VI. The Holy Instant and the Laws of God, P 3
3 All separation vanishes as holiness is shared. For holiness is power, and by sharing it, it gains in strength. If you seek for satisfaction in gratifying your needs as you perceive them, you must believe that strength comes from another, and what you gain he loses. Someone must always lose if you perceive yourself as weak. Yet there is another interpretation of relationships that transcends the concept of loss of power completely.
Journal
I remember one time when I was a young woman and dating, I had an electrical problem at my house. I jokingly said that maybe I needed to trade my pipefitter boyfriend for an electrician boyfriend. But really, is this a joke? I’ve had three marriages in my life and in every single one of them, I was looking for something from these men that I thought I needed. I felt that I was weak in certain areas and needed something from someone I saw as strong.
I didn’t love myself very much and I wanted them to make me feel like I was loveable. I wanted them to make me feel valuable and special. I wanted security and stability in my life and I thought they could provide it. I wanted someone to keep me company and relieve my boredom, and someone to be there for me when I felt down, someone to take my side, to defend me.
You might wonder what is wrong with this attitude as it is very common, even considered normal. But as Jesus says in this paragraph, “If you seek for satisfaction in gratifying your needs as you perceive them, you must believe that strength comes from another, and what you gain he loses.” If the giving and taking are balanced, the relationship seems to work, but inevitably, the balance shifts back and forth, and someone begins to feel like they are coming out on the losing end and then there is a power struggle.
When relationships are looked at with complete honesty, they begin to look more like bargains than like love, and bargains can be broken when one party or the other feels they are giving too much and not receiving enough in return. If one believes that this neediness is love, then love seems like a pretty iffy proposition.
This is not the powerful unconditional love that Jesus talks about in A Course in Miracles. He is going to explain to us in this section that there is another way to have a relationship, one in which there is sharing rather than taking and holiness is shared and thus strengthened. How lovely to think of a relationship in which nothing is needed from the partner, and everything is shared freely, lovingly and gratefully with no thought of scarcity or loss.
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