May 9, 2017
This section of the Course has always spoken deeply to me. Even from my first reading and study to now, it continues to speak to me and teach a valuable lesson. Relationships are important in our journey back to the awareness of who we are. Relationships are the vehicles for the lessons in love we must remember to heal ourselves and the world. The purpose of relationships is the extension and sharing of pure unconditional love. If we don’t feel this love in our relationships, then their purpose is to teach and learn love as guided by Spirit. That is, to heal our relationships with the guidance of Spirit from separation to union in love.
Our relationships are our creations. And they will reflect whatever we think of them and what we are using them for. The purpose of our Creator’s relationship with us, our Creator’s creation, is happiness and nothing else. Likewise, the purpose of our relationship with our creations is to extend happiness, as our Creator did with us, and nothing else. Whatever does not fulfil this function is not and cannot be real. In this world, we tend to make our relationships “special”, meaning we have given them a purpose other than happiness and love. Every special relationship we have made is a substitute for our Creator’s Will, and glorifies our purpose instead of our Creator’s because of the illusion that they are different. Believing our own purpose, we deny our Creator’s purpose because they are in conflict with each other. Look at the purpose you have given to your relationships in this world. Is their purpose pure and unconditional love? If so they will be happy relationships. If not, and we allow, Spirit would not deprive us of our special relationships, but would transform them. And all that is meant by that is that Spirit will restore to them the function given them by our Creator.
The “special” relationships we seem to enter in this world have the purpose we have given them through our belief in our egoic thought system. Whatever thought system we believe, we will defend no matter how much pain and guilt it brings us. Every defense operates by giving gifts, and the gift is always a miniature of the thought system the defense protects, set in a golden frame. The frame is very elaborate, all set with jewels, and deeply carved and polished. Its purpose is to be of value in itself, and to divert your attention from what it encloses. But the frame without the picture, you cannot have. Defenses operate to make you think you can. The Course tells us this of what we think we see:
The special relationship has the most imposing and deceptive frame of all the defenses the ego uses. Its thought system is offered here, surrounded by a frame so heavy and so elaborate that the picture is almost obliterated by its imposing structure. Into the frame are woven all sorts of fanciful and fragmented illusions of love, set with dreams of sacrifice and self-aggrandizement, and interlaced with gilded threads of self-destruction. The glitter of blood shines like rubies, and the tears are faceted like diamonds and gleam in the dim light in which the offering is made. T-17.IV.8:1-4
We are so focused on the fanciful frame that we miss the picture contained in the frame. The picture is of our holy and healed relationship, the reflection of our real relationship with the Creator whose only purpose is happiness. The essence of our relationship is happiness, love and peace. When we align our thoughts with the egoic thought system, it bids us focus on the glittery gaudy frame that has no substance or any element of the holiness contained in the picture itself. Look beyond the appearance of the fanciful frame of the “special” relationship to the holiness of the relationship beyond. We need not accomplish this from our egoic thought system, but allow Spirit to guide our thoughts beyond the frame to the content of the picture within. Once we allow ourselves to see the holiness, happiness and love contained in the picture within, the frame will fade to nothingness and no longer distract us. This is how to discover the happiness and love in each relationship in which we find ourselves, no matter what it looks like on the surface
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