The Special Relationship and the Inclusive Heart
by Tom Baker
Lesson: Chapter 16, The Forgiveness of Illusions, V. The Choice for Completion
Date: June 28, 2009
Love is a word of so much promise and, at the same time, so much disappointment. Love seems simple and we think should be easy. Yet lived out in human relationships love often becomes complicated, contradictory, confusing, argumentative, deceptive, and cruel. Love is regularly mixed with hate as in the "love/hate relationship." As a priest I often did marriage counseling for the very couples that only a year or so ago I had married. The transformation from the unmitigated bliss of engagement to the constant argument and criticism of marriage was appalling to me; and it was usually appalling for the couple. Many had gone from sharing a simple bouquet of flowers to navigating a complicated briar batch. Most of them said things like: "If this was the right person it should be easier than it is." In other words, "I married the wrong one." Although occasionally this appeared to be true, most of the time the matches seemed appropriate and had begun with enormous passion, commitment, tenderness and mutual understanding. Something else seemed to be going on and as the years passed and I began to study A Course In Miracles I became familiar with an ego dynamic which the Course calls special love: "The special love relationship is the ego’s most boasted gift, and one which has the most appeal to those unwilling to relinquish guilt…….No one considers it bizarre to love and hate together, and even those who believe that hate is sin merely feel guilty, but do not correct it."(Text, Chap. 16, V., p. 341).
As I read on about the special love relationship the difficulty human beings have with love began to make sense, even cosmic sense: "It is in the special relationship, born of the hidden wish for special love from God, that the ego’s hatred triumphs. For the special relationship is the renunciation of the Love of God, and the attempt to secure for the self the specialness that He denied. It is essential to the preservation of the ego that you believe this special is not hell, but Heaven. For the ego would never have you see that separation could only be loss, being the one condition in which Heaven could not be." (T. p. 341).
The way the special love relationship works is familiar to us. I trade the flawed, inadequate me for the nearly perfect, competent you and have a giddy feeling of being with someone with whom I can truly be myself. If you feel that way too then you have made the trade of the not so good you with the seemingly perfect me and the ego in us both declares ‘a union made in Heaven.’ (T. p. 342). We call this falling in love or infatuation and it lasts from several hours to several years but is gradually eroded by the suspicion that I have made a bad deal, that you are not so perfect after all and I want myself back. Often one special relationship is traded for another in the form of children, careers, hobbies, heroes, lovers, even spiritual practices but hopefully at some point the light goes on and I realize that the process isn’t working and that ego thinking is doing its old ‘Seek but do not find’ thing. Like an alcoholic hitting bottom this is a terrible but potentially healing moment of insight. The grim fact of human life remains that we often have to become miserable enough to face our long standing terror of Love. Love as it is: inclusive, whole, complete, and joyous and not in the service of my ego self project which is to rid myself of perceived guilt by shifting it onto someone or something else while using a God substitute to make me happy. The Holy Spirit meets me in my misery, the valley of the shadow of death, and offers me a way out. The Holy Spirit begins to teach me forgiveness in a form that I can use and finally understand. As a result my special relationships, which I will always form to protect me from my terror of Love, can be transformed into holy relationships where "an ancient hatred has become a present love." What this looks like is admiration, respect, and graditude for the special "fallen" people in my life and a sense that true happiness is mine already which I will experience as I rest more often in the peace of God. No sacrifice, no suffering, and no punishment needed.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2009