ACIM Notebook

by Hugh Prather
published in The Holy Encounter

“Love.” Even the sound seems almost sibilant, the lisp of a wave across fragile sands, the song of a breeze through a pipework of vines, the peaceful hiss of a lazy lizard. Yet love can be a stone carried in the heart to the end of life’s groaning. Or a quick shattering blow to the spine of hope.

Only those who know full well the jeopardy of opening their hearts can dismiss thunder in pursuit of a ray of sun. Only those who dissolve in love’s waters and rise with love’s rising, a single soundless swell, clear as sight, can know the I that is you and the you that is I.

No sacrifice is needed, for that is too little. No surrender is enough, because to give our self is still to have a self.

Love is recognized whole and preexistent, the music before the sound, the movement before the dance. We may fail to hear our friend, but our friend is still beside us. We may lose sight of our partner, but our partner was always there, the ghost of brilliance once known, yet long ago blocked from sight by our hood of self-preoccupation. For what is an ego but a membrane of insanity suffocating dust?

And what is false love but the belly of God turned inside out? Perversity pervades the blinding blackness, a nude resolve tapped on the shoulder while napping, which rises only to run rabid after visions of bodies that will make it whole. Never mind that children and loved ones are left in the backwash, like microbes in spit.
Now you are running backwards down a crowded sidewalk, friends and family passing in the ocean of others. They turn their heads to see who is moving away. When they see it is you, they call out and ask why you are doing it.

But even as they speak, your legs, possessed with steel-coil resolve, continue in retreat. Before their questions have even ended, you have escaped into the foaming mouth of beer ads, babybait, and cultural approval.

Somehow, in the passing of years, you lost your reason. And your frosted faith was too feeble to persuade you that your home was blowing in the black ribbon of night.

But what is a person to do? You take a little whisky, you get a little frisky. Even lice have feelings.

What happened to us all that love was reduced to an emotion? How did an entire species lose its way? Yet a mistake––no matter how base, no matter how widespread––calls only for correction.

Love is what happens when the mind attempts no shift or computation, none at all. Love should be as effortless as breathing and as indiscriminate as falling snow. Love is a gesture of vision that lightens the burden of all souls equally, yet begrudges not symbols of loyalty.

No one is whole who fails to understand loyalty. To withhold forms of friendship in the name of equality is to have no friends.

A gentle parent is fiercely committed and understands that children don’t feel loved by parents who treat them as any other child. Symbols are not the language of logic, and oneness can’t be reasoned out. The dove feels individually and uniquely warmed by the morning sun. Within the Divine, a child of God is God’s only child.
Yet using love to hold onto our “own” reflects a misunderstanding of its nature. No part of love can be privately kept. Skewering a butterfly ends flight. Slice the moon and the coyote feels no song. “You owe me nothing” is the spiritual corollary of “You mean more to me than life itself.”

A lamb born with no wool, love is from our Mother, who merely seeks her child. Having found it, she enfolds its history into a breathless pause. She blesses its thoughts and soulful senses until we acknowledge this self as our own, honored in our own memory, watched over in our sleep. And in return she asks only that we see as we are seen.

Care for the little ones if you would know God. See them star bright, born tomorrow as well as today, hurdling through the eternal, still enameled with peace.
Love can only accompany what is given away, and since all of love must be given in order for all of it to remain, there can be no range to our giving. There is only one kind of love—the uncalculated kind.