 We continue today with Chapter 20. THE TEMPLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT The meaning of the Son of God lies solely in His relationship with His Creator. If it were elsewhere, it would rest on contingency, but there is nothing else. And this is holy loving and forever. Yet has the Son of God invented an unholy relationship between Him and His Father? His real relationship is one of perfect union and unbroken continuity. The one He made is partial, self-centered, broken into fragments, and full of fear. The one created by His Father is wholly self-encompassing and self-extending. The one He made is wholly self-destructive and self-limiting. Nothing can show the contrast better than the experience of both a holy and an unholy relationship. The first is based on love and rests on it in serene and undisturbed bliss. The body does not intrude upon it. Any relationship in which the body enters is based not on love, but on idolatry. Love wishes to be known, completely understood and shared. It has no secrets, nothing that it would keep apart and hide. It walks in sunlight, open-eyed and calm, and smiling welcome, and in sincerity so simple and so obvious it cannot be misunderstood. But idols do not share, idols accept, but never make return. They can be loved, but cannot love. They do not understand what they are offered, and any relationship in which they enter has lost its meaning. They live in secrecy, hating the sunlight and happy in the body's darkness, where they can hide and keep their secrets hidden along with them. And they have no relationships, for no one else is welcome there. They smile on no one, and those who smile on them they do not see. Love has no darkened temples where mysteries are kept obscure and hidden from the sun. It does not seek for power, but for relationships. The body is the ego's chosen weapon for seeking power through relationships. And its relationships must be unholy, for what they are it does not even see. It wants them solely for the offerings on which its idols thrive. The rest it merely throws away for all that it could offer is seen as values. Homeless, the ego seeks as many bodies as it can collect to place its idols in, and so establish them as temples to itself. The Holy Spirit's temple is not a body, but a relationship. The body is an isolated speck of darkness, a hidden secret room, a tiny spot of senseless mystery, a meaningless enclosure carefully protected, yet hiding nothing. Here the unholy relationship escapes reality and seeks for crumbs to keep itself alive. Here it would drag its brothers, holding them here in its idolatry. Here it is quote safe, for here love cannot enter. The Holy Spirit does not build his temples where love can never be. Would he who sees the face of Christ choose as his home the only place in all the universe where it cannot be seen, you cannot make the body the Holy Spirit's temple and it will never be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater and of love's condemnation. For here is love made fearful and hope abandoned. Even the idols that are worshiped here are shrouded in mystery and kept apart from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no relationships and no return. Here is the quote mystery of separation perceived in all and held in reference. What God would have not be is here, kept quote safe from him. But what you do not realize is what you fear within your brother and would not see in him is what makes God seem fearful to you and kept unknown. Idolaters will always be afraid of love for nothing so severely threatens them as love's approach. Let love draw near them and overlook the body as it will surely do. And they retreat in fear, feeling the seeming firm foundation of their temple begin to shake and loosen. Brother, you tremble with them, yet what you fear is but the herald of escape. This place of darkness is not your home. Your temple is not threatened. You are an idolater no longer. The Holy Spirit's purpose lies safe in your holy relationship and not your body. You have escaped the body where you are the body cannot enter for the Holy Spirit has set his temple there. There is no order in relationships. They either are or not. An unholy relationship is no relationship. It is a state of isolation, which seems to be what it is not. No more than that. The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, all your relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant, time was born and bodies made up to house the mad idea and give it the illusion of reality. And so it seemed to have a home that held together for a little while in time and vanish for what could house this mad idea against reality, but for an instant. Idols must disappear and leave no trace behind their going. The unholy instant of their seeming power is frail as is the snowflake, but without its loveliness. Is this the substitute you want for the eternal blessing of the holy instant and its unlimited beneficence? Is the benevolence of the unholy relationship so seeming powerful and so bitterly misunderstood and so invested in as false attraction, your preference to the holy instant, which offers you peace and understanding? Then lay aside the body and quietly transcend it, rising to welcome what you really want. And from his holy temple, look you not back on what you have awakened from, for no illusions can attract the mind that has transcended them and left them far behind. The holy relationship reflects the true relationship the Son of God has with his Father in reality. The Holy Spirit rests within it in the certainty it will endure forever. Its firm foundation is eternally upheld by truth and love shines on it with a gentle smile and tender blessing it offers to its own. Here the unholy instant is exchanged in gladness for the holy one of safe return. Here is the way to true relationships help gently open, through which you walk together, leaving the body thankfully behind and resting in the everlasting arms. Love's arms are open to receive you and give you peace forever. The body is the ego's idol, the belief in sin made flesh and then projected outward. This produces what seems to be a wall of flesh around the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant seems to be life, an instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand bereft of water and set uncertainly upon oblivion. Here does the Son of God stop briefly by to offer his devotion to death's idols and then pass on. And here he is more dead than living, yet it is also here he makes his choice again between adultery and love. Here it is given him to choose to spend this instant paying tribute to the body or let himself be given freedom from it. Here he can accept the holy instant, offered him to replace the unholy one he chose before. And here can he learn relationships are his salvation and not his doom. You who are learning this may still be fearful, but you are not immobilized. The holy instant is of greater value now to you than its unholy seeming counterpart, and you have learned you really want but one. This is no time for sadness, perhaps confusion, but hardly discouragement. You have a real relationship and it has meaning. It is as like your real relationship with God as equal things are like to each other. Idolatry is past and meaningless. Perhaps you fear your brother a little yet. Perhaps the shadow of the fear of God remains with you. Yet what is that to those who have been given one true relationship beyond the body? Can they be long held back from looking on the face of Christ? And can they long withhold the memory of their relationship with their father from themselves and keep remembrance of his love apart from their awareness? And from the workbook Lesson 163. There is no death. The Son of God is free. Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety, or doubt, as anger, faithlessness, and lack of trust, concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshiping of death as Savior and as giver of release. Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, God of the guilty, and the Lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty? For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand, all hopes and wishes, in its blighting grasp, all goals perceive, but in its slightest sightless eyes. The frail, the helpless, and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust, for it alone will surely come. All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost, however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake, in place of aspirations and of dreams. But death is counted on, for it will come with certain footsteps when the time has come for its arrival. It will never fail to take all life as hostage to itself. Would you bow down to idols such as this? Here is the strength and might of God Himself perceived within an idol made of dust. Here is the opposite of God's proclaimed as Lord of all creation, stronger than God's will for life, the endlessness of love and heaven's perfect changeless consistency and constancy. Here is the will of Father and Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the Holy Son of God. Unholy in defeat He has become what death would have Him be. His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to Him, for He has passed to dust. It says but this, here lies a witness, God is dead, and this it writes again and still again, while all the while its worshipers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so. It is impossible to worship death in any form and still select a few you would not cherish and would yet avoid while still believing in the rest, for death is total. Either all things die or else they live and cannot die, no compromise is possible, for here again we see an obvious position which we must accept if we be sane. What contradicts one thought entirely cannot be true unless its opposite is proven false. The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it, for it implies that God once was alive and somehow perished, killed apparently by those who did not want Him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death, and with the Father died the Son as well. Death's worshipers may be afraid, and yet can thoughts like these be fearful? If they saw that it is only this which they believe they would be instantly released, and you will show them this today, there is no death, and we renounce it now in every form for their salvation in our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This is the stand we take today, and it has given us to look past death and see the life beyond. Our Father, bless our eyes today. We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your love which shines in everything. We live and move in You alone. We are not separate from Your eternal life. There is no death, for death is not Your will, and we abide where You have placed us. In the life we share with You, and with all living things, to be like You, and part of You forever. We accept Your thoughts as ours, and our will is one with Yours eternally. Amen.