Ch. 15. XI. 3 – 7. Jesus: “This Christmas, give the Holy Spirit everything that would hurt you. Let yourself be healed completely that you may join with Him in healing, and let us celebrate our release together by releasing everyone with us. Leave nothing behind, for release must be total, and when you have accepted it with me, you will give it with me!
In our relationship, which is as innocent as our relationship with our Father, and just as powerful, all pain and sacrifice and littleness will disappear. Pain will be brought to us and disappear in our presence, and without pain there can be no sacrifice. And without sacrifice, there love must be!
What you would exclude from yourself must seem fearful, for you endow it with fear as you try to cast it out, though it is eternally part of you. Who can perceive part of himself as loathsome, and live within himself in peace? And who can, without experiencing himself as incomplete and lonely, try to resolve his inner ‘conflict’ of Heaven and hell by ‘casting Heaven out,’ and then laying upon it the attributes of hell?
As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived! And so long will you also perceive yourself as a victim of sacrifice, justified in sacrificing others. For who could thrust Heaven and its Creator aside without a sense of sacrifice and loss? And who could suffer sacrifice and loss without attempting to restore himself? Yet how could you accomplish this yourself, when the basis of your attempts is the belief in the reality of the deprivation? Deprivation breeds attack, being the belief that attack is justified. And as long as you would retain the deprivation, attack becomes salvation and sacrifice is then seen as ‘love.’
So it is then, that in all your apparent seeking for love, you actually seek for sacrifice instead, and find it. Yet you find not love! It is impossible to deny what love is and still recognize it. What love means to you lies in what you have tried to ‘cast outside’ yourself, and love has no meaning apart from you. It is what you have preferred to keep that has no meaning, while what you would ‘keep away’ holds all the meaning of the universe, and holds the universe together in its meaning. Unless the universe were joined in you, it would be apart from God, and to be without Him is to be without meaning!
In the holy instant, the condition of love is met once again, for minds are joined without the body’s interference, and where there is real communication, there is peace. The Prince of Peace was born to re-establish the condition of love by teaching that communication remains unbroken even if the body is destroyed, provided that you not see the body as the necessary means of communication.”