A loneliness slowly began to penetrate down through his throat and into his quivering heart. Give me a little time. If they still exist, if they have parented a colony, if they are anywhere in the wide World, I know those who will know where they are—without a question. It is right that you love your country. There is only one thing greater than our devotion to our country. That is our love of the City of God. Never forget the words of our father Augustine, “The citizens of the City of God fight with spiritual weapons—love and prayer and truth.” God will have mercy upon us. He will grant strength to these people who fight to save us! If we do not pray as we ought, as long as we keep God in our hearts, he will forgive us. We believe in God’s power of truth and love, we have given our lives to him. And we love our nation and our families. Christ will have mercy! He will forgive the sin upon our souls. Christ will forgive! Christ has suffered like us, he became a man to know our sins, and does know our hearts. He too did love a land—he taught us about the lilies of the field! And Christ did love his family and his friends as we love ours! Christ will take us into his care. Ah, he will forgive us, blessed Christ! When we are free, it will feel as though we are being lifted up by everlasting arms…the walls of the chapel will be erased and we will merge with our prayer, united wit Spirit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

As we merge with our prayers, there will be a great burst of light, and the radiance and harmony expands and takes the whole Earth and the sky…all is harmony and beauty and resplendence…one will feel an ecstasy, the dizziness within one will become joyful and at the same moment one will be filled with a vast peacefulness. The everlasting arms hold one, but one needs no support for all is a brilliant light. We will breath the air of infinity, all about us is Being in a great exaltation. Is this everlasting beauty the glimpse into the City of God, a new city where all is peace? A thing of beauty is a joy forever: It is loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Each of us sees the World as an individual, alone, caught up in a vast maelstrom; but by our culture we learn to communicate with our fellow human beings. Poetry, dancing, painting and other arts are all ways of communicating. We not only see the World but the World conforms to our way of seeing it. This is certainly true in the field of art. The great contribution of art is that, in our centuries on this planet, we have been enabled to share, to give to each other, to communicate, to love the World and, in the broad sense, to love each other. This will sound strange to those who think the World is a cold mass of whirling star dust, but not to those who can form their World in communication by whatever beauty they can see and experience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

The anxiety in creating—which we see most clearly in persons like Giacometti or Michelangelo or Beethoven—is overcome by playing. This playing (which may also be hard work) is our human way of overcoming the dualism—finite and infinite—in producing a work of art. The art unites both of these. The World becomes lonely no more, for one experiences being an integral part of it. It used to be asked, in view of the invention and progress of photography, whether painting would not be superseded or at least made only an innocent and unnecessary pastime. The question is absurd. It rests on a radical misunderstanding of painting, the function of which is not to make a record of the external World but to share some special conception of life and the World which the painter experiences. Sometimes artist and people who share essays never know how they will turn out. It is just a conception of the World and will not let go of the individual until one responds. It gives one a sense of participating in the Universe. One experiences a kind of ecstasy, great or small as it may be. And when the product is finished, the producer looks at it and feels a kind of surprise because a view of reality was communicated to them, and they formed it on the medium to communicate it to their friends. The most one can hope for is that you like their production, that it gives you some joy, and that it tells you something about the World as he or she communicates with it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

It is by no means as easy as it may look to live in the immediate present. For it requires a high degree of awareness of one’s self as an experiencing “I.” The less one is conscious of oneself as the one who acts, that is, the more unfree and automatic one is, the less one will be aware of the immediate present. As one person who was trying to avoid boredom in a meaningless (well, not job is meaningless because they provide a life and security) routine job described it, “I work as though I were someone else, not myself.” In such situations we feel as though we were a million miles away from what we are doing, acting as though in a daze or as though in a dream or half asleep or as though there were a wall between one’s self and the present. However, the more awareness one has—that is, the more one experiences oneself as the acting, directing agent in what one is doing—the more alive one will be and the more responsive to the present moment. Like self-awareness itself, this experiencing of the reality of the present can be cultivated. It is often useful to ask one’s self, “What do I experience at this very moment?” Or “Where am I—what is most significant to me emotionally—at this given moment?” To confront the reality of the present moment often produced anxiety. On the most basic level, this anxiety is a kind of vague experience of being exposed and vulnerable; it is the feeling of being face to face with some important reality before which one cannot flinch and from which one cannot retreat or hide. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

The reality of confronting the present moment also produces anxiety because it is like the feeling one might have in coming suddenly face to face with a person one loved and admired: one is confronted with an intense relationship one must react to, do something about. It is an intensity of experience, this immediate and direct confronting of the reality of the moment, similar to intense creative activity, and it carries with it the same susceptibility  and creative anxiety as well as the same joy. The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility. One cannot do much about the past, and very little about the distant future—how pleasant, then, to dream about them! How free from bother, how relieved from troublesome thoughts about what one has to do with one’s life! The mortal who has quarreled with one’s wife can talk of one’s mother with relief, but to consider the quarrel with one’s wife sooner or later entails the question of what one proposes to do about it? It is easier to dream of “when I get married” than to face the question, “Why do I not do something about my social life now?”; simpler to muse of “my future job when I get out of college” than to ask why one’s studies are not more vital at the moment, and what one’s motives for being in college anyway. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

The most effective way to ensure the value of the future, as we have mentioned, is to confront the present courageously and constructively. For the future is born out of and made by the present. The traces of our Earthly being will outlast aeons. That is to say, every creative act has its eternal aspect. This is not by ecclesiastical fiat, or merely because of the immortality of influence, but because, as we have shown, an essential characteristic of the creative act done in human consciousness is that it is not limited by quantitative time. No one values a painting according to how long it took to paint it or how big it is: should we judge our actions by more superficial standards than a painting? This brings us to the deteriorated forms of the religious idea of eternal life. The phrase eternal life is popularly used to imply endless time, as though eternity meant going on year after year limitlessly. One sees this view implied in the question frequently painted by some persons—with what motives Heaven only knows—on the dies f buildings to challenge the passer-by on the highways, “Where will you spent eternity?” When you think about it, this is an odd question. “Spend” implies a given quantity—if you spend half your money, you have only half left; and could one spend half or two-thirds of eternity? Such a view of eternity is not only repugnant psychologically—what a boring prospect, that one spends year after year endlessly!—but it is also absurd logically and unsound theologically. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

Eternity is not a given quantity of time: it transcends time. Eternity is the qualitative significance of time. One does not have to identify the experience of listening to music with the theological meaning of eternity to realize that in music—or in love, or in any work which proceeds from one’s inner integrity—that the eternal is a way of relating to life, not a successions of tomorrows. Hence Jesus proclaimed, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” That is to say, your experience of eternity will be found in how you relate to each given moment—or not at all. Eternity comes into the present moment as a quality of existence. The deteriorated uses of the term eternal have caused many intelligent people to avoid it. And that has been unfortunate, for it has meant omitting an important side of human experience, and constricting our views psychologically and philosophically. The problem of time may well be the fundamental problem of philosophy. An instant in time possesses value to the extent to which it is united to eternity and provides an issue out of the issuelessness of time—only in virtue of being an atom of eternity. The present moment is thus not limited from one point on the clock to another. It is always full of instants, always ready to open, to be produced. One has only to try the experiment of looking deeply within oneself, let us say, trailing almost any random idea, and one will find, so rich is a moment of consciousness in the human mind, that associations and new ideas beckon in every direction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

Or take a dream—it occurred in just one flash of consciousness as the alarm went off, yet it might take many minutes for you to tell all it pictured. To be sure, one picks and chooses. One does not live out one’s dreams or fantasies—except temporarily, if one is composing music, or in a psychoanalytic session, or constructing some plan in fantasy for one’s work. And even then one keeps a clear awareness of the relation of the beckoning possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. This the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment also always has infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities. Time for the human being is not a corridor; it is a continual opening out. The mechanism of necessity can be transposed to any level while still remaining true to itself. It is the same in the World of pure matter, in the terrestrial World, among nations, and in souls. Seen from our present standpoint, and in human perspective, it is quite blind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

If, however, we transport our hearts beyond ourselves, beyond the Universe, beyond space and time to where our Father dwells, and if from there we behold this mechanism, it appears quite different. What seemed to be necessity becomes obedience. Matter is entirely passive and in consequence entirely obedient to God’s will. It is a perfect model for us. There cannot be any being other than God and that which obeys God. On account of its perfect obedience, matter deserves to be loved by those who love its Master, in the same way as a needle, handled by the beloved wife he has lost, is cherished by a lover. The beauty of the World gives us an intimation of its claim to be a place in our heart. In the beauty of the World brute necessity becomes an object of love. What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea wave, or on the almost eternal folds of the mountains? The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. On the contrary, this adds to its beauty. If it altered the moment of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a creature gifted with discernment and choice and not this fluid, perfectly obedient to every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience that constitutes the sea’s beauty. All the horrors produced in the World are like the folds imposed upon the ways by gravity. That is why they contain an element of beauty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

Mortals can never escape from obedience to God. A creature cannot but obey. The only choice given to mortals, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If a mortal does not desire it, one obeys nevertheless, perpetually, inasmuch as one is a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If one desires it, one is still subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added to it, a necessity constituted by laws belonging to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for one; others are done by one’s agency, sometimes almost in spite of oneself. When we have the feeling that on some occasion we have disobeyed God, it simply means that for a time we have ceased to desire obedience. Of course it must be understood that, where everything else is equal, a mortal does not perform the same actions if one gives one’s consent to obedience as if one does not; just as a plant, where everything ese is equal, does not grow in the same way in the light as in the dark. The plant does not have any control or choice in the matter of its own growth. As for us, we are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light. “I say unto you, can you look up to God at that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I say unto you can you look up, having the image of God engraven upon your countenances?” reports Alma 5.19. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10