Being Choosy in RomanceA Foreword for the book SPIRITUAL COUPLING:
A Guidebook for Experiencing a Holy Relationship by Cindy Lora-Renardby D. Patrick Miller
I confess that I can’t think of what A Course in Miracles teaches us about romantic relationships without an oddly fond memory of Choosy.
‘Choosy’ is a rhyming pseudonym for a lovely woman I met during a brief, adventurous period of online dating that followed my divorce after fifteen years of marriage. I found her profile on a year-ending December 31 and wrote to her the next morning, startled to receive an almost immediate response. As I soon learned, it wasn’t actually a response. In fact, Choosy and I had sent greetings to each other simultaneously on that fateful New Year’s Day.
It’s a miracle, I thought, assuming that the synchronicity augured well for a deep and significant romance. Instead, the following thirty days brought on a parade of awkward encounters and stilted conversations. Choosy mostly wanted to go to the movies, and we did a lot of that. But that left hours in which we had to talk to each other, and after sharing film reviews we found little common ground.
Choosy claimed to be an atheist who was nonetheless fascinated by ghost-hunting shows on television. That paradox convinced me that she was probably suppressing an inner spiritual life. So I talked to Choosy — at length, I’m afraid — about how my own spiritual path had been initiated by seven years of a serious illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, how that led to my first encounter with A Course in Miracles, and how that sparked the long healing process that followed… and so on.
I thought this was a profound between-movies topic. But I noticed that a glazed look came over Choosy’s face every time I prattled on about the Course. By the end of the month she’d had enough. On Jan. 31 she unceremoniously dumped me without a word of explanation.
Flash forward two years. I was bounding down the steps after a gym workout and almost ran over Choosy crossing the street, unknowingly heading straight for me. Besides looking startled, she was also pale and unsteady on her feet, obviously exhausted. I couldn’t honestly say “you look great!” so I just asked how she was doing. She replied, “Not so good. I’ve been sick for months and I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”
Immediately I expressed my sympathy — I could honestly say I knew what she was going through — and offered to help with any information or insights that might be useful. Still in wide-eyed surprise, Choosy stared at me and said, “Well, it’s so interesting to run into you right this moment. I was just seeing my therapist, and he suggested that I might benefit from looking into A Course in Miracles.”
Did I experience a brief, silent rush of smug vindication? I'll let you wonder. All I said was, “Oh really?”
Peering at me ever more intently, Choosy then leaned close and whispered, “So can I ask you something I really need to know?”
“Sure,” I whispered back, not clear on why we were being secretive.
Choosy briefly cast her eyes both ways down the sidewalk before asking, quite earnestly, “Isn’t the Course mostly for, like, crazy people?!”
I confess that I burst out laughing right in Choosy’s face — for two reasons. First, it was now abundantly clear what conclusion she had reached about me that led to the abrupt dumping. Second, she was right on target in her characterization of Course students. So I answered, “Yes, you’re absolutely right — as long as you understand that the Course says everyone is crazy!”
This unforgettable encounter came freshly to mind while I was enjoying a preview of this book on relationships and A Course in Miracles written by Cindy Lora-Renard. That’s because so much of what Cindy has to share is what I would call extraordinary common sense — that is, what all of us would already know if we hadn’t somehow lost our minds and become crazy people.
Ken Wapnick, the legendary Course philosopher, often pointed out that despite its many challenges and overall difficulty, ACIM is not an advanced spiritual path. In fact, it’s remedial. It’s not designed to lead us straight to enlightenment. Instead it’s designed to shock us into recognition of the mess that our ego-soaked lives have become, so that we are led to the humble consideration that “there must be another way.” And then step by step, lesson by repetitive lesson, it shows us a way out — a way to sanity inspired by a profoundly different point of view than the sad, tragic, and egocentric perspective we have probably become accustomed to.
Without a doubt, many of us believe that it’s our troubled relationships — which the Course identifies as “special” — that have driven us nuts. The first one we experience is usually the relationship with our parents and/or family of origin, but the kind that tries our sanity as adults is what we usually identify as romantic. That’s the classic one-on-one relationship in which a new and alluring partner appears, at first, to be the man or woman “of our dreams” — everything we could want in feeling, intelligence, sexuality, taste in films, and so on. This is what ACIM identifies as the “special love” phase.
Unfortunately, special love all too often degenerates over time into boredom, restlessness, discord, alienation, and ultimately divorce in every sense of the word. That’s the “special hate” phase — to which most people have no ready response besides resuming their hopeful, hapless search for a “soulmate.”
Cindy throws a very useful wrench into this cycle of special relationships by suggesting that we ask ourselves, “do I want to find my soulmate if I still have a clogged mind, holding thoughts of lack, judgment or fear? To the ego, the answer is yes, because it needs someone or something to project its unconscious guilt on to, and any body will do.”
Hence readers should be forewarned that Cindy is not offering a quick and easy guide to finding the love of your life. She does provide a number of Course-inspired thought tools and meditations, some devised with the help of her husband Gary (I’ve heard of that guy somewhere before) that will speed the reader’s progress with essential disciplines of forgiveness, inner abundance, “fearless communication,” and more. And in Chapter 10 she takes on the big kahuna of partnership — that is, the prickly challenge of deciding whether one wants to be “right or happy.”
As Cindy relates, “I have seen countless situations where two people were ‘at each other’s throats,’ because each of them were trying to make the other one wrong, getting absolutely nowhere in their communication.” For anyone who’s been there, done that, Cindy’s insights will be especially helpful.
While A Course in Miracles is widely viewed as a self-study discipline that many of us tackle alone at first, it is in our relationships that “the rubber meets the road” in terms of realizing its benefits. Thank God and Cindy for this capable and concise yet comprehensive digest of what the Course brings not just to our understanding of relationships, but to our ongoing transformation in the midst of them. The quest to find a soulmate, if regarded humbly enough, is an opportunity for self-confrontation, inward Self-discovery, and eventually the continuous sharing of genuine happiness. Granted, some may find it aggravating that it’s not just a matter of being choosy.
D. Patrick Miller is the founder of Fearless Books, the original publisher of The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard, and author of Understanding A Course in Miracles: The History, Message, and Legacy of a Profound Spiritual Path (Fearless Books, 2nd edition 2021).
