The Holy Relationship

The surface traits of God's teachers are not at all alike. They do not look alike to the body's eyes, they come from vastly different backgrounds, their experiences of the world vary greatly, and their superficial "personalities" are quite distinct. Nor, at the beginning stages of their functioning as teachers of God, have they as yet acquired the deeper characteristics that will establish them as what they are. God gives special gifts to His teachers, because they have a special role in His plan for Atonement. Their specialness is, of course, only temporary; set in time as a means of leading out of time. These special gifts, born in the holy relationship toward which the teaching-learning situation is geared, become characteristic of all teachers of God who have advanced in their own learning. In this respect they are all alike. (ACIM:M-4.1)

That's how the Course speaks of the holy relationship, which is the Holy Spirit's answer to the special relationships our ego favors. Simply put the ego's special relationships are geared to running away from home, they are the pacifiers (addictions) that help us forget our home in Heaven, and give us the temporary satisfactions and distractions which will keep us rooted in the world. The holy relationship is born to us when we put our special relationships in the hand of the Holy Spirit, so that they can serve as a classroom for our way home. So every special relationship becomes a doorway - and as in Roman mythology above every doorway symbolically is the double head of Janus, one face facing towards time, and the other facing eternity, and thus symbolizing how every situation represents a choice opportunity.

Logion 75 has us standing at the doorway, and it refers to the fact that only those who are alone will enter "the bridal suite," which is the expression in traditional literature that corresponds to the Course's notion of the holy relationship. Those who are alone are those who no longer invest in and depend on special relationships, because they are aware now that there is only one of us, the Son of God, and they are thus learning to make the choice for eternity, for the Holy Spirit, so that every situation becomes a classroom in which the Holy Spirit can teach us to find our way home. And the way to choose the Holy Spirit is always by not choosing the ego, which is to say practicing forgiveness, and using every opportunity to let another block to "love's presence" be removed from our mind.

The corollary to this is the notion in the Course that the world was made as an attack on God (ACIM:W-pII3.2:1), and all our special relationships are the ego's tools to deny the oneness of the sonship, and thus to give up our investment in them, and letting go of the specialness is felt by the ego as being alone, but it is really the return to the oneness of the sonship, the oneness of the mind. And the experience of seeing the face of Christ in our brother, is the restoration of this oneness to our awareness. And thus is every relationship no longer special but simply an expression of the Holy Relationship.