THE  GREAT  AWAKENING

 PART I

CHAPTER 8

If you hate the one God loves, then you and your Creator have a different will.  Yet if you are His Will, what you must then believe is that you are not yourself.  You can indeed believe this, and you do, but never will it be more than madness.  There is nothing to prevent you from recognising all calls for help as exactly what they are except your own imagined need to attack.

How willing are you to forgive your brother?  How much do you desire Peace instead of endless strife and misery and pain?  These questions are the same, in different form.  Would you condemn your brothers, or free them?  Would you join in the crucifixion, or the resurrection?  Would you transcend your prison and ascend to the Father?  These questions are also the same, and are answered together.  Through guilt you exclude your Father and your brothers from yourself.  Through Peace you invite them back, realising that they are One with you.  In the protection of your Wholeness, all are invited and made welcome.  And you understand that your completion is God's, whose only need is to have you be Complete.  For your completion makes you His in your awareness, and it is here that you experience yourself as you were created, and as you are.

The grace of God rests gently on forgiving eyes, and everything they look on speaks of Him to the beholder.  The Innocent are safe because they share their Innocence.  Nothing they see is harmful for their awareness of the Truth releases everything from the illusion of harmfulness.  He can see no evil; nothing in the world to fear, and no one who is different from himself.  And as he loves them, so he looks upon himself with love and gentleness.  He would no more condemn himself for his mistakes than damn another.  The kindness of his sight rests on himself with all the tenderness it offers others.  For he would only heal and only bless.

Can you imagine how beautiful those you forgive will look to you?  In no fantasy have you ever seen anything so lovely.  Nothing you see in the world, sleeping or waking, comes near to such Loveliness.  And nothing will you value like unto this, nor hold so dear.  Nothing that you remember that made your heart sing with joy has ever brought you even a little part of the happiness this sight will bring to you.  For you will see the Son of God.  See only praise of Him in what He has created, for He will never cease His praise of you.

Nothing can shake God's conviction of the perfect purity of everything that He created, for it is wholly pure.  You can behold the holiness God gave His Son, and never need you think that there is something else for you to see.  No illusion that you have ever held against him has touched his Innocence in any way.  His shining purity, wholly untouched by guilt, and wholly loving, is bright within you.  Look upon him and love him, for in love of him is your guiltlessness.  Release from guilt, as you would be released.  The redeemed son of man is the guiltless Son of God, and to recognise him is your redemption.

You who could give the Love of God to everything you see, and touch, and remember are literally denying Heaven to yourself.  Forgiveness turns the world of sin into a world of glory, wonderful to see.  Each flower shines in Light, and every bird sings of the Joy of Heaven.  Sin has no place in Heaven, where its results are alien, and can no more enter than can their source.  And therein lies your need to see your brother sinless.  In him is Heaven.  See sin in him instead and Heaven is lost to you.  But see him as he is, and what is yours shines from him to you.