Your Function in the Atonement

14.5. – Your Function in the Atonement
 
When you accept a brother’s guiltlessness you will see the Atonement in
him. For by proclaiming it in him you make it yours, and you will see what
you sought. You will not see the symbol of your brother’s guiltlessness
shining within him while you still believe it is not there. His guiltlessness is
your Atonement. Grant it to him, and you will see the truth of what you
have acknowledged. Yet truth is offered first to be received, even as God
gave it first to his Son. The first in time means nothing, but the First in
eternity is God the Father, Who is both First and One. Beyond the First
there is no other, for there is no order, no second or third, and nothing but
the First.
 
You who belong to the First Cause, created by him like unto himself and
part of him, are more than merely guiltless. The state of guiltlessness is only
the condition in which what is not there has been removed from the
disordered mind that thought it was. This state, and only this, must you
attain, with God beside you. For until you do, you will still think that you
are separate from him. You can perhaps feel his presence next to you, but
cannot know that you are one with him. This cannot be taught. Learning
applies only to the condition in which it happens of itself.
 
When you have let all that obscured the truth in your most holy mind be
undone for you, and therefore stand in grace before your Father, he will
give himself to you as he has always done. Giving himself is all he knows,
and so it is all knowledge. For what he knows not cannot be, and therefore
cannot be given. Ask not to be forgiven, for this has already been
accomplished. Ask, rather, to learn how to forgive, and to restore what
always was to your unforgiving mind. Atonement becomes real and visible
to those who use it. On earth this is your only function, and you must learn
that it is all you want to learn. You will feel guilty till you learn this. For in
the end, whatever form it takes, your guilt arises from your failure to fulfill
your function in God’s Mind with all of yours. Can you escape this guilt by
failing to fulfill your function here?
 
You need not understand creation to do what must be done before that
knowledge would be meaningful to you. God breaks no barriers; neither did
he make them. When you release them they are gone. God will not fail, nor
ever has in anything. Decide that God is right and you are wrong about
yourself. he created you out of himself, but still within him. He knows what
you are. Remember that there is no second to him. There cannot, therefore,
be anyone without his holiness, nor anyone unworthy of his perfect love.
 
Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place made out of darkness
and deceit, for thus are darkness and deceit undone. Fail not yourself, but
instead offer to God and you his blameless Son. For this small gift of
appreciation for his love, God will himself exchange your gift for his.
 
Before you make any decisions for yourself, remember that you have
decided against your function in Heaven, and then consider carefully
whether you want to make decisions here. Your function here is only to
decide against deciding what you want, in recognition that you do not
know. How, then, can you decide what you should do? Leave all decisions
to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as he knows it. So
will he teach you to remove the awful burden you have laid upon yourself
by loving not the Son of God, and trying to teach him guilt instead of love.
 
Give up this frantic and insane attempt that cheats you of the joy of living
with your God and Father, and of waking gladly to his love and holiness
that join together as the truth in you, making you one with him.
 
When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as
easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as
gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer. Only your
own volition seems to make deciding hard. The Holy Spirit will not delay in
answering your every question what to do. He knows. And he will tell you,
and then do it for you. You who are tired will find this is more restful than
sleep. For you can bring your guilt into sleeping, but not into this.
 
Unless you are guiltless you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you
know him. Therefore, you must be guiltless. Yet if you do not accept the
necessary conditions for knowing him, you have denied him and do not
recognize him, though he is all around you. He cannot be known without his
Son, whose guiltlessness is the condition for knowing him. Accepting his
Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete, that knowledge is swept
away from recognition in the very mind where God himself has placed it. If
you would but listen, and learn how impossible this is! Do not endow him
with attributes you understand. You made him not, and anything you
understand is not of him.
 
Your task is not to make reality. It is here without your making, but not
without you. You who have tried to throw yourself away and valued God so
little, hear me speak for him and for yourself. You cannot understand how
much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of
the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it
can compare, and nothing you have ever felt apart from him resembles it
ever so faintly. You cannot even give a blessing in perfect gentleness.
 
Would you know of One Who gives forever, and Who knows of nothing
except giving?
 
The children of Heaven live in the light of the blessing of their Father,
because they know that they are sinless. The Atonement was established as
the means of restoring guiltlessness to minds that have denied it, and thus
denied Heaven to itself. Atonement teaches you the true condition of the
Son of God. It does not teach you what you are, or what your Father is. The
Holy Spirit, Who remembers this for you, merely teaches you how to
remove the blocks that stand between you and what you know. His memory
is yours. If you remember what you have made, you are remembering
nothing. Remembrance of reality is in him, and therefore in you.
 
The guiltless and the guilty are totally incapable of understanding one
another. Each perceives the other as like himself, making both unable to
communicate, because each sees the other unlike the way he sees himself.
God can communicate only to the Holy Spirit in your mind, because only he
shares the knowledge of what you are with God. And only the Holy Spirit
can answer God for you, for only he knows what God is. Everything else
that you have placed within your mind cannot exist, for what is not in
communication with the Mind of God has never been. Communication with
God is life. Nothing without it is at all.