This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on Dec. 1, 2014.
“Have I mentioned lately how much I just love Thanksgiving?” I asked, while standing at the kitchen sink, drying yet another drainer full of pots and pans. “The way it’s all about just being grateful for this wonderful world of ours. For the blessings of family, and friends, and food and, you know; God-damn pumpkins.”
His eyes widened.
“OK,” I said. “Until about three days into prepping the feast, when I find myself fantasizing about—how do I put this?–doing something all together other than chopping another freaking onion or strand of celery with my trusty chef’s knife.”
His brows shot up and down the way they do.
“Alright, just forget about Thanksgiving,” I said. “I mean, we were already on to Christmas the very next morning, anyway, so get over it, right? Or even earlier, this year, come to think of it. Catapulted into the black hole of Friday madness before we’d even managed to spoon the last smear of whipped cream on Thursday’s pie down our greedy, little gullets; fa, la, la, ti da, da!”
My imaginary Jesus just continued to smile in that absolutely genuine way of his, which can really tick you off sometimes, if you let it.
I slapped the damp dish towel down on the counter. “OK, how about we talk instead about the torture chamber I find myself in when I can’t let go of my feelings? That seems to be caused by, and directed at, a problematic costar. (Really, are there, ultimately, any other kind in this dream of separate existence apart from united being?) Who, I may have mentioned before, just refuses to ever comply with my teeniest, tiniest, most absolutely reasonable and appropriate requests?”
“We’ve talked about this,” he said.
I recalled the way I’d recently begun to experience my choice for the wrong mind, my insistence on continuing to see myself unfairly treated, as a kind of solitary confinement. Dark, bleak, dry, and hopeless, “where starved and thirsty creatures come to die.” (From A Course in Miracles workbook lesson 341, paragraph 5) Cold cement walls pressing in on me, without windows or doors into which the tiniest ray of light, the remotest possibility of exit, might shine, eternally banished and alone. The cell my faulty decision-making mind ejects the self I still think I am into when I refuse to let a special relationship off the hook. The asylum I found myself silently raging in again just last night, despite the spirit of the holidays already pinging glad tidings of “Cyber Monday” into my cell phone’s email inbox, quietly furious at this person for no real reason other than their colossal failure to ever comply with my meager wishes and respect my oh, so delicate feelings. I know.
How ironic it still seems that I usually find myself here after first having entered another room entirely, which–if I could render it on canvass as I see it clearly etched in my mind’s eye–would involve no boundaries whatsoever, only freedom; a sense of disconnected walls, ceilings, floors, and story lines, enveloped in every possible shade of the rainbow. Expanding ever-outward at warp speed before disappearing altogether (in the best possible way) into endless white light that is somehow, inexplicably, everything I ever wanted and in no way associated with the prerequisite of physical death. Moved to tears by true gratitude to all before suddenly experiencing myself once more seemingly plunged back into this dungeon of a personal hell.
“Jesus,” I said, dropping my face into the dubious cradle of my palms. “I really can’t stand this anymore! Please help me in some form I can understand, to see things differently, to feel your freedom and kindness, your peace and release!”
I opened my eyes seconds later to find myself sitting back in my imaginary chair across from him at his imaginary office desk.
He reached toward me, handed me a tissue from his infinite, invisible supply.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
“OK.”
“It’s like you say in (A Course in Miracles text) Chapter 24: II, paragraph 6:
‘Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you were like him? Could you attack him if you realized you journey with him, to a goal that is the same? Would you not help him reach it in every way you could, if his attainment of it were perceived as yours? You are his enemy in specialness; his friend in a shared purpose. Specialness can never share, for it depends on goals that you alone can reach. And he must never reach them, or your goal is jeopardized. Can love have meaning where the goal is triumph? And what decision can be made for this that will not hurt you?’
“But, I mean, Jesus!” I cleared my throat, leaned in and lowered my voice. “I don’t want to see our sameness. I mean, if they’re being awful, that would mean I am, too!”
“We’ve talked about this,” he said.
“I know, I know. We both share the same selfish need to blame each other to prove we exist independently from our one, real Self, but it’s not our fault. And the same need to learn that we are wrong about believing we pushed real Love away, then and now. I mean, I understand all that, but I don’t think I really have the faintest clue what it means to truly share.”
“And yet you have.”
He had a point. He always does. Because I knew what he meant. There were definitely times, increasingly, actually; welcome, comforting, sometimes deeply moving, elongated periods when my need for anyone or thing outside me completely fell away, leaving only a well of gratitude. But also other, inexplicably healing times in which I caught myself childishly wishing to have things my way, to blame someone for thwarting me, without feeling compelled to condemn myself for it. Realizing, instead, that maybe everything is really OK; convincing appearances to the contrary aside. Even though things seem to be going to hell everywhere in my dream, even though there are still so many areas of my life that seem to be a mess, in which I seem to be failing. Realizing somehow, even so, however briefly and intermittently, that my goal is still peace; I will still make it home, we will still, each and every seeming one of us, make it home to the inclusively loving, united place we never really left.
I sighed, the Olympic-caliber sigh for which I am justly famous in certain circles. “It’s just that I’ve been asking and asking to see everyone and everything, including the self I still think I am. as you do, for such a long, seeming time. But a part of me just refuses to let go for good of this weighty, recurring problem caused by this seeming ‘other,’ you know?”
He nodded. “Well, so your mind is still split. You trust me way more than you used to but not yet all the way.”
“You might be understating things a bit,” I said.
He laughed. “You still don’t know what you would be without the noose of this relationship you have tied. Without the flaws of your own character your compulsion to emote exponentially magnifies. But maybe you could just cut yourself some slack. You’re doing the best you can. Even deeply flawed people (are there any other kind?) can be peaceful, loving, and loved.”
I blew my nose. “Well, that’s a different story all together,” I said.
“It certainly is.”
We sat for a while in a silence so deeply soothing; I felt no urge whatsoever to fill it.
“Still, you might have spoken up about this a little sooner,” I said, after a while.
He just continued to smile.
And, damn-it, I had to genuinely smile, too. Really, I just couldn’t dream up a single thing left to do.
“The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there.” (Workbook lesson 341, paragraph 4)
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 Tuesday nights at RMMC.