In 1944, C.G. Jung had a near-death experience and like many recipients of this experience found returning to the body challenging and was only ‘persuaded’ to do so by the sense that there was unfinished work for him to do. He experienced the subsequent return as a case of felt imprisonment. This sense that the everyday world we inhabit is seriously out of step with a deeper underlying and freeing reality is a common one. It is one of the key drivers of ‘religion’. We are not as we are meant to be. The world, as currently perceived, is, at best, awry, at worst, an imprisoning entrapment.
Is this simply a misplaced uncertainty? One that should be dispelled from our minds with a healthy, materialist reminder that this is the only world that there is, or could possibly be. Purposefully enjoy it until the end comes, and all is finished. Learn to love your transiency!
Yet, as Richard Smoley notes, in his recently published erudite, well-constructed and thoughtful book, "A Theology of Love: Re-imagining Christianity through A Course in Miracles: A Spirituality based on Love, Not Fear": why would we be subject to such a persistent (and culturally creative) desire if it did not point to a reality that might genuinely satisfy it (rather than simply label it as false). This desire, deepened by the experienced reality of other worlds, phenomenologically robust in their countless instances, as they are different in their interpretation, needs to find suitable framing so that it might be navigated purposively to a meaningful fulfillment.
The core perplexity for Smoley in mainstream Christianity is the doctrine of the atonement – simply put how salvation gets done – there are multiple versions of this, emergent in Christian history, but a highly influential one is the substitution or vicarious theory. Over boldly put, God, who is loving and all-wise because of humanity’s fall has developed a surfeit of wrath directed at humanity’s failure, nothing that humanity could do can assuage this wrath, so God sends His Son, as a sacrifice that will repay humanity’s debts, a repayment that must be paid in blood, His death on the Cross. This is clearly articulated within a context where animal sacrifice is a cultural reality yet carried over into a resultant culture where it is not. That I recognize that this debt has been paid and that I have faith in Jesus as the only sole necessary and sufficient payer is my entrance ticket that yields salvation. No other path is available.
Smoley finds this neither intellectually coherent nor emotionally satisfying for, at heart, it has its roots in fear – a wrathful deity, an obsequious son, necessary violence, and believers corralled by fear rather than by any ennobling, inclusive, loving invitation.
So, we need to create an alternative framing one that adequately describes and articulates the nature of our ‘throwness’ into this world; and, offers a more intellectually credible and emotionally fulfilling pathway to our redemption.
Smoley sets out to do just this in a closely argued text that draws on commonly held features of everyday life, patterns of religious experience; Biblical scholarship, philosophical argumentation; and, two key resources namely insights from the Kabbalah and the Course in Miracles.
In this latter case, the Kabbalah is primarily used to articulate why the reality we normally inhabit is as it is – a five-dimensional box of ten key components – spatial (front, back etc.), temporal and positional in relation to what we move towards (good) and away from (evil). But, that this reality, is one, the lowest one, of a nested hierarchy of realities that lead back to their divine source. That divine source can be solely good but this, everyday reality, must be an admixture – our five-dimensional box is a place of separation and that implies differentiation and admixture between good or bad contexts.
This reality is then mapped onto a similarly resonant, though not identical, scheme in The Course of Miracles; and, it is the Course that not only describes these layers of reality but provides a pathway of liberation from separation to a renewed unity.
In the Course, the Father and the Son are differentiated only in that the Son can entertain the possibility of separation from the Father. This momentary imagination gives rise to the Ego, that the Son chooses to believe in, the Ego gives rise to the world that we daily experience, including our bodies that ‘contain’ that experience. We live suspended in the Ego’s resilient fantasy of separation – a world of good and evil – that it, not God, has created. If one recognizes in this a contemporary expression of Gnosticism, you would be wholly right; and, what Smoley does, in a careful exploration of the underlying metaphysics of the Course, is make a resonant case for why we should take it seriously as both credible and attractive. He, also, notes in support of how Gnosticism has thoroughly penetrated contemporary culture whether it be in the novels of Philip K. Dick or in films like the Matrix. It is seriously in the air once more.
Credibility would require more space than I have available to fully demonstrate but suffice to say the book makes compelling connections between what any ordinary person might consider their experience to be, how ‘extraordinary’ experience can be mapped effectively in relation to this; and, how both the Kabbalah and the Course emerge as robust ‘tools for the head’ to help one think through this expansion in our perspective; how they help tease us out of the ‘box’. All offered not as a dogmatic system but as an experiment after knowing to try out and see. Ironically, the only touches of ‘dogma’ come at the sometimes too narrow, slightly grumpy characterizations of the mainstream Church whose blending of good and evil is probably more nuanced than is allowed here.
But, in the meantime, here are three thoughts on attractiveness.
First, because it is a picturing of reality that is ultimately inclusive – the illusion comes to an end – we are reunited within our commonly held, unifying reality, and nobody is excluded, let alone punished. Jesus, the man from Nazareth, in the Course’s view, is the first person to fully recognize the full nature of our situation and goes to his death not as a substitution for sin but as a demonstration that death too is simply an illusion. His death is exemplary, which requires no imitation because its reality is rooted in the fact of the Resurrection where we are enabled to ‘see through’ death.
Second, because the pathway to this Atonement (and one of the features of the Course is that it uses Christian language in uniquely innovative, and coherent within its own logic, ways) is through the continual practice of forgiveness, forgiveness not born out of either condescension or pity (or subtle manipulation) but from bringing to birth a continuing recognition of our underlying unity. Everyone I harm or who I am harmed by is fundamentally myself. Harm is a condition of separation, is only possible because we entertain this illusion of separation. True forgiveness is the continuing attention to our connectivity, our being enfolded one in another.
Third, because it is resolutely practical. The Course is primarily a workbook of 365 daily meditations and exercises (with supporting commentary and materials). Diligently followed, it is meant to work, to transform one’s life in a way that makes forgiveness and love possible. It is a practice that is both gentle and yet wholly tough-minded. As with forgiveness, so with love, many of the forms in which it appears to us in the realm of Ego are precisely that, exercises in Ego – what the course calls ‘special love’, as distinct from ‘holy love’ predominates – for when we examine our motives how many of them do we find to be self-driven, self-protective, self-interested? Mostly answers the Course robustly, maybe Smoley suggests, a little too dispiritingly so!
This perhaps leads to a consideration of what is less attractive about the Course – that like previous ‘Gnostic’ perspectives though the route may be open to all in theory, in practice, its demands a certain austerity. This may be as with the Course, a psychological one or, as on other occasions, ascetic or intellectual ones such that it becomes a path so daunting as to be for the few! Though, perhaps, this is offset in the Course’s case with a sense of the spaciousness of ‘time’ – since the only downside is the illusion that we already know, we will find the opportunity to apply ourselves to liberation in due course!
The book ends with chapters that consider what this perspective might mean for the practice of Christianity more broadly – what practices and perspectives may persist and which might be usefully put aside – and with a helpful ‘summa’ that recapitulates the Course’s theology or framing that can only be a helpful hermeneutical key to engaging with the text itself.
At the end of my first reading of the book, I did want to set it down, only partially tongue in cheek, with a satisfying hurrah of ‘Valentinus rides again’! Valentinus having been the most successful and purportedly eloquent of early Gnostic writers.
Whether you are convinced or not, it is one of those books that wholly deserves to be seriously wrestled with to assure yourself as to why or why not? It, also, deserves to prompt a more serious Christian theological reflection on the Course in Miracles itself (though on the likelihood of that, I expect I am as pessimistic as the author)!
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