Every soul speaks that same language. Know that language of love that swells within the human temple. Our presence in a place of need is more powerful than a thousand sermons. Being there is our witness. As we love God through our love for others, seemingly insurmountable barriers fall before us. When we are at perfect peace with God, our warm smiles show it. It is a reflection of our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us. It is the most urgent challenge for the holy nation, perhaps the most important principle. It is the nature of human beings to organize. Probably since the Tower of Babel we have been setting up hierarchies, organizational flow charts, orders of authority, and all the other structural schemes dreamed up through the ages. The more advanced the civilization, the more refined the organizational schemes. However, though structures are essential to hold society together, they are there to serve, not be served. The marvels of modern technology have produced a sophistication in systems and structures that encourage the political illusion, the misguided belief that all problems can be solved by structures—namely, institutions. So for each new problem, a new institution is created. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

However, the church is a living organism and its function is to love the God who created it—to care for others out of obedience to Christ, to heal those who hurt, to take away fear, to restore community, to belong to one another, to proclaim the Good News while living it out. The church is the invisible made visible. In happy circumstances, the baby sees its own charm, worth, and lovability when one looks into the (m)other’s face. The first definitions of the self are influenced on the one hand by the internal climate and, on the other, by what you discover about yourself from the mirror of the other. All this is very relevant to the process of psychotherapy, in which people discover parts of themselves which hitherto had been hidden. This uncovering makes people feel unsure and vulnerable. They are not as they thought they were. How will other people react now? Can they accept their new discoveries? The recognition and acceptance found in other people’s eyes (in some circumstances the psychotherapist’s) may make all the difference between renewed defensiveness and a change for the better. When (m)others are sensitive and living, the infant sense of the love of God and is able to experience a smooth sequence from feeling-a-need to having-that-need-met. This smooth sequence makes for the integration in at least three way. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

The smooth sequence welds the arousal of the infant’s needs strongly to the satisfaction to an idea of the World as a-place-where-needs-are-met. So the satisfaction of experienced needs contributes to the infant’s expanding imagery of itself and of the World. The child who has been fortunate in its parents is supported by the confidence that one can do the things which-it-and-the mother did while they were at one, and that the environment is benevolent and not frustrating or hostile. Such a child’s self-imagery is replete with confident self-congratulatory feelings, such as some socially successful parents’ children have who—although they themselves have not yet achieved anything—nevertheless feel that they are somehow more meritorious than the children of parents who are less well off. At a later stage, good parenting brings about not only the infant’s experience that it can cope, but also the experience that it can cope with occasional times when it either is not getting that gratification it is looking for, or is not getting it straight away or not so well. If things have gone well, the child can absorb a certain amount of strain of this kind and can put up with the discovery that the World is sometimes less than entirely beneficent.  The “right” amount of anxiety has been generated for the child one’s own powers. Not too little, not too much, but just the right: “optimal” frustration. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

Learning to deal with frustrations early on is very important. Most of us feel bad about inflicting hurt. However, some people go through life causing a great deal of hurt to other people, including their romantic partners and even their own children. They might fall under the label of narcissistic or borderline personality disorder. When one is on the receiving end of dealing with a person’s ill will, it can be extremely frustrating. When people do not like themselves—no matter how good of a front they put on—they are likely to project this self-dislike onto others. Particularly if this self-dislike stems from abusive behaviour which they have experiences in their past, they will engage in hurtful behaviours towards those people they love—replicating their own lived experiences. They may be driven by a desire to hurt you in the same way they have been hurt, to bring you down and cause you pain in the same way they have experienced it. These individuals need to seek help, but often will not and no one will usually point out to them that they have a problem and hurting others gives them the energy they need to boost their own self-esteem. Hurting others can be part of a strategy to weaken another individual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

Very different from destructiveness are certain deeply buried archaic experiences that often appear to the modern observer as proof of human’s innate destructiveness. Yet a closer analysis can show that while they result in destructive acts, their motivation is not the passion to destroy. One should be warned against the hasty interpretation of all destructive behaviour as the outcome of a destructive instinct, rather one must reorganize the frequency of religious and nondestructive motivations behind such behaviour.  Destructiveness, however, can be spontaneous, or bound in the character structure. By the former I refer to the outburst of dormant (not necessarily repressed) destructive impulses that are activated by extraordinary circumstances, in contrast to the permanent, although not always expressed, presence of destructive traits in the character. However, these destructive explosions are not spontaneous in the sense that they break out without any reason. In the first place, there are always external conditions that stimulate them, such as wars, religions or political conflicts, poverty, extreme boredom and insignificance of the individual. Secondly, there are subjective reasons: extreme group narcissism in national or religious terms, as in India, a certain proneness to a state of trance, as in parts of Indonesia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

It is not human nature that makes a sudden appearance, but the destructive potential that is fostered by certain permanent conditions and mobilized by sudden traumatic events. Without these provoking factors, the destructive energies in these population seems to be dormant, and not as with the destructive character, a constantly flowing source of energy. Vengeful destructiveness is a spontaneous reaction to intense and unjustified suffering inflicted upon a person or the members of the group with whom one is identified. It differs from normal defensive aggression in two ways: It occurs after the damage has been done, and hence is not a defense against a threatening danger. It is of much greater intensity, and is often cruel, lustful, and insatiable. Language itself expresses this particular quality of vengeance in the term “thirst for vengeance.” It hardly needs to be emphasized how widespread vengeful aggression is, both among individuals and groups. All forms of punishment—from primitive to modern—are an expression of vengeance.  The Bible continually mandates restitution for property offenses. The Old Testament in the Christian Bible contains repeated references; and in the New Testament is found the example of Zacchaeus giving back fourfold what had been wrongly taken. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Nowhere in Scripture are prisons instituted as punishment for crimes, however. They are referred to as place for detaining people and for political purposes. The use of prisons for rehabilitation or punishment following conviction is a very recent invention, the result of Quaker-initiated reforms two centuries ago. The word “penitentiary” comes from the Quaker idea that the criminal needed to be penitent and repent and reform themselves. The first state prison in American was the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1790. The program drew national attention and has been duplicated many times since. However, punishment as an expression of vengeance, the classic example is the lex talionis of the Old Testament. The threat to punish a misdeed up to the third and fourth generation must also be considered an expression of revenge by a God whose commands have been disobeyed, even though it seems that the attempt was made to weak the traditional concept by adding “and who will be merciful until the thousandth generation.” The same idea can be found in many primitive societies—for instance, the law of the Yakuts which says events which cause the loss of life require atonement. The atonement was attached to the aggressor’s descendants for nine generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

It cannot be denied that criminal law has a certain social function in upholding social stability. However, why is vengeance such a deep-seated and intense passion? I can only offer some speculations. Let us consider first the idea that vengeance is in some sense a magic act. By destroying the one who committed the atrocity one’s deed is magically undone. (However, that is not very rational and one never wants another person to suffer the same as one did. That is why we have the justice system.) Yet, the former is still expressed today by saying that “the criminal has paid one’s debt”; at least in theory, one is now like someone who never committed a crime. Vengeance may be said to be a magic reparation; but even assuming that this is so, why is this desire for reparation so intense? Perhaps humans are endowed with an elementary sense of justice; this may be because there is a deep-rooted sense of “existential equality”: we all are born from mothers, we were once powerless children, and we shall one day return to Heaven. Although no human can often not defend oneself against the harm others inflict upon one, in one’s wish for revenge one tries to wipe the sheet clean by denying, magically, that the damage was ever done. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

It seems that envy has the same root. Cain could not stand the fact that he was rejected while his brother was accepted. The rejection was arbitrary, and it was not in his power to change it; this fundamental injustice aroused such envy that the score could only be evened out by terminating Abel. However, there must be more to the cause of vengeance. When God and secular authorities fail, humans seem to take justice into their own hands. It is as if in one’s passion for vengeance one elevates oneself to the role of God, and of the Angels of vengeance. The act of vengeance may be one’s greatest hour just because of this self-elevation. While vengeance is indeed widespread there are great differences in degree, up to the point that certain cultures and individuals seem to have only minimal traces of it. There must be factors that explain the difference. One such factor is that of scarcity versus abundance. The person—or group—who has confidence in life and enjoys it, whose material resources may not be ample but sufficient not to elicit stinginess, will be less eager for the reparation of damage than an anxious, hoarding person who is afraid that one can never made up for one’s losses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

This much can be stated with some degree of probability: the thirst for revenge can be plotted on a line at ne end of which are people in whom nothing will arouse a wish for revenge; these are humans who have reached a degree of development which in Buddhist or Christian terms is the ideal for all humans. On the other end would be those who have an anxious, hoarding, or extremely narcissistic character, for whom even a slight damage will arouse an intense craving for revenge. This type would be exemplified by a human from who a thief has stolen a few dollars and who wants one to be severely punished; or a professor who has been slighted by a student and therefore writes a negative report on him when he is asked to recommend the student for a good job; or a customer who has been treated “wrongly” by a salesperson and complains to the management, wanting the individual to be fired. In these cases we are dealing with a character in which vengeance is constantly present trait. The spontaneous outbreak of lust for revenge, with which we are here mainly concerned, occurs in people who do not have a vengeful character, but in whom extraordinary provocations can whip up intense and sometimes almost compulsive vengefulness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Of course, we do not want to be vengeful, nor do we want to hurt others. The goal is to be law abiding citizens, express the love of Christ, and allow the law to enforce the rules of the land. When humans attempt to be Christian without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment as to one who is always inexplicably angry. Every human, not very holy or very arrogant, has to live up to the outward appearance of other humans: one knows there is that within one which falls far below even one’s most careless public behaviour, even one’s loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things have passed through your mind? We have never told the truth. We may confess ugly fact—the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the toke is false. The very act of confessing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they turned into words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls one’s normal form one’s “bad days” and mistakes one’s rare success for one’s normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. However, the important thing is that we should not mistake out inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside. A reaction—it itself wholesome—is not going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of mortality, a reawakening of the social conscience. We feel ourselves to be involve in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with “the system” and which can be dealt with without waiting for the future. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. However, we must learn to walk before we run. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. As if they were no concern of the present speaker’s and even with laughter, I have heard myself recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood. However, mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the prince of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probably that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. It is not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the playing with your cute little toes and singing a song, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy or schoolgirl, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the Universe. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Perhaps in that eternal moment St. Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong—forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, “an acquired taste”—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind. Here we are learning to understand and do the things Jesus gave us in specific commandments and teachings. We are studying his words and deeds in the four gospels. This “learning” is primarily developed through the teaching ministry of our church as we gather. We must learn to trust ourselves wholly to Christ. It is necessary to attribute providence to God. For all the good that is in created things has been created by God. In created things good is found not only as regards their substance, but also as regards their order towards an end and especially their last end, which, is the divine goodness. This good of order existing in things created, is itself created by God. Since, however, God is the cause of things by His intellect, and this it behooves that the type of every effect should pre-exist in Him, as is clear from what has gone before, it is necessary that the type of the order of things towards their end should be pre-exist in the divine mind: and the type of things ordered towards an end is, properly speaking, providence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

For it is the chief part of prudence, to which two other parts are directed—namely, remembrance of the past, and understanding of the present; inasmuch as from the remembrance of what is past and the understanding of what is present, we gather how to provide for the future. Now it belongs to prudence, according to the Philosopher, to direct other things towards an end whether in regard to oneself—as for instance, a human is said to be prudent, who orders well one’s own acts towards the end of life—or in regard to others subject to one, in a family, city or kingdom; in which sense it is said, “a faithful and wise servant, whom one’s lord hath appointed over one’s family,” reports Matthew 24.45. In this way prudence or providence may suitably be attributed to God. For in God Himself there can be nothing ordered towards an end, since He is the last end. This type of order in things towards an end is therefore in God called providence. Whence Boethius says (De Consol. Iv, 6) that {Providence is the divine type itself, seated in the Supreme Ruler; which disposeth all thing”; which disposition may refer either to the type of the order of things towards an end, or to the type of the order of parts in the whole. The intuitive feeling or the seminal idea may be planted in a human’s heart today but it may need twenty to thirty years before it comes to sufficient growth in one’s conscious mind. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

Providence resides in the intellect; but presupposes the act of willing the end. Nobody gives a precept about things done for an end; unless one will that end. Hence prudence presupposes the moral virtues, by means of which the appetitive faculty is directed towards good. Even if Providence has to do with the divine will and intellect equally, this would not affect the divine simplicity, since in God both the will and intellect are one and the same thing. No one was or could have been present at creation. Moreover, while we have an idea of who God is and wants, He wants, He is utterly incomprehensible to finite humans. The World-Mind is forever attempting to reflect its qualities and attributes in the Universe. The Universe is already and eternally within God. No decision was needed nor could there have been one, any ore than a human may decide to be kind. Bringing the Universe out of Himself is a function, quality, or attribute—none of these terms is quite correct but a better is hard to find—an obedience to the law of God’s own being. The movement which brings the Universe into being out of the World-Mind’s stillness is a spontaneous, not a deliberate, one. It just happens because it is the very nature of the World-Mind to make this movement. It is an inner compulsion rather than an inner necessity that moves the World-Mind to bring about these repeated reincarnations of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

If we try to consider the inner necessity which makes the World-Mind manifest Itself to Itself through an other, a cosmos, we find ourselves on the threshold of a mystery. How could compulsion, limit, or desire arise in the desireless one? Human intellect can only formulate such a question, but cannot answer it. The moment we assert that this infinite Power has a motive in making the cosmos, a purpose in creating the World, in that moment we limit it and ascribe need or want or lack to it. The World-Mind has the power of vigorous creativeness as an essential attribute of its nature. It will stop its work of sustaining the Universe when it stops being what it is. There is no other purpose behind creation than that of continuing its own existence. To understand this is to understand that the question as to purpose is not at all applicable to the World-Mind but only to an imagined and inferior being, one which could start or discontinue. We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid—it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. It is not a question of mere optical reflection but of an autonomous answer which reveals the self-sufficing nature of that which answers. Christian symbolism is particularly concerned with healing, or attempting to heal the wound of the gaping rift in this World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

It would be more correct to take the open conflict as a symptom of the psychic situation of humans in the New World, and to deplore their inability to assimilate the whole range of the Christian symbol. As a doctor I cannot demand anything of my patients in this respect, also I lack the Church’s means of grace. Consequently I am faced with the task of taking the only path open to me—bringing the hidden into consciousness. At the same time I must leave my patient to decide in accordance with one’s assumptions, one’s spiritual maturity, one’s education, origins, and temperament, so far as this is possible without serious conflicts. As a doctor it is my takes to help the final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion—be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion—ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with one’s own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. If one is to find out what it is that supports one when one can no longer support oneself, the patient must be alone. I would be only too delighted to leave this anything but easy task to the theologian, were it not that it is just from the theologian that many of my patients come. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

They ought to have hung on to the community of the Church, but they were shed like dry leaves from the great tree and now find themselves “hanging on” to the treatment. As if they or the thing they cling to would drop off into the void the moment they relaxed their hold, something in them clings, often with the strength of despair. They are seeking firm ground on which to stand. Since no outward support is of any use to them they must finally discover it in themselves—admittedly the most unlikely place from the rational point of view, but an altogether possible one from the point of view of the unconscious. We can this this from the archetype of the “lowly origin of the redeemer.” The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic is to define a center. And as a matter of fact the whole process revolves about a certain point or some arrangement round a center, which may in certain circumstances appear even in the initial dreams. As manifestations of unconscious processes the dreams rotate or circumambulate round the center, drawing closer to it as the amplifications increase in distinctness and in scope. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Owning to the diversity of the symbolical material it is difficult at first to perceive any kind of order at all. Nor should it be taken for granted that dream sequences are subject to any governing principle. However, as I say, the process of development proves on closer inspection to be cyclic or spiral. We might draw a parallel between such spiral courses and the processes of growth in plants; in fact the plant motif (tree, flower, et cetera) frequently recurs in these dreams and fantasies and is also spontaneously drawn or painted in Mandala symbolism. In alchemy the tree is the symbol of Hermetic philosophy. Harmonicists believe that true theology exists in all religions, and that it was given by God to humans in antiquity. When the inner voice says what we do not like to hear, we are apt to ignore it in modern times. However, in its manifestation, an intuitive idea is too often such a tiny spark that we are more likely to miss it than not. It is prudent to obey warning premonitions than to ignore them. Take time over problems, let your final decisions wait until they are fully ripe. Where is the wisdom in forcing a quick decision, which could easily be a wrong one, merely to get a decision at all? Intuition is the voice which is constantly calling one to this higher state. However, if one seldom or never pauses amid the press of activity to listen for it, one fails to benefit by it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Such intuitions manifest themselves only on the fringe of consciousness. They are tender shoots and therefore need to be tenderly nurtured. The more one follows a course contrary to intuitive leading, the more will errors of mishaps follow one. These feelings may be cultivated as a gardener cultivates flowers. Their visitation may be brought on again, their delight renewed. If one listens humbly, in the end one will rely on this little inner voice which speaks and tells one which way to turn. Do not deny your intuitive self as Judas denied his master, as Peter denied him. There is also one’s subconscious mind, one’s brilliant and seemingly effortless hunches. One’s judgements come forth spontaneously like lightning, with no supporting brief of argument. One follows one’s own subconscious with blind faith but insists that to have a hunch, one must first have all the facts at one’s command, and one’s intelligence must be working at full speed. Then suddenly and without conscious effort you think of a solution which is really based on facts, but is not achieved by deliberate cerebrations. With it comes an unexampled feeling of well-being. One will learn sooner or later by the test of experience to defer to this intuitive feeing whenever its judgement, guidance, or warning manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Thomas Alva Edison, an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America’s greatest inventor developed many devices such as the phonograph and incandescent electric light and power, telephony and telegraphy sound recording. He said that all his inventions grew out of initial flashes which welled up from within. The rest was a matter of research. The intuitive element has to be awaited wit much patience and vigilant attention. Is one fully open to intuitive feelings that originate in one’s deeper being, one’s sacred self? Or does one’s ego get in the way by its rigidities, habits, and tendencies? The importance of these feelings is that they are threadlike clues which need following up, for they can lead one to a blessed renewal or revelation. The capacity to respond to spiritual intuitions is latent in all humans but trained and developed in few humans. From this hidden source comes at times guidance, warnings, attractions, or aversions which ought to be construed as intuitive messages. However, for this they must first best recognized and believed: they pass too quickly. It is not that one put out the antenna of one’s intuition, so much as that one insulates its end and thus provides clear receptivity. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

We may not forecast how quickly or how well every student will progress in this art. For one may naturally possess much sensitivity but another may posses little. And even when an intuition is recognized immediately, the will may respond to it very slowly. It is true that conscious is the voice of God in the moral life of humans, but it is also true that one seldom hears its pure sound. Most often one hears it mixed with much egotism. Do you hear me, Earth spirits, as I go walking? Do you hear my footfalls, drumming on the dirt? Do you hear my breathing, mixing with the air? Do you hear my heart beating, weaving in the rhythms? Do you hear my words of prayer, asking your attention? Do you hear me, Earth Spirits? Please hear me, please hear me, please hear my voice. Please hear the one who walks among you. Please hear my words of peace and friendship. Please hear my plea, please grant my wish. In mercy Thou bringest light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon, and in Thy goodness renewest continually each day the work of creation. How great are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom has Thou made them all; the Earth is full of Thy creatures. O King, Thou alone hast been exalted from the days of old, praised, glorified and extolled from of yore. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, please have compassion on us. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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