And in this broken child were centuries of evil and centuries of knowledge, and out of him there came no ignominious entreaty but merely the soft and bruised sense of what he was. Old, old evil, eyes that had seen dark ages of which I only dream. He did not open his eyes, and to mortals perhaps there would have been no expression there. However, I felt his sorrow. I felt its immensity, and I wished I did not feel it, and for one moment I understood the gulf that divided us, and the gulf that divided his attempt to overpower me from my rather simple defense of myself. My very chains and I grew friends, so much a long communion tends to make us what we are: even I regained my freedom with a sigh. However, we have understood nothing about infirmary so long as we have not recognized its odd resemblance to war and to love, its compromise, its feints, its exactions, that strange and unique amalgam produced by the mixture of a temperament and a malady. Most people assume that their infirmary and diseases are almost wholly under the command of destiny. An ailment is accepted at best as bad luck and a disease as irrevocable fate. Our very language expresses this attitude. We fall ill, as though the process were as fateful as gravity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

We are the victims of cancer. We get sick (instead of sicken), and we go to the doctor to get cured. And all we can do is be patient while the doctor treats us. All these words and phrases are in the passive voice. We assume that we are under the command of some fate and we can do nothing about it. The good patient is considered docile and cooperative, one who puts oneself completely in the hands of the physician. Our conscious selves seem outside, standing there like slaves on the block while their fate is decided by forced greater than they. This attitude toward illness reminds us of the statement made by the Grand Inquisitor that “mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” This attitude is unfortunately furthered by some misguided physicians under the illusion that it makes their role easier. Even in psychotherapy this occurs. The following is an actual verbatim exchange of a doctor with a patient who has come to a hospital suffering from depression: PATIENT: What will I do about my problems? DOCTOR: Do not inquire into the source of your trouble. Leave this to us doctors. We will steer and pilot you through the crisis…Whatever the pathological process…we will cure you. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

I believe this attitude works against healthy rather than for it. My belief is expressed on one hand by Professor Eli Ginzberg, “No improvement in the health care system will be efficacious unless the citizen assumes responsibility for one’s own well-being.” Dr. Rene Dubos agrees: “Recovery depends upon the mobilization of the patient’s own mechanisms of resistance to disease.” Dr. Dubos emphasizes time and again that the “vis medicatrix nature,” the healing power of nature. That is to say, only when we assert our freedom in engaging it, far from robbing us of our total freedom, destiny expresses itself though nature with constructive force which is available to us. The sense of the soul of the mortal who is in one’s relationships to all individual souls experiences the disappointment of the change into an inanimate living being, and aspires beyond al of them and yet not all the way towards one’s eternal soul. Not the way one seeks something: in truth, there is no God-seeking because there is nothing where one could not find him. How foolish and hopeless must one be to leave one’s way of life to seek God. What has been said earlier of love is even more clearly true at this point: feelings merely accompany the fact of the relationship which after all is established in the soul but between an I and God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

However, essential one considers a feeling, it still remains subject to the dynamics of the soul where one feeling is surpassed, excelled, and replaced by another; feelings, unlike relationships, can be compared on a scale. Above all, every feeling has it place in a polar tensions; it derives its color and meaning not from itself alone but also from its polar opposite; every feeling is conditioned by its opposite. Actually, the absolute relationship includes all relative relationships and is, unlike them, no longer a part but the whole in which all of them are consummated and become one. However, in psychology the absolute relationship is relativized by being derived from a particular and limited feeling that is emphasized. If one starts our from the soul, the perfect relationship can only be seen as bipolar, as conincidentia oppositorum, as the fusion of opposite feelings. Of course, as one looks back one pole frequently disappears, suppressed by the basic religious orientation of the person, and it is only in the purest and most open-minded and  profound introspection that it can be recalled. Yes, in the pure relationship you felt altogether dependent, as you could never possibly feel in any other—and yet also altogether free as never and nowhere else; created—and creative. You no longer felt the one, limited by the other; you felt both without bonds, both at once. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. However, you do not know also that God needs you—in the fullness of his eternity, you? If God did not need them, how would mortals exist, how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—for that which is the meaning of your life. Teachings and poems try to say more, and say too much: how murky and presumptuous is the chatter of the emerging God—but the emergence of the living God we know unswervingly in out hearts. The World is not divine play, it is divine fate. That there are World, mortals, the human person, you and I, has divine meaning. Creation—happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation—we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions. Two great servants move through the ages: prayer and sacrifice. In prayer mortals pour themselves out, dependent without reservation, knowing that, incomprehensibly, one acts on God, albeit without exacting anything from God; for when one no longer covets anything for oneself, one beholds one’s effective activity burning in the supreme flame. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

And those who sacrifice? I cannot despise the honest servants of the remote past who thought that God desired the smell of their burnt sacrifices: they knew in a foolish and vigorous way that one can and should give to God; and that is also known to one who offers one’s little will to God and encounters one in great will. “Let your will be done”—is all he says but truth goes on to say for one: “through me who you need.” What distinguishes sacrifice and prayer from all magic? Magic wants to be effective without entering into any relationship and performs its arts in the void, while sacrifice and prayer step before the countenance, into the perfection of the sacred basic word that signifies reciprocity. They say You and listen. Wishing to understand the pure relationship as dependence means wishing to deactualize one partner of the relationship and this the relationship itself. The position of personal responsibility in which one finds oneself may pass unnoticed or be evaded, but it is present in each important decision, each serious action. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Whether knowingly or unwittingly, one pronounced judgment on each occasion: the faculty of discrimination is always exercised, even by taking shelter under the strict and rigid doctrines of ancient institutions. They may rob one of this feeling of responsibility but its actuality remains. Once committed to the Quest, one will find that it is no light relationship. It exacts obedience, imposes responsibility, and demands consideration in the most trivial and the most important departments of this business living. Only time and experience will bring one to consider the fuller implications of the Quest and its graver consequence. On may then feel alarm or even repulsion; or one may find gratification and even joy. One has not chosen an easy way of life. A future of strenuous self-discipline stretches before one. Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet one seemed all the more supernatural, his face too dazzling, his dark eyes fathomless and just for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell. And when his voice came it was low and almost teasing, forcing me to concentrate to hear it: All night you have been searching for me, and I here I am, waiting for you. I have been waiting for you all along. I think I sensed even then, as I stood unable to look away that never in my years of wandering this Earth would I ever have such rich revelation of the true horror that we are. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7