Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves. That is the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all great geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another’s designs. And the dreams, the dreams are but part of a great design. Our Father which are in Heaven—he is our Father—there is nothing real in us which does not come from him. We belong to God. He loves us, since he loves himself and we are his. Nevertheless he is our Father who is in Heaven—not elsewhere. If we think to have a Father here below is not he, it is a God. We cannot take a single step toward him. We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward him. We do not have to search for him, we only have to change the direction in which we are looking. It is for him to search for us. We must be happy in the knowledge that he is infinitely beyond our reach. Thus we can be certain that the evil in us, even if it overwhelms our whole being, in no way sullies the divine purity, bliss, and perfection. Hallowed by they Name—God alone have the power to name himself. His name is unpronounceable for human lips. His name is his word. It is the Word of God. The name of any being is an intermediary between the human spirit and that being; it is the only means by which the human spirit can conceive something about a being that is absent. God is absent. He is in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

Mortal’s only possibility of gaining access to him is correction of the petition that the kingdom of God should come. We have to cast aside all other desires for the sake of our desire for eternal life, but we should desire eternal life itself with renunciation. We must not even become attached to detachment. Attachment to salvation is even more dangerous than the others. If such a thing were conceivable, we have to think of eternal life as one thinks of water when dying of thirst, and yet at the same time we have to desire that we and our loved ones should be eternally deprived of this water rather than receive it in abundance in spite of God’s will. The three foregoing petitions are related to the three Persons of the Trinity, the Son, the Spirit, and the Father, and also to the three divisions of time, the present, the future, and the past. Give us this day our daily bread—the bread which is supernatural. Christ is our bread. We can only ask to have him now. Actually he is always there at the door of our souls, wanting to enter in, though he does not force our consent. If we agree to his entry, he enters; directly we cease to want him, he is gone. We cannot bind our will today for tomorrow; we cannot make a pact with him that tomorrow he will be within us, even in spite of ourselves. Our consent to his presence is the same as his presence. Consent is an act; it can only be actual, that is to say in the present. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

We have not been given a will that can be applied to the future. Everything not effective in our will is imaginary. The effective part of the will has its effect at once; its effectiveness cannot be separated from itself. The effective part of the will is not effort, which is directed toward the future. It is consent; it is the ”yes” of marriage. A “yes” pronounced within the present moment and for the present moment, but spoken as an eternal word, for it is consent to the union of Christ with the eternal part of our soul. Bread is a necessity for us. We are beings who continually draw our energy from outside, for as we receive if we use it up in effort. If our energy is not daily renewed, we become feeble and incapable of movement. Besides actual food, in the literal sense of the word, all incentives are sources of energy for us. Money, ambition, consideration, decorations, celebrity, power, our loved ones, everything that put into us the capacity for action is like bread. If any one of these attachments penetrates deeply enough into us to reach the vital roots of our carnal existence, its loss may break us and even case our death. That is called dying of love. It is like dying of hunger. All these objects of attachment go together with food, it the ordinary sense of the word, to make up the daily bread of this World. It depends entirely on circumstances whether we have it or not. We should ask noting with regard to circumstances unless it be that they may conform to the will of God. We should not ask for Earthly bread. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

There is a transcendent energy whose source is in Heaven, and this flows into us as soon as we wish for it. It is a real energy; it performs actions through the agency of our souls and of our bodies. We should ask for this food. At the moment of asking, and by the very fact that we ask for it, we know that God will give it to us. We ought not to be able to bear to go without it for a single day, for when our actions only depend on Earthly energies, subject to the necessity of this World, we are incapable of thinking and doing anything but evil. The World winks at dishonesty. The World does not call it dishonesty. Any protest is regarded as a heresy that shows how those who utter it do not belong: argument are not met on their merits; instead one rehearses a few illustrious names and possibly deigns to contrast them with some horrible examples. God saw that the misdeeds of mortals were multiplied on the Earth and that all the thoughts of their hears were continually bent upon evil. The necessity that drives us toward evil governs everything in us except the energy from on high at the moment when it comes into us. We cannot store it. Tone is crucial and often colors meaning. If we do not know what is said seriously and what in jest, we do not know the meaning. We have to know what is said lightly and what solemnly, where a remark is prompted by a play on words, if something is ironical or a quotation, an allusion, a pastiche, a parody, a diatribe, a daring coinage, a cliché, an epigram, or possibly ambiguous. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. At the moment of saying these words we must have already remitted everything that is owing to us. This not only includes reparation for any wrongs we think we have suffered, but also gratitude for the good we think we have done, and it applies in a quite general way to all we expect from people and things, to all we consider as our due and without which we should feel ourselves to have been frustrated. All these are the rights that we think the past has given us over the future. First there is the right to a certain permanence. When we have enjoyed something for a long time, we think that it is ours and that we are entitled to expect fate to let us go on enjoying it. Then there is the right to a compensation for every effort whatever its nature, be it work, suffering, or desire. Every time that we put forth some effort and the equivalent of this effort does not come back to us in the form of some visible fruit, we have a sense of false balance and emptiness which makes us think that we have been cheated. The effort of suffering from some offense causes us to expect the punishment or apologies of the offender, the effort of doing good makes us expect the gratitude of the person we have helped, but these are only particular cases of a universal law of the soul. Every time we give anything out we have an absolute need that at least the equivalents should come into us, and because we need this we think we have a right to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

Our debtors comprise all beings and all things; they are the entire Universe. We think we have claims everywhere. In every claim we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim of the past on the future. That is the claim we have to renounce. To have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump. It is to accept that the future should still be a virgin and intact, strictly united to the past by bonds of which we are unaware, but quite free from the bonds of our imagination though to impose upon it. It means that we accept the possibility that this will happen, and that it may happen to us in particular; it means that we are prepared for the future to render all our past life sterile and vain. In renouncing at one stroke all the fruits of the past without exception, we can ask of God that our past sins may not bear their miserable fruits of evil and error. So long as we cling to the past, God himself cannot stop this horrible fruiting. We cannot hold on to the past without retaining our crimes, for we are unaware of what is most essentially bad in us. Every being I encounter is seen to be essential. Nothing is essential but a being. Doing something with my whole being or my whole essence is the same. The realm of essences and what is essential is not outside this World in some beyond. Essential is whatever is—here and now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

If romanticism is flight from the present, yearning for deliverance from the cross of the here and now, an escape into the past, preferably medieval, or the future, into drugs or other Worlds, either night or twilight—if romanticism can face anything except the facts—then nothing could be less romantic than the central the principal claim we think we have on the Universe. This claim implies all others. The instinct of self-preservation makes us feel this continuation to be a necessity, and we believe that a necessity is right. We are like the beggar who said to Talleyrand: “Sir, I must live,” and to whom Talleyrand replied, “ I do not see the necessity for that.” Our personality is entirely dependent on external circumstances which have unlimited power to crush it. However, we would rather die than admit this. From our point of view the equilibrium of the World is combination of circumstances so ordered that our personality remains intact and seems to belong to us. All the circumstances of the past that have wounded our personality appear to us to be disturbances of balance which should infallibly be made up for one day or another by phenomena having a contrary effect. We live on the expectation of these compensations. The near approach of death is horrible chiefly because it forces the knowledge upon us that these compensations will never come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so. If we say them with our soul, the words “Thy will be done” imply this acceptance. That is why we can say a few moment later: “We forgive our debtors.” The forgiveness of debts is spiritual poverty, spiritual nakedness, death. If we accept death completely, we can ask God to make us live again, purified from the evil in us. For to ask him to forgive us our debts is to ask him to wipe out the evil in us. Pardon is purification. God himself has not the power to forgive the evil in us while it remains there. When he has brought us to the state of perfection, God will have forgiven our debts. Until then God forgives our debts partially in the same measures as we forgive our debtors. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thus to delight in the present—this rational insight brings us that reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants those who haven once been confronted by the inner demand to comprehend. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

Find in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and refuse to pin your hopes on any beyond. Many people have become wary of promises and hopes and take a stand resolutely in the here and now. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The only temptation for mortals is to be abandoned to one’s own resources in the presence of evil. One’s nothingness is then proved experimentally. Although the soul has received supernatural bread at the moment when it asked for it, its joy is mixed with fear because it could only ask for it for the present. The future is still to be geared. The soul has not the right to ask for bread for the morrow, but it expresses its fear in the form of a supplication. It finishes with that. The prayer began with the word “Father,” it ends with the word “evil.” We must go from confidence to fear. Confidence alone can give us strength enough not to fall as a result of fear. After having contemplated the name, the kingdom, and the will of God, after having received the supernatural bread and having been purified from evil, the soul is ready for that true humility which crowns all virtues. Humility consist of knowing that in this World the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change. There must be absolute acceptance of the possibility that everything natural in us should be destroyed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

However, we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear. It must be accepted as an event that would come about only in conformity with the will of God. It must be repudiated as being something utterly horrible. We must be afraid of it, but our fear must be as it were the completion of confidence. The six petitions correspond with each other in pairs. The bread which is transcendent is the same thing as the divine name. It is what brings about the contact of mortals with God. The kingdom of God is the same thing as his protection stretched over us against temptation; to protect is the function of royalty. Forgiving our debtors their debts is the same thing as the total acceptance of the will of God. The difference is that in the first three petitions the attention is fixed solely on God. In the three last, we turn our attention back to ourselves in order to compel ourselves to make these petitions a real and not an imaginary act. In the first half of the prayer, we begin with acceptance. Then we allow ourselves a desire. Then we correct it by coming back to acceptance. In the second half, the order is changed; we finish by expressing desire. Only desire has now become negative; it is expressed as a fear; therefore it corresponds to the highest degree of humility and that is a fitting way to end. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each work, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in the soul. Modern civilization, with its tensions and comforts, its speed and extroversion, its pleasure and treasures hunts, its complicated activities and economic necessities, has trapped its victims so securely that one who would follow an independent path would have to make excessive efforts. It may seem foolish to suggest a scheme of living which involves the sacrifice of time separated out from a pressing day and given up to purposes seldom bothered with by civilized society, whose ways in fact would impede it. It may seem unlikely that people will follow such a scheme when, even if they theoretically accept those purposes, they deem themselves too busy or know themselves too lazy to operate it. It may seem impractical to offer it, especially to those who are dependent upon their work for a livelihood and who lose so much time getting to and from it. And even if they or others could be persuaded into adopting it, there is little likelihood that its exercises would be kept up—for only a comparative few are likely to have the needed strength and perseverance to keep it up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

Where then is the spare time out of the modern mortal’s daily program and the continuously driving will to come from? Where are the exceptional persons wo would make the requisite sacrifices? No mortal will take up such a course of self-improvement and self-development unless one is thoroughly convinced of its necessity. And even then one may lack the willpower to declare war against one’s bad habits, one’s sloth and complacency, one’s pessimism and surface-comfort. One may be unable to change one’s pattern of thought and life, even if one wants to. However, the impulse towards a higher life must in the end come from something other than mere escapism or exotic curiosity. It must come from the thirst for truth for its own sake.  Without this ever-burning thirst for spiritual awareness, no seeker is likely to travel far. Those whom life has wounded may turn to spiritual teachings for comfort, but too often this is only a passing reaction to sufferings. It has its temporary value and place, but it is not the same as consciously and clearly engaging in the Quest because the thirst for truth is predominant. A passionate eagerness to find God is a necessary basis for all the other qualifications in its pursuit. One needs to have the willingness and preparedness to withdraw every day from one’s Worldly and intellectual life utterly, and then to have the humility to open one’s heart in fervent supplication and loving adoration of higher power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12