“When a brother acts insanely, he is offering you an opportunity to bless him. His need is yours. You need the blessing you can offer him.”
A Course in Miracles
I first discovered the work of author David Malouf in high school. I had to write a book report for English class, and I chose Malouf’s novel, An Imaginary Life. The book is a fictional account of the poet Ovid’s exile from Rome in AD 8, and centres on his encounters with a wolf-child; a boy living in the wild who leads him to redemption. Now, decades later, I find myself again writing about one of Malouf’s novels. Ransom is also a fictional account of an episode from antiquity: the meeting of King Priam of Troy with his opponent Achilles during the Trojan war.
In the original story from Homer’s Iliad, Priam leaves Troy and heads into enemy territory to plead for the return of his dead son’s body. To me, Malouf’s retelling of this episode provides analogies for the Course’s process of forgiveness and for the general passage of the human life-script: a life in three acts.
Act One
Ransom begins with the warrior Achilles listening for the voice of his mother at the beach, nine years into the Trojan war. In Homer’s version, Achilles’ mother was never far from his side. However, her form is absent throughout Malouf’s tale; her essence appearing in the abstract sense, represented by “her element”, water.
Achilles recognises he is part water, his mother’s element — “what, in all its many forms, as ocean, pool, stream, is shifting and insubstantial” — and part earth, the element of his father. He is both spirit and matter: part of a Oneness that’s abstract and can’t be contained, but he also resides in the world of concrete forms as a farmer and part-time warrior.
Since he was five years old, Achilles could call to his mother — to her element — and feel “himself caught up and tenderly enfolded”:
As a child he had his own names for the sea. He would repeat them over and over under his breath as a way of calling to her till the syllables shone and became her presence. In the brimming moonlight of his sleeping chamber, at midday in his father’s garden, among oakwoods when summer gales bullied and the full swing of afternoon came crashing, he felt himself caught up and tenderly enfolded as her low voice whispered on his skin. Do you hear me, Achilles? It is me, I am still with you. For a time I can be with you when you call.
For a time. His mother’s encompassing presence was a cherished secret, as that otherworldly connection is to most children. But then it was gone:
She had given him up. That was the hard condition of his being… One day when he put his foot down on the earth he knew at once that something was different. A gift he had taken as natural to him, the play of a dual self that had allowed him, in a moment, to slip out of his hard boyish nature and become eel-like, fluid, weightless, without substance in his mother’s arms, had been withdrawn. From now on she would be no more than a faint far-off echo to his senses, an underwater humming.
She had given him up. And so it seems when such a connection suddenly fades. ‘It’ has gone away, leaving us on our own, our ability to tap into that spaciousness seemingly gone with it. Achilles grieves, but silently, secretly. As you do. He experiences a radical shift:
Somewhere in the depths of sleep his spirit had made a crossing and not come back, or it had been snatched up and transformed. When he bent and chose a stone for his slingshot it had a new weight in his hand, and the sling had a different tension. He was his father’s son and mortal. He had entered the rough world of men… A world of pain, loss, dependency, bursts of violence and elation; of fatality and fatal contradictions, breathless leaps into the unknown; at last of death – a hero’s death out there in full sunlight under the gaze of gods and men, for which the hardened self, the hardened body, had daily to be exercised and prepared.
Ransom strikes me as containing several Jungian elements, this passage in particular. It is reminiscent of Carl Jung’s discussion in Memories, Dreams, Reflections of his No.1 and No.2 personalities. As a small boy, Jung felt he had two very different personalities. No.1 was concerned with the outer world. It related to going to school, being interested in what he was learning, mucking about with friends, feeling self-conscious, and performing duties at home. No.2 related to his inner world and a different experience of self: No.2 wasn’t self-conscious, was connected to a timeless realm, and had an appreciation for the cosmos and nature. This self “knew God as a hidden, personal, and at the same time supra-personal secret”:
What I am here unfolding, sentence by sentence, is something I was then not conscious of in any particular way, though I sensed it with an overpowering premonition and intensity of feeling. At such times I knew I was worthy of myself, that I was my true self. As soon as I was alone, I could pass over into this state. I therefore sought the peace and solitude of this ‘Other,’ personality No. 2.
Jung longed to express his No.2 personality through No.1 and its connection with the outer world, but he knew he couldn’t. When he was twelve years old, he had a dream symbolising the need to strengthen his outer self before living primarily from his abstract, spiritual centre. He knew he must leave his No.2 self behind so that he could first find his anchor in the world. He needed to focus on the stuff of everyday living: going to school, studying, messing about with friends, and earning money, while he let No.2 move into the background.
Jung experienced a reawakening of his No.2 self around midlife after his traumatic split with Sigmund Freud. After a “descent into the unconscious” in which he came face to face with both the darkness and light within, he emerged able to integrate his No.2 personality with his external life via his professional writings. He couldn’t have achieved this however, until he had built a psychological container in the form of a strong, ‘world-based’ identity, forged by engaging with the outer world — Achilles’ “rough world of men, of fatality and contradictions”.
Likewise, we experience a Fall as we leave the immersive oneness of the mother element and enter more forcefully into the discriminating essence of the father. We become increasingly conscious of ourselves as an individual. We become increasingly self-conscious, leaving the self-forgetful play of childhood behind.
This normal passage of psychological growth entails repeated refinement of our sense of ‘I’, which includes what makes us different. Our self-concept must be strong enough to hold on to so we can feel our feet touching the ground throughout life’s challenges. It is an important foundation from which to proceed through life’s first half; something concrete to hold on to, anchoring us in the world so we can function within it.
Act Two
Ransom centres on Achilles’ role as heroic warrior. In ancient times, to be a hero was to carry on fulfilling your allotted role in the face of death. And your role was something you fell into as per the arrangements of the gods. Moaning about what came your way was the height of impiety. To live well, meant to die well, accepting your inevitable demise without compromising your integrity. Therefore, the emphasis wasn’t on prolonging life, but on playing your part with honour, right to the end. This is what gave your life meaning.
Since the inevitability of death provided the opportunity to be a hero, it wasn’t something to be feared. As the scholar Edith Hamilton wrote of the heroes in Nordic mythology, the sustenance for moving forward in the face of defeat is heroism; it is the pure ‘good’ itself:
The hero can prove what he is only by dying. The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
For nine years, Achilles had played the role of honourable warrior, leading his soldiers from Pthia to fight alongside Greeks in the battle for Troy. However, things change dramatically following the death of Achilles’ friend and “soulmate” Patroclus.
The events surrounding Patroclus’ death were tragic. Achilles had been offended by the Greek admirals, and so, in spite, wouldn’t let his army fight alongside them. Patroclus, seeing the Greeks were in desperate need of help, pleaded with Achilles to let go of his pettiness and allow their army to fight. Finally, Achilles agrees but refuses to fight himself. Patroclus convinces Achilles to let him wear his helmet and shield so the Trojan army will be daunted and draw back, giving the Greeks breathing space. This has the unimagined effect of making Patroclus a target of Hector, leader of the Trojan army and son of Priam. Patroclus is slain ruthlessly by Hector, who strips him of Achilles’ armour and mockingly dons it himself.
Achilles is devasted by his loss; an echo of the first. For all of us, a person, animal, or occupation can give us a semblance of that connection we felt to the mother element and the unseen world. There is something reminiscent about it, and our attachment becomes intense. When it goes, as it inevitably will, we mourn a second time, but this time it’s harder. Where both our experience of that ‘mysterious’ world and its loss was a private matter, something bewildering and kept to ourselves, the second loss is public because we’re not so much bewildered as beaten. We crash.
After weeping without restraint, Achilles leaps up enraged and confronts Hector, plunging his dagger into his neck through a gap in his armour. Hector falls to his knees and dies. Achilles also undergoes a transformation, no less dramatic:
Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the borders of an unknown region. For the length of a heartbeat it hesitated, then went on. How long he passed in that twilit kingdom he would never know. It was another, more obdurate self that found its way back…
Achilles suffers a third loss — of himself. He experiences a hardening as he strips Hector of his armour. Then, emotionless, he stands watching as one by one his men plunge their swords into Hector’s body, shouting his name so his family watching from the walls of Troy can hear it. Achilles takes the savagery a step further:
When they were done and had stepped away, he roused himself and approached the body. Stood staring down at it. Then, taking a knife from his belt, he fell to one knee, and swiftly, as if he had always known that this was what he would do, slashed one after the other from ankle to heel the tendons of Hector’s feet.
Tying Hector’s body by the heels to his chariot, Achilles drags it through the dirt around the walls of Troy. The desecration of Hector’s body is considered an affront to the gods, a low act of defilement not befitting a warrior. In Homer’s telling of the tale, it’s notable that Hector’s mother faints at the sight of her son’s body being dragged through the dust, not at his noble death.
Day after day, Achilles continues his affront to the gods, dragging Hector’s body behind his chariot, around the walls of Troy. However, the gods appear to get their own back by making sure that Hector’s body is renewed each morning; the wounds from the day’s parade magically healing over.
Twelve days elapse with Achilles continuing his barbaric routine, yet still he feels nothing. Achilles know it is the heaviness in him, of his heart, that he must throw off to return to himself:
He was waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the outrage he was committing. That would assuage his grief, and be so convincing to the witnesses of this barbaric spectacle that he too might believe there was a living man at the centre of it, and that man himself.
No doubt guilt was associated with Achilles’ intense grief. He had sent Patroclus into battle without him, and in his own armour. Yet the ultimate self-recrimination behind a second experience of loss relates to the first: we did something to make us unworthy of the metaphorical ‘mother’s embrace’. We did something to destroy that connection before and now we have done it again. The first cut is the deepest. The second reopens the wound.
Achilles doesn’t know how to relieve his condition. He can but wait:
He is waiting for the break. For something to appear that will break the spell that is on him, the self-consuming rage that drives him and wastes his spirit in despair. Something new and unimaginable as yet that will confront him with the need, in meeting it, to leap clear of the clogging grey web that enfolds him. Meanwhile, day after day, he rages, shames himself, calls silently on a spirit that does not answer, and sleeps.
Act Three
While Achilles grieves his loss, so too does Hector’s parents: King Priam and his wife, Hecuba. After days of witnessing Hecuba’s despair, adding to his own distress, Priam has a vision suggesting a way out. Before disclosing it to his wife and adult children, he prepares them by announcing that he has made a decision:
Hecuba… After all this time, these eleven days of doing nothing but weep and think and think again, I have come to a decision…
I am too old, I know, to put on armour and go to the field. To ride into the fray and leap down from my chariot and crack heads, and sweat and get bloody. And the truth is I never was a warrior, it was not my role. My role was to hold myself apart in ceremonial stillness and let others be my arm, my fist… To be seen as a man like other men — human as we are, all of us — would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak…
Priam then describes his vision. He saw an old, ordinary wagon drawn by two mules. The wagon was full of treasure and the carter was a man in ordinary clothing. Beside him sat Priam, plainly dressed in a white robe with no royal insignia. The treasure lay under a plain coverlet and included the king’s armour, gold cups and coins amongst other valuables. Then he saw the cart without the coverlet, and in place of the treasure lay Hector’s body, fully restored and ransomed.
This vision, explained Priam, had inspired him to make the decision to take a cart of treasure to Achilles as a ransom for Hector’s body: He planned to beg Achilles humbly, on his knees, to give him back the body of his son.
Priam’s family is outraged. Hecuba is sure that Achilles won’t agree to the ransom — that he is too barbaric to hand over the body in the time-honoured way: “And you expect this wolf, this violator of every law of gods and men, to take the gift you hold out to him and act like a man?” Priam’s reply is that only something radical, something out of the ordinary, could break the spell of grief binding both parties:
I believe… that the thing that is needed to cut this knot we are all tied in is something that has never before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new.
… And perhaps, because it is unexpected, it may appeal to him too: the chance to break free of the obligation of being always the hero, as I am expected always to be the king. To take on the lighter bond of being simply a man. Perhaps that is the real gift I have to bring him. Perhaps that is the ransom.
… You ask me to stand, as I have always done, at a kingly distance from the human… But I am also a father. Mightn’t it be time for me to expose myself at last to what is merely human? To learn a little of what that might be, and what it is to bear it as others do?
Priam is suggesting that he go into enemy territory to meet Achilles on common ground; as fathers who care for their children. Though his family doesn’t like the idea, Priam’s decision is final, and he makes arrangements to procure an ordinary cart, treasure, and a carter from outside the royal entourage. Apart from the royal treasure, everything about the trip was to be new and ordinary: no regalia, no deference towards royalty. Priam is to experience what it is to be simply human. Again, a new experience for him.
The royal treasures Priam will give in exchange for his son can be viewed as symbols of the ego’s gifts; for all that sets us apart from others, the ‘glittering jewels’ of specialness. Priam knows that the real gift — the one that will be of value to Achilles — is his willingness to meet Achilles on the simplest of human terms: with an appreciation of their common struggle and need. As A Course in Miracles says, the only ransom forgiveness asks of us is our illusions of separate interests: “It is not a ransom with a price. There is no cost, but only gain”, and in the exchange we find ourselves again (W-155.8: 3-4).
In the following passage from The Gifts of God, the ransom — the ‘gift’ to Jesus or the Holy Spirit in return for peace — is described as all that we’ve held against ourselves and others:
How can you be delivered from all gifts the world has offered you? How can you change these little, cruel offerings for those that Heaven gives and God would have you keep? Open your hands, and give all things to me that you have held against your holiness and kept as slander on the Son of God. Practice with every one you recognise as what it is. Give me these worthless things the instant that you see them through my eyes and understand their cost. Then give away these bitter dreams as you perceive them now to be but that, and nothing more than that.
I take them from you gladly, laying them beside the gifts of God that He has placed upon the altar to His Son. And these I give to you to take the place of those you give to me in mercy on yourself. These are the gifts I ask, and only these.
Achilles and Priam are opposites in many ways. As king, Priam doesn’t get his hands dirty. Achilles on the other hand is both a farmer and a warrior. He is very in touch with the earth element, with gruesome details of death, decay, and battle. Often our major forgiveness lessons involve people that we perceive as opposites. How could we ever see common ground between us? Yet, in discovering exactly that, we find our ticket Home. We are helped to see beyond the body and the world of differences as we share one interest and one goal:
God’s Teacher speaks to any two who join together for learning purposes… The demarcations they have drawn between their roles, their minds, their bodies, their needs, their interests, and all the differences they thought separated them from one another, fade and grow dim and disappear (M-2.5: 3, 6).
Beginner’s Mind
In contrast to Homer’s Iliad, Ransom gives time and detail to the developing relationship between Priam and Somax. Without the rigid adherence to protocols that a regular journey between king and herald would entail, Priam and Somax are free to act naturally with each other. Priam enjoys the newness of this kind of encounter:
Everything but the realm of the royal was incidental and ordinary, not to be taken much notice of. The formality, the ritual around hierarchy and tradition, that was where the attention was. How refreshing for all of that to fall away.
The novelty of life experienced without old constraints is highlighted when the travellers arrive at a stream where they take a break. Somax encourages Priam to walk in the stream to cool down, and the king delights in feeling his feet in the water and is amused by the movement of fishlings around them. Then, there is Somax himself: his chatter is unnecessary, but Priam enjoys listening to him recite how his daughter-in-law made the best griddle cakes in town; how she flipped them deftly with one finger. Talk without a purpose, for its own sake. Something else that was new.
Divested of his symbolic role, Priam finds himself interested and curious, like a child, taking pleasure in ‘the little things’. Without anything to prove or to ‘be’, he can enjoy the simplicity of existing for a while without pretence. He finds himself in this moment, in this time, without the baggage of tradition.
Priam’s readiness to be in the moment, letting go of the past and future, reflects his readiness to enter a Holy Instant with Achilles. He is indeed the one to take the lead in untangling the knot between them. As the Course says, it only takes one person — “Whoever is saner at the time” — to call for peace and open the way for everyone’s healing:
When you feel the holiness of your relationship is threatened by anything, stop instantly and offer the Holy Spirit your willingness, in spite of fear, to let Him exchange this instant for the holy one that you would rather have… [It is] impossible that the holy instant come to either of you without the other. And it will come to both at the request of either (T-18.V.6: 1, 6-7)[italics mine]
It only takes one person to initiate healing because minds are joined at a level beyond time and space — the level where one person’s choice (for either the ego or the Holy Spirit) serves as an example to others; a reminder of what they too can choose:
The only meaningful contribution the healer can make is to present an example of one whose direction has been changed for him, and who no longer believes in nightmares of any kind. The light in his mind will therefore answer the questioner, who must decide with God that there is light because he sees it (T-9.V.7: 4-5).
Holy Helpers
Along the way, Priam and Somax are joined by the god Hermes, sent to guide them safely into the soldiers’ camp and assist them with their mission. Hermes’ role is like that of the Holy Spirit. When we “step back and let Him lead the way” his Truth will go before us, “lighting up the path of ransom from illusion” (W-155.8:2). We will receive what we need from the Holy Spirit to succeed in our goal of forgiveness and peace:
He seems to be a Voice, for in that form He speaks God’s Word to you. He seems to be a Guide through a far country, for you need that form of help. He seems to be whatever meets the needs you think you have (C-6.4: 5-7).
Hermes, aware of Priam’s plan to approach Achilles on the common ground of fatherhood, says to him as they near their destination, “Now father, the time has come to gather your strength”. Addressing Priam as ‘father’ had a profound effect on the king:
He took comfort from the title the god had just given him… Now, with the play about to begin in which he was to represent ‘the father’ — and in a way he had never till now attempted — he was moved by this invocation of the sacred tie, and took it, from a god’s lips, as an endorsement and blessing.
Hermes’ words reassure Priam that his emphasis on the fatherly tie is the way forward. Likewise, moments of synchronicity act as signposts leading us forward, encouraging us along the way. They represent the Holy Spirit’s correction script: When healing is our goal and we open our mind to guidance, we’ll perceive things in a way that assists us in our cause.
As Priam reaches the camp, we find Achilles in his hut, eating with his men at a trestle table. Achilles has no appetite and handles his food listlessly. Suddenly he hears the “silvery notes” of a lyre emanating from the “smoky darkness at the far end of the hut”. He feels the presence of a god, and the music strikes a chord in him:
He knows what this sudden suspension of his hard, manly qualities denotes. This melting in him of will, of self. Under its aspect things continue to be themselves, but what is apprehensible to him now is a fluidity in them that on other occasions is obscured…
He has moved into his mother’s element and is open again to her shimmering influence.
Hermes, unseen, plays his lyre, setting the mood for Priam’s arrival, and announcing the holiness of the occasion. Achilles accepts the invitation for what is to come, and in doing so reconnects with his mother’s element, his No.2 personality, the part represented by the Holy Spirit:
The Holy Spirit abides in the part of your mind that is part of the Christ Mind. He represents your Self and your Creator, Who are One. He speaks for God and also for you, being joined with Both… (C-6.4: 1-3).
Hermes’ timing is perfect. When Priam enters the hut, standing a few metres from Achilles’ table, Achilles first mistakes him for his deceased friend Patroclus, then for his father whom he last saw nine years ago. He rises to his feet. Overcome with tenderness for the old man before him, he falls on one knee, weeping, and leans forward to clasp Priam’s robe, saying “Father”.
That Achilles mistook Priam for his father suggests that Priam was looking at him — the killer of his son — without condemnation. Such is the power of miracle mindedness. When our goal is healing and we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit’s influence, we are able to share the Holy Spirit’s vision which sees past ‘sins’, beyond what can be seen with the body’s eyes:
Judge not what is invisible to you or you will never see it, but wait in patience for its coming. It will be given you to see your brother’s worth when all you want for him is peace. And what you want for him you will receive (T-20.V.3: 5-7).
Two soldiers rush to Achilles’ side. Startled, Achilles looks again at the old man and sees he has been mistaken. However, he doesn’t attack the stranger because he is still full of tender emotions associated with the “sacred bond” between father and child. He is still in his ‘right mind’.
Priam announces himself and his mission, appealing to Achilles’ appreciation for their common experience as fathers:
Achilles… we should have pity for one another’s losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter on mortal terms. Think, Achilles. Think of your son, Neoptolemus. Would you not do for him what I am doing here for Hector? Would your father, Peleus, not do the same for you?
Achilles inhabits a space far removed from the noise made by the soldiers who are unaware of what is unfolding. He feels “immobilised and outside time”. He has stepped outside the chain of past, present and future, into a Holy Instant where the laws of the world no longer hold. He is in a state of grace in which there is no strain, coming from an acceptance of God’s Love.
Achilles agrees to the ransom and to a temporary truce giving time for a funeral and proper burial. He orders that Hector’s body will be washed and prepared for return to Troy, and invites Priam to eat something with him, then take some rest. This hospitality indicates that Achilles has received Priam’s true offering — healing — with gratitude and appreciation.
Returning to where Hector’s body lay, as he’d done for eleven days, Achilles finds it, as usual, to be unblemished. But now, he doesn’t perceive this as an attack:
Something in him has freed itself and fallen away. A need, an obligation. Everything around him is subtly changed. The body at his feet, in the rightness of its imperturbable calm, his own body, which is tensed as it tips forward, also calm. Some cleansing emotion that flooded through him — when? — when Priam first appeared to him in the figure of his father? — has cleared his heart of the smoky poison that clogged and thickened its every motion so that whatever he turned his gaze on was clouded and dark.
He regards Hector’s body now, and the clean-limbed perfection of it, the splendour of the warrior who has won an honourable death, is no longer an affront.
The affection of the gods for a man whose end it was part of his own accomplished life to accomplish he can now take as an honour intended also for himself…
What he feels in himself as a perfect order of body, heart, occasion, is the enactment, under the stars, in the very breath of the gods, of the true Achilles, the one he has come all this way to find.
… At his feet, the body whose quiet he can accept now as a mirror of his own… They are in perfect amity. Their part in the long war is at an end.
Following Patroclus’ death, Achilles’ guilt caused him to project his self-condemnation onto the gods. He therefore perceived their preservation of Hector’s body as a personal attack. Now, with his guilt healed and sense of unity restored, there is no need for him to project condemnation, nor to attack Hector. In joining with the Holy Spirit, Achilles has reunited with his mother element, his Self, and therefore with Patroclus as well.
Back in his hut, Achilles feels lighter, more energised. He has found himself, and more.
Priam, too, enjoys the fruits of his holy encounter with Achilles. Returning to Troy, he feels he is “coming home to a state of exultant wellbeing.” He was a man of sorrow, but is now “a hero of the deed that till now was never attempted.” Priam’s journey had begun with his right-minded vision for healing and his willingness to perceive shared interests where others only saw opposition.
By extending the light he perceived, Priam was given the opportunity to witness its effects, thereby confirming its reality. That was the true source of Priam and Achilles’ joy and lightness. If the light is with us, then we are not the guilty, shameful person we thought we were:
The miracle worker begins by perceiving light, and translates his perception into sureness by continually extending it and accepting its acknowledgment. Its effects assure him it is there (T-9.V.7: 8-9).
The Human Script
Achilles’ process mirrors our own journey across the lifespan. From losing his sense of communion with the unseen world — often reflected in our relationship to nature — and the comfort it provides, Achilles finds himself thrown into the “rough world of men”. He becomes accustomed to the concrete facts and harsh realities of daily life, establishing a place within it as a farmer and warrior.
He then experiences a second, devasting loss. His dear friend Patroclus is killed and Achilles is burdened with guilt. He loses all sense of honour, and crashes in a very public way. Yet it is this loss that eventually leads him back to the self he lost contact with long ago, the part of him in touch with the invisible world, with eternity.
Perhaps only a devastating classroom could generate such a return, providing a significant fracture in the status quo to shake us out of our acclimatisation to the concrete world. In another of Malouf’s novels, An Imaginary Life, the poet Ovid concludes the following as he realises that his exile from Rome to a remote, rural village — a virtual ‘no man’s land’ — has helped lead him back to himself and the encompassing mother element he had lost connection with as he entered adolescence:
More and more in these last few weeks I have come to realise that this place is the true destination I have been seeking, and that my life here, however painful, is my true fate, the one I have spent my whole life trying to escape. We barely recognise the annunciation when it comes, declaring:
Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but it is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.
Nearing the climax of An Imaginary Life, Ovid is led by a wolf-boy, “the Child”, toward an arc of water marking the boundaries of the Roman world. To cross it would be to enter a region unrefined, natural, original. Of the water, Ovid reflects:
However many steps I may have taken away from it, both in reality and in my mind, it remained… whispering to me: I am the border beyond which you must go if you are to find your true life, your true death at last.
Ovid’s experience in exile had healed old wounds. He reunites with the part of himself at one with oneness as he follows the Child through the water and into the grasslands beyond. And when the time comes, he dies at peace with the world, “immeasurably, unbearably happy”, his wholeness restored.
Likewise, as we practice forgiveness, opening our mind to the presence of the Holy Spirit, which has never left us, we return to ourselves. We can then return to our roles, allowing the Holy Spirit to work through us, where before our neediness was bound to lead the way. That Achilles was reluctant to let his army fight because of a petty dispute with the Greek generals shows that he was operating under his own steam. Even before Patroclus’ death, he wasn’t truly himself.
In closing, the following passage from the Course’s supplement, Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process and Practice, provides a fitting description for the encounter between Achilles and Priam. It shows that when our grief becomes overwhelming, our call for help makes way for the Holy Spirit to restore to our awareness all that we thought was lost:
Many will come to you carrying the gift of healing, if you so elect. The Holy Spirit never refuses an invitation to enter and abide with you… Whoever He sends you will reach you, holding out his hand to his Friend. Let the Christ in you bid him welcome, for that same Christ is in him as well. Deny him entrance, and you have denied the Christ in you. Remember the sorrowful story of the world, and the glad tidings of salvation. Remember the plan of God for the restoration of joy and peace. And do not forget how very simple are the ways of God:
You were lost in the darkness of the world until you asked for light.
And then God sent His Son to give it to you (P-3.III.8:2-3, 6-13).
Image: Grace, 2025, pencil sketch. Used with kind permission from the artist.
Books by Stephanie Panayi
Above the Battleground: The Courageous Path to Emotional Autonomy and Inner Peace
The Bridge of Return: A Course in Miracles as a Western Yoga
The Farthest Reaches of Inner Space
Reflections on A Course in Miracles 