirth in holiness rather than specialness. It is participatory and relational, as holiness must be, lest it devolve into righteousness or satisfaction or some other confusion.

In a way, we are shepherds called by a light to discover the light's manifestation in the world and, by and through our relationship with that manifestation, realize that in fact we are the light.

Jesus' birth in a stable is both mythological and ideological. The early gospel writers were alternately lampooning Caesar's claims to authority and greatness and professing a new order of being founded in radical equality. No longer would justice be a matter of military might and economic dominance. Instead, it would appear as cooperation, care and compassion, especially towards the least among us.

To be born again with Jesus is not to be saved from the world but rather for the world, so that we might all know the happpy grace of Christ and the unalterable peace of God. Nothing else becomes us because nothing else is us.

You are indeed essential to God’s plan. Without your joy, His joy is incomplete. Without your smile, the world cannot be saved. While you are sad, the light that God Himself appointed as the means to save the world is dim and lusterless, and no one laughs because all laughter can but echo yours (W-pI.100.3:1-4).

Our smile saves the world. Our happiness completes God's happiness. It is so simple and clear and yet here we are, and here the world is. We are all still uttering the Thetfordian cry: there must be another way.

It is not enough to mentally imagine this other way. Anybody can say the words - "my smile is the world's salvation." But to understand deeply why our happiness is salvational, and to accept responsibility for becoming happy in that way . . .

That is a practice.

It is - if we want to fully enter the myth of Jesus, in order to remember that together we are Christ - a journey.

And we do not make it alone.

2

A Course in Miracles does not encourage us to linger in Jesus worship or adoration but to move beyond that to a healing relationship with the Holy Spirit. In the course, Jesus is a sign pointing to the Spirit, and a coach guiding us to the Spirit. But it is the Spirit who teaches us what we are in truth, liberating us from illusion and suffering.

Henceforth, hear but the Voice for God and for your Self when you retire from the world, to seek reality instead. He will direct your efforts, telling you exactly what to do, how to direct your mind, and when to come to Him in silence, asking for His sure direction and His certain Word (W-ep.3:2-3).

To commune with the Holy Spirit is to commit to a change in values. Specifically, we commit to no longer honoring differences produced by the body's senses as representing a 1:1 correspondence with reality. We commit to refusing the world's value system - men are this, women are that, white is this, black is that. There is no justification for othering. We have to become radically inclusive and welcoming. The Holy Spirit "sees the altar of God in everyone, and by bringing it to your appreciation, He calls upon you to love God and His creation" (T-7.V.11:6).

When that is our reality - when we love God and his Creation because we recognize the altar in everyone (broadly defined to include rock shrimp, ravens and every blade of grass), we naturally become nonviolent. We naturally stop projecting. We naturally become humble servants of those with whom we share the path. We become happy in a serious, natural and sustainable way, and our happiness extends itself.

I am not there yet! I understand the language and am practiced in the logic but . . . I am not there yet. I have not reached Bethlehem, have not found the stable at its margins. I have not fallen to my knees in the shit-stained straw to give thanks.

I have not yet brought a gift to the One whose only ask of me is that I offer mercy for His Son and for Himself (T-24.III.8:7-11). And I'm tired - I am so so tired.

3

And so a desire opens up in the interior wasteland: the desire to complete the journey and make the gift. To enter wholeheartedly and open-mindedly into the mythology of the birth of Jesus, which upends both the natural and political order. Time and space, and the artificial belief systems of frightened human beings, are undone.

In a sense, to be born again in this way is to become willing and able to recognize "the part as whole" and "the whole in every part" (T-16.II.3:3). There is no separation. There is no cause for suffering or grief.

I know it - and I know I know it - but it is not yet all I know. I have not yet fully released the many grievances that imprison me, much less my capacity for making new ones. I haven not give up the memories that darken my vision of you, nor the dysfunctional belief system that fatally compromises our shared potential to create a healed and healing world.

Thus I begin an Advent journey, which I invite you to join, or share, with me. Each day of Advent I will bear witness in writing to what is broken in me and what longs for healing in me, bringing both to the altar so that Holy Spirit can help sort them out. Perhaps wordiness can be a means by which my heart aligns with the silence and stillness I am - as yet - too frightened to be recreated as.

This writing - from December 1 through December 24 - will be as intimate a witness to fear and loneliness in dialogue with faith and optimism as I can manage. I want to let go of all illusions of lack and deprivation on the Advent road in order to arrive at that manger empty-handed.

My gift will be emptiness - my gift will be to be the manger, the space in which - with you, always with you - a new world can come into being.

It is time, right? We are ready, right?

The daily posts will be at my website. If you write or want to write, I invite you to an Advent journey in words as well. Keep a journal or a blog. Share it with me or others. Or not! Either way, we are in this together.

I make no promise as to any outcome - that we will find Bethlehem or the stable, much less find it emptied of everything that prohibits us from becoming the manger in which Love reveals itself as Love. I have walked on this road for a long time and some of you have walked it longer. The invitation is: let's join and go deeper - in language, in prayer - in the deep currents where heart and mind are not separated - and see what happens.

My first post will be on December 1; I'll mention it as well in my Monday (and maybe Thursday, too) posts here.

Thank you, always, for reading. Without you, it doesn't mean a thing.

~ Sean