Store will be opened promptly at six a.m. and remain open until nine p.m. the year around. Store must not be opened on the Sabbath day unless absolutely necessary and then only for a few minutes. Any employee who is in the habit of smoking Spanish cigars, getting shaved at a barber shop, going to dances and other places of amusement, will most surely give his or her employer reason to suspect one’s integrity and all-around honesty. Each employee must attend Sunday school every Sunday. Men employees are given one evening a week for courting purposes, and two if they go to prayer meeting regularly. After fourteen hours of work in the store, the remaining leisure time must be spent in reading good literature. All God’s children will thrive from our growing knowledge, but to repeat this is only the beginning. We must have the courage to embrace the beauty of science in the name of the Lord. The image of God Incarnate, become Man out of fascination with His own Creation, will triumph in the Third Millennium as the supreme emblem of Divine Sacrifice and Unfathomable Love. It takes thousands of years to understand the Crucified Christ. Why, for example, did the Savior come down to live thirty-three years? Why not twenty? Why not twenty-five? You could ponder this stuff forever. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Why did Christ have to start as a baby? Who wants to be a baby? Was being a baby part of our salvation? And why choose that particular time in history? And such a place! Cosmic Energy is dominant and you do not possess the energy for the material World. You have the energy to pray and commune with God, and to inspire and guide others to elevate themselves so as to attain the spiritual heights and ecstasies of divine experience. Jesus was a perfect example of a soul with excessive cosmic energy (because of his evolution), which enabled him to achieve the most miraculous energy cures the World has ever seen. The spiritual path requires total renunciation. The more one treads the path, the more one is required to renounce. However, one is ready for the experience, the renunciation corresponding to the material World or emotional attachments, and the extreme discipline are not in comparison to all that is received on a higher plane. The renunciation occurs more on a mental and emotional level than on a purely physical plane. One would never be expected to renounce one’s children, for example. If one has children, they are one’s growth as one is theirs. One would not have to renounce a business if it is the only source of income for an individual and that person’s family. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

However, many individuals will totally dedicate their lives and every possible moment to spiritual practices and disciplines, which becomes their life mission, which is demanding. Because of the impact of Christianity on the Western World the revival of the ancient schools of thought at the beginning of the modern period was not only a revival but also a transformation. It is true of the renewal of the arts, of literature, of the theories of the state, and of the philosophy of religion that the rebirth of antiquity in the modern period started to actively shape the material realm. And while in some of the ancient World there was a tragic feeling toward existence that dominated though and life, especially the attitude toward history, the Renaissance started a movement which was looking at the future and the creative and new in it. Hope conquered the feeling of tragedy, and belief in progress the resignation to circular repetition. While the ancient World valued the individual not as an individual but as a representative of something universal, e.g. a virtue, the rebirth of antiquity saw the individual as an individual a unique expression of the Universe, incomparable, irreplaceable, and of infinite significance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

 In human beings the ontological work is elaborated. Humans have the ontological foundation of ethical existence, including the courage to be. And, ss we look into the various areas of human experience, we find a great deal that does not seem to make sense. The above statement may seem humorous or it may seem tragic. It might make a socially conscious person furious. And yet, it represents not only the limited perspective once found widespread in this country, but also some of the attitudes still prevalent in our thinking about work and religion. Theoretically, if a person sleeps eight hours a day, one has eight hours left in the day for something else. It is in this eight hours of something that we are interested here. Also theoretically, we should have no trouble with those eight free hours. Yet, the simple fact is we do. Most of us have not gotten thoroughly used to the idea that leftover time is out own! A case in point: a colleague of ours find his teaching day ends at noon of Fridays. He is a hard-working man who puts in more hours during the week than his contract calls for. He is always prepared for his classes, spends plenty of time in conferences with students, serves on my committees, takes paperwork home almost every evening. He earns his salary and then some! #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

The courage to be is an expression of the essential act of everything that participates in being, namely self-affirmation. Decisive character is manifested in the evdeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, and is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question. The Latin word for endeavour is conatus, the striving toward something. This striving is not a contingent aspect of a thing, nor is it an element in its being along with other elements; it is its essentia actualis. The conatus makes a thing what it is, so that if it disappears the thing itself disappears. Striving toward self-preservation or toward self-affirmation makes a thing be what it is. This striving is the essence of a thing and also its power, in addition to being part of the mind it affirms and has the power to control actions. So we have the identification of actual essence, power of being, and self-affirmation. And more identifications follow. The power of being is identified with virtue, and virtue consequently, with essential nature. Virtue is the power of acting exclusively according to one’s true nature. And the degree of virtue is the degree to which somebody is striving for and able to affirm one’s own being.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

Because of his upbringing (presumably under the Work-Sin Ethic) this teacher has a difficult time when Friday noon comes around and he finds an entire afternoon at his disposal. He confesses that he often feels like volunteering for some assignment that would full up his Friday afternoon. He invites students to confer with him after 12 o’clock on Friday, but those who are finished with their classes at 12 head for the beach or the billiard parlor or home. They are not troubled by any such deep guilt at finding free hours. The person who rigidly works a schedule eight hours a day for five or six days a week probably does not sympathize with our colleague. I remember hearing a bishop eloquently, and in his case sincerely, telling less affluent audience in England that he worked at least sixteen hours a day and asked for nothing better. “If I were a bishop, I would work sixteen hours a day, too, but eight hours of my work a day is quite enough for anybody” declared one workshop foreman in the audience. The assumption here, more prevalent than most people might suspect, is that people who do not punch time clocks do not work. This assumption is irrational and, individual variations on work habits to the contrary, simply invalid! The dictates of individual, corporate, discipline and/or social circumstances support an infinite number of work-habit variations.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

Nine-to-five-ism may be the lot of the majority, but this is just one more example of why occasionally majority does not rule, although it might like to. Our colleagues, who may work odd hors by a laborer’s standards and erratic hours by most people’s habitual, routinized system, does one’s job, earns one’s salary, and in comparison with many people far exceeds what is expected of him or her. By these modern-day standards alone, one deserves every moment of leisure one can come by. (Granted one’s compulsion is more complex; we hope to have people straightened very soon!) It is impossible to conceive of any virtue as prior to the striving to preserve one’s own being. Self-affirmation is, so to speak, virtue altogether. However, self-affirmation is affirmation of one’s essential being, and the knowledge of one’s essential being is mediated through reason, the power of the soul to have adequate ideas. Therefore to act unconditionally out of virtue is the same as to act under the guidance of reason, to affirm one’s essential being or true nature. Very well, we are attempting to make a strong case for a life of balance. The puritan attitude of Work or Sin should be euthanized, allowed or helped to reach oblivion. It is an ethic that denies humanness and makes workhorses or machines out of all organisms that have the potential for being replaced. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

People have a strength of the soul and power to be what they essentially are. Animositas, derived from anima, soul, is the courage in the sense of a total act of the person. By courage I mean the desire [cupiditas] whereby every person strives to preserve one’s own being in accordance solely with the dictates of reason. There is also a desire to join other people in friendship and support. This duality of an all-embracing and limited concept of courage corresponds with the whole development of the idea of courage to which we have referred. In a systematic philosophy of the strictness and consistency of this remarkable fact, we see the two cognitive motives which always determine the doctrine of courage: the universally ontological and the specifically moral. This has a very significant consequence for one of the most difficult ethical problems, the relation of self-affirmation and love toward others. Since virtue and the power of self-affirmation are identical, and since generosity is the act of going out toward others in a benevolent affect, no conflict between self-affirmation and love can be thought of. This of course presupposes that self-affirmation is not only distinguished from but precisely the opposite of selfishness in the sense of a negative moral quality. Self-affirmation is the ontological opposite of the reduction of being by such affects as contradict one’s essential nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

The right self-love and the right love of others are interdependent, and selfishness and the abuse of others are equally interdependent. Self-affirmation is participation in the divine self-affirmation. The power whereby each particular thing, and consequently human beings, preserves one being is the power of God. The participation of the soul in the divine power is described in terms of both knowledge and love. If the soul recognizes its sub aeternitatis specie, it recognizes its being in God. And this knowledge of God and of its being in God is the cause of perfect beatitude and consequently of a perfect love toward the cause of this beatitude. This love is spiritual (intellectualis) because it is eternal and therefore an affect, not subject to the passions which are connected with bodily existence. It is the participation in the infinite spiritual love with which God contemplates and loves oneself, and by loving oneself also loves what belongs to him, human beings. From the existence of God comes the existence of other contingent beings. God possesses objectively a supreme degree of reality because it is the idea of a Perfect Being; here its cause must possess formally a similar degree of reality. Therefore, God is indeed a perfect being. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

God’s excellence is not merely indefinitely, but infinitely, great. This explains why self-affirmation is the essential nature of every being and as such its highest good. Perfect self-affirmation is not an isolated act which originating power in every individual act. In this idea the ontology of courage has reached its fundamental expression. “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof,” Romans 6.12. In time, addictions enslave both the body and the spirit. Full repentance from addiction is best accomplished in this life, while we still have a mortal body to help us. As children of God, we should not let anything enter the body that might defile it. To allow sensors of sight, touch, or hearing to supple the brain with unclean memories is a sacrilege. We will cherish our chastity and avoid foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown us in destruction and perdition. We will flee these things; and follow after righteousness, Godliness, faith, love, patience, and meekness—traits that edify the whole souls. An affect can be conquered only by affect, and the only affect which can overcome the affects of passion is the affect of the mind, the spiritual or intellectual love of the soul for its own eternal ground. Who are we? We are children of God. When your heart runs deeper than a ghost town gold mine, you just know you are bound to find that mother load. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

The omnipotence of God requires that he should be able to do even what we would understand as being logically impossible, and thus that the eternal truths are dependent on God’s will. God could have brought it about that two and two did not equal four; although, since God has not chosen that this should be so, it must be beyond our finite comprehension how it might have been so. God is an efficient cause himself. Our potential is unlimited. Our inheritance is sacred. This affect is an expression of the participation of the soul in the divine self-love. The courage to be is possible because it is participation in the self-affirmation of being-itself. However, why is it that the way of salvation (salus) which God has shown us in the Bible being neglected by almost every? Because it is difficult and therefore rare, like everything sublime. Our inheritance is sacred. May we always honor that heritage—in every thought and deed. The stronger the foundation of our identity is rooted in being a child of God, the stronger our self-worthy becomes. The stronger our sense of self-worth becomes, the less insecure, defensive, and fearful we are. If we are willing to shed our less important identities and place our divine origins at the very forefront of our self-perception, we can be more confident, happy, and content human beings. “And now may God grant unto these, my people, that they may sit down in the Kingdom of God,” reports Alma 29.17. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11