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Chapter 27: The Transition to Holy Ground

10. The Power of Witness

The secret wish and the temptation to find examples in life of being unfairly treated as justification for judgment and anger is a compromise attempt that would combine innocence and attack. Who can combine the entirely 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 symbols of fear or judgment on the path, or you will weave a crown of thorns which will seem to afflict your sisters and brothers and you.

You cannot suffer abandonment and martyrdom alone. And if you are unfairly treated, then your sisters and brothers must suffer the unfairness that you have looked upon. The outrageous violations of what is right must deserve justice to atone for all that is wrong, or justice would be mocked. Thus mistakes are not seen beyond.

You cannot sacrifice yourself alone. For sacrifice is total. If it could occur at all it would entail the Whole of the Divine’s Creation—the Creator with the sacrifice of Its beloved Children. In your release from sacrifice is your sisters and brothers’ made manifest, and shown to be their own. But every pain you suffer do you look upon as proof that they are guilty of attack, if you did not attack yourself. And if you did attack yourself you will still believe it was because they drove you to it. Thus would you make yourself to be the sign that they have lost their innocence, and need only look on your suffering to realize that they have been condemned. And you hope that whatever has been unfair to you will return to them in righteousness, because the unjust punishment that you suffer now belongs to them, and you will be set free when it rests on them.

Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of your sisters and brothers’ guilt, for you will not escape the punishment you wish for them. But in their Innocence you will find your own. Whenever anyone unconsciously consents to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated, or in need of anything, they accuse their sisters and brothers and their Creator of attack upon the Divine’s Child. These wounded ones hold a picture of their mistreatment before the eyes of those accused, that these unforgivable errors and the Creator’s mistreatment can be seen writ in Heaven in their blood and pain, and that these go before the accused, closing off the Gate to Heaven between the Creator and Its Children, and condemning the Children to nightmares and guilt.

Yet is this judgment writ in the illusion of nightmares, and not in Heaven where you and they and your Creator are beyond lack or injustice of any kind, proving the Innocence of All. The picture of yourself you offer your sisters and brothers here you show yourself, and give it all your faith. The Holy Spirit offers you to give to them a picture of yourself in which there is no pain and no reproach at all. And what was martyred to their guilt becomes the perfect witness to their Innocence and your own.

The power of witness is stronger than the power of belief because it brings conviction in its wake. Witnesses are believed because they point beyond themselves to what they represent. Sickness and suffering simply represent guilt—the witness to a payment due that it has been sworn will never be escaped. This sick and sorry picture is accepted if only it can serve to punish. Those who have chosen this picture are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek retribution. Death seems an easy price if they can say, “Behold me, sisters and brothers and Creator and cruel self, at your hands I have suffered and I die!” This the witness to someone’s guilt. And death would prove that their own and their sisters and brothers’ errors must have been sins, and that their Creator must be heartless.

Sickness is perceived as merely a “little” death by those who choose it, a form of retribution not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you give your sisters and brothers you have looked upon in grief. And everything that it has shown to them have you secretly believed because it witnessed to the guilt in them, which you perceived and held dear in madness.

Now in the hands made gentle by Its 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 perceived or pictured at all. But this Picture 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 and your sisters and brothers and Creator’s Innocence. Show this unto your sisters and brothers, who will see that every wound is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in Love. And they will behold their forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will see beyond it to the Innocence that they behold in you.

Here is the proof that neither they nor you have ever sinned, that nothing that their madness bid them do was ever done, or ever had real effects of any kind. That no reproach they laid upon their hearts was ever justified, and that no attack can touch them with the poisoned sting of fear. Attest to your own and your sisters and brothers and Creator’s Innocence and not your or their guilt. Your healing is your sisters and brothers’ comfort and their health because it proves illusions were not true.