ACIM Chapter 14. V. The Circle of Atonement P 3,4
V. Circle of Atonement P 3,4
3. Blessed Son of a wholly blessing Father, joy was created for you. ²Who can condemn whom God has blessed? ³There is nothing in the Mind of God that does not share His shining innocence. ⁴Creation is the natural extension of perfect purity. ⁵Your only calling here is to devote yourself, with active willingness, to the denial of guilt in all its forms. ⁶To accuse is not to understand. ⁷The happy learners of the Atonement become the teachers of the innocence that is the right of all that God created. ⁸Deny them not what is their due, for you will not withhold it from them alone.
4. The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God’s Son, given him in his creation. ²Do not try to steal it from him, or you will ask for guilt and will experience it. ³Protect his purity from every thought that would steal it away and keep it from his sight. ⁴Bring innocence to light, in answer to the call of the Atonement. ⁵Never allow purity to remain hidden, but shine away the heavy veils of guilt within which the Son of God has hidden himself from his own sight.
⁵Your only calling here is to devote yourself, with active willingness, to the denial of guilt in all its forms.
And there we have it. I suppose that if I could have accepted this and practiced it from the first time I read it, my experience of the world would be entirely different now. I can’t complain that Jesus was being cryptic or that I didn’t understand. Apparently, I just didn’t want to do this. Now I do, and I will be vigilant for those times when I don’t. I will notice the guilt thoughts because, finally, I want to. Awakening is now more important to me than being right and maintaining this separate self.
The ego mind insists that some people are wrong-minded, and I can’t just pretend that isn’t true. In truth, everyone who believes they are still ‘here’ is wrong-minded, so that’s a lot of people. What keeps this awareness from being part of the problem is that I am losing interest in judging anyone for their story. Love keeps me from assigning guilt. We are all doing the best we can within the parameters we have established to make this illusory world. Everyone.
The murderer, the pedophile, the politician I don’t agree with, everyone who seems to be determined to keep separation in place, no matter who is hurt by it, is precious to God. I am precious to Him, but I will lose awareness of this if I judge myself or others. So, I am actively willing to deny guilt in all its forms and to notice when I fail to do this so that I can accept correction quickly.
I can’t explain this shift.
I can’t pinpoint some passage from the Course, or some moment when some high-level understanding was achieved. And I don’t know how or when Love filled my heart. It just did. And this level of awareness of Love’s presence is new, and to be honest, I worry it is fragile, and I might lose it. I don’t think that’s right, though. God is Love, so it cannot be fragile. Perhaps I mean that my hold on it is yet fragile, and so I want to protect it until I grow strong in this new awareness. That is why I am committed to devoting myself to the denial of guilt in all its forms. I cannot love what I judge, and guilt in any form obscures the love that we are.
The lessons I have been looking at since the beginning of the year are leading us to understand that the world is a reflection of our thoughts. If my thought is one of judgment, the world I see will be a judgmental world. It will seem that it is full of mean-spirited people who will attack at the slightest provocation, and I will spend my life caught within that cycle of attack-defense mode. I know this is true because that is where I used to be. The love in me is now reflected onto the world, and I am overwhelmed by loving expressions of it.
I still see the cruelty of man against man.
But I no longer see it in the same way. I see it as the call for love that it is. Not pitiful calls, just souls trying one thing and then another, always yearning toward God – toward love, even though they may not be consciously aware of it. I just want to help. I want to support their efforts in whatever way I can. Generally, the best way I can do this is to just love them no matter what. Not believing they are their words or actions, not judging them, not making them guilty, is loving them. The more I am able to do this, the lovelier the world I see.
The words in these two paragraphs are so beautiful and so profound that they awaken a yearning in me to live this. Not later, when I am no longer dreaming this story of Myron, but now, right here in the messy midst of it all. Holy Spirit, protect this tender love, strengthen my determination, and keep me on the path to awakening. Decide for God for me.
Today, I choose vigilance for love, knowing that every release of guilt allows the Circle of Atonement to widen.