The Lord’s mill of justice grinds slowly, but exceedingly well. In the Lord’s economy, no one will escape the consequences of unresolved violations of his laws. In his time, and in his way, God’s full payment will be required for unrepented evil acts. In the broadest sense, spirituality is an aspect of any attempt to approach or attend to the invisible factors of life and to transcend the personal, concrete, finite particulars of the World. Religion stretches its gaze beyond this life to the time of creation. It also concerns itself with afterlife and with the highest values in this life. This spiritual point of view is necessary for the soul, providing the breadth of vision, the inspiration, and the sense of meaning it needs. Spirituality is not always specifically religious. Mathematics is spiritual in the board sense, abstracting from the concrete details of life. A walk through the woods on a sunny winter day can be a spiritual acidity, if only because it is a way of getting away from home and routine and being inspired by tall, antiquated trees and the processes of nature, which are far beyond human scale. Spirit lifts us out of the confines of human dimensions, and in doing so nourishes the soul. The February afternoon grew dark. The ground was covered in feet of white sheets of snow. He grew more tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

After a while, he whispered, “Do something for me? Leave a little early. Walk a few blocks and look at the sky. Walk the World for me.” From his hospital bed, a seventeen-year-old cancer patient yearned to look at the whole sky. He could not move, but he looked at that bright blue sky with such love. The snow had stopped and in its place was a blazing, brilliant Sunshine. Not being isolated, not being in pain, and not being dead are privileges which we relish most after we endure loneliness, agony, and a glimpse of death. Under duress, the human capacity to make meaning out of the barest circumstances assets itself. We cannot shed our awareness that this fate could just as easily be ours. Sometimes people get caught up in playing at rituals that they have no essence. They play with the rubrics in too light a manner. The deep sense of how things can be accomplished, with style, to evoke a dimension that truly nourishes the soul is when you know it is genuine. When someone who has not yet been personally initiated into the World of illness visits someone in a hospital or nursing home, the rift between health and illness is most pronounced. People who are experience impairments often do not have much to day because their lives are so empty. If as an innocent victim have been seriously wronged, do not harbour feelings of hatred, anger at what appears to be unjust. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The soul needs an intense, full-bodies spiritual life as much as and in the same way that the body needs food. The layout of care facilities compels us to walk through a wrenching silence on our way to the person we are visiting. The lobby and hallways are full of people sitting in wheelchairs, staring into space and not speaking to one another. By the time we reach our friend or relative’s room, we may already feel strangled, wanting to flee the silence or to force the exuberance of the outside World into such a speechless place. The soul might be cared for better through our developing a deep life of ritual rather than through many years of counseling for personal behavior and relationships. If we had more ritual in our lives and less psychology adjustment, we might even have a better time of it in such soul matters as love and emotion. We confuse purely temporal, personal and immediate issues with deeper and enduring concerns of the soul. Medical civilization is planned and organized to eliminate pain, alleviate sickness, and to abolish the for an art of suffering and dying. When standing at someone’s bedside in a hospital or nursing home, we find ourselves at a loss for words and believe that we are failing. We rush to arrange flowers or report on the weather, trying to cover our awkwardness with falsely cheerful banter. The Savior has made it clear that to receive forgiveness we must forgive others their offenses against us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

Spirituality is powerful, and therefore has the potential for evil, as well as for good. The soul needs spirit, but our spirituality also needs soul—deep intelligence, a sensitivity to the symbolic and metaphoric life, genuine community, and attachment to the World. We who walk away from the bedside and resume the freedoms of the outside World must be careful not to judge the person suffering from an ailment on our own terms. Inflated by good health, our standards are likely to render our judgments too severe and cause us to miss nuances of pleasure and meaning. The very conditions which evoke our revulsion may be all that someone has left of satisfaction. In our spirituality, we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the highest values; in our soulfulness, we endure the most pleasurable and the most exhausting of human experience and emotions. These two directions make up the fundamental pulse of human life, and to an extent, they have an attraction to each other. This same merging of feelings lessens the loneliness of someone who is grieving the loss of health and independence. People do not need or want to feel like a lump of flesh, like we have to get them out of the way as fast as we can. Yet, try as you might, you will not find enduring happiness until, through repentance, you satisfy personally broken law to restore peace to a troubled conscience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

No one needs to be told that we live in a time of materialism and consumerism, of lost values and a shift in ethical standards. We find ourselves tempted to call for a return to the old values and ways. It seems that in the past we were more religious as a people and that traditional values had more influence throughout the society. However, whether or not that is a blurry, nostalgic view of the past, we want to keep in mind that we have been warned about dealing with present difficulties by wishing for a return to former conditions. This maneuver is a regressive restoration of the persona. Mercy most affects us when we are in the hospital or care facility. We become primitive, hungry for a loving hug and comfort. Time slows down. It can seem that all we have been and done has come to nothing. In this situation, someone taking the time to heed our cravings and recognize our needs means more than we can say. Societies can fall into a defensive strategy, attempting to restore what is imagined to be a better condition from the past. The trouble is, memory is always part imagination, and tough times of another era are later unconsciously gilded into the good old days. If we can resist this temptation to improve the present by restoring the past, we can start to face our current challenges. We can regain peace of conscience by repenting of personal transgressions that cause us internal turmoil. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

In the science of the mind we do not say everything is all right when it is all wrong. We do not say peace when there is no peace, but rather we try to discover what is wrong and why we do not have peace. We do not say that people are not poor, sick, or unhappy. We ask why these things should be if the original cause of all things is harmonious, perfect, radiant, and happy. We have no one to denounce and nothing to antagonize. The key to lost spirituality and numbing materialism is not merely to intensify our quest for spirituality, but to reimagine it. For healing a split between spirituality and Worldliness we must establish soul in the middle, between spirit and body, as a way to prevent the two from becoming extreme caricatures of themselves. We must find concrete ways of getting soul back into our spiritual practices, our intellectual life, and our emotional and physical engagements with the World. Seeking cooperation with all, we should endeavor to relieve the mind of the burden of fear, doubt, and uncertainty. All of these attitudes could be wrapped in one package and labeled a lack of faith in ourselves, in each other, and in life. Let us not fool ourselves by thinking that a few idle statements will do this. Challenges can often bring blessings to others when their needs have caused the disturbed feelings in our mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

A true resolution calls for a calm, insistent determination to reorganize the whole body of our thinking, until at last the little irritations and vexations of life, the too harsh differences of belief, and the disagreements with everything and everyone are redeemed. This redemption can only through a conscious sense of our union with something greater than we are. In doing this, we shall discover love is the lodestone of life. There is nothing cold or unfeeling about the philosophy of religious science and the practice of the science of the mind. As it reaches back to the original source, it must bring some knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven into the consciousness of humanity. Coldness, criticism, unkindness have no place in this philosophy or in this science. We must be willing to place ourselves in the other person’s position and, with true compassion, enter into the thoughts and feelings of others, not as one caught in them or distraught by them, but as one who comes as a redeemer, a savior, to bring light of truth to those who have lost the way. However, we must have a deep desire and willingness to sympathize with the person who suffers. Our efforts will be stepping-stones to greater personal growth as Spirit-guided solutions are found. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

There is no place in this practice for arrogance or the holier-than-thou attitude. The great have always been humble. The great have always been kind. The great have always been lovers of humanity. Peace of mind is restored by resolving the external forces that disturb it. Not so with a troubled conscience, for it is unrelenting, ever present, a constant reminder of the need to correct one’s past mistakes, to resolve an offense to other, or to repent of transgression. The ability to have an unsettled conscience is a gift of God to help us succeed in this moral life. The divine power or influence emanates from God, and it gives light and life to all things. It prompts all rational individuals throughout the Earth to distinguish truth from error, right from it. It activates your conscience. The divine power’s influence can be weakened through transgressions and addiction and restored through proper repentance. The light of God is a power and influence that comes when followed and can lead a person to quality for the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. It is well to remember that even with peace of conscience we can have temporary periods when our peace of mind is interrupted by external concerns. However, our understanding of the causes can relive much of the pressure they generate. As our personal lives conform to the teachings of the Lord, we can seek his help in resolving the troubling issues. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8