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