Sitting with Empty Hands

. . . healing my relationship with A Course in Miracles

Easter still seems so far away. Snow banks cover where in Spring the crocuses will bloom. Yesterday snow flurries fell in my coffee. The war goes on; targeting immigrants goes on. What am I supposed to do?

A Course in Miracles taught me to become responsible for projection - to notice both when I was projecting and how projection makes genuine relationship with others impossible. Projection is undone when we see its negative effects clearly and commit ourselves to not doing it anymore.

My gratitude is immense.

But this is a practice that we return to, a practice that we practice. It has to be. It’s also recursive, which means that eventually it has to practice on the very framework that gives rise to it. That is, eventually, serious ACIM students have to ask: what am I projecting onto A Course in Miracles? What am I afraid of that I’m using the course to avoid looking at?

A little over a year ago, I asked myself if it was possible that my study and practice of A Course in Miracles was itself a defense against love. Had I projected the Kingdom of God onto a teaching about God - and therefore missed God entirely? Was it possible that the course itself was the last block to the “awareness of love’s presence?” (T-in.1:7)

There are no right or wrong answers to those questions, only honest ones. What is true for you? For me, the course had become a sophisticated way of running the same old separation playbook. Intellectual, hard to pin down, kind of a know-it-all, always one foot out the door. I was lost in what Tara Singh called “the lovelessness of ‘I get it and you don’t.’”

Yet when I finally did see A Course in Miracles without projection, it was only because A Course in Miracles had already taught me how to see that way (i.e., don’t project). I took literally its invitation to “come with wholly empty hands” unto God (W-pI.189.7:5), and God was there and had been all along. Isn’t that what good teachers - or courses - do? They make themselves unnecessary (e.g. T-13.I.1:1).

The decision to go empty-handed unto God was not virtuous. It wasn’t disciplined. Nor did I trust that God would be there, or even notice me. But the cost of sustaining the defense was too high. I was tired of being so far away far from folks I love and want to serve. There had to be another way. And there was. There is. But it asks something of us - it asks us to be in relationship with one another and, through one another, with the world. Jesus didn’t say to me, “welcome home.” He said that he was hungry, lonely, sick, imprisoned, exhausted. He asked me for help.

The commitment to undoing projection means sitting with both beauty and difficulty, and not trying to change, reject or possess either. It means encountering life on terms I don’t set and can’t control. I have to sit with uncertainty and powerlessness. I can’t retreat into comfort - another book, a new idea, a revised practice. Insomnia, chickadees, moonlight, bombed-out schools - it all belongs. It’s all given.

I think often of Sojourner Truth. She lived and taught sometimes in my part of New England. Truth’s personal encounter with Jesus brought “such a love in my soul as I never felt before - a love to all creatures.” But then she stops herself. White people have beaten, raped, abused and tortured her and her people for centuries. Can Jesus help her love even the slavers? “But then there came another rush of love through my soul, and I cried out loud - Lord, Lord I can love even the white folks.”

My encounter with Jesus is not Sojourner Truth’s. I am obviously part of the problem she was trying to solve. Honestly, I am part of the problem, Jesus is trying to solve. Yet they both extend a specific invitation - to become responsible, in the context of my life, for the Love that God offers all of us. Really, they ask a question: am I ready to let go of everything that obstructs my awareness of that Love and hinders its extension? What would you say to such worthy questioners?

Halfway through Lent, in fasting and prayer, empty hands opening to a relationship only just now coming into view.

Love,
Sean