VII. The Needless Sacrifice, P 1
1 Beyond the poor attraction of the special love relationship, and always obscured by it, is the powerful attraction of the Father for His Son. There is no other love that can satisfy you, 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.
Journal
The hardest thing for most people to accept is that we don’t know what love is. We think we do. We think we love our spouses and parents and children. And of course, there is love in those relationships, but it is not pure, unconditional love. It is not fully given and fully returned. It is not untainted by the special needs we think we have.
There is such a thing as love and that is the love we share with our Creator. It is powerful, pure and completely satisfying. Unfortunately, while here in time we can only take Jesus’ word on this. There is no memory of it. We deliberately blocked that memory so that we could have this experience.
We keep the memory of God’s love blocked now because if we remembered His love, we rush back into Him. Jesus says in the Course that we have become afraid to return to God, afraid of retribution. In the ego mind from which most of us make decisions, we defend and attack, and so we imagine that God does the same thing. Of course, Love cannot attack and has no need to defend, but we no longer understand love so here we are in this crazy cycle with no apparent way out.
Jesus overcame this confusion, found the way out of our self-imposed prison of ego thinking and makes that escape available to us. Because he did it, it was done for the entire mind. We are saved. Now we only need to accept that this is true. Like frightened children we hide from our salvation, mistaking it for danger. We pretend that we don’t need help and we can do it for ourselves.
So we form relationships in which we bargain for love. It makes me want to cry to think about it. I have done this so many times and every time it has failed and continues to fail over and over again. There is a light for me at the end of this long, long tunnel. I am learning the difference between love and need.
I am learning that I deserve love and am worthy of it. I am learning that I can actually love others, really love them as I let go of using them to get what I already have, that is, love. When I stop using my relationships to get, they become relationships of sharing what we both already have. Then they are closer to what love truly is, not exactly the same, but a clearer reflection of love.
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