In the Context of Relationship

Checking in: What do you need? What do you want?

I

We experience relationship in context.

For example, I am in relationship with childhood friends, fellow ACIM students, hemlock trees out back, Cape Cod and moonlight. Some relationships are wordless, some are almost exclusively dialogue-based. In some I am a student, in others a teacher. Some last lifetimes, some a few minutes.

Often we mistake the context for the relationship itself, but this is an error. The context is a reflection. A mirror can reflect a loaf of bread but if I try to eat the reflection I will remain hungry.

Reflection is natural. It is not a crime against God or nature to notice and even admire a reflection. But when we confuse the reflection for the thing itself, we go awry. We obscure reality with a fantasy of suffering.

Sickness and separation are not of God, but the Kingdom is. If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving what is not of God (T-7.II.1:4-5).

Leo Hartong made good use of the mirage-in-the-desert example. A mirage is not a real oasis where you can quench your thirst. But it is a real mirage. It does reflect what you need and want.

So what do you need? What do you want?

II

A memory:

I am sitting on a bench in Boston Common. It's summer, 1986. Nobody knows where I am. Nobody expects to see me. I have been intentionally making myself absent from the world of relationship. I’m nearly out of money and I have no plans.

The story I am telling myslf is that I am an artist, a poet living dangerously, squeezing from life every last drop of meaning and experience. But in truth I am lonely and scared. In truth I am coming apart. I’m not quite twenty, at the beginning of what I will later call “my bottom.”

A man sits down next to me. He reaches out to shake my hand. He tells me he's a counselor with some organization that connects with young people in crisis. He asks me where I'm staying. When did I eat last?

I am confused. Does he think I'm one of the folks he is paid to help? Doesn’t he see my artistic integrity? I don't know what to say. He didn't mean to but he has penetrated the fantasy that the way I'm living is okay. Suddenly all I can see is my loneliness and the fear. But I can’t talk about it.

He doesn't stay long. When he leaves I try to feel angry. Social do-gooders are the worst. But the anger can't overtake . . . what am I feeling? Sorrow? Yes. I am sad. I am sad because he is gone. I was supposed to say something - what was I supposed to say - and I didn't.

And I wouldn't, of course, for a long time. But still.

III

It is helpful in our practice of A Course in Miracles to remember that a holy relationship is a new way of being. It is a shift in our values that corresponds to a pattern of living that brings peace, justice and happiness to the collective. Peace, justice and happiness manifest and take form; their form teaches us the Love, not fear, is our true inheritance.

When we are in holy relationship, we understand and live by by the idea that the universe "being of God, is far beyond the petty sum of all the separate bodies" we perceive it to be (T-15.VIII.4:5).

For all its parts are joined in God through Christ, where they become like to their Father. Christ knows of no separation from His Father, Who is His one relationship, in which He gives as His Father gives to Him (T-15.VIII.4:6-7).

"Bodies," in this context, must be understood to include stars, blue whales and dandelions. No body of any kind can be excluded else we're no longer talking about Christ.

"Christ" - in this context - is our shared creation, when our relationship is devoted to seeing one another as God sees us. And God does not see the reflection - God sees the creation to which the reflection points.

Committing to remembering Christ - literally re-membering the Body of Christ - means giving attention to the reflection in order to see what it points to. It means entering into relationship with the world on terms set not by the ego in us but by the Holy Spirit in our relationship.

When we are mindful of our shared identity as Christ, our hand naturally becomes "the giver of Christ’s touch," transforming all our relationships into proof that "who accepts God’s gifts can never suffer anything" (W-pI.166.14:5).

Become the living proof of what Christ’s touch can offer everyone . . . Be witness in your happiness to how transformed the mind becomes which chooses to accept His gifts, and feel the touch of Christ. Such is your mission now (W-pI.166.15:2, 4-5).

"Mission" is big language but it is undeniably Christian. Jesus didn't send his followers two by two into the world because he was special. He sent them because when we awaken together from the sleep of forgetfulness nothing else matters but learning how to extend the peace and love of Christ to all our brothers and sisters without qualificaton or condition. They knew how to make others happy; nothing else mattered.

Ken Wapnick helpfully understood this "mission" as making our lives about the other. If you are in a restaurant, then make the experience about the waittress and other diners. If you are driving, the other drivers. Look for Christ in them, find Christ in them and thus remember that you too are Christ.

For me, reading Tara Singh as carefully as I do, the way appears even simpler.

In Gifts from the Retreat, Tara Singh invited folks to "find out what prevents you / from loving one another" (The Voice that Precedes Thought 164). This is an interior investigation that only we can undertake. Why is it so easy to easy to identify others in ways that justify their exclusion? Why do we insist that some people be turned away? What are we protecting?

One aspect of "the secret to salvation is . . . you are doing this to yourself" (T-27.VIII.10:1) is seeing that the divisions in the world by which war, famine and suffering take root exist in our mind and are being used by us. We consent to them.

Seeing this is painful - collaboration with suffering is no joke. It is so painful that we find a lot of ways to not do the work - drugs, television, sex, shopping, exercise, whatever. Addiction is about hiding, not noticing, the truth. But seeing the horror internally rather than projecting it - as terrifying as it is - is healing.

When you see the specific way in which, say, the war in Gaza exists because of ways that you think and live, I promise you that you will change. I promise you you will cry from the heart - from the heart within the heart - to Christ for help and Christ will answer.

For next to you is One Who holds the light before you, so that every step is made in certainty and sureness of the road. A blindfold can indeed obscure your sight, but cannot make the way itself grow dark. And He Who travels with you has the light (T-31.II.11:7-9).

It is not that I save you or that you save me. It is that together become what was never lost and thus does not need salvation.

. . . healing demonstrates that truth is true. The separation sickness would impose has never really happened. To be healed is merely to accept what always was the simple truth, and always will remain exactly as it has forever been (W-pI.137.4:2-4).

We realize that we have no enemies and thus no conflict. We accept that we are extensions of Creation and participants in Creation but not stewards of Creation, and certainly not the Author - if such a thing is possible - of Creation.

Christ is a State.
In that State no one is divided
and everyone is a Son of God (Singh 160).

In reality we are not separate from anything. That is the only context that we need to notice and accept. There is nothing else for a holy relationship to show us because there is nothing else to see.

Everything is related to everything else. The suggestion is, don't look at the parts. Look at the whole. The whole is a vast system, abstract and impersonal, vaster than our senses and understanding can grasp.

If we look a certain way - if we join hands and look together a certain way - then we can see this system, this interconnectedness, this unity. Truly, "the recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks . . . " (T-16.II.3:3).

This is not a question of metaphysics or philosophy. Nor is it religious. Basic obervation and common sense make the premise clear: there is only one relationship and we are it.

IV

Even now sometimes it surface: the loneliness, the fear, the uncertainty. I forget who I am and I forget who you are too. It can take a moment to remember.

And the remembering usually takes the form of service - just basically making sure that folks around me who count on me are okay. Nothing dramatic, nothing overly spiritual. Just the ordinary act of showing up, asking if you need anything and staying close enough to ask again later.

That man didn't save me all those years ago - that's not the story. In 1986 the worst was yet to come by far. But from time to time I do remember him, and the memory reminds me - literally re-minds me - that service is really about being present to whatever is in front of us. “Being present” means giving attention, being willing to help and being willing to shuffle on if help isn’t needed at that precise moment.

I can't make anybody say "I need help." I can't force anybody into this or that form of relationship. But I can be present; I can ask. And I can do the internal wake of undoing the blocks to Love that make presence seem so elite, magical and far away.

That's all it means to be holy: willfully noticing our brothers and sisters and being ready to help - or not - in whatever form they need.

Therefore, gratitude and praise to that man all those years ago who asked was I okay! Gratitude and praise to the confused young man who couldn't yet say "no - please help."

And gratitude and praise for you, patiently traveling beside me while I figure this shit out, because you know - you know - we are in this together.

~ Sean