Loving the Enemy of Love

. . . notes on holiness, healing and gratitude

Holiness and gratitude are intimately related, like friends who cannot be parted. The one makes the other possible. Practicing gratefulness lights a path towards holiness, and the light is holiness. It's simple and works very well.

To be grateful is to give thanks. But rather than think of it in terms of specifics - I am grateful for this, I am grateful for that - it can also be helpful to realize gratitude as a way of living in a world with others, a way that is not contingent on judgment or evaluation at all.

What if gratitude is not dependent on what we have or how we feel? What if it arises at another level, one that both reflects and enables our shared reality as Christ?

The suggestion is, gratitude is a state of being that does not depend on our personal assessment of what happens - this is "good," this is "bad." Assessment takes place of course (welcome to the human body) but it doesn't matter the same way. It doesn’t pressure us into reaction. It's just another thing we notice, like leaves falling or the need to sneeze.

This upends our typical picture of gratitude as an effect we experience personally, and reframes it as a cause, whose effects are healing and occur in the context of relationship.

If you are grateful to your brother, you are grateful to God for what He created. Through your gratitude you come to know your brother, and one moment of real recognition makes everyone your brother because each of them is of your Father (T-4.VI.7:4-5).

This is not about what our brother or sister does! It is not about our assessment of their performance or integrity. They deserve our gratitude because they are Children of God. It is imperative that we actively seek - and find - the light of Creation in everyone we encounter.

Your claim to miracles does not lie in your illusions about yourself . . . It is inherent in the truth of what you are. It is implicit in what God your Father is. It was ensured in your creation, and guaranteed by the laws of God (W-pI.77.2:1, 3-5).

What is true of our sister or brother is true of us as well. Our ability to remember Love in the face of fear, and to live together happily, free of conflict and suffering, is inherent in us. Indeed, this is all we are ever actually called to to teach and learn - our fundamental innocence and its capacity to extend Love without qualification or condition.

Teach peace with me, and stand with me on holy ground. Remember for everyone your Father’s power that He has given him . . . Restore to God His Son as He created him, by teaching him his innocence (T-14.V.9:5-6, 10).

A devoted and active practice of gratitude allows us to perceive the Presence of God in all things. Abhishiktananda said that this Presence permeates our whole existence - it's there when we chant kirtan, there when we nap, there when we go to the bathroom. There is no separation anywhere.

The Presence is always shining on us as the sun is shining on the earth from on high in the sky . . . God has no form. He is beyond every form . . . Nothing "comprehends" him, but he shines through everything and makes himself known in everything (Abhishiktananda Prayer 12 - 14).

Gratitude reveals the presence of God in prismatic snow flurries, steam rising off tea, crows at rest on the church steeple, and scared men with nuclear weapons yelling about freedom.

It's that last example that throws us, right? We're all good until we reach the bad guys with guns. But here's the thing. Only when we perceive God in all of it - including our brothers who harm us or who want to harm us - will we learn how to respond in Love to their fear and thus transform it.

Indeed, the ones who are still scared - who don’t see the Light of Christ in the world but rather shadows and shades of separation - whose response to their interior suffering is to make others suffer worse - bear witness to the work of healing that remain for all of us. So long as one brother or sister walks the earth in fear and trembling then we are all bereft (e.g., T-1.VII.3:13).

There is - thank Christ there is - another way.

We are called, you and I - as ACIM students, followers of Jesus and Teachers of God - to the difficult, even frightening, sites of teaching and learning - sites of dialogue, witness, protest, service, mutual aid - in which we remember both how deep the fear goes and how thoroughly and perfectly - how easily - Love undoes it.

There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not “harder” or “bigger” than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal (T-1.I.1:1-4).

So much grief and anguish is undone in that first principle. It is very powerful healing.

A lot of us are scared these days - unsure, anxious, stressed and tired. I hear this; I am not immune. But times of crisis are also times of great opportunity. Our "enemies" stand before us crying out for the Love. If we listen carefully, those cries will remind us that this Love is ours to give. What else but gratitude to and for them could possibly suffice? What else is Jesus for?

Your gratitude to your brother is the only gift I want. I will bring it to God for you, knowing that to know your brother is to know God (T-4.VI.7:2-3).

The first word of this little essay is "holiness." Holiness is the lived expression of our willingness to remember our shared home in Creation. Holiness feels like gratefulness; gratefulness looks like holiness. The point is not to get lost in performative semantics, much less analysis, but to ask: do I know how to see the Face of Christ today? Do I know how to be aware of and grateful for the Presence of Creation?

Both are given now; both reflect our inheritance, which is Love, now. Both call us to the work of healing - which is simply to give attention to all the cries for Love that reach our ears while recognizing and praising Creation for its endless gift of Love. The two are not separate but one. Unity is salvation. Together we make it so.

~ Sean