 We continue today with Chapter 20, The Vision of Holiness, Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, the celebration of victory and the acceptance of the truth. Let us not spend this holy week brooding on the crucifixion of God's Son, but happily in the celebration of His release, for Easter is the sign of peace, not pain. A slain Christ has no meaning, but a risen Christ becomes the symbol of the Son of God's forgiveness on Himself, the sign He looks upon Himself as healed and whole. This week begins with palms and ends with lilies. The white and holy sign, the Holy Son of God is innocent. Let no dark sign of crucifixion interfere between the journey and its purpose, between the acceptance of the truth and its expression. This week we celebrate life, not death, and we honor the perfect purity of the Son of God and not His sins. Offer your brother the gift of lilies, not the crown of thorns, the gift of love, and not the quote gift of fear. You stand beside your brother, thorns in one hand and lilies in the other, uncertain which to give. Join now with me and throw away the thorns, offering the lilies to replace them. This Easter I would have the gift of your forgiveness offered by you to me and returned by me to you. We cannot be united in crucifixion and in death, nor can the resurrection be complete till your forgiveness rests on Christ, along with mine. A week is a short time, yet this holy week is the symbol of the whole journey the Son of God has undertaken. He started with the sign of victory, the promise of the resurrection already given him. Let him not wander into the temptation of crucifixion and delay him there. Help him to go in peace beyond it, with the light of his own innocence lighting his way to his redemption and release. Hold him not back with thorns and nails when his redemption is so near, but let the whiteness of your shining gift of lilies speed him on his way to resurrection. Easter is not the celebration of the cost of sin, but of its end. If you see glimpses of the face of Christ behind the veil, looking between the snow-white petals of the lilies you have received and have given as your gift, you will behold your brother's face and recognize it. I was a stranger and you took me in, not knowing who I was, yet for your gift of lilies you will know. In your forgiveness of this stranger alien to you and yet your ancient friend lies his release and your redemption with him. The time of Easter is a time of joy and not of mourning. Look on your risen friend and celebrate his holiness along with me. For Easter is the time of your salvation along with mine. And from the workbook, Lesson 158, Today I learn to give as I receive. What has been given you? The knowledge that you are a mind in mind and purely mind sinless forever, wholly unafraid because you were created out of love? Nor have you left your source remaining as you were created. This was given you as knowledge which you cannot lose. It was given as well, so every living thing, for by that knowledge, only knowledge, does it live. You have received all of this. No one who walks the world but has received it. It is not this knowledge which you give, for that is what creation gave. All this cannot be learned. What then are you to learn to give today? Our lesson yesterday evoked a theme found early in the text. Experience cannot be shared directly in the way that vision can. The revelation that the father and son are one will come in time to every mind, yet is that time determined by the mind itself not taught. The time is set already. It appears to be quite arbitrary, yet there is no step along the road that anyone takes but by chance. It has already been taken by him, although he has not yet embarked on it, for time but seems to go in one direction. We would undertake a journey that is over, yet it seems to have a future still unknown to us. Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic, yet there is a plan behind appearances that does not change. The script is written. When experience will come to end, your doubting has been set, for we but see the journey from the point at which it ended, looking back on it, imagining we make it once again, reviewing mentally what has gone by. A teacher does not give experience because he did not learn it. It revealed itself to him at its appointed time, but vision is his gift. This he can give directly, for Christ's knowledge is not lost, because he has a vision. He can give it to anyone who asks. The Father's will and his are joined in knowledge, yet there is a vision which the Holy Spirit sees because the mind of Christ beholds it too. Here is the joining of the world of doubt and shadows made with the intangible. Here is a quiet place within the world made by holy forgiveness and holy as it is by love. Here are all contradictions reconciled for here the journey ends. Experience, unlearned, untaught, unseen is merely there. This is beyond our goal, for it transcends what needs to be accomplished. Our concern is with Christ's visions. This we can attain. Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son of God who was created. It beholds a light beyond the body, an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation and it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees. This can be taught and must be taught by all who would achieve it. It requires but the recognition that the world cannot give anything that faintly can compare with this in value, nor set up a goal that does not merely disappear when this has been perceived. In this you give today, see no one as a body. Greet him as the Son of God he is, acknowledging that he is one with you in holiness. Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision that has power to overlook them all. In his forgiveness are they gone, unseen by one they merely disappear because a vision of the holiness that lies beyond them comes to take their place. It matters not what form they took, nor how enormous they appeared to be, nor who seemed to be hurt by them, they are no more, and all effects they seem to have are gone with them. Undone and never to be done. Thus do you learn to give as you receive, and thus Christ's vision looks on you as well. This lesson is not difficult to learn, if you remember in your brother you but see yourself. If he be lost in sin so must you be. If you see light in him your sins have been forgiven by yourself. Each brother whom you meet today provides another chance to let Christ's vision shine on you and offer you the peace of God. It matters not when revelation comes, for that is not of time. Yet time has still one gift to give in which true knowledge is reflected in a way so accurate its image shares its unseen holiness, its likeness shines with its immortal love. We practice seeing with the eyes of Christ today, and by the holy gifts we give Christ's vision looks upon ourselves as well. Amen.