You and Your Big Love

. . . we are each the other's secre to salvation

When you finish the lessons of A Course in Miracles, you are a new person in a new place: you have a function and a practice, one that goes with you everywhere.

Your function is to love in a loveless place (T-14.IV.4:10), and your practice is to give attention to everything that obstructs that function so that they might be undone and obstruct love no longer.

The loving part is easy. Love is a natural force that moves through us the way rivers flow across the earth and flowers grow towards the sun. We don't have to do anything to love. Just to be is to love.

But looking at the blocks to love is hard. Looking at anger hurts. Having enemies is scary. It means you to have to be constantly prepared to attack, which means you have to constantly be on defense. You see yourself in lights you prefer be applied to others - violent people, selfish people, bad people.

When we look at anger alone we want to fix it. Or maybe indulge it or even flee from it. But all of that involves judgment, which means taking anger literally rather than symbolically.

When we look with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit teaches us to see anger as a symbol of separation, one that we can - with Its help - re-interpret in favor of peace and happiness.

What does this look like in practice?

One day, looking at anger with the Holy Spirit, I noticed something: anger was desperate. More than anything, it wanted attention - it wanted my attention. It would kill for my attention.

Can you see this for yourself - in your own heart, your own life? How desperate anger is? How frightened it is of losing what it covets most - your attention?

Pain compels attention, drawing it away from [the Holy Spirit], and focusing upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means to make the body real (T-27.VI.1:3-4).

For me, in that instant, anger lost all its power. What remained was a cry for love - and it was my cry. The cry for love was mine, and so the response was mine as well. All I had to do was see clearly that I was doing it to myself.

Anger ceased being a conflict, a problem to be solved, and became a helpful reminder of my only function - to love in a loveless place.

Anger appears still - of course it appears. I have miles to go and promises to keep. But it is no longer alien or unwelcome. How could it be? It is my own self asking to be loved. What else but love suffices?

The body is released because the mind acknowledges “this is not done to me but I am doing this.” And thus the mind is free to make another choice instead (T-28.II.12:5-6).

It is a joy to bend the sword into a plowshare. It is easy to go two miles instead of one.

Love is the easy part. Looking at the obstacles to love is the hard part.

When we realize the truth of "you are doing this to yourself," then our brothers and sister merit only gratitude. How patiently they bear our confused and misdirected emotions. How gently they tolerate our insane devotion to separation.

And how luminous they become when at last we see in them only what God sees, because we accept in our shared mind only the thoughts we together think with God.

The only one who is hurt is me. The only one who can heal me is me. And the one who teaches me this is you.

How simple is salvation indeed.

Love,
Sean