Life at the End of Fear

. . . on being the equal of Jesus

In this post I talked about how we have to see that we are the racist. We are the racist. And in this post I talked about seeing that my father and I - whose relationship was complex and difficult - were, in the alchemy of that relationship, the same.

Really what I am talking about is judgment - how we see relationships, explain relationships, justify accepting or rejecting relationships. I am talking about the way judgment arises in our thinking and how we take its limited utility (bread good to eat, rock bad) and extended it into domains where it becomes affirmatively destructive (e.g., having enemies, opponents, adversaries et cetera).

The peace and joy anticipated by A Course in Miracles require us to rethink and then to revise how we use judgement.

In this post, I want to extend this analysis to the figure of Jesus, whose centrality to ACIM's Christianized approach to healing, radically forces us to confront our desire to sustain inequality through active judgment (be it good or bad) of the other.

My thesis is this: if we hold Jesus as special in any way then the whole atonement project falls apart and we have to begin again. If he is the one who is just a little more forgiving, a little kinder, a little more healed, a little different. . .

Then we're back at the beginning. Why? Because if we hold one person apart from us then the whole is dissolved. There are no exceptions to salvation.

Love is not special. If you single out part of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on all your relationships and making them unreal. You can love only as God loves (T-13.X.11:1-3).

Obviousy this also applies to Jesus. How could it not?

Jesus was a human being. He had a body that felt hunger and fatigue, that liked being in touch with other bodies. His feet hurt from walking all day; when the dust blew he sneezed. When it rained in the night he got wet.

He lived in a world that was beautiful but unjust. Starlight over the shepherds, fields full of flowers and bees. But people also starved to death. If they complained too much or too publicly, they were crucified. Baby girls were left on trash heaps; adult women didn't always fare much better.

Jesus didn't have supernatural powers. He didn't walk on water or turn five loaves of bread into five thousand. He was surely charismatic, and his serene confidence in the nearness and reality of God must have been beautifully infectious.

But he wasn't different. He was just like you and me with one possible exception: he knew that he was just like you and me.

There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you (T-1.II.3:10-13).

Please see this: the "difference" referred to here does not make a difference. It's like I just finished dinner and don't feel hungry. You're just sitting down to eat and do feel hungry. Our state is different but we are not different.

There is nothing about Jesus that we cannot attain because there is nothing he has that we do not - right here, right now - also have (e.g. T-1.II.4:1).

And that is both the attraction of Jesus and what is so terrifying about Jesus - not that he is different but that he is the same.

If he's different then time and specialness have a place. Someday we'll be as good as Jesus. Just wait! But if he is the same, then the love he brings forth is the love we are called to bring forth and we don't have any excuse anymore not to.

I know, I know. You appreciate the point but also, come on Sean. Jesus was different the way Gandhi or Dorothy Day was different. They're human, sure, but they've also got a degree of clarity and courage that's just . . . not normal. Not magic maybe, not supernatural but . . . different.

It's a good argument! Lucky for us Marianne Williamson has already faced it down.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world . . . We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others (A Return to Love 165).

Here's the thing. You have to trust that Jesus isn't different than you. You don't have to become Jesus. You don't have to be crucified or live forever on the road. You just have to learn what he learned about being human, and what he learned about being human was that he wasn't different from you or me.

If you can see the way you are the same as another - up to and including Jesus - then you will see how you are equal to that other, and in your shared equality is all of our salvation.

It is the all-inclusive nature of Christ's Second Coming that permits it to embrace the world and hold you safe within its gentle advent, which encompasses all living things with you . . . In this equality is Christ restored as one Identity, in which the Sons of God acknowledge that they are all one (W-pII.9.2:1, 4:3).

A Course in Miracles is a course that teaches us how to think the way Jesus thought, so that we might realize the Second Coming of Christ as "merely the correction of mistakes, and the return of sanity" (W-pII.9.1:1), neatly summed in the admonition to "be not afraid of love" (W-pII.9.4:2).

Hence the longstanding clarity of John's Gospel.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them (1 John 4:16).

And hence the newer clarity of A Course in Miracles: "The fact that God is Love does not require belief but it does require acceptance" (T-9.I.11:5).

When we embrace our brothers and sisters as our own self - when we make no exceptions to the Sonship whatsoever - then we have accepted that "God is Love." This is all Jesus did, and all he asks of us, even now.

Love,
Sean