Complaints in Triplicate, Press Hard, Three Copies

Watch carefully and see what it is you are really asking for. Be very honest with yourself in this, for we must hide nothing from each other. If you will really try to do this, you have taken the first step toward preparing your mind for the Holy One to enter. We will prepare for this together, for once He has come, you will be ready to help me make other minds ready for Him. How long will you deny Him His Kingdom? (ACIM:T-4.III.8)

Having just spent a week on Gary Renard's Happy Dream Cruise, I had the chance of meeting some very interesting people, and explore new angles to the spiritual path I find myself on. In one conversation with a new friend who like myself feels very inspired by the Thomas Gospel, we came to talk about being angry with God and/or Jesus. And then immediately Helen Schucman the scribe of A Course In Miracles, came to mind and her episode of giving God an ultimatum about a research grant she had applied for (See Ken Wapnick's Absence from Felicity), when she went to a church to light a candle, and in her "prayer" she advised God that her getting the grant was an absolutely non-negotiable item. Of course she promptly proceeded not to get the grant. My new friend and I both shared experiences of getting seriously upset and angry with God, prior to breakthroughs in our spiritual lives, and I found myself suggesting that this relates to the passage I quoted above, for after all Jesus is asking us for complete honesty in our relationship with him. I was advised along those lines myself by a friend/therapist in a Course study group, and that has stayed with me ever since, and I've advised many others since then to do likewise, and even to go on record in the form of a letter or a diary and file our consumer complaints with Jesus, and not hold back, but really let him have it when we feel he's letting us down. The point of it all is that the anger does not matter, it's the being honest that counts, and perhaps more so than anything because letting it out in that way makes the relationship very real to us, and can become the basis for a subsequent shift.

In the long run what matters is that we eventually forgive Jesus fully for not being the idol which our ego wants him to be, as in this Course passage:

Is he the Christ? O yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of you. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God. And when you join your will with his, your sight will be his vision, for the eyes of Christ are shared. Walking with him is just as natural as walking with a brother whom you knew since you were born, for such indeed he is. Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God. (ACIM:C-5.5)

In short, we made him different from us, for that's the ego's way of throwing him out the door. By forgiving him our illusions - the ego's differences - we are then re-establishing the relationship, which inevitably leads to a healing in which we learn to see his way, not our ego's way, and it is thereby we learn to follow him, but the basis for that is in accepting the relationship in the first place. Until we do, we continue to freeze him out.