Make Your Life an Ark

. . . and save a seat for me

When we do not connect, there is a poverty in my life. The form this poverty takes is fear and doubt. I am afraid if I reach out you will reject me. I doubt my worthiness. I have no home.

Fear and doubt are inherent in the human experience but we are given relationships in which they are undone, allowing us to rest briefly in the knowledge that nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists. In that space, rejection and unworthiness can't touch us. They don't exist.

Our relationship is holy because it undoes the poverty but it is also holy because I am still in need of it, and thus of you. Alone, I cannot remember the cause for peace and joy. I forget it is possible to live without fear and doubt.

In Gifts from the Retreat (quoted here from The Voice that Precedes Thought), Tara Singh asked, can you live in a way that you do not take advantage of another person?

Relationship is at the level of love.
Where there is advantage
there is no love (143).

For me, this means we have to give each other the space to discover our own truth. We have to face the interior guilt and despair and not project it. A holy relationship is one that cooperates in bringing holiness forth. It knows that truth cannot be forced. It has to be authentic, not mimicked. It cannot be bought or sold.

When we know our own truth, we have to something to offer our brothers and sisters. Our poverty ends and we gather in order to share with each other the gift of salvation.

Salvation is a lesson in giving, as the Holy Spirit interprets it. It is the reawakening of the laws of God in minds that have established other laws, and given them power to enforce what God created not (T-20.IV.2:9-10).

As the world understands giving, what is given to you is lost to me. But as the Holy Spirit interprets giving, only what I give away can I actually keep.

Advantage means instead of giving wholly I keep something for myself. It means I want to at least. It also means I fear you might be aiming for an advantage over me.

Where we admit the possibility of advantage, we deny the possibility of trust. Where there is no trust, there is no relationship, only the guilty using the guilty to try and bargain their way out of hell.

You are the one who shows me the other way by seeing in me what I cannot see for myself: Christ, forgiven and whole.

To each who walks this earth in seeming solitude is a savior given, whose special function here is to release him, and so to free himself . . . each one finds his savior when he is ready to look upon the face of Christ, and see Him sinless (T-20.IV.5:3, 6).

The secret is, Christ does not inhabit a body (T-25.in.1:1). The "face" of Christ is not two eyes, a nose and a mouth. It's how we feel in the presence of someone who sees us as God sees us, whose love is not predicated on advantage. There aren't a lot of people like that in the world but there are some. And we all have the potential.

A Course in Miracles is about waking up to the truth that in order to be saved, one must literally become a savior. It's a decision we make in relationship for the relationship. I want to see you as God sees you; I want to face the fear in me that says I cannot.

To that end, Tara Singh suggested we become like Noah and build an ark.

Your ark is your own life -
the purity you bring within your own life
of eternal light.
Nothing can destroy it (144).

A Course in Miracles says that the ark - which is our rest and our safety because it is our shared remembrance of what is true - can only be entered in holy relationship (e.g., T-20.IV.6:5). It is saying - as Singh is saying - that only in a holy relationship can we learn what is eternal and beyond destruction. Only in a holy relationships can we remember it.

Therefore, we have to honor the relationship. We have to give it our attention. We have to be devoted to it.

Each holy relationship must enter here, to learn its special function in the Holy Spirit's plan, now that its shares His purpose. And as this purpose is fulfilled, a new world rises in which sin can enter not, and where the Son of God can enter without fear and where he rests a while, to forget imprisonment and remember freedom (T-20.IV.6:6-7).

When I do not connect with you, all I perceive is the old world flooded with fear and hate, guilt and regret. Death and destruction abound. When I connect with you - when we listen and share - when together we reestablish the cause for peace and joy - then a new world appears.

Holy relationships are like doves bearing witness to the end of a dangerous journey. We are all but home. And all our relationships have the potential to be holy this way.

Once your eyes are open,
you see the perfection in everything.

Then you sing songs of joy
you have discovered within -
you are independent of all things external.
You discover that you are not separate from anything (Singh 150-151).

When we join this way - when we make our lives an ark and welcome our brothers and sisters to enter and rest with us - we effectively accept God's plan for salvation as our only function (T-20.IV.8:4). There is nothing else we need be concerned about, because God's plan is all-encompassing.

We know this.

There is a place
so sacred and impeccable within us
that is kept intact by the Love of God (Singh 151).

I only know what I know because you share it with me. Over and over we come back to the relationship, back to the dialogue, back to the study, and back to the confession of illusory sins and their unnecessary absolution. Together, we come back to Love.

Truly, as the apostle said, I will never stop thanking God for you.

Love,
Sean