The Coming of the Guest

Chapter 29 – 2. The Coming of the Guest

Why would you not perceive it as release from suffering to learn that you
are free? Why would you not acclaim the truth instead of looking on it as an
enemy? Why does an easy path, so clearly marked it is impossible to lose
the way, seem thorny, rough and far too difficult for you to follow? Is it not
because you see it as the road to hell instead of looking on it as a simple
way, without a sacrifice or any loss, to find yourself in Heaven and in God?
Until you realize you give up nothing, until you understand there is no loss,
you will have some regrets about the way that you have chosen. And you
will not see the many gains your choice has offered you. Yet though you do
not see them, they are there. Their cause has been effected, and they must
be present where their cause has entered in.
 
You have accepted healing’s cause, and so it must be you are healed. And
being healed, the power to heal must also now be yours. The miracle is not
a separate thing that happens suddenly, as an effect without a cause. Nor is
 
it, in itself, a cause. But where its cause is must it be. Now is it caused,
though not as yet perceived. And its effects are there, though not yet seen.
Look inward now, and you will not behold a reason for regret, but cause
indeed for glad rejoicing and for hope of peace.
 
It has been hopeless to attempt to find the hope of peace upon a
battleground. It has been futile to demand escape from sin and pain of what
was made to serve the function of retaining sin and pain. For pain and sin
are one illusion, as are hate and fear, attack and guilt but one. Where they
are causeless their effects are gone, and love must come wherever they are
not. Why are you not rejoicing? You are free of pain and sickness, misery
and loss, and all effects of hatred and attack. No more is pain your friend
and guilt your god, and you should welcome the effects of love.
 
Your Guest has come. You asked Him, and He came. You did not hear Him
enter, for you did not wholly welcome Him. And yet His gifts came with
Him. He has laid them at your feet, and asks you now that you will look on
them and take them for your own. He needs your help in giving them to all
who walk apart, believing they are separate and alone. They will be healed
when you accept your gifts, because your Guest will welcome everyone
whose feet have touched the holy ground whereon you stand, and where His
gifts for them are laid.
 
You do not see how much you now can give, because of everything you
have received. Yet He Who entered in but waits for you to come where you
invited Him to be. There is no other place where He can find His host, nor
where His host can meet with Him. And nowhere else His gifts of peace and
joy, and all the happiness His Presence brings, can be obtained. For they are
where He is Who brought them with Him, that they might be yours. You
cannot see your Guest, but you can see the gifts He brought. And when you
look on them, you will believe His Presence must be there. For what you
now can do could not be done without the love and grace His Presence
holds.
 
Such is the promise of the living God; His Son have life and every living
thing be part of him, and nothing else have life. What you have given “life”
is not alive, and symbolizes but your wish to be alive apart from life, alive
in death, with death perceived as life, and living, death. Confusion follows
on confusion here, for on confusion has this world been based, and there is
nothing else it rests upon. Its basis does not change, although it seems to be
in constant change. Yet what is that except the state confusion really
means? Stability to those who are confused is meaningless, and shift and
change become the law on which they predicate their lives.
 
The body does not change. It represents the larger dream that change is
possible. To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you found
yourself before. There is no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it
not. Yet here on earth it has a double purpose, for it can be made to teach
opposing things. And they reflect the teacher who is teaching them. The
body can appear to change with time, with sickness or with health, and with
events that seem to alter it. Yet this but means the mind remains unchanged
in its belief of what the purpose of the body is.
 
Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its nothingness is
guarantee that it can not be sick. In your demand that it be more than this
lies the idea of sickness. For it asks that God be less than all He really is.
What, then, becomes of you, for it is you of whom the sacrifice is asked?
For He is told that part of Him belongs to Him no longer. He must sacrifice
your self, and in His sacrifice are you made more and He is lessened by the
loss of you. And what is gone from Him becomes your god, protecting you
from being part of Him.
 
The body that is asked to be a god will be attacked, because its nothingness
has not been recognized. And so it seems to be a thing with power in itself.
As something, it can be perceived and thought to feel and act, and hold you
in its grasp as prisoner to itself. And it can fail to be what you demanded
that it be. And you will hate it for its littleness, unmindful that the failure
does not lie in that it is not more than it should be, but only in your failure
to perceive that it is nothing. Yet its nothingness is your salvation, from
which you would flee.
 
As “something” is the body asked to be God’s enemy, replacing what He is
with littleness and limit and despair. It is His loss you celebrate when you
behold the body as a thing you love, or look upon it as a thing you hate. For
if He be the sum of everything, then what is not in Him does not exist, and
His completion is its nothingness. Your savior is not dead, nor does he
dwell in what was built as temple unto death. He lives in God, and it is this
that makes him savior unto you, and only this. His body’s nothingness
releases yours from sickness and from death. For what is yours cannot be
more or less than what is his.