This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on November 1, 2017.
(The world may seem pretty hopeless but the power of our decision-making mind to choose a perspective of sanity and compassionate inclusion beckons surely in every moment nonetheless! Here’s an excerpt from my book Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want on this very topic. :))
Hope may be “the thing with feathers” but—no offense Emily Dickinson—things with feathers fly away. And die. I learned this lesson early. As a little girl, I built a hospital for wounded creatures in the woods, ministering to abandoned baby birds and wounded butterflies with generally tragic results the adjacent makeshift graveyard served to accommodate. While I buried most of my patients, one small robin with a wing issue actually recovered. One day it leapt from my hand and circled away. I watched it rise in the sky with self-righteous elation until I realized it wasn’t coming back. When it disappeared into a cloud I rushed home, locked myself in my room, and sobbed.
I have been thinking about the word hope, defined by Webster’s as: “a wish or desire accompanied by confident expectation of its fulfillment” and asking for help from my right mind to accept that no one or thing in this world has ever or can ever completely fulfill my expectations. Especially not those people I hold especially responsible for preserving my peace of mind by meeting my expectations; what A Course in Miracles calls our “special relationships,” those closest “others” with whom we forge unspoken bargains for meeting our needs. People like my daughter, who I learned over the weekend had betrayed my trust, as teenagers will.
I have the personality of an oldest child, intent on following rules, commingled with a generational urge to topple every symbol of authority that appears to thwart my treasured autonomy. I came of age in the 70’s after all, and still sometimes find myself waxing nostalgic for phrases like “hell no, we won’t go!” whenever I feel somehow herded by the prevailing culture into conformity. And so I’m forever at war with myself. Except when it comes to my daughter, where the oldest, rule-abiding, law-enforcing child always prevails.
Without going into the gory details suffice it to say I discovered she had lied about her whereabouts and what she was up to. Although nothing horrible ensued as a result, it could have, my ego fretted, happily enumerating various graphic scenarios. I was outraged, even though I recalled having done something similar at her age, and might have shown a glimmer of compassion. Instead I chose to guilt trip; reviewing all the sacrifices I had made for her, all the earnest parenting I had done. Feeling more and more guilty, I began to berate myself. How had I failed her? I wondered aloud. What had I done to deserve this, I did not have to say. My message was clear. Look what you have done to me despite all I’ve done for you.
“This is not about you, Mom,” she said. And she was right. Even as I spoke, a part of me recognized nothing I had said had any bearing whatsoever on the real problem or solution. I begged for help from my right mind. I held her as she cried. I stopped talking, and started listening. She hated high school, she said; hated being dependent, hated not being able to make all her own decisions. She just wanted to fast-forward and be in college where everything would be OK—that unreliable thing with feathers again.
I told her I had felt exactly the same way at her age. But you can’t fast forward through life. You have to look at and deal with what’s in your face, even when it takes on the sickening slow-motion quality of an accident. You have to make decisions and, when you make poor ones, self-correct. I said all the things a mother is supposed to say, including that there would be consequences, even as a part of my mind watched gently, compassionately, fully aware it was all a bunch of hooey.
Later, still vacillating between the ego’s fearful litany of “what if?” and “how could she?” and right-minded awareness that she had not betrayed my love because there was really no me apart from her—no love apart from us–to betray, I opened A Course in Miracles to Chapter 17, VII. The Call for Faith, and read:
…you did not believe the situation and the problem were in the same place. The problem was the lack of faith, and it is this you demonstrate when you remove it from its source and place it elsewhere. As a result, you do not see the problem. Had you not lacked faith that it could be solved, the problem would be gone … (from paragraph 1).
I had identified the situation with my daughter as the cause of my distress. Even though the Course tells us again and again that the real problem is always the same: my belief that I actually separated from the one eternal love I am, and exist as an individual dependent on an outside environment for my physical, emotional, and psychological wellbeing. My attempt to deny responsibility for my existence by projecting my guilt outside myself–and experiencing it as an incoming affront, disappointment, broken promise, betrayed confidence, breach of trust–was keeping me in hell. My faith in my daughter’s body and faulty adolescent logic had been misplaced. But what had that ultimately to do with her or me? How could it possibly affect the truth we share, or the one enduring love we remain?
Through practicing the Course’s forgiveness in which I recognize with my right mind that the only thing I need to forgive is my belief in separation I am learning that placing my faith in any body including my own is always misplaced. But placing my faith in forgiveness is always justified. Turning my error in perception over to the truth of my right mind is always rewarded. I am relieved and released when I remember with help from my loving inner teacher that all calls for love—my daughter’s, my husband’s, my clients’, my neighbors’, my fellow Course students’–are my own. And that answering them will never fail to release me from the enervating burden of that thing with feathers.
Susan Dugan’s books – Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness, Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want, and Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness – are available at RMMC and on Amazon. She writes about ACIM based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings at ForaysInForgiveness.com and teaches online via Zoom on Tuesday nights.