Ch. 19. IV. A. 15 – 17. Jesus: “If you send forth only the messengers the Holy Spirit gives you, wanting no messages but theirs to return to you, you will experience fear no more. And the world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt and softly brushed with loveliness.
The world about you contains no fear that you’ve not laid upon it! And truly, there is no fear that you cannot ask love’s messengers to remove from the world you see, all the while that you’re still seeing yourself within it. For the Holy Spirit has given you His messengers to send out to your brother, and to return to you with what love sees. They have been given you to replace the ego’s hungry dogs of fear you sent before. And now the messengers of love go forth to signify the end of fear.
Now love would set its feast before you. On a table graced with an immaculate satin cloth, set in a quiet garden, no sound but singing and a softly joyous whispering is ever heard. This is a feast that honors your holy relationship, and at which everyone is welcomed as an honored guest.
In a holy instant, grace is said by everyone together, as they join in gentleness before the table of communion. And I will join you there, as long ago I promised and I promise still. For in your new relationship am I made welcome. And where I am made welcome, there I am.
I am made welcome in the state of grace the Holy Spirit brings, which means you have at last forgiven me, and have ceased to hold me separate from you. For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die instead of you. To the ego sin means death, and so to it, atonement is achieved through murder. Salvation is then looked upon as a way by which the Son of God was killed, instead of you!
Yet would I really offer you my body, you whom I love, knowing its littleness and unreality? Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart? Mine was of no greater value than yours; no better means for communication of salvation, though certainly not salvation’s Source. No one can ‘die for’ anyone, and death does not atone for sin. But you can live in the world as more than the body, if to show the world the body is not real.
The body does appear to you to be the symbol of sin, but only as long as you believe that it can get you what you want. While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you will also believe that it can bring you pain. To think you could be satisfied and happy, with so little, is but to hurt yourself. And to limit the happiness that you would otherwise have, is but to call upon ‘pain’ to fill your meager store, and to try to make your little life complete with it. But this ‘completion’ is only as the ego sees it! For guilt creeps in where true happiness has been denied, and merely ‘substitutes’ for it.
Communion with your brothers as yourself is another kind of completion entirely, one which goes beyond all guilt, because it goes beyond the body!”