The Atonement does not make holy. 2 You were created holy. 3
It merely brings unholiness to holiness; or what you made to what you
are. 4 Bringing illusion to truth, or the ego to God, is the Holy
Spirit's only function. 5 Keep not your making from your Father, for
hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and of yourself. 6 The
knowledge is safe, but where is your safety apart from it? 7 The making
of time to take the place of timelessness lay in the decision to be not
as you are. 8 Thus truth was made past, and the present was dedicated
to illusion. 9 And the past, too, was changed and interposed between
what always was and now. 10 The past that you remember never was, and
represents only the denial of what always was.
Bringing the ego to God is but to bring
error to truth, where it stands corrected because it is the opposite of
what it meets. 2 It is undone because the contradiction can no longer
stand. 3 How long can contradiction stand when its impossible nature is
clearly revealed? 4 What disappears in light is not attacked. 5 It
merely vanishes because it is not true. 6 Different realities are
meaningless, for reality must be one. 7 It cannot change with time or
mood or chance. 8 Its changelessness is what makes it real. 9 This
cannot be undone. 10 Undoing is for unreality. 11 And this reality will
do for you.
Merely by being what it is, does truth
release you from everything that it is not. 2 The Atonement is so
gentle you need but whisper to it, and all its power will rush to your
assistance and support. 3 You are not frail with God beside you. 4 Yet
without Him you are nothing. 5 The Atonement offers you God. 6 The gift
that you refused is held by Him in you. 7 The Holy Spirit holds it
there for you. 8 God has not left His altar, though His worshippers
placed other gods upon it. 9 The temple still is holy, for the Presence
that dwells within it
is
Holiness.
In the temple, Holiness waits quietly for the return of them
that love it. 2 The Presence knows they will return to purity and to
grace. 3 The graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover
all their sense of pain and loss with the immortal assurance of their
Father's Love. 4 There, fear of death will be replaced with joy of
life. 5 For God is life, and they abide in life. 6 Life is as holy as
the Holiness by which it was created. 7 The Presence of Holiness lives
in everything that lives, for Holiness created life, and leaves not
what It created holy as Itself.
In this world you can become a spotless
mirror, in which the Holiness of your Creator shines forth from you to
all around you. 2 You can reflect Heaven here. 3 Yet no reflections of
the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's
reflection in it. 4 Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. 5
You need but leave the mirror clean and clear of all the images of
hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. 6 God will shine upon it of
Himself. 7 Only the clear reflection of Himself can be perceived upon
it.
Reflections are seen in light. 2 In darkness
they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting
interpretations, rather than in themselves. 3 The reflection of God
needs no interpretation. 4 It is clear. 5 Clean but the mirror, and the
message that shines forth from what the mirror holds out for everyone
to see, no one can fail to understand. 6 It is the message that the
Holy Spirit is holding to the mirror that is in him. 7 He recognizes it
because he has been taught his need for it, but knows not where to look
to find it. 8 Let him, then, see it in you and share it with you.
Could you but realize for a single instant
the power of healing that the reflection of God, shining in you, can
bring to all the world, you could not wait to make the mirror of your
mind clean to receive the image of the holiness that heals the world. 2
The image of holiness that shines in your mind is not obscure, and will
not change. 3 Its meaning to those who look upon it is not obscure, for
everyone perceives it as the same. 4 All bring their different problems
to its healing light, and all their problems find but healing there.
The response of holiness to any form of
error is always the same. 2 There is no contradiction in what holiness
calls forth. 3 Its one response is healing, without regard for what is
brought to it. 4 Those who have learned to offer only healing, because
of the reflection of holiness in them, are ready at last for Heaven. 5
There, holiness is not a reflection, but rather the actual condition of
what was but reflected to them here. 6 God is no image, and His
creations, as part of Him, hold Him in them in truth. 7 They do not
merely reflect truth, for they
are
truth.