The Time of Rebirth

The skeletal branches of towering trees groaned in the wind as I crunched through the snowy quad in the semi-darkness of the deserted campus. I pushed on the doors to the comparative religions building, surprised when they gave way, and slipped on my mask. My imaginary inner professor had taken up invisible residence in a vacant office in this stone building some years ago, a symbol of the light still shining in all minds tucked away among hallways of darkness leading nowhere.

I made my way up the stairs holding tight to the railing, my hands protected from cold and COVID by the mittens my puppy Morgan toils daily to shred. Hoping that my inner professor would still be there in my latest hour of seeming need, against all odds.

From where I stood outside his slightly ajar door, I watched him through the mottled-glass window, silhouetted in the lamplight at his desk. Grading papers, maybe. Playing online cards or chess, whatever the hell he did with himself in his spare time. I hesitated, the fear of moving in his direction welling up again, at war with the terror of staying put. I chose the lesser of the two and knocked softly.

“Come in,” he called.

A welcoming fire blazed in the hearth surrounded by shelves of books whose titles always swam out of focus when I tried to look at them individually. I moved toward the familiar chair facing his oak desk, collapsed into it, unzipped my jacket, took off my mittens.

“I can get you a blanket if you’re still cold,” he said.

I shook my head, a sense of coming home washing through me.

He pushed away the papers he’d been reading, pulled the mask around his neck back up over his mouth and nose, still ready to meet me in the embodied condition I think I’m in. He folded his hands. “What can I do for you today?” he asked.

I thought about 2020, a year launched by the joyful announcement and New Year’s Eve celebration of my daughter and her long-time boyfriend’s engagement at the end of her two-week Christmas visit to our then new home in 2019. A year that then seemed to spiral downward almost immediately with the MOHS surgery in early January to remove skin cancer on my hairline that required cleaning and bandaging for 12 weeks. The injury to my knee and leg a couple weeks later that caused horrific swelling, bruising and internal bleeding, the threat of blood clots, restricted mobility for months. My elevated blood pressure.

Our sweet Kayleigh dog had died suddenly in late February followed by, well, you know—the virus that seemed to have caused so much suffering for so many and continued to wreak havoc despite the impending rollout of a lengthy vaccine process. More blood pressure struggles, a nation and electorate divided almost beyond recognition along inflated, manipulated ideological lines. The fraught elections themselves. Surging COVID cases before Thanksgiving, the approach of the first Christmas in 28 years to be spent without my daughter and another medical test in a few days to rule out a very rare but potentially serious medical problem. The thought of which had seemed to sabotage my fragile efforts to stay tethered to the safety, support and sanity of my right mind outside this dream of sinful separation and sacrifice.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he asked, just to throw me off, I suppose.

“I’m not really a body. A body doesn’t live, a body doesn’t die, a body doesn’t tremble over the possibility of threats to its existence blah, blah, blah. I know all that quite well. I teach it, I believe it, I understand its metaphysical truth and I have moments free of my bodily experience where I welcome the release and relief it brings. But you know what? Most of the time, I’m not anywhere close to being there. I mean, I would sooner forgive my husband or certain political figures I will not name in the middle of a complete ego meltdown than accept that it’s going to be OK if this turns out badly.”

An hour later we were still sitting there, me continuing to list the many unforgiving thoughts and imaginary obstacles to my personal peace I would rather change my mind about than the power of this medical test to throw me into complete panic. My personal hierarchy of illusions on full, humiliating display. I was drinking coffee he had slipped before me at some point, dunking a piece of gingerbread from a tin he’d pulled out of his desk drawer.

Above the mask, his eyes were merry.

“Don’t even think about smiling,” I said, even though I had clearly worn myself out. “Even you have to admit this entire year has just brought one threat after another to this seeming body and I really can’t take anymore. We both know I’m not anywhere near the top of the ladder home yet. I mean, if you could help Helen and Bill get a taxi in Manhattan could you please just help me have this test turn out OK?”

His eyes shone with reassurance but of course I couldn’t see his lips behind the mask.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I sighed. Why had he repeated that? I’d forgotten how annoying those trick questions of his could get.

“OK, it’s like you say in A Course in Miracles Text Chapter 15 X. The Time of Rebirth, paragraph three and four:

‘It is in your power to make this season holy for it is in your power to make the time of Christ be now. It is possible to do this all at once because there is but one shift in perception that is necessary, for you made but one mistake. It seems like many, but it is all the same. For though the ego takes many forms, it is always the same idea. What is not love is always fear, and nothing else.

It is not necessary to follow fear through all the circuitous routes by which it burrows underground and hides in darkness, to emerge in forms quite different from what it is. Yet it is necessary to examine each one as long as you would retain the principle that governs all of them. When you are willing to regard them, not as separate, but as different manifestations of the same idea, and one you do not want, they go together. The idea is simply this: you believe it is possible to be host to the ego or hostage to God. This is the choice you think you have, and the decision you believe that you must make. You see no other alternatives, for you cannot accept the fact that sacrifice gets nothing. Sacrifice is so essential to your thought system that salvation apart from sacrifice means nothing to you. Your confusion of sacrifice and love is so profound that you cannot conceive of love without sacrifice. And it is this that you must look upon; sacrifice is attack, not love. If you would accept but this one idea, your fear of love would vanish. Guilt cannot last when the idea of sacrifice has been removed. For if there is sacrifice, someone must pay and someone must get. And the only question that remains is how much is the price, and for getting what.’”

He was looking straight into my eyes now and I could see what he meant.

I thought about the trouble I was having again with my puppy Morgan. Adopted within the “stay-at-home” confines of the pandemic, he’d become completely dependent on my constant presence and availability. My work days had become an ongoing battle between his need to play or otherwise engage my full attention and my need to work, write, trundle through my daily “to-do” list. The more impatient and upset I became with him, the more he acted out in the form of growling, snapping or chewing something I thought I’d placed out of his reach to death. When I chose the ego as my inner teacher (yeah, still most of the time), I felt constantly required to sacrifice my best interests to meet his needs. Despite my love for him, I often bitterly resented it.

I sighed.

All the “trials” of 2020, large and small, ordinary and potentially catastrophic, even this latest one, were really just outside images of the punishment I secretly thought I had coming for the impossible, unconscious belief that I had sacrificed God’s Love to purchase an individual identity and must pay the price in suffering. As a result, I believed everyone and everything outside me was gunning for me in one way or another, constantly demanding I sacrifice my peace, my happiness, my health. But no matter how much I gave, it was never enough to appease them.

Identified with the ego’s belief in guilty separation from all-inclusive, eternally whole Love, I felt deeply lonely, secretly trying to prove that it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t feel happy, safe or complete, it was all these trials that just wouldn’t stop coming. All these needy and unforgiving people and situations in my life. Love always required sacrifice and offered punishment in return, I told myself, when I had chosen the ego as my teacher. Even though real Love/my uninterrupted union with God (who doesn’t even know about an unreal dream) would never hurt me or anyone. Never require I sacrifice my experience of health and peace; happiness and essential innocence to prove my worthiness of redemption for a “crime” that never happened.

For a moment, having chosen to free myself from the bondage of the ego’s insane thought system, I could feel that, really experience it, you know? Our real, shared safety and support not of this world. Join with the unwavering conviction in it my forgiveness teacher’s eyes offered. Momentarily transported through clouds of guilt to share in his faith that, confronted by the love of truth, fear must vanish. Enveloped by the absolute safety and innocence of our real, shared (by everyone) identity as one Child, inseparably united with God outside this dream.

“What else can I help you with?” he asked.

Funny, but I just couldn’t remember.

We sat like that for a while, swaddled in eternally loving silence and safety as gigantic snowflakes gently fell outside the window behind him.

And then suddenly, I could feel myself hyperventilating again. “Do you have any paper bags around here I could breathe into?” I asked.

His brows shot up the way they do.

“Did I even mention my daughter will not be coming home for Christmas this year!”

 

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