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Is Peace Possible in This World?
What the world is, is but a fact. We cannot choose what or how it will or should be. But we can choose how we would see it. Indeed, we must choose this.
We come to the question of judgment. We must ask ourselves whether our judgment, or the Word of God, is more likely to be true. Each says different and opposite things about the world. God says there is no death, but our judgment sees death as the inevitable end of life. God’s Word assures us that He loves the world; our judgment says the world is unlovable. Who is right? One of us must be wrong. These different things are mutually exclusive and impossible to try to reconcile.
The Holy Spirit gives us the Answer to all problems we have made. The fact that these problems are not real is meaningless to us who believe in them. We all believe in what we have made, for we made it by believing in it. Into this strange and paradoxical situation, God has sent His Judgment to answer ours. Gently His Judgment substitutes for ours. Through this substitution is the not-understandable made understandable. In our judgment it is not possible, and can never be possible, but in the Judgment of God, what is reflected here is only peace.
Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who offer peace. It is not the world that makes peace seem impossible, it is the world we see that is impossible.
Peace now belongs here, because a Thought of God has entered. What else but a Thought of God turns hell to Heaven merely by being what it is? The earth bows down before its gracious Presence. Now the question is no longer “Can peace be possible in this world?” but rather, “Is it not impossible that peace be absent here?”
-- Adapted from Manual for Teachers (#11) section of the book “A Course in Miracles”
