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A Child, a Man, and Then a Spirit
(Volume 15 Number 4 December 2004)
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To commemorate the publication of the Foundation's 32-CD set, “Jesus: Songs of Gratitude and Love”(1) and the Christmas season, I have written this article discussing Jesus' important role in our spiritual development. The subtitle is taken from Helen Schucman's poem “A Jesus Prayer,” which begins with the line, “A Child, a Man, and then a Spirit,” referring to Jesus(2), while the identical line appears in lower case in the third stanza, referring to all of us. The poem thus expresses our wish that we follow the same Atonement path Jesus took and become like him. The 3rd-century Christian philosopher Origen had views on Jesus that are germane to our discussion. Seriously departing from the orthodox position-which is why, incidentally, he is not St. Origen-this brilliant thinker used the analogy of a tree to make his point. Before the fall (or separation), the creatures of God (also termed rational beings by Origen, his equivalent of the Course's Son of God) were like fruits on a tree, whose trunk represented God. Through their own negligence, boredom, or sloth, these beings became restless and fell to the ground. Jesus is the name of the rational being who throughout the fall remained constant in his remembrance of the Creator. Thus, he fell so close to the tree's trunk that he instantaneously fused with it, once more at one with God as Christ, and placing himself in the position of being able to help all the fallen ones regain awareness of their oneness with the Source of creation. Thus we read Jesus' words to us in the text, echoing Origen's vision of our savior and teacher:
I will awaken you as surely as I awakened myself, for I awoke for you. In my resurrection is your release.…Trust in my help, for I did not walk alone, and I will walk with you as our Father walked with me (T-12.II.7:2-3,5).Jesus, therefore, is clearly not the exclusive Christ of traditional Christianity, but a part of the one Self, of which we all are a part. He is the name we give to that fragment of the whole who first remembered his Identity as Christ and helps us do the same. In the clarification of terms and speaking in the third person, Jesus describes himself and his role:
The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ [the symbol of forgiveness] in all his brothers and remembered God. So he became identified with Christ, a man no longer, but at one with God.… In his complete identification with the Christ-the perfect Son of God…Jesus became what all of you must be. He led the way for you to follow him. He leads you back to God because he saw the road before him, and he followed it (C-5.2:1-2; 3:1-3; 5:1; italics omitted).We thus pray that we take Jesus' hand on the journey and follow him back to God-awakening from the childish dream of separation, learning the forgiveness that characterizes our spiritual maturity or manhood, and finally remembering Who we are as spirit.
We begin our journey with a statement of Jesus' equality with the rest of the Sonship, which comes at the beginning of the text:
Equals should not be in awe of one another because awe implies inequality. It is therefore an inappropriate reaction to me.... There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you.... I am in [no] way separate or different from you except in time, and time does not really exist (T-1.II.3:5-6,10-4:1).This statement corrects what is perhaps, from the perspective of A Course in Miracles, the seminal error of Christian theology: the inherent specialness of Jesus as God's only and beloved Son. Many students of the Course are familiar with the distinction drawn by St. Paul, the architect of Christian theology, when he referred to Jesus as the Son of God, while all of us remain as adopted sons:
...when the appointed time came, God sent his Son...to enable us to be adopted as sons (Galatians, 4:5).If, indeed, Jesus forever remained different from us-an elder brother whose little brothers and sisters never grow to share in his full stature within the Kingdom-he would be a stellar example of the “dream that comes in mockery” that he mentions in “The Gifts of God” (p. 121). This dream constitutes the belief in separation, specialness, and differences that mocks the perfect Oneness of God and His creation. In the same vein, Jesus tells us in the text that a good teacher makes himself obsolete:
Like any good teacher, the Holy Spirit knows more than you do now, but He teaches only to make you equal with Him (T-6.V.1:1).Before discussing the implications of these statements, let us look first at the dangers inherent in not seeing Jesus as equal. We speak of the special relationship-the ego's major weapon in its war against God. Specialness is so effective as a defense against truth because it convincingly portrays the Son of God as separated, differentiated, and victimized, even as he victimizes. This is powerfully depicted in the fourth and fifth laws of chaos (T-23.II.9-12): People have what they have taken, which means that our sense of lack is due to others taking from us what is rightfully ours, hiding it in their selves. Thus our salvation lies in retrieving this substitute for love-killing to get it, if necessary-and making it our own once again. Following these laws, therefore, if we see Jesus as different, we are compelled as egos to secretly attack him for having taken the innocence and perfection that rightly belongs to us. Indeed, if Jesus is the only begotten Son of the Father, he must have taken our place as God's favorite, reflective of the sibling rivalry that is an inherent part of what Freud euphemistically called the family romance. From this belief arose a theology of sin, punishment, sacrifice, and judgment that became the backbone of Christian thought for over two millennia, replacing what should have been only a gospel of forgiveness and universal love. The egos of the world could not but perceive in Jesus the one who stole their birthright, much as Jacob, the progenitor of the Children of Israel, stole his brother Esau's proper birthright through trickery and deception (Genesis 27). Thus do we see in Jesus the sin of separation and usurpation we do not want to acknowledge in ourselves, as he describes for us in the text:
I am made welcome in the state of grace, which means you have at last forgiven me. For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die instead of you. To the ego sin means death, and so atonement is achieved through murder. Salvation is looked upon as a way by which the Son of God was killed instead of you (T-19.IV-A.17:1-4; italics mine).The world projected onto the dream figure of Heaven's love and innocence its secret sin and hidden hate (T-31.VIII.9:2), making him guilty and deserving of punishment for our sin of hating God and crucifying His Son. How then could we love him? It is truly impossible to love one who is perceived as different, for the aforementioned laws of chaos dictate our hatred for those who have what we lack. And yet, following the dynamic of reaction formation,(3) the Christian world has persisted in the belief it loves its savior, who in its warped theology is the savior. Being the projected image of the Son's unconscious guilt, Jesus saves us from the terrifying fate of having to confront the guilt that demands punishment, by the same sacrifice and crucifixion that gave rise to the world in the first place and cost us our glory as Christ. In fact, organized Christianity provides a wonderful example of special love in action. Our hated guilt is kept hidden by this love, as described in this powerful statement:
The special love relationship is an attempt to limit the destructive effects of hate by finding a haven in the storm of guilt. It makes no attempt to rise above the storm, into the sunlight. On the contrary, it emphasizes the guilt outside the haven by attempting to build barricades against it, and keep within them. The special love relationship is not perceived as a value in itself, but as a place of safety from which hatred is split off and kept apart (T-16.IV.3:1-4).This desperate need to maintain the barricades of specialness as defenses against the underlying guilt is what has driven-and still drives-otherwise sincere Christians to pursue lives of judgment, hatred, and even murder:
If the crucifixion is seen from an upside-down point of view, it does appear as if God permitted and even encouraged one of His Sons to suffer because he was good. This particularly unfortunate interpretation...arose out of projection.... Persecution frequently results in an attempt to “justify” the terrible misperception that God Himself persecuted His Own Son on behalf of salvation.... It has been particularly difficult to overcome this because...many have been unwilling to give it up in view of its prominent value as a defense (T-3.I.1:5-6; 2:4,6).These projections are reflected anytime we make Jesus different from us, for perception of differences can only lead to the flowering of hate-filled specialness. Thus it is that our insistence that Jesus always be there for us-an elder brother comforting, guiding, teaching his younger siblings-ensures that special love will forever take the place of Heaven's love. We therefore end up rejecting his stated purpose for himself:
My mind will always be like yours, because we were created as equals. It was only my decision that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision....[which] is made by giving, and is therefore the one choice that resembles true creation. I am your model for decision. By deciding for God I showed you that this decision can be made, and that you can make it (T-5.II.9:1-3,5-7).Denying Jesus' important role in leading us from the spiritual immaturity of self-centered specialness to the Self we share with God, prevents his serving as the model for decision that allows us to choose as he did. To borrow Origen's image, rather than remembering our Identity as spirit and choosing to return to the trunk of eternal life, we remain in the ego's fallen world of individuality, alienation, and death. In A Course in Miracles, Jesus helps us weigh the tragic cost of maintaining this belief in the reality of differences.
To repeat, one of Christianity's most egregious mistakes was making Jesus special, thereby preventing our becoming one with him and thus with our Self, guaranteeing that we remain little children and apart from our Creator and Source. As described in The Song of Prayer (S-1.II), our pathway home is like the ascent up a ladder. The journey begins with our self-perceptions as specific bodies, requiring specific help from other specific bodies to meet our specific needs. Thus our need to have Jesus fulfill the role of older brother, the idealized friend and comforter of which almost every child dreams; not too dissimilar to the belief in a beneficent, all-giving Santa Claus or the ego's magical image of an omni-benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent Father. Jesus becomes the one to whom we can always run with our problems, fulfilling the childish magical hope for an end to our suffering and pain. We are thus not aware that persisting in the belief that Jesus is a separate body-albeit a non-physical one-whose purpose is to help heal the mind's perception of itself as separate, ends up as the perfect ego ploy to ensure that we forever remain as bodies in our self-concept. If we truly wish to return home, we must follow the one who will lead us through our specific needs, weaning us of the dependence on him that, following the ego's law, will inevitably lead to contempt, preventing us from accepting the love that leads us to itself-our Self. The following passage highlights the great sacrifice to us of seeing ourselves and our brothers-including Jesus-as bodies:
To see a brother in another body, separate from yours, is the expression of a wish to see a little part of him and sacrifice the rest....And while you see your brother as a body, apart from you and separate in his cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him and you. What greater sacrifice could be demanded than that God's Son perceive himself without his Father? And his Father be without His Son? Yet every sacrifice demands that They be separate and without the other. The memory of God must be denied if any sacrifice is asked of anyone (T-26.I.1:6; 4:2-6).Jesus wants us to consider carefully whether losing awareness of our unity with God is worth it to maintain our separate bodies-separate from each other, from him, and from God. One can hear Jesus' plea throughout his course to come join him, which we cannot do if we fearfully insist that we are different, and that we need him to survive in this world of fear and death. Thus, for example, he exhorts us in the text to use the power of our minds to join him; the same power that is in his mind:
Your mind is the means by which you determine your own condition, because mind is the mechanism of decision. It is the power by which you separate or join, and experience pain or joy accordingly. My decision cannot overcome yours, because yours is as powerful as mine. If it were not so the Sons of God would be unequal. All things are possible through our joint decision, but mine alone cannot help you....If you want to be like me I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching....God's Sons are equal in will, all being the Will of their Father. This is the only lesson I came to teach (T-8.IV.5:7-11; 6:3-5,8-9).We cannot learn Jesus' lesson, however, as long as we maintain our differences, thus imprisoning ourselves and him in the wall of separation the body represents. We cannot then join with him, let alone love him, and thus cannot remember Who we are and return home.
Whom you seek to imprison you do not love. Therefore, when you seek to imprison anyone, including yourself, you do not love him and you cannot identify with him. When you imprison yourself you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification is with the Father and with the Son. It cannot be with One and not the Other. If you are part of One you must be part of the Other, because They are One (T-8.IV.8:3-8).Very early in the Course's scribing, Jesus made this same point to Helen of his proper role when she beseeched him for help to remove her fears and anxieties:
The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate....I know it [fear] does not exist, but you do not. If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with a basic law of cause and effect; the most fundamental law there is. I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking (T-2.VI.4:1-4; T-2.VII.1:3-5).In other words, Jesus was telling Helen and all of us-his students and brothers-that we should not look to him for help in the world, for he is not there. Just as the world misunderstood him two thousand years ago, mistaking his glorious self for the inglorious body, so, too, can students of A Course in Miracles be tempted to forget his overriding message to us all:
I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me (W-pI.201-220).As it must, this truth holds for Jesus as it holds for us. One form of this prominent ego error lies in focusing on hearing Jesus' voice (or the Holy Spirit's) as something apart from our own. To be sure, we cannot deny our experience as separate bodily selves, and so need to begin with that perception. Yet the goal is to grow in the realization that the two voices are really one, and as they blend together-our separate selves disappearing into the radiance of Christ's vision-this one voice, too, dissolves into the One that has no voice that speaks for Christ, for it is the Christ. The formlessness of love has come to replace the Voice that had spoken for it within the dream:
And then the Voice is gone, no longer to take form but to return to the eternal formlessness of God (C-6.5:8).At a recent class held at the Foundation, a woman spoke of her relationship with her adolescent daughter-a difficult classroom to which any parent of teenagers can relate. When she needed to place limits on her daughter, the woman would tell her that Jesus said that she should behave thusly, thereby invoking his authority as replacement for her own. While this tactic was moderately successful, it carried within it the seeds of long-term failure since she was inadvertently undermining her own authority by belittling it in deference to Jesus. She was in effect telling her daughter that she was inadequate to be her mother, for only Jesus had the wisdom to give advice and place limits on her ability to miscreate. She was thus modeling inadequacy and failure, rather than someone who could draw upon the strength of Christ and make it her own, offering her daughter the same opportunity by her example, helping her to grow as she had grown. Likewise, students who rely on “hearing” the inner Voice, frequently end up stunting their own spiritual growth so they never realize there is but one Voice, and it is their own. Indeed, as long as our lives are dominated by the thought system of guilt, fear, and attack, we need a symbol that is perceived external to the ego and represents the Voice we still fear to claim as our own. Yet our path should be one that gradually shrinks the gap between our voice and our Voice, allowing us to grow into spiritual adults and then beyond. In this regard, William Thetford made an insightful observation about Helen's scribing of A Course in Miracles. He said that the same process of dissociation-i.e., splitting off her ego self from her right-minded self-that enabled Helen to take the Course down, also prevented her from learning it. Bill's wise words go to the heart of this article. By maintaining the strict separation between her voice and Jesus', in one sense necessary for her to scribe his course, Helen also made it impossible ever to identify with him and complete the journey with him and as him. To her credit, when Helen was confronted by would-be idolators, she would adamantly insist that they follow the Course as their model and not her, as she was a notoriously bad example of it, thus referring to the dynamic that Bill described. While the cost of maintaining our separation from Jesus and insisting on our differences is great, the rewards of joining with him are greater still, as we now see.
Our goal is thus to join with Jesus and realize our unity with him, yet this does not mean foregoing the benefit of going to him for help. It would indeed be foolish to deny our ego identifications and need for a symbol to offset and correct our mistaken choice. However, we should not content ourselves with remaining on the bottom rungs of the ladder-asking, again, for specific help of a specific person for a specific need-when Jesus is ready to lead us to the non-specific top, and on to God. Thus at the same time we begin in the world of specific bodies, the condition in which we think we exist (T-25.I.7:4), our ultimate purpose remains to rise as quickly as we can from this level of need to our truer need of seeing that it is the mind's guilt that is the problem, and not external concerns. Therefore, while it is helpful to turn to Jesus for specific help rather than the ego, recognizing our mistaken identification, we should not use the relationship to reinforce our belief in magic-seeking and “receiving” external help- but rather to be the means of choosing the miracle to undo the mind's choice for the ego. In this way we would come to recognize the only Answer we need. In The Song of Prayer, Jesus urges us to move beyond the specific to the One:
To ask for the specific is much the same as to look on sin and then forgive it. Also in the same way, in prayer you overlook your specific needs as you see them, and let them go into God's Hands. There they become your gifts to Him, for they tell Him that you would have no gods before Him; no Love but His. What could His answer be but your remembrance of Him? Can this be traded for a bit of trifling advice about a problem of an instant's duration? God answers only for eternity. But still all little answers are contained in this (S-1.I.4:2-8).It is God's answer of non-specific Love that is our goal, for in its gentle embrace we find the comforting answer to all our specific concerns and problems. Therefore, seeing ourselves as separate from Jesus and powerless without his comfort and help, roots our attention in the body and not the mind. This is exactly opposite to his stated purpose for A Course in Miracles that we become like him and remember our shared Identity as God's Son. Moreover, if Jesus represents God's Son as he was created-as one-no one from the Sonship can be excluded. Focusing on the body-either through our perceived bodily needs or special needs of others- ensures the Sonship will remain fragmented in our perception. The body's purpose is to separate, and once we make the satisfaction of needs paramount, we cannot but judge others based on these needs. This holds whether we speak of the bodies of those special people in our personal life, or the body of Jesus from whom we demand answers to our questions and our demands. He no longer is the brother helping us to remember our shared Identity and purpose, but one as separate as we, who exists independent of us and is there only to supply our requests and comfort us in our distress. When Helen asked Jesus once what she should say to someone who needed help, his gentle response moved her from the specific request-albeit coming from her attempt to be helpful-to the healing of her mind through releasing judgment:
Remember you need nothing, but you have an endless store of loving gifts to give. But teach this lesson only to yourself. Your brother will not learn it from your words or from the judgments you have laid on him. You need not even speak a word to him. You cannot ask, “What shall I say to him?” and hear God's answer. Rather ask instead, “Help me to see this brother though the eyes of truth and not of judgment,” and the help of God and all His angels will respond (Absence from Felicity, p. 381).Thus would Helen, and all of us, be helped to let go of the judgments that reinforce separation from each other, allowing the unifying Love of God to extend through our minds to embrace all people, including Jesus. At last we have the vision to see the inherent unity in the seemingly separated fragments of the Sonship-one in ego, one in the Holy Spirit, one in Christ.
In summary, therefore, our prayer to ourselves-this season and every season-is that we continue to grow with Jesus, drawing ever closer to his self, that we may remember our one Self that God created. Jesus is our model and guide, as we joyfully take his hand to walk the journey of life to Life Itself. Our hope and prayer-given shape by Helen's words-remain on our lips but an instant longer, reminding us of the teacher whose purpose is to have us become like him:
A child, a man and then a spirit. So FOOTNOTES: 1. See p. 9 for a full description of the set and ordering details. 2. Helen reserved the right in the poetry to use upper case for words and pronouns referring to Jesus, while in A Course in Miracles itself, these words are in lower case to highlight our fundamental equality with him.
3. Reaction formation occurs when we hold a belief or act in a way contrary to unacceptable unconscious impulses.
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