I give you the vision of Creation and Eternity here. The dim awareness of this difficulty is probably one of the main reasons that so little effort is made to make the necessary changes. Many think: “Why strive for the impossible? Let us rather act as if the course we are steering will lead us to the place of safety and happiness that our maps indicate.” Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. However, only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties, those who have not given up hope can succeed. This sobriety marks the distinction between awake and dreaming utopians. If, by an absurd hypothesis, I were to die without ever having committed any serious faults and yet all the same I were to fall to the bottom of Hell, I should nevertheless owe God an infinite debt of gratitude for his infinite mercy, on account of my Earthly life, and notwithstanding the fact that I am such a poor unsatisfactory creature. Even in this hypothesis I should think all the same that I had received all my share of the riches of divine mercy. For already here below we receive the capacity for loving God and for representing him to ourselves with complete certainty as having the substance of real, eternal, perfect, and infinite joy. Through our fleshly veils we receive from above presages of eternity which are enough to efface all doubts on this subject. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

The human Utopia of the Messianic Time—a united new humankind living in solidarity and peace, free from economic strife and from war and class struggle—can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm on the realization of the human Utopia as we have spent on the realization of our technical Utopias. Whether such a change from the supremacy of natural science to a new social science will take place, nobody can tell. If it does, we might still have a chance for survival, but whether it will depends on one factor: how many brilliant, learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are attracted by the new challenge to the human mind, and by the fact that this time the goal is not control over nature but control over technique and over irrational social forces and institutions that threaten the survival of Western society, if not the human race. The problem is the will and the humanist spirit of those who work on them; besides, when people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, the will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright. Human beings shall neither live in inhuman poverty, nor simply be consumers. So great is the confusion about love in our day that it is even difficult to find agreed upon definitions of what love is. We define love as a delight in the presence of the other person and an affirming of one’s value and development as much as one’s own. Thus there are always two elements to love—that of the worth and good of the other person, and that of one’s own joy and happiness in relation with one.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

The capacity to love presupposes self-awareness, because love requires the ability to have empathy wit the other person, to appreciate and affirm one’s potentialities. Love also presupposes freedom; certainly love which is not freely given is not love. TO love someone because you are not free to love someone else, or because you happen by the accident of birth to be in some family relation to the individual, is not to love. Furthermore, if one loves because one cannot do without the other, love is not given by choice; for one could not choose not to love. The hallmark of such unfree love is that it does not discriminate: it does not distinguish the loved person’s qualities or one’s being from the next person’s. In such a relation you are not really seen by the one who purports to love you—you might just as well be someone else. Neither the one who loves nor the loved one acts as persons in such relationships; the former is not a subject operating with some freedom, and the latter is significant chiefly as an object to be clung to. There are kinds of dependence which in our society—having so many anxious, lonely and empty persons in it—masquerade as love. They vary from different forms of mutual assistance or reciprocal satisfaction of desires (which may be quite sound if called by their right names), through the various business forms of personal relationships to clear parasitical masochism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

In not infrequently happens that two persons, feeling solitary and empty by themselves, relate to each other in a kind of unspoken bargain to keep each other from suffering loneliness. Self-affirmation in human relationships is much more likely to leave people feeling close to each other than the alternative of trying to guess what the other person wants and then attempting to please one. On causal inspection it might appear very desirable in a marriage, for example, for both the man and the woman to be dedicated to pleasing the partner. It almost sounds like the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have then do on to us, does it not? These are two hitches. In the first place, if one does not tell us, how can we be sure what the other person really wants? It is not unusual at all for couple to do something that neither of them wants to do, because they have only guessed—never really known—what the other wanted done and because each has been so considerate of the other person’s feelings that they have not made their own wishes clearly know. The second hitch is that is we acceded to another person’s wished (or what we think they want) we are likely to have more resentment about the matter than we are fully aware of. And we are almost sure to express that resentment in some way, however subtle. If the Golden Rule is indeed to be applied it would be: I am going to let those I care for know how I feel and what I desire, because this is the way I would like them to relate to me. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

If I do not agree with what they say, I am perfectly capable of standing up for myself. And I have sufficiency confidence in them to assume that they can fight for themselves if and when necessary. In the home, it appears that the most emotionally satisfying arrangement for both men and women is one where there is free-floating leadership. In other words, when a decision is to be made there is no assurance in advance whose judgment will be followed. In this arrangement both the man and the woman (and the children, too) are free to express their feelings and ideas. This makes for some lively discussion, even passionate discussions, at times! However, as a matter of fact democracies are always considerably more discussion prone then authoritarian governments. And how much love and emotional closeness can be experienced between a man and a woman if a man is convinced of his superiority and a woman is afraid to open her mouth for fear of displeasing the master? Besides, is a book not more exciting and more fun if you do not know for certain in advance how it is going to end? Even if we only consider the plane of purely human relations, the gratitude we own those we love is infinite. Our human relationships perpetually enshrine the light of God and should raise gratitude to a still higher degree. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

 It might seem that God is sending you this truth through the pen I am holding. It is more suitable for some thoughts to come by direct inspiration; it is more suitable for other thoughts to be transmitted through some creature. God uses either way with his friends. However, when love is engaged in for the purposes of vanquishing loneliness, it accomplishes its purpose only at the price of increased emptiness for both persons. Love, is generally confused with dependence: but in point of fact, you can only love to proportion to your capacity for independence. The creative relationship between men and women that is being suggested here calls for relatively mature and self-reliant individuals. It is important to bond with the Heavenly country and live in an atmosphere of human warmth. This is the native city to which we owe our love. Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the Sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our Heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. Our intelligence too should have the same complete impartiality. Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God’s creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love his with regard to all things here below. When a soul has attained a love filling the whole Universe indiscriminately, this love becomes the Angel with golden wings that pierces an opening in the celestial sphere of the World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

After that, such a soul loves the Universe, not from within but from without; from the dwelling place of the Wisdom of God, our first-born brother. Such a love does not love beings and things in God, but from the abode of God. Being close to God it views all beings and things from there, and its gaze is merged in the gaze of God. It is true that Christ said to his disciples: “Love one another.” However, I think that there is a question of friendship, a personal friendship between two beings, by which God’s friends should be bound each to each. Friendship is the one legitimate exception to the duty of only loving universally. Moreover, to my way of thinking, it is not really pure unless it is so to speak surrounded on all sides by a compact envelope of indifference which preserves a distance. We are living in times that have no precedent, and in our present situation universality, which could formerly be implicit, has to be fully explicit. It has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life. Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent. A new type pf sanctity is indeed a fresh spring, an invention. If all is kept in proportion and if the order of each things is preserved, it is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the Universe and of human destiny. It is the exposure of a large portion of truth and beauty hitherto concealed under a thick layer of dust. More genius is needed than was needed by Archimedes to invent machines and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvelous invention. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

Only a kind of perversity can oblige God’s friends to deprive themselves of having genius, since to receive it in superabundance they only need to ask their Father for it in Christ’s name. Such a petition is legitimate, today at any rate, because it is necessary. I think that under this or any equivalent form it is the first thing we have to ask for now; we have to ask for it daily, hourly, as a famished child constantly asks for bread. The World needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors. Where there is a need there is also an obligation. By a strange twist, the thought of God’s anger only arouses love in me. God’s favor and mercy makes tears at my heart. We receive love from others not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love. And our capacity to love depends, in turn, upon our prior capacity to be persons in our own right. To love means, essentially, to give; and to give requires a maturity of self-feeling. A truly living God does not involve a demand for love in return. To produce art requires that the artist be able to love—that is to give without thought of being rewarded. We are not talking about love as a giving up or self-abnegation. One gives only if one as something to give, only if one has a basis of strength within oneself from which to give. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

It is most unfortunate that on our society that we have had to try to purify love from aggression and competitive triumph by identifying it with weakness. Indeed, this inoculation has been so much of a success that the common prejudice is that the weaker people are, the more they love; and that the strong person odes not need to love! No wonder tenderness, that yeast without which love is as soggy and heavy as unrisen bread, has been generally scorned, and often separated out of the love experience. What was forgotten was that tenderness goes along with strength: one can be gentle as one is strong; otherwise tenderness and gentleness are masquerades for clinging. The Latin origin of our words is nearer the truth—”virtue,” of which love is certainly one, comes from the root vir, man (here in the sense of masculine strength), from which the word “virility is also derived. Some may be questioning, “But does one not lose oneself in love?” To be sure, in love as in creative consciousness, it is true that one is merged with the other. However, should not be called losing one’s self; again like creative consciousness, it is the highest level of fulfillment of one’s self. When pleasures of the flesh is an expression of love, for example, the emotion experienced at the moment of climax is not hostility or triumph, but union with the other person. The poets are not lying to us when they sing of the ecstasy of love. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

As in creative ecstasy, it is that moment of self-realization when one temporarily overleaps the barrier between one identity and another. It is a giving of one’s self and a finding of one’s self at once. Such ecstasy represents the fullest interdependence in human relations; and the same paradox applies as in creative consciousness- one can merge one’s self in ecstasy only as one has gained the prior capacity to stand alone, to be a person in one’s own right. We do not man this discussion to be a counsel of perfection. Nor is it meant to rule out or depreciate all of the other kinds of beneficial relationships, such as friendship (which may also be an important aspect of parent-child relations), various degrees of interchange of human warmth and understanding, the sharing of pleasures of the flesh and passion, and so on. Let us not tall into the error so common in our society of making love in its ideal sense all-important, so that one has only the alternatives of admitting one has never found the pearl of great price or resorting to hypocrisy in trying to persuade oneself that all of the emotions one does feel are love. We can only repeat: we propose calling the emotions by their right names. Learning to love will proceed most soundly if we cease trying to persuade ourselves that to love is easy, and if we are realistic enough to abandon the illusory masquerades for love in a society which is always talking about love but has so little of it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Our greatest sense of fulfillment and satisfaction comes in being in meaningful relationships with other people (not necessarily in marriage) whom we love and who love us. We never outgrown our need for love, human understanding, and communication. If we can achieve a relatively high degree of personal independence, then we will be free to satisfy these needs in mutually fulfilling relationships with others. If we have confidence in our abilities to be relatively free and able to disentangle ourselves if we feel others are attempting to manipulate and control us, it will be less frightening to us to say in the many ways that it can be said openly and clearly, “I love you, and I need and want your love.” By participating in the community, people find life becomes more interesting and stimulating. Intelligence is continuously growing for both the individual and the species; it I meaningful to say that we are more intelligent than we were a few years, ago and that our children will be more intelligent than we are. There is no other armor so strong as truth, none other that will turn aside the shafts of envy, hatred, malice, and al the rest of that great horde of iniquities, as will the simple unadorned truth. We believe in being honest. May God help us to practice what we believe. Our challenge is to avoid bondage of any kind, help the Lord gather his elect, and sacrifice for the rising generation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11