Mari’s Blog
Holding the mystery
This is a time of knowing who you are and who I Am while at the same time, holding, or carrying, the mystery within you. That mystery is the tension of opposites. It is time and eternity. Love and hate. Good and evil. In other words, All and Nothing. It is the tension of individuation, a tension that has existed since the beginning of time, between time and eternity, between the attributeless love and the attribute laden being. Between the one being of love and the many beings of form, between love’s extension and form’s projection. (The Dialogues, Day39.38)
This course was written for the mind—but only to move the mind to appeal to the heart. To move it to listen. To move it to accept confusion. To move it to cease its resistance to mystery, its quest for answers, and to shift its focus to the truth and away from what can be learned only by the mind. I.1
Sunday morning. The cabin. Over the fence, the sunrise produces a bold Japanese style painting. Blue mountains, both rolling and steep, neon pink above, one strand of cloud held within the neon pink, as blue as the mountains.
Honestly, it is as if that mountainous far horizon is real. Henry (my grandson) once called the horizon – “the lake.” We would sit on the cabin stoop and he would talk about the lake over there on the other side of the freeway fence. It was not sunrise or sunset when he said this. The sky was vast and blue. I did not deny him his “lake.” Maybe the borderlands of sunrise and sunset are like that, and represent, as humans do, the truth of our state of being here. Sort of in between. Always coming and going.
The sky lightens. The mountains are gone. The glow remains.
A friend wrote me the other day, saying “The Course seems to have become your life.” He 
asked, “Is that so?” He said that when he met me, only a few years ago, it didn’t seem to be. I wondered. Is this so? Have I crossed another borderland of acceptance? One that says that I am not only giving my full attention to living in this dynamic and creative way that has been revealed, but that I’m willing to have it be my life, to be a voice for it? Had I been hanging out with the creative tension of that question, as I hung out with the sun’s dramatic rising? Was it coming on for a day? Or for the last 17 years?
The question sat. Then . . . I found definitions yesterday. Definitions within A Course of Love about the words used within it. So many times I’d try to find them and they’d refuse to be found. All was amorphous, like a sort of teasing or a gentle asking: How do you feel about this? What meaning does this have to you? How does this idea meet you where you are right now? The requirement: to let an idea pass through you, and not know what it was about for as long as it might take for knowing to come. The certainty that you couldn’t look up the answer. It didn’t exist apart from you.
Still, momentarily excited, I took note of these definitions. Finally! I thought. Then, by evening, without thinking about it at all, I had begun, I now see, to question. Somewhere I knew not, those definitions were at work in me, turning from answers to questions. This morning, as the sun rose, I begin to feel the tension.
C:19.15 Philosophy applies thought to mystery and that is why philosophy becomes such a muddle of words. It is difficult for you to accept that what you most need to know cannot be achieved through the same methods you have used in order to know about other things.
We don’t see the definitions until we see them. Perhaps until we’re meant to see them. Perhaps until we don’t need them anymore. There’s a reason these definitions I found (and I won’t say where) come near the end of The Dialogues. There—they confirm rather than tell. There, they contribute—when we even see them—to what we have already discovered. Can we trust that we don’t need the definition in advance of knowing?
I may be joined with this Course so that it is not defined. As long as I live, and perhaps beyond the years of my life, I can hold the mystery, and respect each one’s right to hear this Course directly, in their way, in the uniqueness of their own joining with its giver; with the joining of the giver with their own life.
Yet the matter is broader than definitions. It runs all the way through the Course in our change of mind about who we are. With the change to our way of knowing. And it is particularly relevant to the notion of the ideal self, so thoroughly discussed in The Dialogues, and often amongst ourselves, where the quest for the ideal comes couched in many guises. It is wonderful to be able to be a voice that can suggest that we are each the mystery that is spoken of. Each of us are called to embrace the mystery of ourselves and to embrace the mystery of our relationship with our Creator, and the givens of our creation. There is no need to compare, to give undo attention to the attitude of those who suggest that the answer is known, that there is a right way to be, a better way to be, an accomplished way to be. No one else has my life to live . . . or yours.
Can we look at one another and see the marvel in whatever creative tension we are carrying at the moment? Can we see that our turmoil is no less than another’s peace? Our peace no more than another’s tender vulnerability? Can we trust that each one is where they’re meant to be and that there is no ideal other than being one’s own Self and embracing the tension and the mystery and even the dark mystery, that allows one’s own Self to be revealed?
This is the beginning of individuation in union and relationship. This is the beginning of wholeness. What you strive for here is revelation. For only through revelation can you know all and still hold the mystery. D:Day39.5
The great change of which I am a part
This time of concentration on the self is unheralded in history. It is what has been needed. Be grateful to all of the forerunners of the new who have been courageous enough to call you to examine yourself. Be grateful to yourself that you have had the courage to listen and to learn and to study what these forerunners of the new, these prophets of the new have called you to learn. Be appreciative of every tool that has advanced your progress. But now be willing to leave them behind. T4:9.7
It is the first perfect morning of the summer. The first morning when I am totally comfortable in my thin, cotton, three-quarter-sleeved top. My first morning without socks. The first morning when the cabin is not just a little too hot or cold.
When I head back inside, I have the feeling of wandering. Drifting from one thing to the next. I pick up my word puzzle, the one called “Wonderworld” in my daily paper, the one where you find and circle the letters of words. This morning’s puzzle is on sleep patterns. I start with “tern” and find “patterns.” My pen glides smoothly, making circles on the absorbent newsprint. “Ages” becomes “stages.”
A year or so ago, I switched from crossword puzzles to these. I like forming the circles. I like
forming the words. I like it that I don’t have to think, as I did with crossword puzzles. I am mindlessly tinkering with words and letters. Mindlessly occupied. This morning I see it as a metaphor.
There is no sense of getting better at my Wonderworld puzzle, as there had been with the crossword puzzle, which I started out struggling with and felt pride in as I improved. Donny did the New York Times crossword and I did the “other” one, the easier one. We sat quietly at the kitchen table with our own sections of the newspaper. Mine was on the page with garage sales and job postings. His next door to the comics. Sometimes I’d ask him about a word. He’d say, “How many letters?” Each time he’d come across a question about an author or literature, he’d ask me. It was one of my favorite parts of the day, gained after years of getting kids out the door. A “married couple time” of finding that unique combination of being together and yet not occupied by each other or the concerns of a home. A time of sitting contentedly…yet exercising our brains.
Now I shape circles, quietly, carefully, with my black medium-point pen that glides. I remember my mom saying that in the early days of being taught penmanship, the teachers would have the children make circles upon circles across a page, getting their hands ready to move the pen in the motion of cursive; a skill no longer taught. Pride in penmanship is becoming a thing of the past. It is not useful or necessary.
As I construct my words from their letters, all this runs through my mind without coming in words until I am back to the cabin and realize the words are there. I sit down again, once again following a thread that appears unrelated to anything at all. Ideas, musings, they seem to come as “directions.” I am being moved in this way. I am following, not leading. I am in a certain flow that is going somewhere even if it appears not to be. I am left to connect the dots as I connect the letters into words. I am combining, seeing newly, watching words becoming what they are.
Feeling dazed by change for a while, I have thought it was about this or that. The feel of change was accentuated by Ivor’s death, which seemed to come as change on top of change—taking change from the specific and personal to the profound and the universal. Change that is a direction but not a map. Change that is turning from head power to heart power. Change that is turning from separation to union. Change that is about acceptance. Change that is picking up speed. A quiet revolution. And change that is, just possibly, a movement to being able to be at peace within change. To being change. Change that includes accepting what I don’t want to change too. To accept those things about myself that won’t change—because I like them. To realize I like my serious, contemplative side; that I like taking “short” walks, that I like my coffee “hot” no matter that it means continuously reheating it. That I like the mindless word puzzle over the one that requires the use of my brain.
Accepting, too, the fervor that comes of imagining that I can have something to do with changing the world. Jesus changed the world. I do not forget that his Courses are also alive in people around the world and that they are changing the world. In Day 2 of The Dialogues Jesus says, “You have let go the ego, re-viewed your life, unlearned previous patterns, and now see the difference between the image you hold of yourself and your present Self.” But then he goes on to say, and I love this, that we have not as yet developed the capacity to accept this fully.
This capacity is what I suddenly have come to see has been developing through change. Like putting letters together into words, this dawning idea has filled out a picture. The new capacity arises in sudden bursts. It arises and spills out. There is hopefulness. It is a “great arising” as it comes into expression, full of passion and pathos. Part of it is a desire to see the world’s needs met. What I want for myself, I want for the world. I want to live in harmony and abundance and simplicity. To live quietly, without the shrill noise of discontent, conflict, injustice. Yes, I want to change my world and the world.
I’ve wanted to change the world ever since I began to feel its pain and mine as if they were one. I was maybe 14 or 15 years old. The years of Vietnam and Nixon. The time when the middle class bred hippies went to college and dropped out of the world of their parents’ lives. When the circumstances combined into an arising that couldn’t help but reach out and announce newness. It was change so quick and vast that life felt totally different in 1970 than in 1965. It was a change that called for . . . change. How could anyone remain the same?
These months of tussling with change have had a purpose. Of that I am certain. I am developing the capacity, slowly, painstakingly, for the great change of which I am a part.
I was least accepted as prophet and savior by those who were most like me, those who watched me grow, worked alongside my parents, and lived in the same town. This was because they knew I was not different from them, and they could not accept that they were the same as me. They were then, and you are now, no different than I. We are all the same because we are not separate. God created the universe as an interrelated whole. That the universe is an interrelated whole is no longer disputed even by science. What you have made to hide your reality has been, with the help of the Holy Spirit, being turned into that which will help you learn what your reality really is. Yet you still refuse to listen and to learn. You still prefer things to be other than what they are and, through your preference, choose to keep it so.
Make a new choice! The choice that your heart yearns to make for you and that your mind is finding increasingly difficult to deny. When you choose unity over separation, you choose reality over illusion. You end opposition by choosing harmony. You end conflict by choosing peace. C:6.4-5
A life, a death, a prophetic call
There has been a death. A death that has taken a much beloved man from this earth and the ACOL community. Ivor Sowton was a significant part of the supportive community that exists for A Course of Love, ACOL’s publisher, Glenn Hovemann, and Take Heart Publications.
I am so low down on the list of those who knew and loved Ivor that to speak of him feels presumptuous. Yet one thing I know is that he was devoted to A Course of Love and truly cared about me. This was known . . . yet a surprise. It is honoring . . . and humbling. It makes me cry and it makes me square my shoulders and want to do right by him. Ivor Sowton’s death leaves 
me with feelings that are about him and about all of us. Feelings that are about wanting to stay with the heart of things—the human heart in its sorrow and love, and feelings that reach beyond the human to the heart of everything—the divine heart in which we abide and that abides in us.
Since hearing of his death I have done the usual things: speaking to others who knew him, praying, feeling the grief, writing notes, staring into space. But I also had a peculiar urge. I felt drawn to a book called “The Prophetic Imagination,” by Walter Bruggemann. The last time I picked it up, back in 2011, I was drawn by the combination of the prophesized end of the Mayan calendar in 2012 and the occurrence of the Occupy movement, then probably at its height. The draw made perfect sense. This time, I wondered why? Why at this time? This time of Ivor’s death?
But before too long I sensed the connection, and it is personal at the same time that it is universal: Ivor’s quest was to understand the condition in which he found himself. This was how I felt as I was first drawn to the prophets—at the time when ACOL was newly completed. “This is what we do,” I thought. “When we are drawn to our highest glory, the quest to understand the current condition of our own selves becomes acute.” And this is so much a part of A Course of Love! To see ourselves where we are! Yet I know I turned to the prophets “after” ACOL because I felt so bad that I was still … me … and still suffering. I wanted to know why, and there was no answer. So my encounter was fully of that quest to understand my condition. A Course of Love had come through me! Why wasn’t I joyous, healed, and whole?
It was a painful quest. I was struggling. The answer came to me in
this way. I read in “The Prophets,” by Abraham Heschel, that the prophet’s heart and soul were at stake in what was said and what became of what was said. What I read, so many years ago, after having bought the old, used book from a shop that still held old books, in the small town called Stillwater, landed inside of me in that old-fashioned phrasing: you feel the way you do because your heart and soul are at stake. No one talks of anything being at stake anymore. Not our freedoms, hardly even our Earth. It is hard to feel something this extreme—that something valuable beyond compare is at stake. But this is the prophetic tradition. The tradition itself. What it does. And this is repeated in Jesus’ words within this Course. We are now to leave to ego and the separation behind. This is it. It is time.
The urge driving us is at its strongest, I suspect (I know it was in me), as there begins to be an awakening to the idea that there is a genuine alternative to the despair of separation. When I began to feel that—as an actual happening within myself, I began to realize what I hadn’t known: that something truly new was possible. This was when the stakes felt highest. Like a do or die proposition. Feeling separate was no longer an acceptable or livable condition.
In returning to the prophets, I also returned to the idea that prophecy is meant for a particular people in a particular time, and I’ve come to see Ivor himself as a prophet for our times. In taking his own life, he became a herald calling us to see what is at stake: our very selves. These strong words suggest, of course, a paradox. We cannot lose the eternal. Yet prophecy speaks to the eternal in time; to where we live and the condition in which we exist here and now. Ivor’s death calls me to be more clear that an alternative to separation can be found, and to support with the greatest of love, all those who have, like I have, as Ivor has, confronted the despair of separation on their way to liberation and union. I suspect that each of us feel this way at some point in our journey.
Beyond this intensely personal realization is another that I have trusted is also at the heart of A Course of Love. The main feature of the prophetic tradition is that it says things can be different. “What the prophetic tradition knows is that it could be different, and the difference can be enacted.”
The message in prophetic works and persons may be timeless, but the timing of the entrance of that message into the world is also and always significant. It’s a way of God’s voice speaking to us and calling for a response, and us speaking to God, and also calling for a response. After a death, we want to ask God, Why? We sit, absorbed in our not knowing, our lack of understanding, our grief, a felt incapacity to get answers and often even to form questions. Yet we also become aware that God is listening. We become aware that our hearts are heard.
In The Prophetic Imagination I am reminded that prophets, although they’re often seen as lonely voices crying out in the wilderness, are actually representative voices of the people, giving expression to what the people need. A Course of Love entered the world two months after 911. 
After those deaths affected people around the world. These messages entered a time in which, on the whole, people had gotten away from their hearts and didn’t even know they wanted to return. Ivor’s death has occurred as A Course of Love is reaching more and more people, as I daily read expressions from people who state with passion that this is just what they needed, what they’d been waiting for. I hear, in their amazement at this discovery, the same wonder I heard in Ivor’s voice. We are all desperate to leave our separated state behind, permanently and forever.
Ivor has made this need palpable among us.
Walter Brueggemann claims that the capacity to grieve is the most visceral announcement that things are not right and that grief invites us not to pretend that they are. He says that “bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling that permits a new reality . . . to emerge.” Jesus assures us, in A Course of Love, that we must continue to feel what we feel as we leave the old behind and move into the new.
Ivor has reminded us what is at stake. He has reminded me that A Course of Love can help us to hold it all—the hurt and the promise—as we travel to the time of fulfillment in us. As we do this, we create the new. And as we do this, we will honor Ivor’s quest to know himself in the splendor that he didn’t know we saw in him already, in the union that so many of us felt with him . . . already. He will continue to call us, I am certain of it, to find union in our lives.
Manifesting God
My eldest daughter is married. I’ve inherited a new grandson, a son-in-law, and a whole slew of
“in-law” relations. I learned there is now such a thing as “gel” nail polish and polished my nails for the wedding—the first time in about twenty years. It was beginning to wear off when I drove to the North Shore mid-week to “get away” and enjoy Lake Superior. I took the polish off yesterday before spending the evening on my son’s deck with a sizeable group of family members, with music, food, and fireworks. June, the “wedding” month of 2015 is behind me and even July 4th. A two month period with no holidays is beginning. Ah…. I feel like I can settle down again.
There’s been so much “happening” that maybe it’s not surprising that the idea of “knowing” as a “happening” came to me. Here’s how it came—with me having the thought that “It is almost as though knowing “happens,” and then it gradually approaches my conscious awareness. It “happens” outside of the conscious arena…and then moves into it…with all its implications. With its need for manifestation.”
That single thought got me pondering manifestation. That word: “Manifestation.” It is there in the definition of a sacrament: the outward manifestation of an inner reality. There in the words Fr. Adrian spoke at the wedding: a marriage is a manifestation of the love of God. Do any of us feel that we’re manifesting the love of God, or an inner reality . . . as we’re doing it?
I thought of manifestation as I was out walking and hiking. Very aware of the squishy sound of 
my shoes sliding over wet rock; of the flutter of bird wings and calls; of the air on my bare arms, the smell of it and how it held the lake; the sound of the lake’s gentle gurgle and ocean-like roar. Aware of the outward reality, even as I was mulling, not in thought or words, but still mulling this transition into manifestation of a new reality. It is time to manifest a new reality. This is a sacrament too, and I can abide with that idea.
At the wedding, my cousin Joy got tears in her eyes. Her whole face screwed up as she said, “I can’t imagine my dad not being here.” Her dad, my Uncle Jack, is the last living member of my dad’s immediate family. I thought, “No one wants to face loss of love. The “manifested” love that we feel and see in each other.”
This new life I’ve been writing about and feeling approaching had its inception at some point that I did not realize and has been moving into manifestation ever since. That’s where I am! In the process of making this sacramental passage.
And you always have to close out the old first. You have to leave behind your single state with marriage. You have to leave behind your body with death. Or maybe it isn’t exactly like that. As the Quaker saying goes, Way Opens/Way Closes. The opening of the new comes before the end of the old leaves. That’s the way it is. The way it works. And I suppose it’s natural that there is the place where they meet, the door, more or less, half open and half closed at the same time, and you stand on one side of it one day – trying to keep the door open to the old, and stand on the other side another day—trying to push your way into the new, and only then, perhaps after much pushing and pulling, becoming actually . . . aware.
I was sitting on the couch out in the cabin a few days before my trip north, which I don’t normally do as I’m writing, and in a pause, I noticed a book on the shelf across from me. It looked like a book I had by Fr. Thomas Keating, but I didn’t think it would be, as all that is there, on that particular shelf, are the books I was reading and researching as I discovered feminism a few years ago. This was a thin book, and the pale, sea-green color of it was what made me think it was one of my Keating books. It’s an unusual color and the light was falling on it, illuminating it and the green, so pale as to almost be a non-color, was shimmering. I got up, went over to see what it was, still not expecting anything. Then I read, “Manifesting God.”
I open “Manifesting God” to a page with a corner turned down, where Keating is talking of the Kingdom not being limited but present and active in the ordinary, the profane, and everyday life. “To follow Christ into the Kingdom, we have to give up the myth of rising to some kind of serenity in which nothing can disturb us, or to a wisdom by means of which we can answer all questions and doubts. … The Kingdom is not a success story.”
He spoke of how we can see negativity…or the transformation that is occurring.
The chapter I opened to ends like this:
“When you do not know where you are going; when you have no proof that you are on the right road; when you are thoroughly confused; when everybody rejects you and speaks ill of you, rejoice! … Divine wisdom communicates God’s view of reality and opens our eyes ….”
I remember now the view from the old light house I visited in Two Harbors. The view from the window, and the view from the shore, and the view from the top of the hill. But I feel like it almost doesn’t matter. I got what I needed when the book called me over to find it, and to carry with me, the idea of it’s title.
Being called to the new
You are the ushers, the pioneers of the new.
The electricity isn’t working in the cabin this morning. I check the fuse box down in the basement, but nothing’s blown, and so without a sure quick fix, I figure I can run in and out for coffee and not investigate further…now. I can see, if barely, and that’s how I like it. I got out here at first light, in that pause in the day that plays tricks on my eyes. Everything is held in that pause. It’s like the morning/the day are one, and they’re enveloped in fog, but it’s not fog. It’s just the in between of darkness and light, morning’s murkiness, as if it has the same problem I do when I first open my eyes, the need to rub the sleep out, adjust to being awake.
My daughter Mia is getting married on Friday. It’s funny the things you think about at such a time. One of them has been weather. I’ve been watching the weather more closely than usual because of the wedding. Each weekend this month I’ve been thinking about brides. Each weekend has started out poorly. Yesterday was no exception. A deluge. Beautiful and sunny for the brides by mid-afternoon, but I imagine them waking with alarm, and not being overly fond of the steamy effect left by the rain. My hair, without a clip, was a white woman’s Afro.
I’ve been watching the peonies too, as these are the flowers Mia has always dreamt of having at her wedding. I’ve been keeping my eye on the timing of peonies for years and knew they’d be peaking about now. The kind of summer we’ve had though, they bloomed early and what are left have been weather-beaten. My sister-in-law is going to the farmer’s market later in the week to see if she can find any—or another flower that can stand-in, if not.
We talked of the make-up of families the other day, particularly aunts and uncles. Henry will have a new uncle. Uncle Steve (or Stove as he’s nicknamed). We were remarking that there was no difference for us, as children, between the “blood” uncle or aunt or the “married into the family” uncle or aunt, and that it lasted…that indiscriminate love.
There’s been a lot of focus on the church service, and my favorite priest, now retired, will be doing the ceremony. I was an adult before I heard this definition of a sacrament: A sacrament is an outward manifestation of an inner reality. I thought that was about the coolest thing I ever heard.
There are probably more details involved in the reception, and I told Henry that sacraments are real causes for celebration and that the last really, really big party we had was for his first sacrament—his baptism.
What I remember most fondly about my preparations for that is ironing the tablecloth, and how it felt so ceremonial. I had an intricate tablecloth from Italy that I’d never used, and I got it out for his big day. There was something meditative about the ironing. It was quiet and reminded me of my youth when my mom had to iron all those uniform shirts for us Catholic school kids. There is a sound and a smell to ironing. I decided then, as I ironed, that the tablecloth was going to be the “Baptismal” tablecloth, and that was it. I’d bring it out for each future baptism, and that alone.
But alas, when Jack was baptized his mom had her own ideas and was giving the party at her own house. I’m sure she would have said okay if I’d asked her to use it, but it was clearly her time to begin her own traditions. Now is another one. For her and for me.
I’m actually writing about this so that I can scrap the other blog I wrote this morning on transitions. I’m trying to get out of talking about change so much, or at least talking about change without talking about any specific change, which is a little on the shoddy side for a writer. For God’s sake if you’re going to talk about something so much, you’ve got to give it some substance, some particulars, some character, some depth. You can’t just talk about change. So here’s a particular change: a wedding. It’s a family wedding. I’m gaining a son-in-law. Mia is gaining a whole new family. A new church. A new name.
But I think the deal with some changes is that they’re sacramental in a less formal way. You’re making a new “inner” reality a new “outer” reality, and it’s going on every day, almost moment by moment.
The biggest moments of my life, the biggest changes, have come more from what I think of as spiritual rather than religious. They’ve come from those moments when everything is suddenly different. None of those moments were about one specific thing but about each specific and every non-specific thing at once. Most of the time I haven’t known “how” things are different, only that they are. And “they” are only different because “I” am.
After I got married, I remember the big “reality check” on difference as coming the first time I had to list my “next of kin” and it was no longer my mom or dad but my husband. That felt really weird. You celebrate sacraments in part for the same reason you collect documents that testify to your changed status: you need witnesses to your changed state. You share about change, even amorphous change, to witness to it and sometimes to call others to it…as Jesus calls us all…to the new.
In a way, the change is simply . . . change. The change is . . . becoming new.
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, this is the call you have heard for as long as you can remember, the call you have heard as often as you have grown still and listened. It is the one beautiful note, the tolling of the bell of the Lord, your invitation to return home. This call has always sounded. It is not a death knell but a call to life. It is not of the past or the future but of the eternal now. It is within you as we speak, the tone and timbre of this dialogue.
It calls to you and asks you to invest your life with the very purpose you have always desired. You are not purposeless now. Your life is not meaningless. You are the ushers, the pioneers of the new. Your work, as will be often repeated, is to accept the new, and deny or refuse to accept the old. Only in this way will the new triumph over the old. D3:2-3
