Read on the ACIM CE App: https://acimce.app/:W-139
Lesson 139
I will accept Atonement for myself.
Practice Instructions
Purpose: “To accept the truth about yourself, and go your way rejoicing in the endless love of God” (9:4).
Longer: Two times—morning and evening—for five minutes.
- Begin by reviewing your mission: “I will accept Atonement for myself, for I remain as God created me.”
- Then go into a meditation aimed at reconnecting with the knowledge of who you are. You haven’t lost this knowledge. It is still there, deep within your memory. You may want to picture this knowledge as a light at the very center of your mind, and then focus on sinking down and inward to make contact with it. Increase your motivation to reach this knowledge by realizing that you can remember it for everyone (11:2). Whenever your mind wanders off, be sure to call it back by repeating the opening lines.
Shorter: Hourly, for several minutes.
Do a shorter version of the longer practice (begin by repeating, “I will accept Atonement for myself, for I remain as God created me”). Lay aside all distracting thoughts. Let all false beliefs about yourself be cleared away, and learn that the chains that would hide your Self from your awareness are nothing but fragile cobwebs.
Commentary
What does it mean to accept the Atonement for myself? This lesson puts an end to any idea that this is a selfish notion, or that it means my only concern is myself, or my personal happiness. Nothing could be clearer than this: “It is more than just our happiness alone we came to gain. What we accept as what we are proclaims what everyone must be along with us” (8:6-7).
To accept the Atonement for myself means to accept the truth of what I am, to decide to “accept ourselves as God created us” (1:2). And what am I? I already know, in my heart of hearts, but I resist knowing. This lesson is magnificent in its trenchant dissection of the insanity of the way we question our Identity. It questions all our questioning. It raises all our doubts to doubt. It denies the possibility of denial. It belittles our thoughts of littleness. How can we be anything except what we are? How can we not know what we are? “The only thing that can be surely known by any living thing is what it is” (2:3).
God created us as extensions of His Love. That is our mission; it is what we are. To accept the Atonement is to accept this truth about ourselves. To accept the Atonement is to begin to function as God’s Love in the world.
Every time we refuse to see the magnificence in another we are denying our own. We look on others with less than love because we refuse to see how much we merit it. We are God’s representatives on earth; accepting the Atonement is to accept our mission. We are here to restore the grandeur of what we all are to every mind—not just to our own. This grandness, this magnificent inclusiveness, this divine generosity is our very being. We are the open heart that embraces the world, remembering “how much a part of us is every mind” (11:3).
In us our Father’s Love can contain them all. Our heart is big enough for all the world.
This is Who we are. Today, let me remember. Today, let me accept my holy aim. Today, let me know myself as part of this great throbbing, all-embracing Heart of God.