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Chapter 20: Beyond the Obstacles to Peace

3. The Messengers of Fear and Love

The attraction of guilt produces fear of Love. For Love can never see guilt at all, because it cannot be seen, being unreal. It is the Nature of Love to see only Truth, for there It sees Itself, with which It would unite in holy Union and Completion. As Love must see beyond fear, so must fear be unable to perceive Love. For Love contains the end of guilt as surely as fear depends on it. Love is attracted only to Love. Seeing beyond guilt completely, It beholds no fear. Being wholly without attack, It cannot be afraid.

Fear is attracted to what Love cannot see. And while fear believes that what Love sees does not exist, Love knows that what fear looks upon has no being. Fear looks on guilt with devotion just as Love beholds Itself in Everything the Divine created. And each has messengers that they send forth, and which return to them with messages written in the language in which their going forth was asked. Love’s Messengers are gently sent, and return with Messages of Love and Gentleness. The messengers of fear are harshly ordered to seek out guilt, and cherish every scrap of apparent evil and sin that they can find, losing none of them on pain of death, and laying them dutifully before their lord and master.

Perception cannot obey two masters, each asking for messages of different things in different languages. What fear would feed upon, Love sees beyond. What fear demands, Love cannot even conceive. The fierce attraction that guilt holds for fear is wholly absent from Love’s gentle Seeing. What Love beholds is quite invisible to fear, and meaningless to it. Relationships in this world are the result of how the world is perceived. And this depends on which emotion was called on to send its messengers to perceive it, and return with word of what they perceived.

Fear’s messengers are trained through terror, and they tremble when their master calls upon them to serve it. For fear is merciless even to its “allies.” Its messengers steal guiltily away in hungry search of guilt, for they are kept cold and starving, and made very vicious by their master, who allows them to feast only upon what they return to it. No little shred of guilt escapes their hungry eyes. And in their savage search for sin, they pounce on anything they perceive, and, shrieking, carry it to their master to be devoured.

Send not these savage messengers into the world to feast upon it and to prey upon your experience of reality. For they will bring you messages of bones and skin and flesh. They have been taught to seek for the corruptible, and to return with gorges filled with things decayed and rotting. To them such things are beautiful, because they seem to allay their savage pangs of hunger. For they are frantic with the pain of fear, and would avert the punishment of it who sends them forth, by offering it what they hold dear.

The Holy Spirit has given you Love’s Messengers to send instead of those trained through fear. They are as eager to return to you what they hold dear as are the messengers of fear. When you send the Messengers of Love forth, they will see only the blameless and the beautiful, the gentle and the kind. They will be careful to let no little act of charity, no tiny expression of forgiveness, no little breaths of Love escape their notice. And they will return with all the happy things they found, to share them lovingly with you. Be not afraid of them. They offer you awakening. Theirs are the Messages of Safety. For they see the world as kind. Creation’s Gentleness is all they see.

If you send forth only the Messengers the Holy Spirit gives you, wanting no messages but theirs, you will perceive fear no more. The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt, and softly brushed with Beauty. For the world contains only the fear that you laid upon it, and none you cannot ask Love’s Messengers to remove from it, and perceive it still. The Holy Spirit has given you Its Messengers to send each other in the holy relationship, and return to each with what Love sees. They have been given to replace the hungry dogs of fear you sent before. And they go forth to signify the end of fear.

Love, too, would set a feast before you. This feast is on a table covered with a spotless cloth, set in a quiet garden, where no sound but singing and a softly joyous celebration is ever heard. This is a feast that honors your holy relationships, and at which everyone is welcomed as an honored guest. And 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 promise still. For in your new relationships am I made welcome, and where I am made welcome, there I am. I am made welcome in the State of Grace, which means you have at last forgiven me, and with me all our sisters and brothers. For I became the symbol of the Innocence that the ego despises as sin, and so in the ego’s eyes I had to die. For to the ego, sin is truth and means death, and so the ego’s version of atonement is achieved through forcefully eliminating and thus removing what it perceives as threat.

“Salvation” is thus looked upon by those who associate with the ego, and perceive the world through the ego’s fear of being eliminated, as a way by which the Child of the Divine was killed and sacrificed instead of them. And by this mad interpretation, I became the symbol to many of the fear of death as atonement. It is for this insane projection onto me that I must be forgiven by my sisters and brothers. Would I have offered any of my brothers or sisters, whom I love equally and value truly, my body in sacrifice, knowing its littleness? Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart? My body was of no greater value than yours. It was just as good a means as any other body for the communication of awakening, but certainly not to be confused with awakening’s Source.

No one can “die” for anyone, because death doesn’t exist, as I demonstrated. Nor can the appearance of death “atone” for sin. But each one can live in such a way to show that death is not real, which does offer Atonement to everyone.

The body does appear to be the symbol of sin while 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 to hurt yourself. To limit the Happiness that you will to have calls upon pain to fill your meager store and to make your life complete, which it can never do. This incompleteness is completion as the ego perceives it. For guilt creeps in where Happiness has been removed, and substitutes for It.

Communion or true connection with others is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt because it goes beyond the body. Communion comes with Peace, and Peace must transcend the body.