This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on Apr. 1, 2017.
The Friday before my daughter’s Spring Break we gathered to remember a 20-year-old college student who had been heading to California on holiday when her personal story abruptly and inexplicably ended. Rain turned to snow–and back again–as we headed with hundreds of family members, friends, and acquaintances to find seating in the back of a packed Lutheran church.
Beside me my daughter’s shoulders remained admirably straight as we watched the girl’s family proceed to their seats in the front pew. I squeezed my daughter’s hand but she did not return the pressure. She finds it difficult to accept comfort; always has. She likes to show the world just how strong she can be. I know that one. Just behind us, one of my daughter’s teachers choked back tears.
We stared at the photograph of a young girl with a winning smile standing on a beach, waves crashing behind her. We listened to her sister–my daughter’s classmate–sing the Dolly Parton song I Hope You’ll Dance, a heart-wrenching, courageous performance still replaying itself in my head. We listened to the girl’s church youth group, high school, and college friends describe her sense of humor, her zest for life, her energy, athleticism, and kindness. We read along with prayers and watched a video celebrating her life. We dabbed at our eyes and did our best not to sob. We did not even know this girl, only her younger sister, and yet like every human in that church we knew her story all too well.
The minister talked about how children are a gift. But he skirted the central question weighing on everyone’s mind, the question that never gets answered and rarely even asked in our experience here in the dream. What kind of father would take back a gift so soon? What kind of parent would give a gift that didn’t last in the first place? What kind of “gift” is this life anyway? A cruel gift which—regardless of length—always ends the same tragic way; always causes the same unbearable suffering in those left behind.
As we fought our way back to the car in the escalating snowstorm I took my daughter’s arm. She was wearing the same expression she had worn as a three-year-old listening to TV reports about Congressional efforts to cut programming for PBS children’s television. Brows furrowed; eyes narrowed, fists clenched; the tasty word “bad” on her tongue.
“I want you to know that God would never do that to someone,” I said, sitting in the car, staring straight ahead, longing to connect. “Not to those parents. Not to that child.”
I wanted her to know what I was learning in A Course in Miracles and beginning at least sometimes to actually believe. I wanted her to share in the only real hope we have in this world: that its story of seeking and never finding that ends in death is not our reality but a defense against the eternal, undivided, abiding love of our true nature. That beyond this world there is a world we want, a world we have turned our backs on in our fear and selfishness but can just as easily learn to embrace right here and now in the condition we think we’re in.
She broke down. “It’s just not right,” she sputtered. “It doesn’t make any sense. I mean what kind of God? Why would …”
She didn’t know a whole lot about God. Despite a couple of years during her childhood in which we intermittently attended a Unity, Divine Science, and Protestant congregational church we were not a religious family. I had rejected my Catholic upbringing and my attempts to replace it with other organized religious paths left me feeling like a serial hypocrite. Mostly I had spoken to my daughter as a child about finding the God in her heart. A God I had always sensed we existed somehow within despite all evidence to the contrary in our human experience. I urged her to remember that she was a part of God and could always go within to the God in her heart for comfort and guidance. I had no idea whether any of it made sense or had taken. Even so, I reached for the God in my heart now.
I held her as she cried. I don’t know what I said but I know it came from a heart beyond this body because I lost track of my false self and hers, time and space as I spoke. I could feel her relaxation in my own loosening limbs, accepting for a moment God’s real “gift,” the only true comfort available to us here; the memory of our one, whole mind that has never forsaken and will never forsake us. Despite our hallucination of banishment to a realm of mortality in which we obsessively reenact the original choice for individuality, casting our guilt over that alleged decision onto others to relieve ourselves of its crushing weight, continuing to push away the truth that the “tiny mad idea” of separation from our source never happened.
For one moment, face to face with the unbearable heaviness of being in this illusory world as seemingly demonstrated in a life cut short, we joined our mind with the incredible lightness of our true nature and were healed. Until our fear came boomeranging back and we went off to California for spring break, seeking for ourselves once again where we can never be found.
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.