Oh, if only I could give you some peace of mind. I wish I could. Please, please wait for her to call you, and do not think about her anymore. A final consequence and evidence of the loss of our conviction of the worth and dignity of the person is that we have lost the sense of the tragic significance of human life. For the sense of tragedy is simply the other side of one’s belief in the importance of the human individual. Tragedy implies a profound respect for the human being and a devotion to one’s rights and destiny—otherwise it just does not matter whether Orestes or Lear or you or I fall or stand in our struggles. Arthur Miller, in the preface to his play The Death of a Salesman, makes some telling comments on the lack of tragedy in our day. The tragic character, he writes, is one “who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.” And “the tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself.” These conditions obtained in the periods in Western history when great tragedy was written. One has only to look at fifth-century Greece, when Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote the mighty tragedies of Oedipus, Agamemnon and Orestes, or at Elizabethan England when Shakespeare gave us Lear and Hamlet and Macbeth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

However, in our age of emptiness, tragedies are relative and rare. Or if they are written, the tragic aspect is the very fact that human life is so empty, as in Eugene O’Neill’s drama, The Iceman Cometh. This play is set in a saloon, and its dramatis personae—alcoholics, comfort men and women, and, as the chief character, a mortal who in the course of the play goes psychotic—can dimly recall the periods in their lives when they did believe in something. It is this echo of human dignity in a great void of emptiness that gives this drama the power to elicit the emotions of pity and terror of classical tragedy. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which we have mentioned earlier, is itself one of the few real tragedies about the common people—neither alcoholics nor psychotics—who make up the social situation in this country out of which most of us have sprung. (In the movie version of this drama, Willie Loman, the salesman, is unfortunately made to look pathetic—those who saw only the movie may have to imagine Willie in a broader context to appreciate his real tragic import.) He was a man who took seriously the teachings of his society, that success should attend hard, energetic work, that economic progress is a reality and that if one has the right contacts achievements and salvation should follow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

It is easy enough from our later perspective to see through Willie’s illusions, and to poke fun at his unsound go-getter values. However, that is not the point.  The one thing that matters is that Willie believed; he took seriously his own existence and what he had been taught he could rightly expect from life. “I don’t say he is a great man,” says his wide in describing Willie’s disintegration to their sons, “but he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.” The tragic fact is not that Willie is a man of the grandeur of Lear or the inward richness of Hamlet; “he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor,” as his wife also says. However, it is the tragedy of a historical period—if one multiplies Willie by the hundreds of thousands of fathers and brothers who also believed what they were taught but found in the changing times that it did not work, one has enough to shake one with pity and fear as in the tragedies of old. “He never knew who he was,” and he was one who took seriously his right to know. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

“The flaw, or crack in the tragic character,” Miller writes, “I really nothing—and need be nothing—but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are ‘flawless.’ Most of us are in that category.” Miller goes on to point out that the quality in a tragedy which shakes us “derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this World. Among us today this fear is as strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was.” Let no one assume we are advocating a pessimistic view we mourn the loss of the tragic sense. On the contrary, as Miller also notes, “Tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker’s brightest opinion of the human animal.” For the tragic view indicates that we take seriously mortal’s freedom and one’s need to realize oneself; it demonstrates our belief in the indestructible will of mortals to achieve one’s humanity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

The knowledge of human nature and the insights into mortal’s unconscious conflicts which are disclosed in psychotherapy give new ground for believing in the tragic aspects of human life. The psychotherapist, privileged to be an intimate witness to some persons’ inner wrestling and their often grave and bitter struggles with themselves and with external forces which challenge their dignity, gains a new respect for these persons and a new realization of the potential dignity of the human being. Countless times a week, furthermore, one receives proof in one’s consulting work that when mortals at last accept the fact that they cannot successfully lie to themselves, and at last learn to take themselves seriously, they discover previously unknown and often remarkable recuperative powers within themselves. The picture of the roots of the malady of our time given in this essay adds up to a bleak diagnosis. However, it does not necessarily imply a bleak prognosis. For the beneficial side is that we have no choice but to move ahead. We are like people part way through psychoanalysis whose defenses and illusions are broken through, and their only choice is to push on to something better. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

We—and by we I mean everyone, however old or young, who is aware of the historical situation in which we live—are not the lost generation of the 1920’s. The term lost, when applied to members of that period of adolescent rebellion following the first World War, meant that one was temporarily away from home, and could go back again whenever one became too frightened at being on one’s own. However, we are, rather, the generation which cannot turn back. We in the middle of the twentieth century are like pilots in the transatlantic flight who have passed the point of no return, who do not have fuel enough to go back but must push on regardless of storms or other dangers. What, then, is the task before us? The implications are clear in the above analysis: we must rediscover the sources of strength and integrity within ourselves. This, of course, goes hand in hand with the discovery and affirmation of values in ourselves and in our society which will serve as the core of unity. However, no values are effective, in a person or a society, except as there exists in the person the prior capacity to do the valuing, that is, the capacity actively to choose and affirm the values by which one lives. This the individual must do, and in this way one will help lay the groundwork for the new constructive society which will eventually come out of this disturbed times, as the Renaissance came out of the disintegration of the Middles Ages. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Those who are concerned with making the World more healthy had best start with themselves. We could go father and point out that finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow mortals. It is said that when the fisher people in the sea around Norway see their boat heading for a maelstrom, one reaches ahead to try to throw an oar into the boiling whirlpool; if one can do so, the maelstrom quiets down, and one and one’s boat go safely though. Just so, one person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him or her. This is what our society needs—not new ideas and inventions, important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen and superwomen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves. It is our task to find the sources of this inner strength. Students in the having mode of existence will listen to a lecture, hearing the words and understanding their logical structure and their meaning and, as best they can, will write down every word in their loose-leaf notebooks—so that, later on, they can memorize their notes and this pass an examination. However, the content does not become part of their own individual system of thought, enriching and widening it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Instead, with the information being consumed, they transform the words they hear into fixed clusters of thought, or whole theories, which they store up. The students and the content of the lectures remain strangers to each other, expect that each student has become the owner of a collection of statements made by somebody else (who has either created them or taken them over from another source). Students in the having mode have but one aim: to hold onto what they learned, either by entrusting it firmly to their memories or by carefully guarding their notes. They do not have to produce or create something new. In fact, the having type of individual feel rather disturbed by new thoughts or ideas about a subject, because the new puts into question the fixed sum of information they have. Indeed, to one for whom having is the main form of relatedness to the World, ideas that cannot easily be pinned down (or penned down) are frightening—like everything else that grows and changes, and thus is not controllable. The process of learning has an entirely different quality for students in the being mode of relatedness to the World. To being with, they do not go to the course lectures, even to the first one in a course, as tabulae rasae. They have thought beforehand about the problems the lectures will be dealing with and have in mind certain questions and problems of their own. They have been occupied with the topic and it interests them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

When people are interest and eager to learn, instead of being passive receptacles of words and idea, they listen, they hear, and most important, they receive and they respond in an active, productive way. New questions, new ideas, new perspectives arise in their minds. Their listening is an alive process. They listen with interest, hear what the lecturer says, and spontaneously come to life in response to what they receive. They do not simply acquire knowledge that they can take home and memorize. Each student has been affected and has changed: each is different after the lecture than he or she was before it. Of course, this mode of learning can prevail only if the lectures offers stimulating material. Empty talk cannot be responded to in the being mode, and in such circumstances, students in the being mode find it best not to listen at all, but to concentrate on their own thought processes. To undertake this venture of becoming aware of ourselves, and to discover the sources of inner strength and security which are the rewards of such a venture, let us start at the beginning by asking, What is this person, this sense of selfhood we seek? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We want to experience ourselves as an identity who is separated from our parents and can stand against them if need be. This remarkable emergence is the birth of the human creature into a person.  This consciousness of the self, this capacity to see one’s self as though from the outside, is the distinctive characteristic of mortals. Our consciousness of ourselves is the source of our highest qualities. It underlies our ability to distinguish between I and the World. It gives us the capacity to keep time, which is simply the ability to stand outside the present and to imagine oneself back in yesterday or ahead in the day after tomorrow. Thus human beings can learn from the past and plan for the future. And thus mortals are the historical mammal in that one can stand outside and look at one’s history; and thereby one can influence one’s own development as a person, and to a minor extent one can influence the march of history in one’s nation and society as a whole. The capacity for consciousness of self also underlies mortal’s ability to use symbols, which is a way of disengaging something from what it is, such as the two sounds which make up the word “table,” and agreeing that these sounds will stand for a whole class of things. Thus mortals can think in abstractions like “beauty,” “reason,” and “goodness.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

This capacity for consciousness of ourselves gives us the ability to see ourselves as others see us and to have empathy with others. It underlies our remarkable capacity to transport ourselves into someone else’s parlor where we will be in reality next week, and then in imagination to think and plan how we will act. And it enables us to imagine ourselves in someone else’s place, and to ask how we would feel and what we would do if we were this other person. No matter how poorly we use or fail to use or even abuse these capacities, they are the rudiments of our ability to begin to love our neighbor, to have ethical sensitivity, so see truth, to create beauty, to devote ourselves to ideals, and to die for them if need be. To fulfill these potentialities is to be a person. That is what is meant when it is stated in the Hebrew-Christian religious tradition tat mortals are created in the image of God. However, these gifts come only at a high price, the price of anxiety and inward crises. The birth of the self is so simple and easy matter. For the child now faces the frightful prospect of being out on one’s own, alone, and without the full protection of the decisions of one’s parents. It is no wonder that when one begins to feel oneself an identity in one’s own right, one may feel terribly powerless in comparison with the great and strong adults around one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The healthy child, who is loved and supported but not coddled by one’s parents, will proceed in one’s development despite this anxiety and the crises that face him or her. And there may be no particular external signs of trauma or special rebelliousness. However, when one’s parents consciously or unconsciously exploit one from their own ends or pleasure, or hate or reject one, so that one cannot be sure of minimal support when one tries out one’s new independence, the child will cling to the parents and will use one’s capacity for independence only in the forms of negativity and stubbornness. If, when one first begins tentative to say “No,” one’s parents beat one down rather than love and encourage one, one thereafter will say “No” not as a form of true independent strength but as a mere rebellion. Of if, as in the majority of cases in the present day, the parents themselves are anxious and bewildered in the tumultuous seas of the changing times, unsure of themselves and beset by self-doubts, their anxiety will carry over and lead the child to feel that one lives in a World in which it is dangerous to venture into becoming one’s self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

This brief sketch is schematic, to be sure, and it is meant to give us as adults a kind of retrospective picture in the light of which we can better understand how one fails to achieve selfhood. Most of the data for these conflicts of childhood come from adults who are struggling, in dreams, memories or in present-day relations, to overcome what in their past lives originally blocked them in becoming fully born as persons. Almost every adult is, in greater or lesser degree, still struggling on the long journey to achieve selfhood on the basis of the patterns which were set in one’s early experiences in the family. Nor do we for a moment over look the fact that selfhood is always born in a social context. Genetically, Auden is quite right: for the ego is a dream till a neighbor’s need by name create it. Or, as we put it above, the self is always born and grows in interpersonal relationships. However, no ego moves on into responsible selfhood if it remains chiefly the reflection of the social context around it. It our particular World in which conformity is the great destroyer of selfhood—in our society in which fitting the pattern tends to be accepted as the norm, and being well liked is the alleged ticket to salvation—what needs to be emphasized is not only the admitted fact that we are to some extent created by each other but also our capacity to experience, and create, ourselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Humans first emerged from the animal World as a freak of nature. Having lost most of the instinctive equipment which regulates the animal’s activities, one was more helpless, less well equipped for the fight for survival, than most beings. Yet mortals had developed a capacity for thought, imagination, and self-awareness, which was the basis for transforming nature and oneself. For many thousands of generations mortals lived by food gathering and hunting. One was still tied to nature, and afraid of being cast out from her. One identified oneself with other terrestrial beings and worshipped these representatives of nature as one’s gods. After a long period of slow development, mortal began to cultivate the soil, to create a new social and religious order based on agriculture and animal husbandry. During this period one worshipped goddesses as the bearers of natural fertility, experiences oneself as the child dependent on the fertility of the Earth, on the life-giving productivity of mother. At a time some four thousand years ago, a decisive turn in mortal’s history took place. One took a new step in the long-drawn-out process of one’s emergence from nature. Mortals severed ties with nature and with Mother, and set oneself a new goal, that of being fully born, of being fully awake of being fully human; of being free. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

 Reason and conscience became the principles which were to guide one; one’s aim was society bound by the bonds of humanly love, justice and truth, a new and truly human home to take the place of the irretrievably lost home in nature.  We have inherited a plentiful amount of physical wealth—but almost nothing of those values, and the moths and symbols from which they come, which are the basis for responsible choice. What did we do when we unchained this Earth from its Sun? There is a disorder of the will and not of the motor apparatus, and this indicates that the catatonic, in one’s pathological World, is caught in the same inner deadlock as we are in our World of reality. The catatonic’s problem hinges on values and will, and one’s immobility is one expression of the contradiction one experiences. It is now clear that we must take into account what the environment does to an organism not only before but after it responds. Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences. I believe that the sequence and timing of our actions over years can help us to see one united and compressive work and not just a series of independent and discrete initiatives. God has revealed a pattern of society progress for individuals and families through ordinances, teaching, programs, and activities. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

I pray that we can recognize the Lord’s work as one great Worldwide work that is becoming ever more home centered. I know and testify that the Lord is revealing and will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God. I promise that increased perspective, purpose, and power will be evident in our learning and living the restored gospel of Jesus Christ as we strive to gather together in one al things in Christ—even in him. All opportunities and blessings of eternal consequence originate in, are possible and have purpose because of, and endure through the Lord Jesus Christ. And in him we find the assurance of peace in this World, and eternal life in the World to some. The holy is first of all experiences as present. It I here and now, and this means it encounters us in a thing, in a person, in an event. Faith sees in a concrete piece of reality the ultimate ground and meaning of all reality. No piece of reality is excluded from the possibility of becoming a bearer of the holy; and almost every kind of reality has actually been considered as holy by acts of faith in groups and individuals. Faith in God produces awe, fascination, and adoration. The assertion that life has sacred character is meaningful for possessing faith. The purpose of God’s plan is to give his children the opportunity to choose eternal life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

They can do everything, actually. They can do the cooking and the cleaning, and they can meet and greet the drop-in guests. They can host the Easter Fest and Christmas Supper and every other imaginable event. Fact is, they can all do far more than they believe they can. And they all have plenty of money, money enough to walk away from this place and be comfortable wherever they go. That gives them a feeling of security, and an air of independence. However, they want to be right here. This is their home. However, they want for there to be a presence, a Cresleigh Rocklin Trails presence, and without that, they are insecure. People who have lost the sense of their identity as selves also tend to lose their sense of relatedness to nature. They lose not only their experience of organic connection with inanimate nature, such as trees and mountains, but they also lose some of their capacity to feel empathy for animate nature, that is animals. In psychotherapy, persons who feel empty are often sufficiently aware of what a vital response to nature might be to know what they are missing. They may remark, regretfully, that though others are moved by a sunset, they themselves are left relatively cold; and though others may find the ocean majestic and awesome, they themselves, standing on rocks at the seashore, do not feel much of anything; and while many people find the steeply pitched roofs, turrets and stained glass of a Victorian house charming and charismatic, they see just a building with some fins and glass. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The most important things are the hardest to say. How weirdly appropriate. Our relationship to nature tends to be destroyed not only by our emptiness, but also by our anxiety. A little girl coming home from school after a lecture on how to defend one’s self against the fake news media, asked her parents, “Mother, can’t we move someplace where there isn’t any news?” Fortunately this child’s terrifying but revealing question is an allegory more than an illustration, but it well symbolizes how anxiety makes us withdraw from nature. Modern mortals, so afraid of the fake news media they have constructed, must cower from the TV and hide in caves—must cower from the TV which is classically the symbol of vastness, imagination, entertainment. On a more everyday level, our point is simply that when a person feels oneself inwardly empty, as is the case with many modern people, one experiences nature around one also as empty, dried up, dead. The two experiences of empties are two sides of the same state of impoverished relation to life. We can see more clearly what it means to lose one’s feeling for nature if we glance back to note how the sense of relationship to nature flourished in the modern period, and then died down. One of the chief characteristics of the Renaissance in Europe was an upsurging of enthusiasm for nature in all its forms—whether in the form of animals, or of trees, or in the inanimate form of stars and colors in the sky. One can see this new feeling coming beautifully to life in the paintings of Giotto in the early Renaissance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

If, after looking at the stylized and stiff forms of medieval art, you suddenly come up the frescoes of Giotto, you will be surprised by the most charming cockatiels, lively dogs and windsome donkeys, all presented as vital parts of human experience. And you will likewise be surprised to see that Giotto, in contrast to the artists of the Middle Ages, painted castles and trees as natural forms delightful for their own beauty, not simply for their symbolic religious message; and that, also in contrast to medieval art, he shows human beings experiencing joy, grief, contentment as individual emotions. His paintings tell us more powerfully than words that wen a human being experiences himself as an identity who actively feels his relation to life as an individual, he also experiences as alive relations to animals and nature. However, by the nineteenth century the interest in nature had become increasingly technical; mortal’s concern now was chiefly to mature and manipulate nature. The World had become disenchanted. To be sure, the disenchantment process ad begun way back in the seventeenth century, when we were taught that the body and mind were to be separated, that the objective World of physical nature and the body (which could be measured and weighed) was radically different from the subjective World of mortal’s mind and inner experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The practical result of this dichotomy was that subjective, inner experience—the mind side of the dichotomy—tended to be put on the shelf, and modern mortals had a heyday pursuing, with great success, the mechanical, measurable aspects of experiences. So by the nineteenth century nature had largely become impersonal, as in science, or an object to be calculated for the purpose of making money, as the architecture charts rights angles for the purposes of commerce. Obviously, when we point out that the overemphasis on things which could be calculated and manipulated went hand and hand with the growth of industrialism and bourgeois commerce, we are implying no criticisms of machines and technical progress as such. We mean simply to point out the historical fact that in this development nature became separated from the individual’s subjective, emotional life. Near the beginning of the nineteenth William Wordsworth, among others, clearly saw this loss of the feeling for nature, and be saw the overemphasis on commercialism which was partly its cause and the emptiness which would be its result. He described what was occurring in his familiar sonnet: The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; we have given hearts away, a sordid boon! #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

 This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours, and are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers; for this, for everything, we are out of time; it moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; so might I, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; or hear old Triston blow his weathered horn. It is not by poetic accident that Wordsworth yearns for such mythological creatures as Proteus and Triton. These figures are personifications of aspects of nature—Proteus, the god who keeps changing his shape and form, is a symbol for the sea which is eternally transforming its movement and its color. Triton is the god whose horn is the sea shell, and his music is the echoing hum one hears in the large shells on the shore. Proteus and Triton are examples of precisely what we have lost—namely the capacity to see ourselves and our moods in nature, to relate to nature as a broad and rich dimension of our own experience. The dichotomy we have learned has given modern mortals a philosophical basis for getting rid of the belief in witches, and this contributed considerably to the actual overcoming of witchcraft in the eighteenth century. Everyone would agree that this was a great gain. However, we likewise got rid of the fairies, elves, trolls, and all of the demicreatures of the woods and Earth. It is generally assumed that this, too, was a gain since it helped sweep mortal’s mind clean of superstition and magic. However, I believe this is an error. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Actually what we did in getting rid of the fairies and the elves and their ilk was to impoverish our lives; and impoverishment is not the lasting way to clear mortal’s minds of superstition. There is a sound truth in the old parable of the mortal who swept the evil spirits with one; and the second state of the mortal was worse than the first. For it is the empty and vacant people who size on the new and more destructive forms of our latter-day superstitions, such as beliefs in the totalitarian mythologies, engrams, miracles like the day the Sun stood still, and so on. Our World has become disenchanted; and it leaves us not only out of tune with nature but with ourselves as well. As human beings we have our roots in nature, not simply because of the fact that the chemistry of our bodies is of essentially the same elements as the air or dirt on the grass. In a multitude of other ways we participate in nature—the rhythm of the change of seasons or of night and day, for example, is reflected in the rhythm of our bodies, of hunger and fulfillment, of sleep and wakefulness, of pleasures of the flesh and gratification, and in countless other ways. Proteus can be a personification of the changes in the sea because he symbolizes what we and the sea share—changing moods, variety, capriciousness, and adaptability. In this sense, when we relate to nature we are but putting our roots back into their native soil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

However, in other respect mortals are very different from the rest of nature. He possesses consciousness of oneself; one’s senses of personal identity distinguishes one from the rest of the living or nonliving things. And nature cares not fig for a mortal’s personal identity. That crucial point in our relatedness to nature brings into the center of the picture the basic theme of this book, mortal’s need for awareness of oneself. One must be able to affirm one’s person despite the impersonality of nature, and to fill the silences of nature with one’s own inner aliveness. It takes a strong self—that is, a strong sense of personal identity—to relate fully to nature without being swallowed up. For really to feel the silence and the inorganic character of nature carries a considerable threat. If one stands on a rocky promontory, for example, and looks at the sea in its tremendous rising and falling of swells, and if one is fully and realistically aware that the sea never has a tear for others’ woes nor cares what any other things, that one’s life could be swallowed up with scarcely an infinitesimal difference being made to the tremendous, ongoing, chemical movements of creation, one is threatened. Or if one gives oneself to the feeling of the distance of the far mountain peaks, permits oneself to empathize with their heights and depths, and if one is aware at the same moment that the mountain never was the friend of one, nor promised what it could not give, and that one could be dashed to pieces on the stone floor at the foot of the peak without one’s extinction as a person making the slightest differences to the walls of granite, one is afraid. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

This is the profound threat of nothingness or nonbeing, which one experiences when one fully confronts one’s relation with inorganic being. And to remind one’s self, dust thou art, to dust returnest, is hollow comfort indeed. Such experiences in relating to nature have too much anxiety for most people. They flee from the threat by shutting off their imagination, by turning their thoughts to the practical and humdrum details of what to have for lunch. Or they protect themselves from the full terror of the treat of nonbeing by making the sea a person who would not hurt them, or by taking refuge in some belief in individual Providence and telling themselves, one shall give one’s angels charge concerning thee…least at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. However, to feel from one’s anxiety, or to rationalize one’s way out of it, only makes one weaker in the long run. It requires, we have said, a strong sense of self and a good deal of courage to relate to nature creatively. However, to affirm one’s own identity over against the inorganic being of nature in turn produces greater strength of self. At this point, however, we are getting ahead of our story—how such strength is developed belongs to later discussion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

We wish here to emphasize that the loss of the sense of one’s own self is detrimental to our souls and society. Little we see in Nature that is ours, as a description of many modern people, is a mark of the weakened and improvised person. Mortals, in order to feel at home in the World, must grasp it not only with one’s cognitive abilities, but with all of one’s sense, one’s eyes, one’s ears, and with all of one’s body. One must act out with one’s body what one thinks out with one’s brain. Body and mind cannot be separated in this, or in any other aspect. If mortal grasps the World and thus unites oneself with it by thought, one creates philosophy, theology, myth and sciences. If mortal expresses one’s grasp of the World by one’s sense, one creates art and ritual, one creates song, dance, drama, painting, sculpture. Using the word “art,” we are influences by its usage in the modern sense, as a separate area of life. We have, on the one hand, the artist, a specialized profession—and on the other hand, the admirer and consumer of art. However, this separation is a modern phenomenon. Not that there were not “artists” in all great civilizations. The creation of the great Egyptian, Greek, or Italian sculptures was the work of extraordinarily gifted artists who specialized in their art; so were the creators of Greek drama or of music since the seventeenth century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

However, what about a Gothic cathedral, a Catholic ritual, an Indian rain dance, a Japanese flower arrangement, a folk dance, community singing? Are they art? Popular art? We have no word for it, because art in a wide and general sense, as a part of everybody’s life, has lost its place in our World. What word can we use then? In the discussion of alienation I used the term “ritual.” The difficulty here is, of course, that carries a religious meaning, which puts it again in a special and separate sphere. For lack of a better word, I shall use “collective art,” meaning the same as ritual; it means to respond to the World with our senses in a meaningful, skilled, productive, active, shared way. In this description the shared is important, and differentiates the concept of collective art from that of art in the modern sense. The latter is individualistic, both in its production, and in its consumption. Collective art, is shared; it permits mortals to feel one with others in a meaningful, rich, productive way. It is not an individual leisure time occupation, added to life, it is an integral part of life. It corresponds to a basic human need, and if this need is not fulfilled, mortals remain as insecure and anxious as if the need for a meaningful thought picture of the World were unrealized. In order to grow out of the receptive into the productive orientation, one must relate oneself to the World artistically and not only philosophically or scientifically. If a culture does not offer such a realization, the average person does not develop beyond one’s receptive or marketing orientation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Where are we? Religious rituals have little importance any more, except for the Catholics. Secular rituals hardly exist. Aside from the attempts to imitate rituals in lodges, fraternities, sororities, and so on, we have a few patriotic and sport rituals, appealing only to a most limited extent to the needs of the total personality. We are a culture of consumers. We “drink in” the movies, the crime reports, the cranberry juice, the fun. There is no active productive participation, no common unifying experience, no meaningful acting out of significant answers to life. What do we expect from our young generation? What are they to do when they have no opportunity for meaningful, shared artistic activities? What else are they to do but to escape into drinking, movie-daydreaming, crime, neurosis, and insanity? What help is it to have almost no illiteracy, and the most widespread higher education which has existed at any time—if we have no collective expression of our total personalities, no common art and ritual? Undoubtedly a relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all—is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading, radio-listening, internet-consuming culture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

No sane society can be built upon the mixture of purely intellectual knowledge and almost complete absence of shared artistic experience, college plus football, crime stories, plus Fourth of July celebrations, with Mothers’ and Fathers’ day and Christmas Supper thrown in for good measure. In considering how we can build a sane society, we must recognize that the need for the creation of collective art and ritual on a non-clerical basis is at least as important as literacy and higher education. The transformation of an atomistic into a communitarian society depends on creating again the opportunity for people to sing together, walk together, dance together, admire together—together, and not be members of a lonely crowd. A number of attempts have been made to revive collective art and ritual. The Religion of Reason with its new feast days and rituals, was the form created by the French Revolution. National feelings created some new rituals, but they never gained the importance which the lost religious ritual once has. Cultural rituals are encouraged in our communities, but the significance is never greater than that of the patriotic ritual. Collective art and rituals are found in the youth movement, which flourished in years before the immigration debacle. However, many community movements remain rather esoteric and are drowned in the rising flood of nationalism and political debates. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

On the whole, our modern ritual is impoverished and does not fulfill mortal’s need for collective art and ritual, even in the remotest sense, either as to quality or its quantitive significance in life. What are we to do? Can we invent rituals? Can one artificially create collective art? Of course not! However, once one recognizes the need for them, once one begins to cultivate them, probiotics and prebiotics will grow, and gifted people will come forth who will add new forms to old ones, and new talents will appear which would have gone unnoticed without such new orientation. Collective art will begin with children’s games in kindergarten, be continued in school, then in later life. We shall have common dances, choirs, plays, music, bands, not entirely replacing modern sport, but subordinating it to the role of one of the many nonprofit and nonpurpose activities. Here again, as in industrial and political organizations, the decisive factor is decentralization; concrete face-to-face groups, active responsible participation. In the factory, in the school, in the small political discussion groups, in the village, various forms of common artistic activities can be created; they can be stimulated as much as is necessary by the help and suggestion from central artistic bodies, but not fed by them. At the same time, modern radio, television, and internet techniques give marvelous possibilities to bring the best music and literature to large audiences. Needless to say it cannot be left to business to provide for these opportunities, but that they must rank with our educational facilities which do not make a profit for anybody. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

It might be argued that the idea of a large-scale revival of ritual and collective art is romantic; that it suits an age of handicraft, and not an age of machine production. If this objection were true, we might as well resign ourselves to the fact that our way of life would destroy itself soon, because of its lack of balance, and sanity. However, actually, the objection is not any more compelling than the objections made to possibility of railroads and heavier-than-air flying machines. There is only one valid point in this objection. The way we are, atomized, alienated, without any genuine sense of community, we shall not be able to create new forms of collective art and ritual. However, this is just what I have been emphasizing all along. One cannot separate the change in our industrial and political organization from that of the structure of our educational and cultural life. No serious attempt for change and reconstruction will succeed if it is not undertaken in all those spheres simultaneously. Can one speak of a spiritual transformation of society without mentioning religion? Undoubtedly, the teachings of the great monotheistic religions stress the humanistic aims which are the same as those which underlie the productive orientation. The aims of Christianity and Judaism are those of the dignity of mortals as an aim and an end in oneself, of humanly love, of reason and of the supremacy of spiritual over material values. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

These ethical aims are related to certain concepts of God in which the believers of the various religions differ among themselves, and which are unacceptable to millions of others. However, it is an error of the nonbelievers to focus on attacking the idea of God; their real aim ought to be to challenge religionist to take their religion, and especially the concept of God, seriously; that would mean to practice the spirit of humanly love, truth and justice, hence to become the most radical critics of present-day society. On the other hand, even from a strictly monotheistic standpoint, the discussions about God mean to use God’s name in vain. However, while we cannot say what God is, we can state what God is not. It is not time to cease to argue about God, and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry? Today it is not Baal and Astarte but the deification of the state and of power in authoritarian countries and the deification of the machines and of success in our own culture; it is the all-pervading alienation which threatens the spiritual qualities of mortals. Whether we are religionists or not, whether we believe in the necessity for a new religion or in the continuation of the Juaeo-Chrisitian tradition, inasmuch as we are concerned with the essence and not with the shell, with the experience and not with the word, with mortals and not with the institution, we can unite in firm negation of idolatry and find perhaps more of a common faith in this negation than in any affirmative statements about God. Certainly we shall find more of humility and of brotherly love. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

This statement remains true even if one believes, as I do, that the theistic concepts are bound to disappear in the future development of humanity. In fact, for those who see in the monotheistic religions only one of the stations in the evolution of the human race, it is not too far-fetched to believe that a new religion will develop within the next few hundred years, a religion which corresponds to the development of the human race; the most important feature of such a religion would be its universalistic character, corresponding to the unification of humankind which is taking place in this epoch; it would embrace the humanistic teachings common to all great religions of the East and of the West; its doctrines would not contradict the rational insight of humankind today, and its emphasis would be on the practice of life, rather than on doctrinal beliefs. Such a religious would create new rituals and artistic forms of expression, conducive to the spirit of reverence toward life and the solidarity of mortals. Religion can, of course, not be invented. It will come into existence with the appearance of a new great teacher, just as they have appeared in previous centuries wen the time was ripe. In the meaning, those who believe in God should express their faith by living it; those who do not believe, by living the precepts of love and justice and—waiting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned lives in many forms, subjectively and objectively. Every religious and cultural group and, to a certain degree, every individual is the bearer of a special experience and content of faith. The subjective state of the faithful changes in correlation to the change of the symbols in faith. Faith is a construction of thought. There are no pure types in any realm of life. However, one can distinguish two main elements in every experience of the holy. One element is the presence of the holy ere and now. It consecrates the place and the reality of its appearance. It grasps the mine with terrifying and fascinating power. It breaks into ordinary reality, shakes it and drives it beyond itself in an ecstatic way. It establishes rules according to which it can be approached. The holy must be present and felt as present in order to be experienced at all. At the same time, the holy is the judgment over everything that is. It demands personal and social holiness in the sense of justice and love. Our ultimate concern represents what we essentially are and—therefore—ought to be. It stands as the law of our being, against us and for us. Holiness cannot be experienced without its power to command what we should be. If we call the first element in the experience of the holy the holiness of being, the second element in the experience of the holy could be called the holiness of what ought to be. In an abbreviated way one could call the first form of faith its ontological type, and the second form its moral type. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The dynamics of faith within and between the religions are largely determined by these two types, their interdependence and their conflicts. Their influence reaches into the most intimate cells of personal faith as well as into the movement of the great historical religions. They are omnipresent in ever act of faith. However, one of them is always predominate; for mortals are finite, and one can never unite all elements of truth in complete balance. On the other hand, one cannot rest on the awareness of one’s finitude, because faith is concerned with the ultimate and its adequate expression. Mortal’s faith is inadequate if one’s hole existence is determined by something that is less than ultimate. Therefore, one must always try to break through the limits of one’s mortality and reach what never can be reached, the ultimate itself. Out of this tension the problem of fait and tolerance arises. A tolerance bound to relativism, to an attitude in which noting ultimate is asked for, is negative and without content. It is doomed to swing toward its own opposite, an intolerant absolutism. Faith must unite the tolerance based on its relativity with certainty based on the ultimacy of its concern. In all types of faith this problem is alive, but especially in the Protestant form of Christianity. From the power of self-criticism and from the courage to face one’s own relativity come the greatness and danger of the Protestant faith. Here more than anywhere else the dynamics of faith become manifest and conscious: the infinite tension between the absolute of its claim and the relativity of its life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Heavenly Father guides us and gives us the experiences we need based on our strengths, weaknesses, and choices so that everything we do will be blessed. We can trust and rely upon the Father. I am blessed that I was introduced to religion at a young age, because in times of hardship, I would not know where to turn and do not dread to think what my life would be like if I did not know God. Being taught about God is certainly a blessing and my faith in him has grown over the years. Sometimes because of challenges in life and the intensity and duration of somethings I may have to endure, I wonder if my prayers are working and sometimes stop praying, but I know that God is reading my thoughts and knows what I need. I will get back to my praying when my soul is ready to, and I encourage others never to stop. Because God has an eternal perspective, Heavenly Father can see things we cannot. His joy, work, and glory are to bring pass our immortality and exaltation. Everything God does it for our benefit. God wants our eternal happiness more than we do. And God would not require us to experience a moment more of difficulty than is absolutely needed for our benefit or for that of those w love. As a result, God focuses on helping us to progress, not on judging and condemning us. As spirit children of God, each of us has the potential to become like the Heavenly Father. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

Why give up an opportunity to see her again? There was not any harm in just seeing her. The more we come to terms with our soul tendencies, the more we find ourselves conceiving and living by a universal structure of reality. A friend of mine with whim I was having lunch seemed depressed. The lunch was not far along when he told me that he was preoccupied over some event of the weekend. His three children, aged twelve to twenty-three, had devoted several pithy hours to pointing out how he had been, if not responsible for, at least a prime contributor to, their problems. The upshot of their attack was that he had not made enough clear decisions in his relation to them, had not take a firm enough stand or set a strong enough structure. However, it is important that his children felt comfortable enough to communicate their issues with him, because some adult children stay respectful to their parents out of necessity and you never may know how they feel about the things you did and know you are responsible for doing that caused extreme hardship in their lives, when you know it is your fault, regardless of if you are in denial or not. Nonetheless, my friend, a sensitive, imaginative man who was a considerable success in his own life and work, had been brought up by strict inner-directed parents. However, he had known that he could never raise his children on that Victorian will-power pattern. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

At the same time, my friend and his wife had also never been devotees of the popular over permissiveness which filled the vacuum when Victorianism was routed. What struck me with poignancy as he talked was my awareness that almost every parent these days seems to express in some form the same pain and perplexity that infused his question, “How does a parent make decisions about his children? How should a father asset his will?” This crisis of will affects the neurotic and normal alike—the patient on the couch as well as the psychiatrist or psychologist in the chair listening to him. The man I referred to was not in treatment for neurosis; yet he was experiencing the same contradiction in will and decision that is an inescapable expression of the psychological upheaval of the transitional age in which we live. The inherited basis of our capacity for will and decision has been irrevocably destroyed. And, ironically if not tragically, it is exactly in this portentous age, when power has grown so tremendously and decisions are so necessary and so fateful, that we find ourselves lacking any new basis for will. That Victorian will power is a faculty by which people make resolutions and then direct their lives down the rational and moral road that the culture dictates. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

However, most of what motives us and our behaviors—whether in bringing up children or participating in pleasures of the flesh or running a business—are determined by unconscious urges, anxieties, fears, and the endless host of bodily drives and instinctual forces. The deeply rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice is quite unscientific and must be given ground before the claims of a determinism which governs mental life. Loss of individual will and responsibility is due to the fact the people no longer reflect on what is emerging from the depths of their soul or culture, and then they reflect and interpret and mold what they find without pondering why. In effect, this is a mutilation of one’s own consciousness, and it forfeits the chance to pus through the crisis to a new place of consciousness and integration. And in the process, one’s image of oneself will never be the same again; our only choice is to retreat before this destruction of our vaunted will power or to push on to the integration of consciousness on new levels. I do not wish or choose to do the former; but we have not yet achieved the latter; and our crisis of will is that we are now paralyzed between the two. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

The dilemma arising from the undermining of will has become a thorny problem. Among the sophisticated use of the term will power has become perhaps the most unambiguous badge of naivete. It has become unfashionable to try, by one’s unassisted efforts, to force one’s way our of a condition of neurotic misery; for the stronger the will the more likely it is to be labeled a counter-phobic maneuver. The unconscious is heir to the prestige of will. As one’s fate formerly was determined by will, now it is determined by the repressed mental life. Knowledgeable moderns put their backs to the couch and in so doing may fail to put their shoulders to the wheel. As will has been devalued, so had courage; for courage can exist only in the service of will, and can hardly be valued higher than that which it serves. In our understanding of human nature we have gained determinism, lost determination. The tendency to see ourselves as the spawns of determinism has spread, in late decades, to include contemporary mortal’s conviction that one is the helpless object of scientific forces in the form of atomic power. The helplessness is, of course, vividly represented by the nuclear bomb, about which the typical citizen feels powerless to do anything. Many intellectuals saw this coming and asked in their own terms whether modern mortals are obsolete. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

However, the important development in our present decade is that this is the common awareness of all who even watch TV or go to the movies, the modern era has destroyed mortal’s faith in one’s ability to influence what happens to him or her. Indeed, the central core of modern mortal’s neurosis, it may be fairly said, is the undermining of one’s experience of oneself as responsible, the sapping of one’s will and ability to make decisions. The lack of will is much more than merely an ethical problem: the modern individual so often has the conviction that even if one did exert one’s will—or whatever illusion passes for it—one’s actions would not do any good anyway. It is this inner experience of impotence, this contradiction in will, which constitutes our critical problem. Our ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because emblematic language alone is able to express our supreme concern. Symbols have one characteristic in common with signs; they point beyond themselves to something else. The red sign at the street corner points to the order to stop the movement of cars at certain intervals. A red light and the stopping of cars have essentially no relation to each other, but conventionally they are untied as long as the convention lasts. The same is true of letters and numbers and partly even words. They point beyond themselves to sounds and meanings. They are given this special function by convention within a nation or by international conventions, as mathematical signs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Sometimes such signs are called symbols; but this is unfortunate because it makes the distinction between signs and symbols more difficult. Decisive is the fact that signs do not participate in the reality of that to which they point, while symbols do. Therefore, signs can be replaced for reasons of expediency or convention, while symbols cannot. This leads to the symbol: It participates in that to which it points: the flag participates in the power and dignity of the nation for which it stands. Therefore, it cannot be replaced except after an historic catastrophe that changes the reality of the nation which it symbolizes. An attack on the flag is felt as an attack on the majesty of the group in which it is acknowledged. Such an attack is considered blasphemy. Another characteristic of a symbol is that it opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us. All arts create symbols for a level of reality which cannot be reached in any other way. A picture and a poem reveal elements of reality which cannot be approached scientifically. In the creative work of art we encounter reality in a dimension which is closed for us without such works. The symbol’s characteristic not only opens up dimensions and elements of reality which otherwise would remain unapproachable but also unlocks dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

We never know we go—when we are going. We jest and shut the door; fate following behind us bolts it, and we accost no more. A great play gives us not only a new vision of the human scene, but it opens up hidden depths of our own being. Thus we are able to receive what the play reveals to us in reality. There are within us dimensions of which we cannot become aware except through symbols, as melodies and rhythms in music. Symbols cannot be produced intentionally—this is further characteristic. They grow out of individual or collective unconscious and cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimension of our being. Symbols which we have an especially social function, as political and religious symbols, are created or at least accepted by the collective unconscious of the group in which they appear. Additionally, a consequence of the fact that symbols cannot be invited, like living beings, they grow and die. They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. The symbol of the king grew in a special period of history, and it died in most parts of the World in our period. Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. The die because they can no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

These are the main characteristics of every symbol. Genuine symbols are created in several sphere of mortal’s cultural creativity. The built environment reflects the natural World and the conception of the people who inhabit it of their place within the natural scheme of things. A building’s form might echo the World around it, or might contrast with it—but, in each case, the choices builders make reveal their attitudes toward the World around them. The architecture of the vast majority of early civilizations was designed to imitate natural forms. The significance of the pyramids of Egypt is the subject of much debate, but their form may well derive from the image of the god Ra, who in ancient Egypt was symbolized by the rays of the Sun descending to Earth. A test in one pyramids reads: “I have trodden these rays as ramps under my feet.” I believe that inscription is in one of the Pyramids of Mycerinus (circa 2470 BCE). As one approached the mammoth pyramids, covered in limestone to reflect the light of the Sun, the eye was carried skyward to Ra, the Sun itself, who was in the desert the central fact of life. Human’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically! One may ask: Why can it not be expressed directly and properly? If money, success or the nation is someone’s ultimate concern, can this not be said in a direct way without symbolic language? It is not only those cases in which the content of the ultimate concern is called “God” that we are in the realm of symbols? #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The answer is that everything which is a matter of unconditional concern is made into a god. If the nation is someone’s ultimate concern, the name of the nation becomes a sacred name and the nation receives divine qualities which far surpass the reality of being and functioning of the nation. The nation then stands for and symbolizes the true ultimate, but in an idolatrous way. Success as ultimate concern is not the natural desires of actualizing potentialities, but is readiness to sacrifice all other values of life for the sake of a position of power and social predominance. The anxiety about not being a success is an idolatrous form of the anxiety about divine condemnation. Success is grace; lack of success, ultimate judgment. In this way concepts designating ordinary realities become idolatrous symbols of ultimate concern. The reason for this transformation of concepts into symbols is the character of ultimacy and the nature of faith. That which is the true ultimate transcends the realm of finite reality infinitely. Therefore, no finite reality can express it directly and properly. Religiously speaking, God transcends one’s own name. This is why the use of one’s name easily becomes an abuse or a blasphemy. Whatever we say about that which concerns us ultimately, whether or not we call it God, has a symbolic meaning. It points beyond itself while participating in that to which it points. In no other way can faith express itself adequately. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

The language of faith is the language of symbols. If faith were what we have shown that it is not, such an assertion could not be made. However, faith, understood as the state of being ultimately concerned, has no language other than symbols. When saying this I always expect the question: Only a symbol? One who asks this question shows that one has not understood the difference between signs and symbols nor the power of symbolic language, which surpasses in quality and strength the power of any nonsymbolic language. One should never say “only a symbol,” but one should say, “not less than a symbol.” With this in mind we can now describe the different kinds of symbols of faith. The fundamental symbol of our ultimate concern is God. In the 1432 portrait of God by Jan van Eyck, God is celebrated in a materialism that is the proper right of benevolent kings. Behind God’s head, across the top of the throne, are Latin words that, translated into English, read: “This is God, all power in his divine majesty; of all the best, by the gentleness of his goodness; the most liberal giver, because of his infinite generosity.” God’s mercy and love are indicated by the pelicans embroidered on the tapestry behind him, which is Christian tradition symbolize self-sacrificing love, since pelicans were believed to wound themselves in order to feed their young with their own blood if other food was unavailable. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

A symbol of God is always present in any act of faith, even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God. One God can deny the other one. Ultimate concern cannot deny its own character as supreme. Therefore, it affirms what is meant by the word “God.” Atheism, consequently, can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern—to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism. Whether it is possible is a problem which must remain unsolved at this point. In any case, one who denies God as a matter of ultimate concern affirms God, because one affirms ultimacy in one’s concern. God is the fundamental symbol for what concerns us ultimately. Again it would be completely wrong to ask: So God is nothing but a symbol? Because the next question has to be: A symbol for what? And then the answer would be: For God! God is a symbol for God. This means that in the notion of God we must distinguish two elements: the element of ultimacy, which is a matter of immediate experience and not symbolic in itself, and the element of concreteness, which is taken from our ordinary experience and symbolically applied to God. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

The mortal whose ultimate concern is a sacred tree has both the ultimacy of concern and the concreteness of the tree which symbolizes one’s relation to the ultimate. The person who adores Apollo is ultimately concerned, but not in an abstract way. One’s ultimate concern is symbolized in the divine figure of Apollo. The mortal who glorifies Jahweh, the God of the Old Testament, has both an ultimate concern and a concrete image of what concerns one ultimately. This is the meaning of the seemingly cryptic statement that God is the symbol of God. In this qualified sense God is the fundamental and universal content of faith. It is obvious that such an understanding of the meaning of God makes the discussion about the existence or non-existence of God meaningless. It is meaningless to question the ultimacy of a supreme concern. This element in the idea of God is in itself certain. The symbolic expression of this element varies endlessly through the whole history of humankind. Here again it would be meaningless to ask whether one or another of the figures in which an ultimate concern is symbolized does exist. If existence refers to something which can be found within the whole of reality, no divine being exists. The question is not this, but: which of the innumerable symbols of faith is most adequate to the meaning of faith? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

In other words, which symbol of ultimacy expresses the ultimacy without idolatrous elements? This is the problem, and not the so-called existence of God—which is in itself an impossible combination of words. God as the ultimate in mortal’s ultimate concern is more certain than any other certainty, even that of oneself. God as symbolized in a divine figure is a matter of daring faith, of courage and risk. God is the basic symbol of faith, but not the only one. All the qualities we attribute to him, power, love, justice, are taken from finite experiences and applied symbolically to that which is beyond finitude and infinite. If faith calls God “almighty,” it uses the human experience of power in order to symbolize the content of its infinite concern, but it does not describe a highest being who can do as one pleases. So it is with all the other qualities and with all the actions, past, present, and future, which mortals attribute to God. They are symbols taken from our daily experiences, and not information about what God did one upon a time or will do at sometime in the future. Faith is not the belief in such stories, but it is the acceptance of symbols that express our ultimate concern in terms of divine actions. Another group of symbols of faith are manifestations of the divine in things and events, in persons and communities, in words and documents. This whole realm of sacred objects is a treasure of symbols. Holy things are not holy in themselves, but they point beyond themselves to the source of all holiness, that which is of ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13