The body does appear to be the symbol of sin while you believe that it can get you what you want. While you believe that [the body] can give you pleasure, you will also believe that it can bring you pain. To think you could be satisfied and happy with so little is to hurt yourself, and to limit the happiness that you would have calls upon pain to fill your meager store and make your life complete. This is completion as the ego sees it. For guilt creeps in where happiness has been removed, and substitutes for it. Communion is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt, because it goes beyond the body.
What has the body really given you that justifies your strange belief that in [the body] lies salvation? Do you not see that this is the belief in death?
The Holy Spirit’s messengers are sent far beyond the body, calling the mind to join in holy communion and be at peace. Such is the message that I gave [the messengers] for you. It is only the messengers of fear that see the body, for they look for what can suffer. Is it a sacrifice to be removed from what can suffer? The Holy Spirit does not demand you sacrifice the hope of the body’s pleasure; [the body] has no hope of pleasure. But neither can it bring you fear of pain. Pain is the only “sacrifice” the Holy Spirit asks, and this He would remove. (A Course in Miracles, T-19.IV.A.17:10-15;B.2:6-7;3. See also ACIM Text Made Simple.)
The Course tells us that the body was made by the ego as a limit on Love. Since we were created by Love as Love, to attempt to limit Love is to hurt ourselves. Believing we have limited Love automatically brings guilt with it because we believe we have hurt our Source.
The body is the symbol of the belief that we have limited Love, separated from our Source. Thus the body is the symbol of sin. The body image seems to be maintained through guilt. Guilt is attractive to the ego because it makes separation seem to be real. The ego is constantly alert for opportunities to perceive guilt because this is the basis for maintaining the ego’s seeming existence.
The Holy Spirit offers us another way of using the body to serve our awakening to Love instead of our imprisonment in guilt. The Holy Spirit’s messengers show us the Reality that lies beyond the body. It guides us to use the body to communicate the Love that we are. The body then becomes an instrument of communication instead of the ego’s tool of separation.
Let us today hold our minds and hearts open to Holy Spirit’s messages of Love that we may serve the awakening to Love.
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