ACIM Chapter 14. IV. Your Function in the Atonement P 7, 8

ACIM Chapter 14. IV. Your Function in the Atonement P 7, 8

IV. Your Function in the Atonement

7. Unless you are guiltless you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you know Him. ²Therefore, you must be guiltless. ³Yet 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. ⁴He cannot be known without His Son, whose guiltlessness is the condition for knowing Him. ⁵Accepting 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. ⁶If you would but listen, and learn how impossible this is! ⁷Do not endow Him with attributes you understand. ⁸You made Him not, and anything you understand is not of Him.

8. Your task is not to make reality. ²It is here without your making, but not without you. ³You who have tried to throw yourself away and valued God so little, hear me speak for Him and for yourself. ⁴You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. ⁵There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt apart from Him resembles it ever so faintly. ⁶You cannot even give a blessing in perfect gentleness. ⁷Would you know of One Who gives forever, and Who knows of nothing except giving? (ACIM, T-14.IV.7:1–8:7)

Unless you are guiltless you cannot know God…

I will tell you why that phrase grabbed my attention. It defined the stakes. I want to know God, and guilt is going to prevent that. But then, as I read the rest of the sentence, I see that it is God’s Will that I know Him. Therefore, I must be guiltless. You know, I think all that we have been studying in the previous section and in this one has had a profound effect on me. I am still aware of guilt in my mind, but I am not so attracted to it anymore. In fact, my initial response is to recognize it as an irrelevant thought.

There have been many opportunities to test this as I read the news and scroll through Facebook. I have so much compassion for those who are suffering, but I am not so tempted to see guilt involved in it. Once in a while, I fall into that trap, but I have little interest in staying there because, more than wanting to see someone guilty, I want to know God. I will admit, though, that there have been a couple of times I had to claw my way out of the trap. Still, I always do. At this point, I want to know God more than I want to stay there..

The question becomes, how do I undo guilt? No, wait, that’s not the question because this paragraph isn’t saying that I need to stop seeing guilt. When the paragraph says:

Therefore, you must be guiltless.

It doesn’t mean I must purify myself. It means we are already guiltless, or knowledge would be impossible at all. God created us innocent, and so we must be. Anything else is an error to be undone. I practice this all day, every day. When I feel guilt or think I spot it somewhere, I ask the Holy Spirit to decide for God for me. I am not asking that He make me innocent, but that He show me my innocence and everyone else’s, that He show me the truth that is right there in my mind beneath the fear that obscures it.

This sentence is central:

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.

It is not that we are being punished for our wrong thinking. It is that accepting guilt obscures reality. It keeps us from seeing the truth of our Oneness with God. There is no guilt in God, so if we think there is guilt in us, we will not be able to accept that we are of God and in God. So when I read about some form of suffering caused by another, and I decide who is guilty in this situation, I haven’t done anything wrong. If I feel guilty for a past or present behavior, I haven’t ‘sinned.’ But what I have done is used the mind in a way that makes knowledge inaccessible. Thus, I can’t access the truth that we are all of us completely and eternally innocent.

I have listened to and believed that noisy voice in my mind nearly all my life.

It tells me that to be a mature functioning human, I must learn to judge things, define things, explain things, and respond to things. I do this as if doing so is what keeps existence itself in place. I have spent all that time trying to do this, and so often failing to achieve any satisfaction or peace in doing so. And frankly, I have found it a fruitless and exhaustive occupation. That is why I am willing to throw the whole project out the door and start over.

A Course in Miracles offers me this opportunity. It tells me that reality is already complete and I am not its author. It is here without your making, but not without you. This means that reality doesn’t care how I feel about it. It doesn’t depend on my judgment. It just keeps being what it is. What is needed from me is my recognition of it.

You cannot understand how much your Father loves you

I love this sentence. It is reassuring and deeply touching. Maybe because there is still doubt that I am lovable. That, of course, is a result of guilt, most of which is unconscious. However, it does show itself when I look out and find guilt. I find it because it originates within. The mind always looks for itself. As a result, I have had to relearn what love actually is.

What we call love is quite conditional. It is mixed with preferences, need, fear of loss, and bargaining. I don’t know about you, but every relationship I have ever had contains most, if not all, of those unloving elements. For a long time, I had no idea there was any other way to love. I still struggle with some of them in even my dearest relationships, such as with my children. But I continue to accept purification because I want to remember how to love as God does.

Love in God is completely unconditional.

It has no opposite, does not evaluate, and does not fluctuate. I didn’t know this about God before because I was taught that God was more like us in nature. I remember laughing in relief when I heard someone say that God created us in His image and we did Him one better and created Him in ours. So that’s what happened! God is not vengeful, angry, and punishing. That is us in our confusion and fear about Who we Are.

I think that Jesus models this for us when He says: ³If you want to be like me I will help you, knowing that we are alike. ⁴If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. (ACIM, T-8.IV.6:3-4)

I can’t imagine God from this reduced state in which I find myself. But I can say that Jesus has helped me to at least envision Him now as loving and infinitely patient.

Here is what happens when I believe in guilt.

I don’t know who or what I am because I don’t know what God is. Knowledge has become inaccessible, and so I have to invent a false self and a false God, which has left me in more confusion and fear. As a result, I am always trying to justify these false images at the expense of truth. I think this is at the root of all judgment and fear in our relationships. It all feels so overwhelming when I think of it, but the good news is that I don’t have to fix any of this. Reality is not affected by my confusion. I just need to stop denying it. And even this one thing is simple. God is known through the recognition of innocence.

God is known through the recognition of innocence, and I am learning to stop standing in the way of what has always been true.