This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on April 19, 2014.
I was walking my dog and decided to check in with someone I regularly call whose approval I have secretly, unsuccessfully sought for decades. I interviewed her a while, reciting a rote script as disingenuous as the confession I used to make as a child. Inquiring about health and weather; movies seen, meals ingested. Until I’d exhausted the frame of reference of our seemingly narrow, unstable strip of common ground, my voice stalling in the same old awkward pause, wherein she complied with her end of our unspoken bargain by asking me what was new with me.
I’d been busy writing and preparing for a workshop I was teaching the following day, I told her. I didn’t mention the C (Course) word. I didn’t have to. Her question and my answer lingered, a stillborn after-image I could almost touch in the unsettled spring air.
“And how is the weather there?” she continued, her habitual non-response to any mention of my involvement with A Course in Miracles framed in the form of a completely unrelated question that sometimes does, and sometimes does not, seem to induce the burning resentment it now once more did. And I had to laugh, really, actually began to, holding my not-as-smart-as-it-claims phone away from my mouth so as not to seem unkind, insane, or worse. Recognizing once more in our exchange my secret wish to feel slighted, unseen, unknown, in an unconscious effort to prove I really exist apart from the undifferentiated union of eternal Love but it’s not my fault. Interpreting her denial of my relationship with the big, blue book as a denial of my very existence, a denial of me!
At my feet, Kayleigh circled and tugged at her leash, sniffing out the perfect spot on the newly minted park lawn on which to deposit irrefutable evidence of her own existence. In the vast inverted bowl of a sky, cartoon-like cirrus clouds scudded by as if in search of intelligent life and a bird of prey I could not identify corkscrewed toward a nest exposed within branches still unwilling to show their leafy hands.
“It’s been such a late spring here, too,” I said, and made a few more polite noises, before excusing myself, and hitting “end” call. Kayleigh finished her teeny bodily business and I headed back home, thinking about how the ego seemed to have hijacked my chosen spiritual path, ironically aimed at exposing our belief in the importance of personal differences and separate interests, to instead reinforce the sense of isolation I had stealthily cherished all my life. So my family and most of my pre-Course friends had no interest in the spiritual practice now at the center of my so-called life. This could not possibly upset me unless I had dropped Jesus’—that symbol of the part of our mind that remembered to laugh at the tiny, mad idea of separation—proverbial hand, and picked up the ego’s instead.
I thought about what it says in A Course in Miracles Manual for Teachers, “13. How Should the Teacher of God Spend His Day?” About setting our intention first thing in the morning to make the purpose of our day learning from our inner teacher as we encountered the lessons in forgiveness of what never was we’d chosen to review at any given moment. I was presenting this passage from the text the following day, had been mulling over its message and yet, seemed to have found so many other more important things to take care of this morning than spending quiet time with Jesus, affirming my intention. Pressing issues such as checking out the weather on the Outer Banks where we’d be vacationing in several weeks, googling whether it’s safe to take probiotics with the antibiotics I was currently on which suddenly made absolutely no sense to me at all, and checking out the new photos on my daughter’s facebook page.
“Why did my mid-life crisis have to involve finding A Course in Miracles?” I whined, finding myself once more instantly transported to my inner teacher’s office. Slumped back in my chair at his desk once more. “I mean, I could have just taken some art classes or something.”
He smiled. “So you think the Course is the problem?” he said.
I sighed. “Not really.”
The Course had nothing to do with it, of course. It seemed so annoyingly transparent these days, the way I’d peopled my dream with costars guaranteed to bring up my sense of lacking the love and approval I secretly believed I’d forever squandered in my derelict flight from the “oneness joined as one” of our true nature. I had the ego on speed dial alright, knew just what call logs to access to trigger my sense of unfair treatment when I needed my victimization fix. And still all too often refused to contact the only presence that could fill that gaping lack, now sitting right here with me where he had always been, my imaginary solo walks, calls, and senseless wanderings into bereft nothingness notwithstanding.
On the flip side, I’d caught myself dodging the bullet of another dream figure for months in an effort to avoid the sense of feeling randomly, inexplicably attacked every interaction with this person seemed to provoke. And yet, when circumstances in my classroom conspired to force me to spend time with them recently, I actually remembered to invite the bearded wonder into my awareness as we talked. And experienced a welcome sense of sameness in our conversation, the solid, frightening lines of demarcation between us suddenly blurred. Defenses dropped; common interests restored.
“So what does that tell you?” he asked.
“That maybe I just need to take you with me all the time?”
“Imagine that,” he said.
He had a point; he always did, but still. I sighed. Again. “It’s just that no one has ever really gotten me at all,” I said, the call from this morning once more weighing heavily on my scant gray matter. “Stuck with me, you know?”
He handed me a box of tissues from his endless, invisible supply.
I blew my nose. “I know what you’re thinking,” I said, after a while.
He nodded.
“What am I, chopped liver?”
He threw back his head and laughed.
I didn’t want to join him, I really didn’t. But, damn it; his laugh is as contagious as my brother Michael’s all those years ago in church when we would sit in the front row of the balcony and drop dimes from our collection change down into the top of women’s bouffant hairdos.
Jesus thought that was pretty hilarious, too.
“Yet there will be temptations along the way the teacher of God has yet to travel, and he has need of reminding himself throughout the day of his protection. How can he do this, particularly during the time when his mind is occupied with external things? He can but try, and his success depends on his conviction that he will succeed. He must be sure success is not of him, but will be given him at any time, in any place and circumstance he calls for it. There are times his certainty will waver, and the instant this occurs he will return to earlier attempt to place reliance on himself alone. Forget not this is magic, and magic is a sorry substitute for true assistance. It is not good enough for God’s teacher because it is not good enough for God’s Son.” (Paragraph 8)
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.