This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on April 19, 2014.
I rapped gently on his office door.
My imaginary inner teacher glanced up from his desk, smiling, and waved me inside.
I dropped into the chair, cleared my throat. “Bless me Father for I have sinned,” I began, bowing my head and pressing my palms together.
“I have a better idea.”
“But I have a confession to make,” I said, the sense of dread I’d carried all night deepening. After all, he had never refused to meet me in the condition I think I’m in before.
“What if we just talk instead,” he said.
“You mean, like equals?”
He shrugged.
My heart raced. “What are you, out of your mind?”
“Like friends,” he said.
I swallowed, drew a ragged breath, head still bowed. He had never failed me before, but still. I had not always been, shall we say, completely honest with him. Not that I’d ever been completely honest in the confessional of my youth, either. I mean, say what you want about me, I was not a stupid child. “I don’t think I want to heal,” I whispered, now. There, I’d said it. I waited for the heavens to open up, the shower of fiery just desserts I’d been not-so-artfully dodging all my life to rain down on me.
“Go on,” he said, still smiling.
“I don’t want to identify with my inner strength; I want to prove my weakness. I don’t want to be proven wrong, I want to prove I have no choice.”
“How do you know this?” he asked.
I thought about the blue ping pong ball Ken Wapnick used to symbolize the decision maker in our one mind on his chart at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles in Temecula, California. The time I was attending a workshop there and he playfully threw it at someone in the audience who’d asked a question along the lines of the “senseless musings” Jesus speaks about in the workbook (Lesson 139, paragraph 8). An apt metaphor for what we think happened to us—being cast out of heaven as punishment for our decision to side with the ego—when, in fact, we did the alleged fleeing. Projecting the fantasy of independence out into a vast nowhere, entering imaginary bodies, and forgetting all about that bouncing blue ball that had never really gone anywhere at all. How it seemed an apt metaphor, now, for my own wayward Course-student behavior over the past week.
I thought about the multiple problems—one damn thing after another, really—that appeared to have resurfaced on the playground of my enormous, interactive forgiveness classroom. The way in which I mindlessly became deeply engrossed in the ego’s game of “who’s got the greater guilt,” played out all around me, designed to root me more deeply in this dream of permanent exile from real love, as though I had no choice in the matter. How quickly the deadly game devolved into a rabid hunt for the treasure of guilty grievances buried long ago and forgotten that seemed to have resurfaced to mock me. Gleaming jewels in my Pandora’s Box of reasons Susan will never find her way home. The shameful ballast that would weight me here forever, just when I thought I was finally making progress with this Course.
“If I wanted to heal, I would,” I said, in answer to his question. “But I must not want to heal. Because new evidence of my unworthiness just keeps cropping up all the freaking time. I’m so busy with damage control; I don’t have time to look with you, even though I know that’s how to heal.”
“We’ve talked about this.”
“I know, I know. Quit trying to manage my own life, is what you’re really saying. Trying to go it alone is what got us into trouble in the first place. But, Jesus, it’s not like I don’t try.” I leaned in closer. “Can we speak candidly?”
He nodded.
“I’ve even imagined myself walking with your hand in mine, you know? Showing you the proverbial monsters under my bed, in the closet, dancing on my bedroom walls, bombs detonating all around me. When I do that I see the monsters are just a play of light and shadow, the bombs have been disarmed. There can be no fallout. I am safe in my bed again, merely dreaming, just like you say in the big, blue book:
“No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not looking is the way they are protected. There is no need to shrink from illusions, for they cannot be dangerous. We are ready to look more closely at the ego’s thought system because together we have the lamp that will dispel it, and since you realize you do not want it, you must be ready. Let us be very calm in doing this, for we are merely looking honestly for truth. …” (From Chapter 11 V. paragraph 1)”
He nodded.
“Still, the truth is, I get tired of seeing things your way.”
His brows shot up and down the way they do.
I lowered my voice again. “I mean, I know you told me a while ago I needed to have a more intimate relationship with you, to make it the priority of my days, But you’re not exactly the easiest person to live with.”
“Is that a fact,” he said.
I nodded. “You don’t seem to really get me, sometimes, you know? To be perfectly honest, I can still only take so much of you at a time. Maybe eight, nine hours, max, from the moment I wake up. Then I’m ready for something else altogether. A mental blast from the past, for example, once more soiling my present and jeopardizing my future, a mental argument with someone about the mess they made in my classroom, relishing a friend’s juicy story, binge watching House of Cards, courtesy of my new Netflix streaming capabilities. I could go on. And on. But really, it goes downhill, fast, from here.”
“I think I get the picture.”
“All designed to prove I really am this pitiful, little self, not a decision maker outside the dream of time and space, capable at any moment of changing my mind about the cause of my distress. Still, since that’s all there really is, I must have chosen to throw your love away again, right? Not because I’m stupid. Not because I’m beyond redemption. Just because I’m secretly terrified your love will swallow me whole, pun intended.”
“Excellent,” he said.
“The thing is, maybe I’m still too afraid to look with you 24/7, but at least I know what I’m doing, and why. And I’m beginning to see that, even when I judge myself harshly for it, it never works. Because, let’s face it, you never go anywhere. I realized this the other day while I was editing my next collection of forgiveness essays and there you were again, hiding in plain sight in the spaces between the letters, reminding me this process is not linear, just like you might have mentioned; I don’t know, a few billion times. I had experienced the answer, real peace, light, true kindness, before, following even my darkest dreams, which means that healing must be in progress right now, even though I’m not currently feeling it.”
“Go on,” he said.
“I mean, reading my own writing was like reading a message in a bottle I had written into the script and left for myself, a love letter from my right mind. You hadn’t left me, after all.”
He handed me a tissue from his endless, invisible stash.
“But how can I trust that?” I asked, after a while.
He narrowed his eyes.
“I mean, I wrote it. And just look at what a mess I’ve made of things.”
“I’m always looking,” he said, smiling.
“I see. So the ego’s version of my so-called life is always along the lines of: “You’re unraveling on all levels—surrender Dorothy! But you’re saying the messy curriculum just means I’m ready to look at more guilty lies with you, allowing your light to shine them away. So what, if I’m not ready to do it 24/7? I’ll get there.”
We had a good laugh together then.
Back in my living room, I fired up another episode of House of Cards, and started to explain the plot to Jesus, who, it turns out, had all the time not in the world.
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.