Ordinary life and formal religion are an understanding of religion as guidance for the soul. In many respects, we cannot fully see our parents as people until after they pass into Heaven. Then, their physical presence no longer distracts us, and the consequences of making judgments seems much less dire. Passing away finally extricates us from these relationships, unmasking our parents’ separateness and humanness. Not separating individual and social life from spiritual ideas, we might find more intimate connections between what goes on in church and what happens in the deepest places of the heart. Then we would realize that, more than psychological and sociological relevance, we need rituals carried out with understanding and care, sacred stories told with reverence and discusses with depth, and spiritual guidance that is tutored profoundly in traditional and imagery. The word regret derives from the Old English gretan, to speak to, or call out. We return through memory to events that had been previously unclear and re-greet them with the knowledge we have gained since these events transpired. After a loved one passes away, many tend to carry a feeling of guilt that usually will remain and should teach us to become kinder toward the living. We learn the works of God and accept the grace he has provided for us. We form the commitments and covenants of eternal families that become our passport to exaltation.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

We are always able to see father looking back than we can in the moment. People report feeling loved ones near them at moments, even after they had passed away, and then they think about how they resemble that individual, and we will notice how similar our behaviors are to theirs. Sometimes we might even slip into that person’s way of thinking. After his father passes away one man says: when working, I frequently get up from my desk to sit on a wicker chair on the back patio, letting my thoughts wander at random, with no connection to the work at hand. At those times, I always fix my gaze on the old cypress tree, which has branches spreading out in all directions. One day, I recalled that Father also looked out at the branches of a tree as he sat in his wicker chair on the veranda in our country home. I felt then as if I were staring into a deep pool in front of me. I was overawed by the realization that Father had lost himself in thought in the same way. With feelings like these, the image of Father as a distinct and individual human being formed in my mind. I began to see him and talk with him frequently. Flowers understand most of the selflessness of spring rains. Moon understands most the generosity of the Sun. I understand most the deep love of Father, kindness is love, sternness is love, full of hope and care. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Impelled by the fervor of their regret, many people find that they need to express all that remained unspoken at the time their parents passed away. Many people claim to have hold conversations with deceased parents, either in a dream or at their grave. Many can actually feel the presence of their parents within them. Emotions activated by a parent’s death often take on a life of their own, evolving as we evolve. Some people get to know their Father after his death. Their own struggles with pain, defeat, help them to know their father and to love him. “I learned that the most important thing in life is death. He was gone. I could never talk to him again Before that time, I did not understand how serious life was,” one man said. He frequently thinks back to all the time he wasted and chances he threw away to do things he thought he could do later. Since his father did, the man finds that he does not have patience for chatter. He gets up and leaves when his friends start talking about nothing. He cannot get it out of his mind that one day it is all over. He thinks about how his father just disappeared and he makes sure that he says what he wants to do and does it. After losing a parent, goals and time management become extremely important for some. We want to reach our eternal destination. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

The time remaining to us after our parents die becomes more lonely and more lucid. When a parent goes, half of our innocence goes, too. It gets ripped away. Something, someday will replace that innocence, maybe something more useful, but we cannot know what, or how soon, and while we wait, it hurts. The waiting is often rewarded expansively. Virtually all adult children experience an upsurge of growth, a freeing of their own potential as part of their bereavement. Some men become efficacious after their father’s death. However, we cannot rush these discoveries. They are the consequence of living, not thinking. We can hasten to ask questions of surviving relatives, piecing together blurry aspects of the past, but true forgiveness and growth arise with the passage of time and the infusion of new experiences. Even the most painful losses can free and strengthen us. We have to give up nostalgia and guilt to see this. Acceptance keeps you waiting, and then comes all at once. It is exuberant and generous, not dull and sluggish like loss. Bereavement and guilt displays the most persistence. Often the only liberation is to admit out loud the wrong we think we committed, testing them against another person’s experience. Guilt that demands perfection is relentless, while guilt that allows room for weakness subsides over time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

Speculation is a good word, a soul word, coming from speculum, mirror, an image of reflection and contemplation. Only when we stop holding ourselves to impossible standards can we start to relinquish the burden of our inevitable omissions and errors. In the long run, our flawed performance does not matter as much as the sincerity of the efforts we exerted. Regret provokes our attainment of hindsight and incites our search for more. The stronger our regret after our parents’ deaths, the more we can be assured that our wisdom has grown. Eventually, our self-knowledge and our understanding of our parents may expand to the point that it becomes possible to forgive ourselves and to grant our parents an unconditional right to their shortcomings. We cannot reflect on deeper issues involved in their lives, even if we spend hundreds of hours gathering data and working on research. The intellect often demands proof that is it on solid ground. The thought of the soul finds its grounding in a different way. It likes persuasion, subtle analysis, an inner logic, and elegance. It enjoys the kind of discussion that is never complete, that ends with a desire for further talk or reading. It is content with uncertainty and wonder. Especially in ethical matters, it probes and questions and continues to reflect even after a decision has been made. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Exaltation is the goal of this mortal journey, and no one get there without the means of God. Almost everyone has secrets, parts of their lives they do not disclose to anyone, or fragments they only share with certain people. So, when it comes to our parents, we may never understand why they did the things they did. The thick of life sometimes needs to be distilled before it can be explored with imagination. This kind of sublimating is not the defensive flight from instinct and body into rationality. It is a subtle raising of experience into thoughts, images, memories, and theories. Eventually, over a long period of incubation, they condense into a philosophy of life, one that is unique for each person. For a philosophy of life is not an abstract collection of thoughts for their own sake, it is the ripening of conversation and reading into thoughts that are wedded to everyday decisions and analysis. Such ideas become part of our identity and allow us confidence in work and in life decisions. They provide a solid base for further wonder and exploration that reaches, through religion and spiritual practice, into the ineffable mysteries that saturate human experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

Soul knows the relativity of its claim on truth. It is always in front of a mirror, always in a speculative mode, watching itself discover its developing truth, knowing that subjectivity and imagination are always in play. Truth is not really a soul word; soul is after insight more than truth. Truth is a stopping point asking for commitment and defense. Insight is a fragment of awareness that invites further exploration. Intellect tends to enshrine its truth, while soul hopes that insights will keep coming until some degree of wisdom is achieved. After the loss of a parent people try to move on, love others, and bond with them, but at some point they get tired. Each situation is a learning experience, but after a while they see it as force and just wait for the experience to burn out so they can go their own way and be free of the obligation of trying to be human, friendly, and loving. Wisdom is the marriage of intellect’s longing for truth and soul’s acceptance of the labyrinthine nature of the human condition. We are not going to have a soulful spirituality until we begin to think in the ways of the soul, and then maybe someday we will meet someone who understands us and is actually able to truly connect. If we bring only the intellect’s modes of thought to our search for a path or to spiritual practices, then from the very beginning we will be without soul. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

The bias toward spirit is so strong in modern culture that it will take a profound revolution in the very way we think to give our spiritual lives the depth and subtlety that are the gifts of the soul. Therefore, a soul-oriented spirituality begins in reevaluation of the qualities of soul; subtlety, complexity, ripening, Worldliness, incompleteness, ambiguity, and wonder. All people are born with a predetermined desire to express life, to come to self-fulfillment through love and accomplishment, and to live creatively. This is the cosmic urge to express something that seems to be inherent and fundamental in all living beings and nature. We have an emotional craving for self-expression. We have a passion for love, to have something we may lavish our affections and, and in finding fulfillment in the object of our desire. For some, it may be a person, for other it may be a career, and/or a house and car. This impulsion is born with a life itself, and we are told from birth, and even prenatally, the infant should be surrounded by an atmosphere of love an attention. So, as we mature, we work towards those things that make us feel safe and loved. God’s plan is in place. He is at the helm, and his great and powerful ship flows towards salvation and exaltation. Remember, we cannot get there by jumping out of the boat and trying to swim there by ourselves. I am trying to win an Oscar, like Reese Witherspoon, but for me it is more symbolic. Maybe someday you will understand what that Oscar is for me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8