By Sue Pearson
The diamond wedding ring dazzled and defined me. Or so I thought. It was big – four carats –an extravagant display to show the world who I was. I was spoken for. I was wanted. I was desired. I was loved and even cherished. I was settled. I was happy. I was at peace. These were my thoughts as I accepted this 20th-anniversary gift from my husband. Upon reflection, none of these thoughts were true. The ring only designated to the world that I was married, and four years later, even that would not be true.
This marriage was troubled from the start. I had thought about leaving in the early days. I was often criticized about one thing or another, but I rationalized that perhaps if I just tried harder to meet his expectations, then things would get better. They never did. I developed a way to insulate myself once I knew that his harshness towards me was more a reflection of his flaws rather than mine.
The extravagant ring was a way for me to fool myself that perhaps he really did love me. And even if he didn’t, wearing the fancy jewelry would fool the rest of the world that I was special in someone’s eyes. I would live with the charade. And then one day, I couldn’t do it anymore. I discovered his many betrayals and a trail of lies I could no longer ignore. It had taken 24 years for me to face reality. His weren’t the only mistakes. I had agreed to live in this world of his design. That was on me.
Once I left that world, I was free to create something better for myself. I developed a deep love for the “me” I had buried for so long. I had no need to be special in someone else’s eyes. I was finally “enough” all by myself. I put the ring away. No more pretending for the rest of the world.
All this has been part of my spiritual deepening. I have realized we all want to be special. It’s part of the reason we are in this world. A Course in Miracles [ACIM] explains that after God created us, we longed for Him to love us individually, as more special than anyone else. “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.” [CE T-16.V.5:1-2]
God would love us only the same. Still, we thought we could be special. According to ACIM, this led to our separation from God and a dream realm we created. Here we had an illusion where we could twist and turn while our egos strove for that specialness we craved all the while forgetting who we are and always will be–children of God.
When I was a very young child, I practiced being a “good” girl to avoid my mother’s wrath. She was angry a lot of the time and took it out on my sister, who was boisterous and defiant. But if I were the quiet, compliant child, I could be special and loved.
Other times, it’s not our behavior but our adornments that show our need to be special. We seek idols of all kinds to prove how special we are. This is easy to spot in over-the-top “showiness.” This seemed obvious when a Homeland Security chief sported a fifty-thousand-dollar Rolex watch while posing in front of suffering souls in a notorious foreign prison. She certainly set herself apart. That is, after all, the aim of specialness.
Here’s what ACIM has to say about specialness: “And thus does specialness become a means and end at once. For specialness not only sets apart, but serves as grounds from which attack on those who seem “beneath” the special one is ‘natural’ and ‘just’” [CE T-24.I.6:3-4].
Specialness can also take the form of making idols of other human beings. When I was a news anchor on television, I was uncomfortable being regarded as special. But people treated me like a celebrity. I remember being in a store shopping for some ordinary things when a woman carrying a full bag of items she had just purchased, looked at me and shouted to other customers, “Look! There’s Sue Pearson from KCRA!” In her excitement, she dropped her bag, and everything tumbled out on the floor. I was so embarrassed, but I reached out to her, helping put her items back in the bag. She was so flustered that she couldn’t speak.
It seemed so odd to me that I would be regarded as some kind of idol. But then I had to confront this behavior in myself. One day in the newsroom, actor/comedian Bob Hope, a legend of my generation, came by for an interview with one of our reporters. When I was introduced to him, I could only gawk; I had no words. Now here was a real celebrity! But his warm smile and outstretched hand beckoned me to accept him as an ordinary acquaintance. I could not get past my awe.
But when my beloved father was dying, I transcended the notion of specialness with the help of my deceased mother. During an unexpected holy vision, I saw my mother, bathed in celestial light, reach out to help my father transition to heaven. I don’t know how or why I was able to be present, but I was transported into this vision we call a shared-death experience. During my lifetime, my mother had been an often-cruel alcoholic. My sister, brother, and I despised her. But now, in this holy light within the vision, I saw her as God sees all of us. She was perfect, forever innocent, and beautiful. At that moment, I experienced miraculous forgiveness, knowing her earthly transgressions meant nothing to me. She was simply spectacular! I knew then that God sees each and every one of us this way.
After this shared-death experience, a friend introduced me to A Course in Miracles, a three-volume book that reinforced and deepened my spiritual journey. The need to be special was becoming but a shadow of the past.
When my beloved mother-in-law was dying, she was overwhelmed with an outpouring of love from not only family but friends far and near and even people she didn’t know.
She turned to me as she lay in her bed. “Sue, does all this love and concern mean I’m special?”
I said, “No.”
“Wow, you really know how to take the wind from my sails!”
“Now, wait. What I mean is that you are not more special than anyone else in this world. All of us are equally special, and can we just revel in that truth without having to be better than or more special than the next person?”
During the exquisitely painful time my long marriage was coming apart, I asked God for help. I thought I might die from the depth of the emotional pain I was experiencing. God came into my awareness and communicated a thought that was far from my mind. Without words, but mind to mind, He said, “Sue, you are spectacular!” He wrapped my very being in a love that was beyond earthly description. In that celestial hug, I absorbed all that love and sent it back to God, grateful for this miraculous healing. Not for an instant did I think God thought I was more spectacular than anyone else. He wanted me to see who I really was and know that I had the strength to get through and past the pain. If He had said, “Oh poor Sue. You poor, poor, pitiful human. I see your pain.” That would only have kept me wallowing in my distress. The healing came from His love and confirmation of my strength. Now I know we are all spectacular, even if it’s hidden behind fear and sometimes misdeeds.
After I put that dazzling wedding ring away, I decided to give my good jewelry to my grandchildren. And the intention was not that the girls would have fancy jewelry to show off to their friends. The intention was that they would have something of mine to remember me by, something they could touch and wear that would bring back the memories of the love I had for them.
Consider Jesus’ intention when he asked his followers to remember him. He didn’t say “Take, eat this artisan Parisian Brioche… Drink this Chateau Mouton-Rothschild wine…” He said essentially: Take, eat this bread…and drink this wine…Do this in remembrance of me. Simple, generic, unpretentious requests. He also mentions to his disciples that eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of him is about forgiveness.
And this is the gift my fancy ring finally brought me to – forgiveness. I had wrapped up so many symbols in the flashy diamond ring… things I thought about myself, my former husband, the world. It wasn’t wrong to wear it, but it was wrong for me to deceive myself about its value in my life. In forgiving myself for this ego-driven deception, I am challenged to forgive everybody else their need to be special. We are, after all, humans in this illusory world. But perhaps we could more easily embrace our higher, “spectacular” selves if we could dispense with the flaunting of specialness.
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Let him forgive you all your specialness, and make you whole in mind and one with him again. He waits for your forgiveness only that he may return it unto you. [CE T-24.II.8:5-6]
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