The Second Obstacle: The Belief the Body is Valuable for What It Offers

Chapter 19 – 7. The Second Obstacle: The Belief the Body is Valuable for What It Offers

We said that peace must first surmount the obstacle of your desire to get rid
of it. Where the attraction of guilt holds sway, peace is not wanted. The
second obstacle that peace must flow across, and closely related to the first,
is the belief that the body is valuable for what it offers. For here is the
attraction of guilt made manifest in the body, and seen in it.
 
This is the value that you think peace would rob you of. This is what you
believe that it would dispossess, and leave you homeless. And it is this for
which you would deny a home to peace. This “sacrifice” you feel to be too
great to make, too much to ask of you. Is it a sacrifice, or a release? What
has the body really given you that justifies your strange belief that in it lies
salvation? Do you not see that this is the belief in death? Here is the focus
of the perception of Atonement as murder. Here is the source of the idea
that love is fear.
 
The Holy Spirit’s messengers are sent far beyond the body, calling the mind
to join in holy communion and be at peace. Such is the message that I gave
them for you. It is only the messengers of fear that see the body, for they
look for what can suffer. Is it a sacrifice to be removed from what can
suffer? The Holy Spirit does not demand you sacrifice the hope of the
body’s pleasure; it has no hope of pleasure. But neither can it bring you fear
of pain. Pain is the only “sacrifice” the Holy Spirit asks, and this he would
remove.
 
Peace is extended from you only to the eternal, and it reaches out from the
eternal in you. It flows across all else. The second obstacle is no more solid
than the first. For you want neither to get rid of peace nor limit it. What are
these obstacles that you would interpose between peace and its going forth
but barriers you place between your will and its accomplishment? You want
communion, not the feast of fear. You want salvation, not the pain of guilt.
 
And you want your Father, not a little mound of clay, to be your home. In
your holy relationship is your Father’s Son. He has not lost communion with
him, nor with himself. When you agreed to join one another, you
acknowledged this is so. This has no cost, but it has release from cost.
 
You have paid very dearly for your illusions, and nothing you have paid for
brought you peace. Are you not glad that Heaven cannot be sacrificed, and
sacrifice cannot be asked of you? There is no obstacle that you can place
before our union, for in your holy relationship I am there already. We will
surmount all obstacles together, for we stand within the gates and not
outside. How easily the gates are opened from within, to let peace through
to bless the tired world! Can it be difficult for us to walk past barriers
together, when you have joined the limitless? The end of guilt is in your
hands to give. Would you stop now to look for guilt in your brother?
 
Let me be to you the symbol of the end of guilt, and look upon your brother
as you would look upon me. Forgive me all the sins you think the Son of
God committed. And in the light of your forgiveness he will remember who
he is, and forget what never was. I ask for your forgiveness, for if you are
guilty, so must I be. But if I surmounted guilt and overcame the world, you
were with me. Would you see in me the symbol of guilt or the end of guilt,
remembering that what I signify to you you see within yourself?
 
From your holy relationship truth proclaims the truth, and love looks on
itself. Salvation flows from deep within the home you offered to my Father
and to me. And we are there together, in the quiet communion in which the
Father and the Son are joined. O come ye faithful to the holy union of the
Father and the Son in you! And keep you not apart from what is offered you
in gratitude for giving peace its home in Heaven. Send forth to all the world
the joyous message of the end of guilt, and all the world will answer. Think
of your happiness as everyone offers you witness of the end of sin, and
shows you that its power is gone forever. Where can guilt be, when the
belief in sin is gone? And where is death, when its great advocate is heard
no more?
 
Forgive me your illusions, and release me from punishment for what I have
not done. So will you learn the freedom that I taught by teaching freedom to
your brother, and so releasing me. I am within your holy relationship, yet
you would imprison me behind the obstacles you raise to freedom, and bar
my way to you. Yet it is not possible to keep away One Who is there
already. And in him it is possible that our communion, where we are joined
already, will be the focus of the new perception that will bring light to all
the world, contained in you.