VIII. The Only Real Relationship
1. The holy instant does not replace the need for learning, for the Holy Spirit must not leave you as your Teacher until the holy instant has extended far beyond time. For a teaching assignment such as His, He must use everything in this world for your release. He must side with every sign or token of your willingness to learn of Him what the truth must be. He is swift to utilize whatever you offer Him on behalf of this. His concern and care for you are limitless. In the face of your fear of forgiveness, which He perceives as clearly as He knows forgiveness is release, He will teach you to remember that forgiveness is not loss, but your salvation. And that in complete forgiveness, in which you recognize that there is nothing to forgive, you are absolved completely.
2. Hear Him gladly and learn of Him that you have need of no special relationships at all. You but seek in them what you have thrown away. And through them you will never learn the value of what you have cast aside, but still desire with all your heart. Let us join together in making the holy instant all that there is, by desiring that it be all that there is. God’s Son has such great need of your willingness to strive for this that you cannot conceive of need so great. Behold the only need that God and His Son share and will to meet together. You are not alone in this. The will of your creations calls to you, to share your will with them. Turn, then, in peace from guilt to God and them.
3. Relate only with what will never leave you, and what you can never leave. The loneliness of God’s Son is the loneliness of his Father. Refuse not the awareness of your completion and seek not to restore it to yourself. Fear not to give redemption over to your Redeemer’s Love. He will not fail you, for He comes from One Who cannot fail. Accept your sense of failure as nothing more than a mistake in who you are. For the holy host of God is beyond failure, and nothing that He wills can be denied. You are forever in a relationship so holy that it calls to everyone to escape from loneliness and join you in your love. And where you are must everyone seek and find you there.
4. Think but an instant on this: God gave the Sonship to you, to ensure your perfect creation. This was His gift, for as He withheld Himself not from you, He withheld not His creation. Nothing that ever was created but is yours. Your relationships are with the universe. And this universe, being of God, is far beyond the petty sum of all the separate bodies you perceive. For all its parts are joined in God through Christ, where they become like to their Father. Christ knows of no separation from His Father, Who is His one relationship, in which He gives as His Father gives to Him.
5. The Holy Spirit is God’s attempt to free you of what He does not understand. And because of the Source of the attempt, it will succeed. The Holy Spirit asks you to respond as God does, for He would teach you what you do not understand. God would respond to every need, whatever form it takes. And so He keeps this channel open to receive His communication to you, and yours to Him. God does not understand your problem in communication, for He does not share it with you. It is only you who believe that it is understandable. The Holy Spirit knows that it is not understandable, and yet He understands it because you made it.
6. In the Holy Spirit alone lies the awareness of what God cannot know, and what you do not understand. It is His holy function to accept them both, and by removing every element of disagreement, to join them into one. He will do this because it is His function. Leave, then, what seems to you to be impossible, to Him who knows it must be possible because it is the will of God. And let Him Whose teaching is only of God teach you the only meaning of relationships. For God created the only relationship that has meaning, and that is His relationship with you.[1]
The only real relationship is the relationship we have with God. When we have a relationship with God we have a relationship with love for all there is. We have a relationship with the universe. We are no longer trapped by the petty likes and dislikes of the flesh; we know ourselves as God knows us – joined with Christ in Sonship – as one with all of Creation.
What does this look like in our daily lives? As humans how can we imagine let alone experience the concepts that Jesus is teaching us? As we practice the holy instant we practice our divine nature in God. We go beyond what separates me from you and you from me. We practice our holiness for God is holy and we belong to Him and with Him.
We get over our fear of forgiveness. We get over our fear of forgiveness when we realize there is nothing to forgive – I have nothing to forgive in you and you have nothing to forgive in me. We are mutually human; we are mutually divine – we cannot be both and we cannot choose alone. As I choose God, you choose God; as you choose God, I choose God. It may seem like a personal, individual decision but in Sonship we are one. We are more than the sum of our separate bodies. We separated together and we join together – as one.
This is truth or it is not truth. There should be no argument. To argue and to get angry signifies specialness. We are not expected to “believe in” that which we have no way of understanding, proving, or testing. And yet our hearts and minds remember – we have one relationship, and our relationship is with God – in our relationship with God lies our relationship with one another. When we remember God as Love, we can say that our one relationship is with Love and in Love lies all our relationships. We can give up our search for love in one particular person, in our families and friends, in our love for our country or our culture or those who look like us and act like us. We can give up our pet theories; we can give up our religious doctrines; we can give up A Course in Miracles for that matter – for when we devote ourselves to God, we leave what seems impossible for us to understand to Holy Spirit who teaches us all things and brings all things to our remembrance.
We do not call to God to come to our humanity and make it better for us; we call to God to redeem us from the flesh and awaken us to His Kingdom. We do not call to Love to destroy our enemies; we call to Love to heal us and deliver us from the hostility that turns us against each other. There can be no real relationship in separateness for separateness can only offer us specialness in place of God. In devotion to a part and not the whole, we weaken and sicken, plunder and kill. We escape this chain of savagery – the wars that are fought in specialness, the favoritism that pits us against each other, the fawning, flattery, and sacrifice that specialness calls forth – simply by putting specialness aside and accepting the only real relationship that ever was, that is, and ever will be.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 15 The holy instant. VIII The only real relationship. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
For daily 2021 Workbook lessons visit www.i-choose-love.com courtesy of Linda R.
Audio credit: www.eckiefriar.com
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