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July - September, 2009

A Story About Love

by Barret Hedeen

There was once a boy named Barret. Barret was a happy boy, at least that’s how he remembers himself. The times of sadness, envy bitterness and unfulfilled plans had receded into the dim recesses of time, easily outshone by memories of happiness that were not the only thing he experienced. His illusory past of ‘only happiness’ served well his desire to feel diminished by the circumstances in his life currently. How could now not feel less than ideal when an imaginary idyllic childhood stays in the background, overshadowing the ideas he had about his life? When Barret allowed himself to see how he used his past as a shield against experiencing the happiness under the fear, the importance that he had given it became less pressing.

As this pressure falls away, love is revealed in its unchanging perfection. How could this be? Wasn’t love the thing he had with his mother? He always said, “I love you,” and she always said it back to him — he had thought that that for sure was it. Yet he didn’t feel that way with everyone. He had left many out. This new awareness, this joining, was not limited to just one. It excluded no one, for it recognized this allness lies in us all, and would be incomplete without just one of us.

I promised you a story about love, and it seems to me that it is just beginning to be told — a story of how we each have taken something all-encompassing, unending, limitless, and pretended that we could attach it to a particular thing which may be a situation, a memory, a finite something, thinking that it would somehow have the same meaning for us. But only wholeness can be whole, in spite of our pointless attempts to celebrate things other than that.

Of the many different experiences and things that have been dubbed ‘love,’ there is almost always some sort of limit or noninclusiveness in their description. Sometimes the term ‘unconditional love’ is discussed as well, but generally in terms of experiencing it with a specific person and not everyone. How could this really be unconditional? Applying it to one person only strikes me as a big condition!

How could love be anything other than whole, if separation is an inherent part of loneliness, withdrawal and lack? A loving Creator would not consider any of these to be a part of love. And we are indeed blessed with a loving Creator. Only the ego’s idea of love, which is dubbed ‘special love’ in the Course, could attempt to join such opposing ideas and keep a straight face.

As Jesus counsels us in the Course, “Try to believe, however briefly, that nothing can harm you in any way.” These words sound nice, but we generally aren’t willing to consider that nothing can really harm us. It doesn’t make sense in our world, since we have adopted a perspective of fragility, mortality and susceptibility to our inner demons seemingly displayed outside of us. There are things outside of us that want to hurt us, or so we think, yet this illusion plays right into the ego’s special love.

We can begin to look at the characteristics of what we call love to see what we hold true. Is it given in peace or is it mixed with fear? “There is no fear in love for love is guiltless.” (T-13.X.10:4) Is there a certainty of your innocence in it? For “Love holds no grievances.” (W-pI.68)

This, then, is our task — to be willing to bring our concepts of love to the light of Jesus’s gentle vision. There need be no worry or concern about this process, for “Nothing real can be threatened.” Any false concepts about love will merely slip from our separated mind and be no more, since they weren’t really there to begin with. And all that is true about our experience of love cannot leave us in truth and will shine ever more brightly without our mistaken ideas about it blocking its free extension.

So, to return to our story, what’s going to happen with Barret? Does everything work out for him? Will he come to remember the love he truly is? These are good questions, and the answers to them may not have happened yet, but I can tell you for sure the answer to the last one is unequivocally ‘Yes!’ 
Here’s to you (and to me) remembering our Divinity!

© 2009, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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