The End of Blame

. . . and the beginning of our shared healing

What is your relationship to blame? When and how do you blame other people, traditions and ideas? For what do you blame them?

I do not like the feeling shame and guilt, but they are aspects of living with which I am in relationship. I know how to talk about them, go into them, and contextualize them. I’m pretty good at it.

Implicit in this "knowing" is the willingness to blame others for that guilt and shame. I am not doing this to myself - it was done to me. My life is an effect of others - their choices, their unhealed minds, their violence and dysfunction.

It is clear that when I think this way I am not thinking as God thinks. Love does not blame, because blame does not heal. Blame cherishes guilt and cultivates fear. But Love is always the correction of errors, not the idolization of errors.

Things that I blame for how I am (which reflects the underlying belief in what I am) include, in no particular order: Dad and Ma, alcoholism, corporal punishment, corporate food production, television, capitalism, gender, authoritarianism, law school, Ken Wapnick and Tara Singh, the Catholic church and even some of you reading this.

To name a few :)

To blame another is to declare our intention to remain unhealed. It is a refusal to countenance forgiveness on terms given by A Course in Miracles. And this is not a crime against God or Nature, but also: is it really what we want? Are we really studying and practicing this particular spiritual path just so we can decline the healing it offers us?

In the world, forgiveness means seeing - noticing and naming - sin and then magnanimously agreeing to temporarily and conditionally waive punishment. The Course calls this "forgiveness-to-destroy."

All forms forgiveness takes that do not lead away from anger, condemnation and comparisons of every kind are death . . . Be not deceived by them, but lay them by as worthless in their tragic offerings (S-2.II.8:1, 3).

The alternative is to see only errors calling for correction and - this is where the Course becomes challenging for many of us - to recognize that the errors are in our mind. They aren't out there. They aren't somebody else's doing. We are doing this to ourself (T-27.VIII.10:1).

Seeing and recognizing this is hard.

Did you grow up in a family wracked by alcoholism? Have you been hit repeatedly and painfully by someone claiming to love you as they hit you? Were you taught - at any age, but especially a young age - that there was a special place in hell for you? That God wanted you in hell?

That is bad shit! And for a lot of us, it's even worse than that. So when ACIM comes along and says "just forget about all that," we push back. Of course we push back. Of course someone should pay for doing that to us.

It is helpful to see how we've set it up: our innocence requires another to be guilty.

It is also helpful to understand that God does not think that way.

Even if we disagree - even if we decide not to follow this ACIM path any more - it is helpful to at least not deny that the Course teaches that the truly Innocent are innocent because they perceive no cause for guilt (e.g., T-27.I.9:1, T-27.I.10:1).

Go slowly with me here - not because I know something you don't, but because I am trying to learn the lesson you are here to teach me. I am repeating it to you so you can say, "yes, Sean - you're finally getting it" or "no, Sean - not quite but keep trying."

The Holy Spirit invites us to give attention to the people, places and things we blame without actually blaming them. For just a moment - literally an instant - we are asked to see the world without blaming it at all.

When we do this, we realize that we are neither victims, nor judges, nor executioners.

In that moment of realization all that we perceive are our brothers and sisters. Our suffering is shared with them - not caused by them. But because our suffering is shared, healing is shared as well.

The Vision of Christ - which is the Holy Spirit's gift of healing - allows us to see the other as perfectly equal to us. Therefore, it allows us to avoid slicing and dicing the world into good guys, bad guys and even worse guys against whom we are pitted for survival.

Our equality is the idea we are invited to remember as we go about our day. We don't have to stop blaming anybody or anything, we just have to notice when we are blaming them, and be willing to learn there is another way, one that rests on perfect equality.

Our willingness becomes the means by which that other way - which is the way of Love - is restored to our minds and, by extension, to all life. That this takes the form of baby steps, foot-dragging, and sometimes even stepping backwards is not a crisis.

We are not called to heal alone or in part. We are simply asked not to refuse the Presence of the One who knows how to heal and does. That One - call them Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Christ, Mind, God, whatever you like - heals us by healing others through us.

That One dissolves the separation of self and other, which undoes even the possibility of blame because it undoes harm. In oneness, there is no other, either to harm or be harmed by.

In this way blame - which is simply fear by another name - is transformed into responsiveness, which is another name for Love.

There is only Love, which sometimes takes the form of a cry for Love in order to remember again that it is Love. That is our fundament. That is our reality. Our only function is to remember this for one another, and the only way to remember for the other is to remember with the other.

Thank you as always for reading and sharing with me.

Love,
Sean