ACIM Chapter 13. III. The Fear of Redemption, P 3, 4

ACIM Chapter 13. III. The Fear of Redemption, P 3, 4

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 3

3 In honesty, is it not harder for you to say “I love” than “I hate”? You associate love with weakness and hatred with strength, and your own real power seems to you as your real weakness. For you could not control your joyous response to the call of love if you heard it, and the whole world you thought you made would vanish. The Holy Spirit, then, seems to be attacking your fortress, for you would shut out God, and He does not will to be excluded.

Is it harder for me to say I love you than I hate you? I think that may be true. It has been shifting, and I say I love you more often, and I mean it. But I still feel resistance sometimes, especially if I feel attacked. I don’t use the word “hate”—not out loud and not even in my mind—but I mean it. I even feel that way toward people I love at times.

 One day, I said something that triggered a response in my dear friend.

I apologized, but she didn’t want to let it go, and I started to feel guilty for my thoughtlessness. Instead of being loving, I was sarcastic. That sarcasm was just another way of saying, I hate you for making me feel bad. Then, of course, I felt worse. When I felt threatened at work, I responded with hateful thoughts. When I caught that, I asked for help to see differently, but I saw that I chose defense first many times.

 The idea that I need to protect this body, this image, this life is what inspires the desire to attack and what provokes the hateful responses. As long as I keep defending and attacking, I will not be willing to hear the call to Love. When I defend myself against my brothers, I defend against union. And so I defend myself against God because God is not division. My strength lies in God. In my defensiveness, I choose weakness over my own power.

 Another way to say this is that we know, deep within a hidden place in our mind, that the only way we can keep ourselves from responding joyfully and eagerly to God’s Call to Love is to defend against it. We protect ourselves from this Call by convincing ourselves that guilt and fear are real and that we must defend ourselves against them. So, we have made a false association between hate and safety. In so doing, we have cut ourselves off from our true power, which is love. Since we believe attack is our salvation, we have taught ourselves to see God as the enemy Who would destroy us with His love.

 Understanding this, I feel more compassion for those who act out of fear.

I can think of the people who have committed mass murders and realize that they are unlike me only in that they acted on the fear and hate that is also in my mind. I can help us all if I ask that my mind be healed of hate and that I be open to love instead. Each time we see hate in our mind and allow it to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, we undo this insane thought system a bit more, and sanity becomes more attractive to us. We fear less and love more. We open to God a bit more and are more attracted to His love.

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 4

4 You have built your whole insane belief system because you think you would be helpless in God’s Presence, and you would save yourself from His Love because you think it would crush you into nothingness. You are afraid it would sweep you away from yourself and make you little, because you believe that magnitude lies in defiance, and that attack is grandeur. You think you have made a world God would destroy; and by loving Him, which you do, you would throw this world away, which you would. Therefore, you have used the world to cover your love, and the deeper you go into the blackness of the ego’s foundation, the closer you come to the Love that is hidden there. And it is this that frightens you.

Reading this, I see that the whole problem is very simple. I love God, and my love for Him is so big, so intense, so complete that if I let myself remember that love, I would rush to Him and into Him. My fear is that this would leave me helpless, crushed, and obliterated. I would be nothing. I would cease to exist. So, I defend myself against God.

I attack His memory and then run deeper into the darkness of the ego to hide from His Love. I believe that this attack-and-defense strategy is my strength. All this is happening only in my mind. I attack what I am and hide from myself. And nothing is happening because none of this is possible. God cannot be attacked, and I cannot defend against Love.

I dream and dream and dream. I dream of suffering and loss and pain.

Mostly, I dream of fear. I am afraid to come out of the dream and go more deeply into it. I am afraid of God and of my Self, afraid that I have hidden myself away, and afraid I have not hidden well enough. In my mind, I have made this self, this body, this world, and I have given it value, and now I think I must defend it against Love. And all the time, I love God, and He loves me, and I cannot hide from Love. I can only pretend to do so.

“and the deeper you go into the blackness of the ego’s foundation, the closer you come to the Love that is hidden there. And it is this that frightens you.”

This is the essence of our resistance to doing the work. We are afraid of looking at our ego thoughts because we are afraid of finding the Love that is hidden there. I have been vigilant about my thoughts and have been taking them to Spirit for correction for years now, and yet I still resist at times. Recently, I have noticed myself pushing some of these thoughts down and away. Holy Spirit told me to stop doing that, to look at them with Him. I have nothing to fear in looking because, ultimately, I will find only Love.

The world I made to play at separation is of no value.

It is nothing, just thought given temporary form and meaningless. It is not me, not this body or this life or any other life. Letting it go would have as much impact as does coming into the house after a day of play has for a child. This is all we are doing with the study of the Course. We are convincing ourselves to let the memory of Love overtake us. We are choosing to come out of the dark and return to our Home after a moment of play. The solution to the only problem we have ever had is simple: surrender to God, surrender to Love. Return to my Self.

Keith Kavanagh has an excellent video on Forgiveness. It is the simplest and most effective forgiveness process I have found. To watch watch his video, CLICK HERE.