Jeremy, The Christ at Buchenwald, and my Commentary Inspired by the Mind Training of A Course in Miracles.

This is a commentary on “Jeremy,” an essay from the book, “Against the Pollution of the I:  Selected Writings of Jacques Lusseyran.”
 

I was so inspired reading this essay that I recorded passages that came to mind as I read certain sentences and paragraphs.

Sentences and paragraphs from the essay are in bold, and my passages are in a plain font.

I do not know if there is a greater blessing than to encounter a true old person, that is, one who is joyous.

Jeremy was an example: he found joy in the midst of Block 57. He found it during moments of the day where we found only fear. And he found it in such great abundance that when he was present we felt it rise in us. Inexplicable sensation, incredible even, there where we were: joy was going to fill us.

Eternity

William Blake

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Live in eternity’s sunrise.

The one who fills my memory is like this. His name is Jeremy Regard.

It is not I who would give him this name. It was his. How many novelists would like to have invented it?

This is how “regard” is translated into English:

Regardez l’homme.

Look at the man.

Je tiens l’homme en grande estime.

I hold the man in great regard.

Jeremy was looking through.

Lesson 42, God is my strength.  Vision is His gift.

And here and there one could just barely glimpse a second forge standing there, a forge of the spirit.

I heard Jeremy speak of men who did not come to his shop just for their horse and their wagons but for themselves. They came so as to go home all steeled and new, to take home a little of the life they were lacking and which they found overflowing, shining, and gentle at the forge of father Jeremy.

. . .he seemed to be addressing invisible beings_. through you.

Namste.

You felt it as you feel a hand on the shoulder, a hand which summons, which brings you back to yourself when you were about to disappear.

I am God’s Son, complete and healed and whole, shining in the reflection of His Love.   (Who am I?)

Each time he appeared, the air became breathable: I got a breath of life smack in the, face.

The root meaning of “spirit,” is “to breathe.”  We  are breathing ion the Holy Spirit, the breath of God.

 But I also knew many who died very quickly, like flies, because they thought they were in hell.

Lesson 325, All things I think I see reflect ideas.

From judgment comes a world condemned. And from forgiving thoughts a gentle world comes forth…

"For one who knows how to see, things are just as they always are," he said.

Well, without a doubt, there exist in certain beings, as there existed in him, a rightness and wholeness so perfect their way of  seeing communicates itself, is given to^-you; for, at least, an instant. And the silence then is truer, more exact, than any word.

But one day it became obvious, palpable to me in the flesh, that Jeremy, the welder, had lent me his eyes.

With those eyes, I saw that Buchenwald was not unique, not even privileged to be one of the places of greatest human suffering. I also saw that our camp was not in Germany as we thought, in the heart of the Thuringee, dominating the plain of Lena, in this precise place and in no other. Jeremy taught me, with his eye, that Buchenwald was in each one of us, baked and re-baked tended incessantly, nurtured in a horrible way. And that consequently we could vanquish it, if we desired to with enough force.

One time n Session, Dear One said, “I will stand here for a moment so that you can catch your true reflection.”

. . .the land of Cockaigne.

In medieval times Cockaigne was a mythical land of plenty.

A man who did not dream: that was more important than anything. The rest of us were dreamers.

Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest. (4.1. 18-58)

For him, and for us through him, the world was saved in each second. This benediction had no end. And, when it ceased, it was that we had ceased wanting it, that we—and not it—had ceased being joyful.

Lesson 325, All things I think I see reflect ideas.

This is salvation’s keynote.

What was supernatural in him, from all evidence, didn't belong to him; it was meant to be shared. The spectacle, if it existed, was for us to find and to find within ourselves. I have the clearest memory of finding it. I perceived, one day like the others, a little place where I did not shiver, where I had no shame, where the death-dealers were only phantoms, where life no longer depended on the presence of the camp or on its absence.  I owed it to Jeremy.

This reminds me of making contact with small children.  For example, I am in the checkout lane at Wal-Mart, and a small child is in the cart in front of me makes great eye contact with me, recognizing something in me that his parents do not see.  We just keep it up, smiling, until his parents checkout and leave.

What I call the supernatural in him was the break with habits which he had completely realized. Those habits of judgment which make us call any adversity "unhappiness" or "evil," those of greed which make us hate, desire vengeance, or simply complain—a minor but incontestable form of hatred—those of our dizzying egocentricity which make us think that we are innocent each time we suffer. He had escaped from the network of compulsive reflexes, and it was this necessary movement which neither good health—or even perfect health, if such exists—can explain.

Lesson 61, I am the light of the world.

. . .the ego’s petty views of what you are and what your purpose is.  

If I have used the word "supernatural," it is because the act of Jeremy sums up to me the religious act itself: the discovery that God is there, in each person, to the same degree, completely in each moment, and that a return can be made toward Him.

Who is the light of the world except God's Son? This, then, is merely a statement of the truth about yourself. It is the opposite of a statement of pride, of arrogance, or of self-deception. It does not describe the self-concept you have made. It does not refer to any of the characteristics with which you have endowed your idols. It refers to you as you were created by God. It simply states the truth.

We would all gain a lot by putting memory in quarantine.

The petty memory, at least, the stingy, encumbering memory which makes us believe in this unreality, this myth: the past.

Lesson  7,  I see only the past.

It is memory which suddenly brings back—without a shadow of reason—a person, or the shred of an event which then installs itself in us. The image throws itself on the screen of consciousness; it swells, soon there is nothing else but it. The mind's circulation stops. The present disperses. The moments which follow no longer have the force to carry us. They no longer have any flavor. In short, this memory secretes melancholy, regret, all manner of inner complication.

The miracle does nothing. All it does

is to undo. And thus it cancels out

the interference to what has been done.

It does not add, but merely takes away.

And what it takes away is long since gone,

but being kept in memory appears

to have immediate effects. This world

was over long ago. The thoughts that made

it are no longer in the mind that thought

of them and loved them for a little while.

The miracle but shows the past is gone,

and what has truly gone has no effects.
(T-28.1)

 Jeremy, when he speaks to me, does not do so from out of my past, but from the depths of my present, there, right in the center. I cannot move him.

There is no link of memory to the past.  (T-28.1)

The good which he enjoyed was not his. Or rather, it was—but by participation. It was just as much ours. This is the mystery and power of those beings who serve something other than their own provisional personalities: one cannot escape them.

Christ is God's Son as He created Him.

He is the Self we share, uniting us
with one another, and with God as well.
(What is the Christ?)