The
wish to be (perceive yourself) unfairly treated is a compromise
attempt that would combine...
attack
and
innocence.
Who
can combine the wholly incompatible, and make a unity of what can
never join?
Walk
you the gentle
way, and you will fear no evil and no shadows in the night. But
place no terror symbols on your path, or you will weave a crown
of thorns from which your brother and yourself will not escape.
You cannot crucify yourself alone. And if you are unfairly treated,
he must suffer the unfairness that you see. You cannot sacrifice
yourself alone. For sacrifice is total. If it could
occur at all, it would entail the whole of God’s creation,
and the Father with the sacrifice of his beloved Son.
In your release from sacrifice
is his made manifest, and shown to be his own. But every pain you
suffer do you see as proof that he is guilty of attack. Thus would
you make yourself to be the sign that he has lost his innocence
and need but look on you to realize that he has been condemned.
And what to you has been unfair will come to him in righteousness.
The unjust vengeance that you suffer now belongs to him, and when
it rests on him are you set free.
Wish
not to make yourself a living symbol of his guilt, for you will
not escape the death you made for him. But in his innocence,
you find your own.
Whenever
you consent ...
to
suffer pain,
to
be deprived,
unfairly
treated or
in
need of anything,
you but
accuse your brother of attack upon God’s Son.
You
hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes that he may see
his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before
him, closing off the gate and damning him to hell. Yet this is writ
in hell and not in Heaven, where you are beyond attack and prove
his innocence. The picture of yourself you offer him you show yourself
and give it all your faith.
The
Holy Spirit offers you to give to him a picture of yourself in which
there is no pain and no reproach at all. And
what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his
innocence.
The
power of witness
is beyond belief because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness
is believed because he points beyond himself to what he represents.
A sick and suffering you but represents your brother’s guilt;
the witness which you send lest he forget the injuries he gave from
which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry picture
you accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The
sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to
kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say,
“Behold
me, brother, at your hand I die.”
For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove
his errors must be sins.
Sickness
is but a “little” death; a form of vengeance not yet
total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The
bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother you
have looked upon in grief. And everything that it has shown to him
have you believed because it witnessed to the guilt in him which
you perceived and loved.
Now
in the hands made gently by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture
of a different you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you
really are cannot be seen nor pictured. Yet this one has not
been used for purpose of attack and therefore never suffered pain
at all.
It
witnesses to the eternal truth that you
cannot be hurt and points beyond itself to both your innocence
and his.
Show
this unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed and
every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look
on his forgiveness there and with healed eyes will look beyond it
to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that
he has never sinned; that nothing which his madness bid him do was
ever done or ever had effects of any kind; that no reproach he laid
upon his heart was ever justified, and no attack can ever touch
him with the poisoned and relentless sting of fear. Attest his innocence
and not his guilt. Your healing is his comfort and his health because
it proves illusions are not true.
It
is not will for life, but wish for death that is the motivation
for this world. Its (world's) only purpose is to prove guilt real.
No
worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this
one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed,
and lend conviction to the (ego thought) system they speak for and
represent. And each has many voices, speaking to your brother and
yourself in different tongues. And yet to both the message is the
same.
Adornment
of the body seeks to show how lovely are the witnesses for guilt.
Concerns
about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life;
how easily destroyed is what you love.
Depression
speaks of death and vanity of no real concern with anything at
all.
The
strongest witness to futility, which bolsters all the rest and
helps them paint the picture in which sin (guilt) is justified,
is sickness in whatever form it takes.
The
sick have reason
for each one of their unnatural desires and strange needs. For who
could live a life so soon cut short and not esteem the worth of
passing joys? What pleasures could there be that will endure? Are
not the frail entitled to believe that every stolen scrap of pleasure
is their righteous payment for their little lives? Their death will
pay the price for all of them if they enjoy their benefits or not.
The end of life must come, whatever way that life be spent. And
so take pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral.
These
are not sins, but witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and
death are real, and innocence and sin will end alike within the
termination of the grave.
If
this were true, there would be reason to remain content to seek
for passing joys, and cherish little pleasures where you can. Yet
in this picture is the body not perceived as neutral and without
a goal inherent in itself. For it becomes the
symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences still are
there to see, so
that the cause can never be denied.
Your
function is to show your brother sin (guilt) can have no cause.
How
futile must it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what
your function is can never be! The Holy Spirit’s picture changes
not the body into something it is not. It only takes away from it
all signs of accusation and of blamefulness.
Pictured
without a purpose, it is seen as neither sick nor well, nor bad
nor good. No grounds are offered that it may be judged in any way
at all. It has no life, but neither is it dead. It stands apart
from all experience of fear or love. For now it witnesses to nothing
yet, its purpose being open, and the mind made free again to choose
what it is for. Now is it not condemned, but waiting for a purpose
to be given that it may fulfill the function that it will receive.
Into
this empty space, from which the goal of sin has been removed, is
Heaven free to be remembered. Here its peace can come, and perfect
healing take the place of death.
The
body can become...
a sign of life,
a promise of redemption,
and
a breath of immortality
to
those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it
have healing as its purpose. Then will it send forth the message
it received and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth
and value that it represents.
Let
it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked.
And to your brother let its message be,“Behold
me, brother, at your hand I live.”
The
simple way to let this be achieved is merely this; to let the body
have no purpose from the past, when you were sure you knew its purpose
was to foster guilt. For this insists your crippled picture is a
lasting sign of what it represents. This leaves no space in which
a different view, another purpose, can be given it. You do not know
its purpose. You but gave illusions of a purpose to a thing you
made to hide your function from yourself. This thing without a purpose
cannot hide the function that the Holy Spirit gave. Let, then, its
purpose and your function both be reconciled at last, and seen as
one.