October 18, 2016
Our lives in this world of form are full of relationships. There are many, all at one time, and many that come one after another. One thing we can say about most relationships is that they often let us down. We usually enter into relationships because we think we can get something from them or we feel obliged to give or pay something in return. If we are honest with ourselves, they are all about seeking and getting love outside ourselves that we think we don’t have. The Course tells us this about relationships.
Beyond the poor attraction of the special love relationship, and always obscured by it, is the powerful attraction of the Creator for Us. There is no other love that can satisfy us, because there is no other love. This is the only love that is fully given and fully returned. Being complete, it asks nothing. Being wholly pure, everyone joined in it has everything. This is not the basis for any relationship in which the ego enters. For every relationship on which the ego embarks is special. T-15.VII.1:1-7
We always seem to have some sort of attachments in our relationships. This one will complete me. This one will give me something I lack. This one will release me from something or some obligation. Yet each of these ideas about our relationships actually limits us by making us a slave to them. We are seeking love in our relationships, yet we find ourselves captive to them. Are any of our relationships really free of any obligations or conditions? Are obligations and conditions the love we seek in our relationships?
Guilt is the tool our egoic thought system uses to maintain the “specialness” of relationships in our minds. The Course has said before that the ego attempts to maintain and increase guilt, but in such a way that we do not recognize what it would do to us. For it is the ego’s fundamental doctrine that what we do to others we have escaped. What really happens is that what we do to others we do to ourselves. So when we limit others by making obligations and conditions on our relationships, we are limiting ourselves and making ourselves captive to our “special” relationships. Under these conditions, we certainly feel we have sacrificed for the love that we seek in our relationships. We have essentially bound ourselves with the chains of guilt to the obligations and conditions of our special relationships and thus have seemed to sacrifice our freedom.
It is this chain that binds the One Child of God to guilt, and it is this chain the Holy Spirit would remove from our holy mind. For the chain of savagery belongs not around the chosen host of God, who cannot make themselves host to the ego. In the name of our release, and in the Name of the One Who would release us, let us look more closely at the relationships the egoic thought system contrives, and let the Holy Spirit judge them truly. For it is certain that if we will look at them, we will offer them gladly to Spirit. What Spirit can make of them we do not know, but we will become willing to find out, if we are willing first to perceive what we have made of them. T-15.VII.5:1-5
We need not do this alone. We cannot do this alone. Once we are even a little willing to allow Spirit to guide us, our relationships will be transformed from limiting, conditional relationships to holy relationships where love is the freedom that looses all the chains we have limited them with. Take a moment and step out of the captivity we have made for ourselves in our relationships and allow those relationships to be healed and transformed. Eternal Love will be there at the core of each relationship, where it has always been, as we allow it to rise in our awareness. No more do we need sacrifice our freedom to dwell in the awareness of Eternal Love.
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