Forgiveness: A Ghost Story

Love means letting go of fear

I

I want to tell a story that is true but strange. The strange part makes it hard to appreciate the true part. But if I ignore the strange part, then the true part loses its significance.

This is a story about forgiveness and projection. It is also a kind of ghost story, one I have been trying to tell for many years without success.

The story is, a friend of mine who died many years ago, and from who I was estranged when he died, came back to ask for my forgiveness. When I gave it, I learned that I was the one who had needed forgiveness and, in that recognition, I was forgiven and the relationship healed, in spite of death.

Charlie was quite a bit older than me. He was the partner of a professor who took me under her wing in the lost years of my early and mid-twenties. Their friendship was truly a light in the darkness that the darkness could not put out. Charlie taught me how to cook vegetarian (don't buy canned beans unless you're camping), how to listen to Robert Johnson (in the dark, with headphones, alone) and even how to be a parent (when your child laughs, laugh with them, and when they cry, cry with them).

He was one of the finest and most helpful teachers I have ever had, and I have had some good teachers over the years.

But the last time we saw each other a lot of water had passed under the bridge. I wasn't a lost child anymore, and Charlie was on the far side of his fifties. We couldn't connect. I was hurt and confused; he was annoyed and distant. We didn't hug or shake hands saying goodbye.

A year or so later, he was dead.

II

If we want to practice A Course in Miracles, then we have to be willing to become responsible for projection. First we have to see when we're doing it, and then, second, we have to not do it. Both steps in that process are hard. Sometimes they seem impossible.

Projection is a defense. That which we cannot face within (the guilt is too intense, the fear of punishment too awful) we project outward onto others. I am not selfish, Elon Musk is selfish. I'm not shallow and vain, Kim Kardashian is.

Once we externalize the guilt and fear, then we are no longer responsible for it. I judge against Elon Musk and the Kardashians. I'm good; they’re the problem.

Broadly speaking, projection always intensifies and sustains separation (T-2.I.2:1). The grim charade can go on for lifetimes.

Yet projection has a correlate in the world that helps restore to memory the cause for peace and happiness. Where projection displaces our awareness of love, extension allows that love to remember itself in us, restoring to awareness our innocence and joy. It is a "fundamental aspect of God" which we share with one another (T-2.I.1:1).

Being must be extended . . . The extension of God's Being is spirit's only function. Its fullness cannot be contained, any more than can the fullness of its Creator (T-7.IX.2:6, 3:1-2).

The Holy Spirit can take any projection and convert it into extension. We can learn how to love even in the face of great fear.

The Holy Spirit is the spirit of joy. He is the Call to return with which God blessed the minds of His separated Sons . . . The Holy Spirit is God's answer to the separation; the means by which the Atonement heals until the whole mind returns to creating (T-5.II.2:1-2, 5).

Even, apparently, when our projection includes the dead.

III

I have never been a good sleeper. But rather than toss and turn in bed, I usually sit in the kitchen with warm tea or go outside to visit the horses. I appreciate the quiet and the stillness. My mind settles; sometimes I'm able to close my eyes a bit before the day begins.

Charlie visited me on one of those nights. I was in the kitchen gazing at stars out the west-facing window when I realized I was not alone. When I turned, Charlie was there. He asked if we could talk.

It’s fine to ask: what exactly are you talking about here, Sean? Are you saying a ghost visited? Was it a side effect of sleep deprivation? Are you lying to get attention?

None of that. I am saying that the body insists that death is the end of communication and, from the body's perspective, this is logical enough. Bodies do end; brains and brain activity do end. But we are not bodies! Communication can go on despite the body's absence and, when it does, the conversation is as real as any conversation a body ever had. More so, even, because it is no longer constrained by time or space.

Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. Yet it is given you to show him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream (T-27.II.6:8-11).

Charlie was not a student of A Course in Miracles. But he knew the truth of the afore-mentioned quote better than I do. Death can't touch - let alone heal - a mind that fears it is guilty. Only forgiveness can do that.

IV

We talked about our last visit. Mostly Charlie talked. He said that it was his fault. I had grown up in ways that startled him. It reminded him of what had passed in his life, and he couldn’t handle it. He was scared and took it out on me. He had believed there would be time to get right again but there wasn't. It happens that way sometimes. He was sorry - truly and deeply sorry. Would I forgive him?

V

The moment I agreed to forgive Charlie - and I did, with all my heart - an interior logjam I hadn't known was there broke open. A thousand-year old knot unraveled.

I was liberated from denial.

I saw the projection clearly: my late friend in a posture of responsibility for our estrangement because I could not - because I would not - otherwise bear the pain of his death, the amends I did not make myself and, critically, the fear that I would be punished by God for this failure to love perfectly.

Do you see? I made it his fault - via a very elaborate projection - in order to avoid facing my guilt and my fear. I made this beautiful man - this brilliant friend and teacher - my enemy.

True forgiveness means seeing the way that we hold our brothers and sisters hostage to ego’s insistence on separation over love. We use them to reinforce our pain, our specialness, and our grievances.

This is what A Course in Miracles means when it teaches us that the secret to salvation is seeing that we are doing this - all of this - to our own selves (T-27.VIII.10:1).

Charlie did not come back because either one of us was bad. He was there because I was still confused. I was still scared. Charlie was the symbol by which I remembered that God is not the Author of fear but of Love, and that Love alone is our shared inheritance and identity.

Your inheritance awaits only the recognition that you have been redeemed. The Holy Spirit guides you into life eternal, but you must relinquish your investment in death, or you will not see life though it is all around you (T-12.IV.7:5-6).

I was forgiven. I was healed. Charlie had not visited me; I had projected him. And yet the friendship we had shared, and the love that it reflected, undid the projection. There was only love; there is always only love.

I grieved for Charlie, then. I grieved hard. I grieved a lost friend and his untimely death; I grieved the terrible things we do to ourselves because we are scared to discover there is nothing to be scared of. We make ourselves miserable when happiness - when truth, beauty, meaning and joy - are all given to us, all the time. There is - thank Christ there is - another way.

When I was done grieving, I went upstairs to sleep.

"Are you able to rest?" my wife murmured, there in the darkness.

"I am," I said, and I did.

Love,
Sean