Highlights from the Sacred Journey of Love Webinar

Yesterday kironJ Gardner of the UK Miracle Network and I hosted a webinar on the topic of love in A Course in Miracles and I’d like to share a couple clips from that event.

In the first clip, I offer one of my biggest personal lessons around being a good holy relationship partner. Oftentimes where these relationships derail is when each person is not only bringing their own agenda and desire for control, but they are also bringing their own expectations for the role they want the other person to fill.

No surprise, then, that what we hope will become a true holy relationship – where we harmoniously join with another person in a common goal that transcends the ego – usually devolves into specialness, dysfunction, and eventual separation.

How can we do things better in our partnerships?

For starters, we can try being better partners ourselves.

• We can stop placing demands on other people and withdrawing our love when they don’t oblige.
• We can stop attempting to control others with our caretaking, i.e. caring for someone else in order to take their love in return.
• We can stop forcing others to bear witness to our suffering as a way to guilt them into displaying the compassion we seek and prevent them from leaving.
• We can stop projecting the people from our past onto people in our present, making them responsible for fulfilling our own unmet desires.

This is obviously an ugly list of behaviors but, if we’re honest, I’ll bet we see shades of ourselves in all of them. Moreover, and sadly, these are typically the behaviors we most often display with those we “love.”

Of course, these actions are hardly loving, which is where the second clip comes in.

Here kironJ explains a few of the “conditions of love” as the Course describes them, e.g.

• Love never alters with a person or a circumstance.
• Love has no exceptions so the journey is to include everyone in our loving attitude.
• Love is impartial in its giving.
• Love holds no grievances.
• Love doesn’t judge.
• Love would have us lay down all defenses as merely foolish.

Can we love like this? Yes, we can and – for the sake of our own salvation and our function as miracle workers in the world – it’s clear that we must.