Choosing Peace over Fear

In yesterday’s newsletter (you can sign up here if you like), I mentioned that the world was made to make love homeless. In such a world do you feel fear or peace?

One way to answer this question is to ask: am I aware of any needs right now? Have I made plans for future needs? Is past information helping me make those plans? Recognize those needs?

If you answer yes to any of those questions (and really, we all do), then you are in fear and – here is the good news – you are not alone and you are in as far as you can go. There is fear or there is peace. It is not a question of degrees (e.g., T-3.IV.1:5). This is why miracles do not admit to orders of difficulty ((T-1.I.1:1) and “all expressions of love are maximal” (T-1.I.1:4).

Peace is the absence of plans (e.g., W-pI.135.11:1) because one’s trust in their brother and sister is total and unconditional. When we trust one another completely, then the love of God becomes our sole provision. Who plans when God provides through Creation? Past and future dissolve in the unshakeable happiness of the Holy Instant where judgment is impossible and joining already accomplished.

What is Heaven but union, direct and perfect, and without the veil of fear upon it? Here are we one, looking with perfect gentleness upon each other and on ourselves. Here all thoughts of any separation between us becomes impossible . . . And here would I unite with you, my friend, my brother and my Self (T-20.III.10:3-5, 7).

If you feel fear, it is because you have judged against your brother, and thus against yourself. And thus you have closed your heart to God. The solution is to love your brother as your own self now.

It is tempting to think we must undo the apparent effects of the past. We must make amends, say. Or we need to prepare for the future – save up money, stockpile food. But the past and the future are not real and all our fussing over them can’t change that one bit. Now is the only time there is and there is only one thing you are called to do in it: love your brother and sisters.

Any problem we take to the Holy Spirit, no matter how specific, no matter how seemingly dependent on the laws of time and space, the answer is always the same: love now. Be kind now. Be gentle now. The past and the future are not our concern. Behold the birds of the heavens and consider the lilies of the field . . .

It is clear, is it not? Like crystal? And yet we fight it every minute of every day. We work so hard not to hear it, let alone make it our practice.

We do not need to undo our own supposed errors. We do not not need to do better going forward. We need simply to give attention to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, be led by them into the Holy Instant, and there know with calm and quiet certainty that the separation is an illusion, as are all its apparent effects.

This is the state of Christ. In it, we know that the only thing we can do is love our brothers and sisters now. In love, the illusion of past and future are undone. In love, there are neither errors nor problems.

In love I see you, perfectly whole, brighter than the sun. There is nothing to fear at all. Your radiance encompasses me, dissolves and undoes me, as you are dissolved and undone in God, and God – that idea we’ve clinging to all these many centuries – is dissolved and undone in Love.

You and your brother will now lead the other to the Father as surely as God created His Son holy, and kept him so. In your brother is the light of God’s eternal promise of your immortality. See him as sinless, and there can be no fear in you (T-20.III.11:7-9).

Together we make it so.