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When One’s Personal Life is Miraculously Saved During Some Period of Great Danger, Perhaps in the Face of Death, it is for a Purpose!
Who would cash this royalty check? No one. It was seven o’ clock and the fancy skyscraper, which housed Shanghai World Financial Center, at 100 Century Avenue, Lu Jia Zui, Pudon Xinqu was for the most part closed, and Armand had no identification because his wallet had somehow disappeared day before yesterday. So dismal this glaring gray Winter twilight, the sky boiling silently with low metallic clouds. Even the stores had taken on an uncommon grimness, with their hard facades of marble or granite, the wealth within gleaming like archaeological relics under museum glass. He plunged his hands in his pockets to warm them, and he bowed his head as the wind came with greater fierceness and the first sign of rain. He did not give a darn about the check, really. He could not imagine pressing the buttons of a phone. Nothing here seemed particularly real to him, not even the chill. Only the dream seemed real—Lestat had somehow set into motion something that even he could never control. When we express our freedom peacefully, openly, cheerfully it is easier to persuade others to want to help us achieve justice. This might entail a high price, but it will achieve the sense of dignity, the rebirth, the self-esteem among the mortals—it will earn freedom for their people. The way of non-violence means a willingness to suffer and sacrifice, but it is a way to free people from a permanent death of the spirit, and noting can be more redemptive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
What is the inner dignity, the experience of rebirth, that occurs as one takes one’s stand? Let us note two cases. When one experiences a loss of freedom for the first time, something happens inside a person. One crosses a barrier. It is an emotional experience which jars and confuses one; later, after the emotional impact one has worn thin, one is left with a new sense of oneself as a citizen. An individual is able to sense this, and one suspects that it is truth of others. When people refuse to be victimized any longer by the Kashisties (fictional secret rouge law enforcement troops from Law and Order SVU), they become transformed into a power community of men and women, capable, despite the severest limitations, of free and even heroic acts. Their subsequent activity at the polls and in initiating a boycott of businesses that practice discrimination suggests that this kind of freedom, though essentially personal, will inevitably lead to social action, and that freedom once won is not readily surrendered. If we do not encourage less affluent communities to engage in direct action-picket lines, boycotts, demand civil rights protection in housing and a safe and clean-living environment with properly functioning appliance—all the money and loving care in the World will not succeed in providing them with a dignified life. Our people must feel that they are shaping their own lives; they that have implemented changes in the politics of the powerful. One cannot engineer a freedom. A freed mortal is not yet free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Thus people do earn their right to be free. They experience the birth of themselves inwardly, shape themselves, experience the dignity of an independent human being. We might think of the demonstration as a rite of the initiation through which the people of the World are mustered into the sacred order of freedom. It is also a rite the entire World must undergo to exorcise the demons of racial, gender, creed, cultural, and spiritual hate. “All that separates, whether of race, class, creed or sex is inhuman and must be overcome,” reports Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. If in a spasm f emancipated exuberance these rites should cause inconvenience or violate the canons of cultivated good taste or trouble the dreams of some good-livers—I think it is forgivable….exuberance and…inconvenience are small prices to pay when a World is undoing historic wrong. Freedom is an art demanding practice, and too many of us are unpracticed. Freedom is an art demanding practice, and too many of us are unpracticed. Freedom is not an end; it is a beginning and a process. We feel further from the end now than we did before a decade’s progress was wrought. This is part of the fact that freedom is never static, never gained once and for all; and this is because essential freedom is an inner state that must be re-affirmed in each act. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The majority leaps at the thought that life has some higher mean, some better worth. Destiny, which can always present as the limiting factor, may make the struggle to attain freedom more difficult than at first envisioned. This certainly is true for the egalitarian movement; sometimes people do not build their foundation deep enough to sustain the later shocks. However, essential freedom is an inner state that is reaffirmed in each act. The struggle is surely more complex than we may foresee, but the complexity is splendid; perhaps that is freedom too. “I have told you all this,” said Jesus Christ, “so that you may have the happiness I have had,” reports John 15.11. In starting this task, he knows that he is not carrying out his own personal desire but following a way chalked out for him by the higher self. There are certain rare moments when intense sorrow or profound bereavement makes a mortal sick at heart. It is then that desires temporarily lose their force, possessions their worth, and even existence itself its reality. One seems to stand outside the busy World those figure flit to and fro like the shadowy characters on a cinema screen. Worst of all, perhaps, significance vanishes from human activity, which becomes a useless tragi-comedy, a going everywhere and arriving nowhere, an insane playing of instruments from which no music issues forth, a vanity of all the vanities. It is then, too, that a terrible suicidal urge may enter one’s blood and one will need all one’s mental ballast not to make away with oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Yet these dark moments are intensely precious, for they may set one’s feet firmly on the higher path. Light here symbolizes the spiritual World, and darkness our Earthly home. Our purely spiritual acts contrast with the gluttonous Worldly activity going on in some communities and a faction of individuals act like wild dogs knawing at a bone and alley cats searching for leftovers. Christ must be the center of our attentions, and his light will draw us to righteous ways. Few realize this whilst all complain. The self-destruction to which one is being urged by focusing on dreaded experiences of life is not the crude physical act, but something subtle—a suicide of thought, emotion, and will. One is being called indeed, to die to one’s ego, to take the desires and passions, the greeds and hates out of one’s life, to learn the art of living in utter independence of externals and in utter dependence on God. And this is that same call which Jesus Christ uttered when he declared: “One that loseth one’s life shall find it.” When discrimination, systematic oppression, or injustice is welcomed or forces on us, we all kind of lose our lives and want to be reborn in Christ and evict the demons out of our temple. Thus the sorrows of life on Earth are but a transient means to an eternal end, a process through which we have to learn how to expand awareness from the person to God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Only When the person can feel in their own muscles, in their own hearts, that they have risked themselves, that they have leaped, that they have risked themselves, that they have gained the sense of dignity necessary for the real experience of freedom, then freedom of being is gained. Thus, they will develop their collective legends as we developed ours in 1776. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are mortals who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical. However, it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will,” reports Sir Frederick Douglass. If a mortal will not come to this quest willingly, because it leads to Truth and one loves Truth, then one must be forced onto it, unwillingly, because there is no other way to alleviate one’s burdens and reduce one’s miseries. When dreams are pleasant, most persons have no inclination to wake up, whereas when they are frightening they soon awaken. So too the dream of Worldly life does not impress them wit the need of true religion until it become tragic or severely disappointing. Only when sorrow drives them to question the value of living do they take a real interest in non-Worldly urges. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Certain events will so arrange themselves as to put a mortal upon the quest, or if one is already on it, to prepare one for a further advance. They will not be pleasant events, for they will crush one’s spirit, or render it lame and weak for a time. However, it is only through this apparent defeat by circumstances that one is compelled to accept a course which will, spiritually, benefit one greatly in the end. Do mortal’s hearts have to be broken before they yield to the Most High? Often, yes, but not if they heed the teacher, prophets, seers, and sages. Where a mortal is ready for this quest but stubbornly clings to one’s old familiar way of thought and life, God may or may not release karma that will tear one away from it. One’s desires will then be macerated by suffering until its will to live gets weaker and weaker. A few come to this quest after the shock produced by the unreasonableness and unfairness and stupidity of the treatment they received from the organization, the group, the sect, the church, the party, to which they belonged. Some crisis in their lives, such as the need to get married or to get divorced, blocked by solemn bleak dogma or decision, become the occasion of the shock. Sometimes, heartless discourtesy provokes swift disillusionment. A single jarring incident, a single deliberate injustice or hurt or insult is enough to bring on such resentment and indignation—penetrating as sharply as a hypodermic needle—that character change and a new outlook were inaugurated. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Some have even come to the quest not because they had any real vocation for it but because they had nowhere else to go, because the World had lost all meaning, all hope for them through some ghastly tragedy or some heartbreaking loss, and this was a better way than committing suicide. However, the best way to come to the quest is of course to fulfill the higher possibilities as a human being. If they are ever to come alive spiritually, most persons need a drastic shock, an enforced awakening, a sharp arousal from that long sleep which is the egoic existence. Only if it breaks antiquated habits, trends, and inclinations, this is effective, and thus will make a new mortal. When a mortal comes to the point when all one’s outer life dissolves in tragedy or calamity, one comes also to the point when this quest is all that is left to one. However, one may not perceive this truth. One may miss one’s chance. Either consciously or not, one says to oneself, in a sense, “By my I alone I cannot endure this adverse destiny. I must seek help and support from outside myself.” So one goes to another mortal or to an institution, but in the end one must go to God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
When one’s personal life is miraculously saved during some period of great danger, perhaps in the face of death, it is for a purpose. Before a mortal comes to this path one may have to grope and stumble and struggle for years. If the mortal lets others draw one down below one’s own level, the emotion of remorse and disgust or the logic of suffering and self-preservation may force his return. They need first to discover that they are on the wrong road. Out of the distress or frustration following it may arise the search for a right one. No person makes one take on this task or enterprise, this labour or quest—whatever one wishes to call it. A summons come to one from within, from a part of oneself hidden in mystery, and one obeys. Why? It is for those who feel that their lives ought to hold something more than the mere gaining of material necessities or even the mere satisfying of intellectual urges. If one will follow up this intuition, one will be able to move one’s feet eventually out of darkness into light. When a mortal becomes tired of hearing someone else tell one that one has a soul, and sets out to gain firsthand experience of it for oneself, one becomes spiritual. However, unfortunately, for mortals ever come to this point. Only after they have felt the uncertainties of human affection, the transiencies of human passion, and the insufficiencies of human activities, mortals will seek to feel the real life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
To those who wish to escape from the pressures of tyrannies of contemporary materialism, philosophical Christianity offers the most effective way and the safest road. It seeks to understand the true relationships between the divine and the human. It will enable them to realize their spiritual potentialities. For materialism is and can be only a temporary phase of mortal’s endeavour to comprehend the facts of life. When the mind is sufficiently developed, the presence of God within us sooner or later, creates of itself the craving for truth and the abstract questions about life, God, and mortals. This knowledge that life in this World can never by fully satisfying makes one commit oneself one day to the quest for God. Christ has conquered these powers which govern the World, and it is affirmed triumphantly in the beautiful and powerful words of the book of Romans in the Holy Bible. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Jesus Christ died for us,” reports Romans 5.8. If these words have power over our souls in our time, they must say something we feel to be true, even if we do not share the ancient belief in the stars and their constellations. They name the powers in whose bondage we all are and with us all mortals in all periods of history, and the whole of creation. And they show us that which can give us the certainty that these powers do not prevail against us, that they are conquered and that we can participate in the victory over them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Who, in recent years, and indeed in our whole century, does not feel the irresistible forces which determine our historical and personal destiny? They drive nations and individuals into insoluble conflicts, internal and external; into arrogance and insanity, into revolt and despair, into inhumanity and self-destruction. Each of us is involved in these conflicts and driven to a greater or lesser degree by these forces. The personal life of each of us is in come way determined by them. No security is guaranteed to anyone; no house, no work, no friend, no family, no country anywhere in the World is safe, no plans are certain of fulfillment, all hopes are threatened. The mayor of Sacramento, Darrell Steinberg, even went as far as to tell people if they need food and affordable housing to, “Eat from a garbage can if you have to, sleep somewhere even if it’s a park. None of this matters.” And tent cities are now popping up all along the rail road for miles and miles, and homeless camps are being shutdown, with threats of arrest, as violence and loud words are spoken. Meanwhile, nothing is being done to add affordable housing to prevent homelessness, but that taxpayer funded ($600 million) King’s arena went up overnight, while the team still owns the other perfectly good arena that is sitting empty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
This is not a new state of things in human history. However, what is new is that during a few years of comparative safety, we had forgotten that this is the true state of things. Now we see it again everywhere because suddenly we are living in its midst in every part of the Earth. No taxation without representation is a slogan originated during the 1700s that summarized one of the 27 colonial grievances of the American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies, which was one of the major causes of the American Revolution. Driven by the forces of fate, we ask the question humankind has always asked: What lies behind this inequality; what is its meaning; how can we endure it? Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a mortal could stake one’s life on it a thousand times. True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie. It is enough that God has said, “Ask and you shall be given.” Faith in God and Jesus Christ is a gift from Heaven that comes as we choose to believe and as we seek it and hold on to it. You will find some of your greatest joys in your efforts to make your home a place of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and a place that is permeated with love. That miraculous feeling is what we all want in our homes. It is a feeling that come from being spiritually minded. And it will come to pass that there will be no contention in the land, because of the love of God which does dwell in the hearts of people. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Faith is the key to leading your family to raise to that spiritual place we are meant to experience. As we grow and help others grow in the faith that Jesus Christ is our loving Redeemer, we will feel a desire to repent. As we do, humility will begin to replace pride. As we begin to feel what the Lord has given us, we will want to share more generously. Rivalry for prominence or recognition will diminish. Hate will be driven out by love. And finally, like it did for the people converted by King Benjamin, the desire to do good will fortify everyone against temptation to sin. King Benjamin’s people testified that they had “no more disposition to do evil.” So building faith in Jesus Christ is the beginning of reversing spiritual decline in your family and community and home. That faith is more likely to bring repentance than your preaching against each symptom of spiritual decline. In addition to your example of growing in faith, your praying as a family can play a crucial part in making a home a sacred place. God loves with a great love the mortal whose heart is a light of passion for the impossible. The rest of your life will be the best of your life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
What a Bitter Irony it is that the Soul, Which is So Near, in Our Very Hearts in Fact, is Yet Felt By So Few!
He had others powers as well. Each evening as he awakened, he found himself listening to voices from all over the World. He lay in the darkness bathed in sound. He heard people speaking in Greek, English, Romanian, Hindustani. He heard laughter, cries of pain. And if he lay very still, he could hear thoughts from people—a jumbled undercurrent full of wild exaggeration that only frightened him. He did not know where these voices came from. Or why one voice drowned out another. Why, it was as if he were God and he were listening to prayers. The thing that stirs the Grand Inquisitor, that threatens his sum complacency, is the human spirit of rebellion. He is obsessed with it; he comes back to it again and again. “Mortals are created a rebel,” he states regretfully, “and how can rebels be happy?” and “What though one [mortals] are everywhere rebelling against our power, and proud of their rebellion? It is the pride of a child, and a schoolboy.” “Humankind are slaves of course,” he reassures himself, “though rebellious by nature.” He vows that such oppositional efforts will be useless, “though mortals might be a hundred times a rebel.” There is good reason for one’s concern. Rebellion is the one way human beings can demonstrate that they are not what the Grand Inquisitor called them: “slaves, base, vile, weak, and cowardly.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
This stubborn, oppositional tendency in humankind raises the question, Is the possibility for rebellion necessary and inevitable for human freedom? I answer yes. Only when something opposes it and take it away is freedom seen. Hence the word freedom exists always in the company of such verbs as resist, oppose, rebel. I do not mean rebellion in the sense of fixation on immature patterns of defiance nor in the sense of sheer destructiveness, or rebellion for its own sake or for the sake of diversionary excitement in one sector of one’s life to avoid commitment in another. I mean the capacity for rebellion as the preservation of human dignity and spirit. I mean the act of coming to terms with one’s own autonomy, learning to respect one’s own “no.” Thus, the capacity to rebel is the underpinning of independence and the guardian of the human spirit. Rebellion preserves the life core, the self as conscious of its existence as a self. The capacity to rebel gives one’s cooperation efficacy. Otherwise one is simply inert human weight rather than a cooperating human being. And if one senses these characteristics as important in oneself, one must, if only to preserve one’s own psychological integrity, grant this sense of dignity and the respect that it rightly demands to other persons in the World as well. Without rebellion, humankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremedial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
The mortal who refuses to obey authority has, therefore, in certain circumstances, a legitimate function, provided one’s disobedience has motives which are social rather than personal. The You encounters me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. However, that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed. The You encounters me. However, I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions and thus with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions. The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become’ becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter. The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing can ceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purposes intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
Before the immediacy of the relationship everything mediates becomes negligible. It is also trifling whether my You is the It of other I’s (“object of general experience”) or can only become that as a result of my essential deed. For the real boundary, albeit one that floats and fluctuates, runs not between experience and non-experience, nor between the given and the not-given, nor between the World of being and the World of value, but across all the regions between You and It: between presence and object. The present—not that which is like a point and merely designates whatever our thoughts may posit as the end of elapsed time, the fiction of the fixed lapse, but the actual and fulfilled present—exists only insofar as presentness, encounter, and relation exist. Only as the You become present does presence come into being. The I of the basic word I-It, the I that is not bodily confronted by a You but surrounded by a multitude of contents, has only a past and no present. In other words: insofar as a human being makes do with the things that one experiences and uses, one lives in the past, and one’s moment has no presence. One has nothing but objects; but objects consist in having been. Presence is not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us, waiting and enduring. And the objects is not duration but standing still, ceasing, breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, the lack of relation, the lack of presence. What is essential is lived in the present, objects in the past. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
This essential twofoldness cannot be overcome by invoking a World of ideas as a third element that might transcend this opposition. For I speak only of the actual human being, of you and me, of our life and our World, not of any I-in-itself and not of any Being-in-itself. However, for an actual human being the real boundary also runs across the World of ideas. To be sure, some mortals who in the World of things make do with experiencing and using have constructed for themselves an idea annex or superstructure in which they find refuge and reassurance in the face of intimations of nothingness. At the threshold they take off the clothes of the unattractive weekday, shroud themselves in clean garments, and feel restored as they contemplate primal being or what ought to be—something in which their life has no share. It may also make them feel good to proclaim it. However, the It-humanity that some imagine, postulate, and advertise has nothing in common with the bodily humanity to which a human being can truly say You. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the most sublime fictitious sentiment is a vice. The ideas are just as little enthroned above our heads as they reside inside them; they walk among us and step up to us. Pitiful are those who leave the basic word unspoken, but wretched are those who instead of that address the ideas with a concept or a slogan as if that were their name! #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Our Declaration of Independence puts it politically: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Our nation was born in 1776 by virtue of the spirit of insurgency of our forefathers. This rebellious quality was the turning point in Philip’s therapy. His cry “If Nicole wants to continue her present bedhopping, the hell with her—I will make my life with someone else” was the crucial step in his asserting his freedom from his neurotic bond to her. Even in creativity the rebellion is present in a different sense. Every act of creation is preceded by an act of destruction, as Picasso was so fond of saying. The scientific aspect of creativity is not different here from the artistic; the essential characteristic of a creative contribution is that it transcends prior experience and contains a revolt against it. Concerning inner values, it is significant that this capacity to preserve one’s freedom by insurgency is present in artists. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly see oneself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about one an order which is one’s own, to sow strife and ferement so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
The artist creates the uncreated conscience of the race. Rebellion may be discerned in the rebirth experience we endure at every point of psychological growth. The normal rebellion is, of course, most clearly seen in adolescence, in the fight against what one’s parents stand for in favor of creating a new, free World of one’s own. When the young person oneself has not yet developed enough courage to declare one’s independence and to begin to take responsibility for one’s own life, in psychotherapy, it is often the function of the therapist to support this rebellion of the adolescent against one’s parents. However, they still recommend that you show your parents respect and this is also a commandment in the Bible because as part of our Heavenly Father’s plan, we were born into families. He established families to being us happiness, to help us learn correct principles in a loving atmosphere, and to prepare us for eternal life. Parents have the vital responsibility to help their children prepare to return to Heavenly Father. Parents fulfill this responsibility by teaching their children to follow Jesus Christ and live his gospel. “And they shall also teach their children to pray, and to walk uprightly before the Lord,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 68.28. Independence is the only way which one will learn one’s freedom. Independence is the anvil on which people can hammer out their autonomy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Freedom to govern oneself is not conferred simply by the erstwhile master signing a decree of independence and moving out. (“Freedom is not a cake that drops into one’s mouth and is there for the swallowing, but a citadel to be stormed with the saber. Whoever receives freedom from foreign hands remains a slave. Everyone must go through this stage in which they commit their all to some ideal, that is more important to them than life itself. By earn—what is mean is the developing of dignity, the sense of interdependence, and the collective legend that one experiences in the trenches—all of these psychological experiences forming the structure on which a free nation composed of free individuals can be established. This independence is most significantly an inner process that changes the character of the people who have become free, a process that involves the building of human dignity into each one of the now free persons. The sense of solidarity binding each member to the group, the collective consciousness now oriented toward freedom in the whole community—these are a necessary part of the welding together of people who have been slaves into a nation conscious of itself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Some egalitarians hold that the strident quality in the movement is inevitable, and that the liberation movement cannot escape being oppositional since it has to fight so much opposition. The struggle may be one’s way of earning their own freedom and equality. When, in The Queen of the Damned, Queen Akasha finally walks out of her castle and marriage, one breathes a deep sign of relief. For at last she has been able to rebel against a destructive and stultifying entanglement. If I have the possibility of rebellion, it is implied at the same time that I do not need to rebel. I am free to choose to cooperate instead. Then my cooperation has a reality and an authenticity. It would not be thus if I were coerced into cooperating—for instance, if I had no possibility of rebellion; the cooperation of a slave is not cooperation at all, but slave labor. Or I can revel nonviolently. “We will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself,” reports Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King knew what a high price this might entail. However, it would achieve the sense of dignity, the rebirth, the self-esteem among people of the World—it would earn freedom for the people. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
No one can really escape from this inner loneliness by outer means. In the end, and however long put off, they will have to face it. Most often, such an hour comes in with sorrow or bereavement, hurt or disappointment. “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor Angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Romans 8.38-39. These words are among the most powerful ever written. Their sound is able to grasp human souls in desperate situations. In my own experience they have proved to be stronger than the sound of exploding shells, of weeping at open graves, of the sighs of the sick, of the moaning of the dying. They are stronger than the self-accusation of those who are in despair about themselves and they prevail over the permanent whisper of anxiety in the depth of our being. What is it that makes these words so powerful? It is not their literal meaning, for in many respects that is strange to us. The Angels and principalities, the height and depth, and even life and death point to the constellations of the stars which, according to ancient beliefs, determine the fate of mortals and history. People are in their power, driven by fear and fighting for courage, sometimes victorious, more often defeated. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
There are Reserves of Power and Intelligence Within Yourself of Which You Live Undreaming
Everyone believes in family. Family trees seem to go back forever; people pass on funny stories about famous relatives who passed away three or four hundred years ago. Many feel great communion with these people, no matter how different they seem. The most penetrating and profound picture of the paradox of human freedom versus security is presented by Dostoevsky in his legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. The legend begins in Seville in the sixteenth century with the burning of a hundred heretics in the town square. This “magnificent auto da fe,” as Dostoevsky calls it, was presided over by the cardinal of the church, the Grand Inquisitor, in the presence of the king, the knights, and the ladies of the court. All of these towns people were there, and they heaped a bundle of sticks bound together as fuel on the fires under the dying heretics. The next morning, before the burning recommenced, Jesus returned to Seville. “He came softly, unobserved, and yet, irresistibly drawn to him, they surrounded him, they flock about him, follow him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion…The crowd weeps and kisses the Earth under his feet. Children throw flowers before hum, sing, and cry ‘Hosannah.’ ‘It is he—it is he!’” #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Coming out of the cathedral, the Grand Inquisitor, a tall and erect man of ninety with sharp eyes “in which there burns a sinister fire,” observes everything. After watching for a few moments, he motions his palace guards to arrest Jesus and throw him into prison. That night under the cover of darkness, the Inquisitor comes to the prison and speaks to his silent prisoner: “Is it You? you?…Why have you come to hinder us?…Tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed your feet…at the faintest sign from me will rush up and heap embers on your fire.” The kernel of his accusations is that Jesus taught people freedom, promised them freedom, expected them to be free. “Did you not often say then, ‘I will make you free’?…Yes, we have paid dearly for it,” the old antiquated man goes on. “For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with your freedom, but now, today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet…You gave them a promise of freedom which in their simplicity and their natural unruliness they cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a mortal and a human society than freedom.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Jesus’ great mistake, the old Inquisitor argues, was his refusal to accept Satan’s magical power. “Turn [these stones] into bread, and humankind will run after you like a flock, grateful and obedient, though forever trembling, lest you withdraw your hand and deny them bread….Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will…cry, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’ I tell thee that mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” Although the Grand Inquisitor argues that human beings will choose bread and the security that bread symbolizes rather than freedom, one is no simple materialist. He is aware that the Church, to take away mortal’s freedom, must take charge of the human conscience, appease it, and relieve men and women from the burden of the knowledge of good and evil. For moral choice—or the freedom of conscience—is the most seductive thing of all. Human beings must have some stable conception of the purpose of life or else they will experience death by suicide. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Indeed, human beings need three things, he states, all of which the Church furnishes: “mystery, miracle, and authority.” These relieve people not only from physical hunger but from the struggles of conscience—and, I would add, relieve them of wonder, awe, independence, and a sense of autonomy. In the World the Grand Inquisitor presents, the yearning for security on all levels of life has triumphed. The people will be told what to believe: the Church will inform them when they can sleep with mistresses or wives and when they cannot. The Grand Inquisitor presents an enticing picture: there will be no crime anymore and, therefore, no sin. Yes, the Church will have to lie to do these things, he admits—particularly when it tells people they still follow Christ; and this “deception will be our suffering,” the Inquisitor puts it. The Church has been following Satan, he admits, the “wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence.” The Church made this bargain eight centuries before, in 756, when Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, granted Ravenna to Pope Stephen III, thus establishing the pope’s temporal power. However, all this will enable the Church to “plan the universal happiness of humankind.” The Church will devote itself to “uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious anthill.” Humans are like “pitiful children,” but “childlike happiness is the sweetest of all.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
If it is done with the Church’s permission, every sin will be expiated. If the people are obedient—obedience has now been elevated to the highest virtue—they will be allowed to have children of their own. Everyone, the millions of them, will be happy. Everyone, that is, except those who direct this great program. Only we, “the hundred thousand who rule over them,” will be unhappy, says the Inquisitor, only those “who guard the mystery,” only those who have taken upon themselves “the curse of knowledge of good and evil.” He finally looks directly into Jesus’ face and challenges him, “Judge us if you can and dare…I too prized the freedom with which you have blessed mortals….But I awakened…and joined the ranks of those who have corrected your work…I shall burn you for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is you. Tomorrow I shall burn you. Dixi.” What strikes us most sharply is the contemptuous image the Inquisitor holds of humankind. If they are not kept rigidly in restraint, human beings are weak, base, vicious, vile, ill-fated, pitiful, helpless, sinful, and tend toward rebellion. The highest moral principle for such creatures—and what the Church teaches—is absolute obedience. The human beings will express their childish mirth, contentment, and other emotion, all within the jurisdiction of the Church: “I swear,” cries the Inquisitor to Jesus, “human beings are slaves of nature.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
On their own power, human beings cannot confront the “curse of the knowledge of good and evil.” Thus, the Inquisitor pushes humankind back again into the preconscious state of innocence in the Garden of Eden. No stronger demonstration that freedom is a sign of the nobility of human beings could be imagined than this, that without it they based. The legend of the Grand Inquisitor asks sharp questions of each of us. Do we choose comfort rather than risk, stagnant certainty rather than creative doubt? Do we choose to remain in a dull and uninteresting job because the pay is certain, or choose to remain in a destructive marriage because of fear of loneliness if we left, or choose to cling to the security of the doll’s house? Do we choose to walk out on marriage quarrels rather than confront in the inevitable misunderstandings and blows to one’s narcissism in working the problems out? The Grand Inquisitor confesses, symbolically, that he knows the paradox of freedom is all too real. They—the officials of Church—must face the paradox, even though they may succeed in protecting humankind from it. The paradox, he admits by implication, is present in all persons who seek to realize themselves. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
However, the Church will protect humankind as a whole from self-realization, from going through the cries of freedom that should occur in everyone’s growth. They will keep humankind as children who never taste failure, struggle, aspiration, rebellion, and the joy of life that comes from a sense of human dignity. They never will understand the irony in that enticing character in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the Indian who quotes Shakespeare continually and wanders about longing to suffer. Those “children” of the Grand Inquisitor will never be gripped by the drama of King Lear or know the delight of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or be shaken by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Because we have God ever present within, us we are ever engaged in the search for him. The feeling of God’s absence (from consciousness) is what drives us to this search. Through ignorance we interpret the feeling wrongly and search outside, among objects, places, persons, or even ideas. Each person discovers afresh for oneself this homey old truth, that one has a sacred soul. One need not wait for death to discover it or depend solely on the words of dead prophets until then. One knows that in striving to fulfill the higher purpose of one’s being, one is not only obeying the voice of conscience but also approaching the place of blessedness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
There are reserves of Power and Intelligence within yourself, of which you live undreaming. In its early manifestation it may show as a feeling of being too limited by ignorance of life’s meaning and purpose and the need to get some light in this darkness. However, the feeling may be too vague, to generalized and ill-defined to be detected and known for what it is. At intervals, on certain grave, joyous, or relaxed occasions, one may feel a deep nostalgia for what one may only dimly and vaguely comprehend. One may name it, in ignorance, otherwise but it will really be for one’s true spiritual source. What a bitter irony it is the soul, which is so near, in our very hearts in fact, is yet felt by so few! “While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the jar and poured it over this head. However, there were some who said to themselves indignantly, ‘Why was the ointment thus wasted? For this ointment might have been sold for more than three hundred denari, and given to the poor.’ And they reproached her. However, Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed by body beforehand for burying. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole World, what she done will be told in memory of her,” reports Mark 14.3-9. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
What has she done? She has given an example of a waste, which, as Jesus says, is a beautiful thing. It is, so to speak, a holy waste, a waste growing out of the abundance of the heart. She resents the ecstatic element in our relation to God, while the disciples for being angry about the immense waste this woman created? Certainly not a deacon who has to take care of the poor, or a social worker who knows the neediest cases and cannot help, or a church administrator who collects money for important projects. Certainly the disciples would not be blamed by a balanced personality who has one’s emotional life well under control and for whom it is one’s emotional life well under control and for whom it is worse than nonsense, even criminal, to think of doing what this woman did. Jesus felt differently and so did the early Church. They knew that without the abundance of the heart nothing great can happen. They knew that religion within the limits of reasonableness is a mutilated religion, and that calculating love is not love at all. Jesus did not raise the question about how much eros and how much agape, how much human passion and how much understanding was motivating the woman; he saw the abundant heart and he accepted it without analyzing the different elements in it. There are occasions when we must analyze ourselves and others. And certainly we must know about the complexity of all human motives. However, this should prevent us from accepting the waste of an uncalculated self-surrender nor from wasting ourselves beyond the limits of law and rationality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
The history of humankind is the history of men and women who wasted themselves and were not afraid to do so. They did not fear the waste of themselves, of other mortals, of things in the service of a new creation. They were justified, for they wasted all this out of the fullness of their hearts. They wasted as God does in nature and history, in creation and salvation. The monsters of nature to which Jahweh points in his answer to Job—what are they but expressions of the divine abundance? Luther’s God, who acts heroically and without rules—is he not the wasteful God who creates and destroys in order to create again? Has not Protestantism lost a great deal by losing the wasteful self-surrender of the saints and the mystics? Are we not in danger of a religious and moral utilitarianism which always asks for the reasonable purpose—the same question as that of the disciples in Bethany? There is no creativity, divine or human, without the holy waste which comes out of the creative abundance of the heart and does not ask, “What use is this?” We know that lack of love in our early years is mentally destructive. However, do we know that the lack of occasions to waste ourselves is equally dangerous? In many people there has been an abundance of the heart. However, laws, conventions, and a rigid self-control have repressed it and it has died. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
People are sick not only because they have not received love but also because they are not allowed to give love, to waste themselves. Do not suppress in yourselves or others the abundant heart, the waste of self-surrender, the Spirit who trespasses all reason. Do not greedily preserve your time and your strength for what is useful and reasonable. Keep yourselves open for the creative moment which may appear in the midst of what seemed to be waste. Do not suppress in yourself the impulse to do what the woman at Bethany did. You will be reproached by the disciples as the woman was. However, Jesus was on her aide and he is also on yours. Most of those who are great in the kingdom of God followed her, and the disciples, the reasonable Christians in all periods of history, will remember you as they have remembered her. Jesus connects this anointing of his body with his death. There is an anointing of kings when they begin their reign and there is an anointing of corpses as a last gift of the living dead. Jesus speaks of the latter kind of anointing although he might easily have spoken of the former. In so doing, he turns both the ecstasy of the woman and the reasonableness of the disciples into something else. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
By Jesus’ passing into Heaven the reasonable morality of the disciples is turned into a paradox: the Messiah, the Anointed One, must waste himself in order to become the Christ. And the ecstatic self-surrender of the woman is tested by the ignominious perishing of the object of her unlimited devotion. In both cases we are asked to accept an act more radical, more divine, more saving than either ecstatic waste or reasonable service. The Cross does not disavow the sacred waste, the ecstatic surrender. It is the most complete and the most holy waste. And the Cross does not disavow the purposeful act, the reasonable service. It is the fulfillment of all wisdom within the plan of salvation. In the self-surrendering love of the Cross, reason and ecstasy, moral obedience and sacred waste are united. May we have the abundance of heart to waste ourselves as our reasonable service! Those who come for the first time to an awakening of thought upon these matters, may grow more enthusiastic as they explore them more. The heart leaps at the thought that life has some higher meaning, some better worth. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in Heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who where before you,” reports Matthew 5.11. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
We May Wander the Whole Length of Chang’an Avenue and Find No Shop Which Can Sell Us a Packet of Starry Truths that Might Comfort and Console
I told you. It is just a dream. However, if you want a name, let me call it the gateway of life and death. I will bring you with me through this gateway. And why? Because I am a coward. And I love you too much to let you go. I promise you nothing. How can I? I have told you what lies ahead. See how everything creates its opposite! War continues in the midst of peace. Want is born from abundance. In one and the same laboratory, the same people search for what will kill and what will cure, cultivating both good and evil. Freedom is fraught with paradoxes because of its unique character. Before there could be any freedom to walk on the streets or to raise cattle in frontier towns, for example, law and order were necessary. If freedom is to exist at all, a certain degree of security is essential, yet security is the opposite of freedom. The purpose of government is to preserve sufficient security so that each mortal may live without fear of one’s neighbor. Have to, paradoxically, is strangely freeing. The word paradox is used to describe the relationship between two opposing things, which even through they are posited against each other and seem to destroy each other cannot exist without each other. God and the devil, good and evil, life and death, beauty and unattractiveness—all these opposites appear to be at odds with each other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
However, the paradox is that the very confrontation with the one breathes vitality into the other. When we are aware of death, life is more alive, more zestful; and only because there is life death has significance. God needs the devil. When we see it in opposition to destiny, freedom comes alive, and destiny is significant only when it is in opposition to freedom. The opposites fructify each other: each gives dynamism, power, to the other. The emotions elicited in us by a paradox are surprise and amazement. The assertion that God cannot exist without the devil catches short those who believe life is a one-way ticket to paradise. That male and female need the differences between each other gives pause to those who dabble in simplistic hopes for a future brave new androgyny. People do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of bow and the lyre. This is illustrated by the bow and cord; one can shoot with the bow because of the tension set up by the string pulling against it. Or the frame of the lyre and its strings. Each of these opposites is useful to us by virtue of the tension set up between the two forces. The paradox we confront here is that between freedom and destiny. It can be stated in many ways. One is that freedom gets it vitality, its authenticity, from its juxtaposition with destiny. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
And destiny, such as in death, is important to us because it perpetually threatens our freedom; the Grim Reaper stands at any given moment in our freedom is, new possibilities beckon us in our dreams, in our aspirations, in our hopes and actions, and the possibility pushes us to acknowledge, encounter, confront, engage, or rebel against our destiny. The paradox is fundamental in psychotherapy, a point not realized by most therapists. Louis de Pointe du Lac, for example, when we came to terms with the paradoxes of his life, only then did he attain his personal freedom. The chief one was his love-hate relation with his mother. However, there were other derivative paradoxes such as his dependency-love relation with Lestat de Lioncourt. The major experiences such as birth, death, love, anxiety, guilt are not problems to be solved, but paradoxes to be confronted and acknowledged. Thus in therapy we should talk of solving problems only as a way of making the paradoxes of life stand out more clearly. Attention to the paradox….My contribution is to ask for a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and not for it to be resolved. By flight to a split-off intellectual functioning it is possible to resolve the paradox, but the price of this is the loss of the value of the paradox itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Just as the acceptance of normal anxiety is necessary if we are to be able to free ourselves of neurotic anxiety, so the acceptance of the normal paradoxes of life—love-hate, life-death—is necessary is we are to achieve freedom from the compulsive and neurotic aspects of our problems. The confusion with regard to freedom in our day is that we have conceived of freedom as a bow with no string to hold it in tension or a lyre with no frame to give it tautness and hence produce music. We were created free, the American Declaration of Independence tells us, and hence we assume there are no limits. Freedom thus has lost its viability; it has vanished like the flame going out in our fireplace when we need it most. When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him or her, then one is no thing among things nor does one consist of things. He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the World grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, one is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but one; but everything else lives in his or her light. Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines—one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity—so it with the human being to whom I say You. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
I can abstract from one the color of one’s hair or the color of one’s speech or the color of one’s graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately one is no longer You. And even as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, the sacrifice not in space but space in the sacrifice—and whoever reverses the relation annuls the reality—I do not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometime and Somewhere. I can place one there and have to do this again and again, but immediately one becomes a He or a She, an It, and no longer remains my You. As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cowers at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals. The human being to who, I say You I do not experience. However, I stand in relation to one, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I experience one again. Experience is remoteness from You. The relation can obtain even if the human being to whom I say You does not hear it in one’s experience. For You is more than It knows. You does more, and more happens to it, than It knows. No deception reaches this far: here is the cradle of actual life. This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through one. Not a figment of one’s soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
What is required is a deed that a mortal does with one’s whole being: if one commits it and speaks with one’s being the basic word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being. The deed involves a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the alter of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness of such a confrontation demands this. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits oneself may not hold back part of oneself; and the work does not permit me, as a tree or mortal might, to seek relaxation in It-World; it is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me. The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced World. Not as a ting among the internal things, not as a figment of the imagination, but as what is presented. Tested for its objectivity, the form is not there at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Forming is discovery. As I actualize, I uncover. I lead the form across—into the World of It. The created work is a thin among things and can be experienced and described as an aggregate of qualities. However, the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again. What, then does one experience of the You? Nothing at all. For one does not experience it. What, then, does one know of the You? Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars. The You encounter me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. However, that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed. The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions and this with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions. The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I required a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter. “The Lord healeth the broken in hear, and bindeth up their wounds—Bless the Lord, O my soul…who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction,” reports Psalm 147.3; 103.2,3, 4. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
How do we paint Jesus the Christ? It does not matter whether he is painted in lines and colors, as the great Christian painters in all periods have done or whether we paint him in sermons, as the Christian preachers have done Sunday after Sunday, or whether we paint him in learned books, in Biblical or systematic theology, or whether we paint him in our hearts, in devotion, imagination and love. In each case we must answer the question: How do we paint Jesus Christ? The stories in the Gospel of Matthew contribute to the answer; they add a color, and expression, a trait of great intensity, they paint him as the healer: It is astonishing that this color, this vivid expression of his nature, this powerful trait of his character, has more and more been lost in our time. The grayish colors of a moral teacher, the tense expression of a social reformer, the soft traits of a suffering servant have prevailed, at least amongst our painters and theologians and life-of-Jesus novelists; perhaps not so much in the hearts of the people who need somebody to heal them. The gospels, certainly, are not responsible for this disappearance of power in the picture of Jesus. They abound in stories of healing; but we are responsible, ministers, laymen, theologians, who forgot that “Savior” means “healers,” he who makes whole and sane what is broken and insane, in body and mind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
The woman who encountered Jesus was made whole, the demoniac who met him was liberated from his mental cleavage. Those who are disrupted, split, disintegrated, are healed by him. And because this is so, because this power has appeared on Earth, the Kingdom of God has come upon us; this is the answer Jesus gives to the Pharisees when they discuss his power of healing the mentally possessed; this is the answer he gives to the Baptist to overcome his doubts; this is the order he gives to his disciples when he sends them to the towns of Israel. “And as ye go, preach, saying, the kingdom of God is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” That is why they shall do and for this he gives them authority and power; for in him is the kingdom of Go has appeared, and its nature is salvation, healing of that which is ill, making whole what is broken. All we still able to experience this power? I do not speak of theological inhibitions about the acceptance of such a picture of Christ. They do not weigh very heavily. Of course we were worried about miracle stories for many decades; today we know what the New Testament always knew—that miracles are signs pointing to the presence of a divine power in nature and history, and that they are in no way negations of natural laws. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Of course, we were and we are worried about the abuse of religious healing for commercial and other selfish purposes or about its distortion into magic and superstition. However, when the right use is lacking and superstitions arise, the abuses occur because faith has become weak. All these are not serious problems; good theology and good practice can solve them. However, the serious problem is, as always, the problem of our own existence. Are we healed, have we received healing forces, here and there from the power of the picture of Jesus the Savior? Are we grasped by this power? Is it strong enough to overcome our neurotic trends, the rebellion of unconscious strivings, the split in our conscious being, the diseases which disintegrate our minds and destroy our bodies at the same time? Have we overcome in moments of grace the torturing anxiety in the depth of our hearts, the restlessness which never ceases moving and whipping us, the unordered desires and the hidden repressions which return as poisonous hate, the hostility against ourselves and others, against life itself, the hidden will to death? Have we experienced now an then in the moments of grace that we are made whole, that destructive spirits have left us, that psychic compulsions are dissolved, that tyrannical mechanisms in our soul are replaced by freedom; that despair, this most dangerous of all splits, this real sickness unto death, is healed and we are saved from self-destruction? Has this happened to us under the power of the picture of Jesus as the Savior? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
This is the real problem, the true Christological problem (theologically speaking), the question of life and death (humanly speaking), for every Christian and of Christendom of today. Do we go to the physicians lone, or to the psychotherapists alone or to the counsellors alone in order to be healed? Sometimes, of course, we should go to the, but do we also go to or—more precisely—do we also receive the healing power in the picture of Jesus the Christ who is called the Savior? This is the question before us, and this question is answered by those who can tell us that they have experienced his healing power, that the New Being has grasped their bodies and their soul, that they have become whole and same again, that salvation has come upon them. Not always, of course, but in those moments which are moments of grace and in which they are anticipated the perfect wholeness, the wholeness of God being in all. Can we join this answer? To believe that this quest is only for religious people, or for impractical dreamers, and not for reasonable people or for mortals active in the World is to believe something that is untrue. The laity, the masses, are entitled to be told that a higher truth exists, that they can come to it when they can cope with it, tat it is up to them to equip themselves with needed qualifications. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Just because most people appear to have superficial interests and are not yet ready for the deeper thoughts of philosophy does not necessarily mean that they are not making spiritual progress. One the contrary, they may be doing very well on their own particular levels of development. It will simply be necessary for them to incarnate many more times before they are capable of understanding the more advanced truths. Aspirants come from the low, the middle, and the high strata of life—with most probably from middle. No age is unsuited to be the study and practice of philosophy. No one is too young to begin it, nor too late. Although the middle-age and elderly, being more experiences, are more receptive to the ideas of emotional control and personal detachment, philosophy is not necessarily a subject fit only for those in their Sunset years. Mortals who are seized by ambition, who want money, prestige, honours, power, will not welcome the idea of detachment, and they are right. For they are not yet ready for it: they need to gain the fruits of their desires, to experience the strivings and accomplishments from which the truth about them can be deduced. Only after the lessons have been learned can they be in a position to reflect properly and impartially upon this idea and appreciate its worth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
One who is afraid to touch this study because one is afraid of spoiling one’s Worldly career is unfit for it. Nevertheless, it is an error to believe that those who shed such a fear are called upon to forget their tasks or shirk their responsibilities and duties in this World. They are not. If they become indoctrinated with the ideas here taught, they can succeed in their tasks and duties; they need not fail. Those who live in a private realm of far-fetched phantasies which are caricatures of the real facts, as well as those who betray all the signs of neuroticism, hysteria, or psychopathy, often talk overmuch about the quest but do not seem able to apply its most elementary injunctions. To encourage them to follow it is only still further to build up their ridiculous egoism and bolster their fool’s paradise. For them the quest is unachievable until they become different persons. The unequal balance of the whole psyche is a characteristic of those seekers who impatiently shun the philosophic discipline. Hence we find that emotional neuroticism, intellectual disorder, volitional weakness, and egotistical excess are strongly marked in a number of people who take a fussy, shrieking interest in mysticism. They seek ardently for teachers but not for truth, for personalities rather than principles. They surrender themselves eagerly to visible organization but not to the invisible God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
It does not occur to them that the absence of proper qualifications unfits them for personal discipleship under competent master. For anyone to express even a hint of this unfitness is to arouse their anger, provoke their hostility, and stiffen their conceit. And if one goes out to suggest, in however kindly and constructive a manner, that their energies would be more profitably directed towards self-improvement than towards running after incompetent teachers and absurd sects, one is rewarded by abuse and vilification. Neither a dry pedantic intellectualism nor a sloppy excitable emotionalism is desirable in the seeker after truth. It is not for irresponsible persons, those of feeble will or hysterical nerves. It is wrong to look upon this quest as one for semi-lunatics, emotionally disturbed persons, or gullible, brainless miracle-hunters. It is not a place for the deposit of sickness, troubles, and deficiencies. Such things must be taken elsewhere for repair. All too many people take to this quest who are not really ready for it, who need to become human beings before seeking the more massive achievement of becoming superhuman ones, who ought to attain personal decency, balance, discipline, practicality, and calmness before losing themselves in the theoretical flights of spirituality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Truth is discoverable but not by everyone. It is not discoverable by criminals who break every ethical law, by lazy who will not pause and look within each day, by the cynics who sneer at the quality of reverence, by those who do not value it enough to cultivate their true intelligence. Does everyone have the right to know this truth? Yes and no. Yes—because all mortals must do so in the end as a part of the fulfilment of life’s purpose. No—when they are as yet uninterested in it and unable or unwilling to receive it. If our thought is to be straight and fearless we ought to fling all prejudices overboard at the very start of our voyage. The prejudiced mortal with one’s prejudices confirmed not contradicted. One is not really looking for truth. Before the quest can ever begin, prejudices must be removed. This is a psychological operation which the mortal cannot preform upon oneself, expect in part, without a great effort. The fool cannot follow this Quest. One may try to but one will be sent back to learn some wisdom through Earthly lessons and through Earthly difficulties brought on by one’s foolishness. Flighty temperaments, which seek the latest novelty rather than the first truth, are unfit for philosophy. The very name “Quest” implies movement, travelling, journey; those who remain stationary cannot be said to be on the “Quest.” By this I do not mean those who find themselves stagnating against their will, but those who make no effort inwardly to advance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The truth is sometimes so spiky and so uncomfortable that people hide from it. Entry on the quest is a sign that enough courage has been gathered to face it. Those who assert that they are questers but who are too much in love with their own fancies are incapable of facing the realities being those fancies. To this extent their quest is a bogus one, although not usually a consciously bogus one. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them! No factory can manufacture divine peace for us, nor can any workshop turn out the inspirations which bestow heroism on a mortal. We may wander the whole length of Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, China and find no shop which can sell us a packet of starry truths that might comfort and console. The morning post will bring a hundred letters in the office mail, but it will not bring one word or hint that shall conduct us nearer the higher aims. “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as children, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved,” reports Romans 8.20-24. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
In the Realm of the Minds there is No Limits–The Gods Sell Anything to Everybody at a Fair Price!
At times, I feel them. You might say we feel each other. Jesus was called a physician, and it is the physician for whom we ask first when we are looking for health. And this is good. For, as all generations knew, there is healing power in nature. And if this power is wisely used and skillfully assisted, much healing is possible. Those who despise this assist and rely on the power of their will ignore both the destructive might and the constructive friendliness of nature. They do not know that our body contains not only the forces of discord between its elements but also forces of concord. The great physician is one who does not easily cut off parts and does not easily suppress the one function in favor of the other, but one who strengthens the whole so that within the unity of the body the struggling elements can be reconciled. And even if deep traces of former struggles in our body remain, this is possible as long as we are live. You have launched upon a quest from which there is no turning back. You have embarked upon a journey which will demand from you the utmost patience and deepest faith, the strongest determination and cultivation of the keenest intelligence lying latent within you. This Quest is not an undertaking of a few weeks of months. It is, as I have often said, a lifetime’s work: patience is required from us and must be given by us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Yes, one may discover the elusive secret of life—but one must first work for it. The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price. Take a few minutes off each day to find yourself, to question yourself, to awaken yourself—that is part of the price demanded. The physician can help, one can keep us alive, but can one make us whole? Can one give us salvation? If discord, cleavage, restlessness rule our mental life, if there is no unity and therefore no freedom in our soul, if we are possessed by compulsions and fantasies, by disordered anxiety and disordered aggression, if mental disorder or disease are threatening or have conquered us, certainly not. Time and growth are needed before a mortal can sign that absolute commitment of mind and life for which it asks. Spoiled plans or disappointed hopes may turn a mortal toward this quest but only appreciation of peace or love of truth can keep one on it. If we want to be healed, we ask for help of friends or counselors or analysts or psychiatrists. And they, if they know what to do, try to assist the healing powers of our soul. They do not appeal to our will power; they do not ask for removal or suppression of any trend, but they work for reconciliation, reconciliation of the struggle forces of our soul. They accept us as we are and make it possible for us to look at ourselves honestly and with clarity, to realize the strange mechanisms under which we are suffering and to dissolve them, reconciling the genuine forces of our soul with each other and making us free for thought and action. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Only when one’s quest becomes a whole-heartedly single-minded enterprise, working for a solitary end, disregarding all else yet retaining the sense of balance is it likely to succeed. No vow of secrecy will be required of one, no pledge of loyalty demanded from one; one must enter the scattered formless order by a silent act of one’s whole heart, not by a vocal utterance of one’s fleshly lips. It is too presumptuous for an ordinary mortal to attempt to follow the philosophic path? We answer that no mortal who feels the need of truth to support or guide one’s life should be regarded as presumptuous in this matter. One need not be discouraged. One need may dabble or penetrate deeply. The path is for one also. However, it is so only to the extent that one is willing to pay the cost—no more. One is free to pay as little, and get as little, as one wishes. No one has the right to force one to give more. The counselor and psychiatrist can help; one can liberate us, but can one make us whole? Can one give us salvation? If we are not able to use our freedom and if we are conquered by the tragic conflicts of our existence, certainly not. None of us is isolated. We belong to our past, to our families, classes, groups, nations, cultures. And in all of them health and infirmary are fighting with each other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
How can we be whole if the culture is split within itself, if every value is denied by another one, if every truth is questioned, if every decision is good and bad at the same time? How can we be whole if the institutions in which we live create temptations, conflicts, catastrophes too heavy for each of us? How can we be whole if we are connected, often intimately connected with people who are in discord with themselves, in hostility against us, or if we have to live with people, individuals, groups, nations who are irreconciled and sick? This is the situation of all of us, and this situation reacts on our personal life, disrupts the concord we may have reached. The reconciliation in our souls and often even in our bodies breaks down in the encounter with reality. Who heals reality? Who brings us a new reality? Who reconciles the conflicting forces of our whole existence? We look at those who are most responsible for our institutions, for our historical reality, the leaders, the political leaders, the wise administration, the educated, the good people, the revolutionary masses. There are healing powers in all of them, otherwise there would be no more history. And it is understandable that in the period of Jesus just rulers were called saviors and healers. They can maintain human life on Earth; but can they make us whole, can they bring us salvation? #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
They cannot because they themselves need wholeness and are longing for salvation. Who heals the healer? There is no answer to this antiquated reality. Everybody and every institution are infected, the healer and the healed. Only a new reality can make us whole, breaking into the old one, reconciling it with itself. It is the humanly incredible, ecstatic, often defeated, but never conquered faith of Christianity that this new reality which was always at work in history, has appeared in fullness and power in Jesus, the Christ, the Healer and Savior. This is said of Christ because Jesus alone does not give another law for thought or action, because Christ does not cut off anything or suppress anything that belongs to life, but because Jesus is the reality of reconciliation, because in Christ a new reality has come upon us in which we and our whole existence are accepted and reunited. We know, even when we confess this faith, that the old reality of conflict and infirmary has not disappeared. Our bodies ail and die, our souls are restless, our World is a battlefield of individuals groups. However, the new reality cannot be thrown out. We live from it, even if we do not know it. For it is the power of reconciliation whose work is wholeness and whose name is love. “And he called him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity,” reports Matthew 10.1. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
People find truth only to the degree that they are entitled to do so. Their aspiration is not enough by itself to determine this degree; their mental, moral, and intuitional equipment also determines it. Whether one is able to follow regular periods of prayer or not, one may still have the basic essential for spiritual advancement. This is the fundamental mood of aspiration, a strong yearning to gain the consciousness of one’s innermost being. The traveler on this quest is a mortal who uses one’s consciousness and one’s will to better one’s character and purify one’s heart. The aspirant who comes to the Quest out of pure disinterested love for it rather out of a hunger for occult powers or a thirst for occult experiences, who seeking to know and do the right thing, will go ahead much more quickly and encounter much fewer dangers than the others who are not. If one has not become convinced of one’s weakness and wickedness, one cannot even set foot on this path, for only then will one be really rather than vocally willing to desert narcissism. There are not many who are ready for such independence of attitude and life. A certain inner strength is necessary for it first of all, and of course a natural or acquired willingness to desert the herds if necessary. When a mortal is ready to confess one’s ignorance, one is ready to begin one’s study of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Very few people want to be lonely. Most try to find love. No one really wishes to live in constant interpersonal chaos or to be the cause of frequent disruptions of human relationships. Loneliness is ultimately an internal, subjective human experience. Therefore, in order to effectively combat its lethal influence, medicine must adopt techniques and approaches that go beyond the current scientific-objective approach of infirmary. Medicine must move beyond science to deal with this problem. We must use scientific objectivity to hep us understand human relationships as a philosophical attitude widely shared in our society that is causing rather than alleviating loneliness. Some people find that they are satisfied by the sheer pleasure of being in the midst of activity. They need to be around people, to absorb that colour and vitality of lives being actively lived. Many people want to feel like they are part of the human race. To feel that their lives are worthwhile, others need to participate in something larger than themselves. And not everything is about finding romance nor romantic love. People need to know that somewhere, at least for a few hours a week, their presence is expected and their efforts make a difference. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
When a mortal is ready to drop the distorting influence of the emotions and passions which actuate one, one is ready to begin the study of philosophy. Life with spiritual beings—here the relation is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We are no You and yet feel addressed; we answer—creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth. However, how can we incorporate into the World of the basic word what is possessed outside language? In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You; in each we perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You, in every sphere according to its manner. I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground. I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with Earth and air—and the growing itself in its darkness. I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life. I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law—those laws according to which the elements mix and separate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it. Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition. However, it can also happen, I will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. This does not require me to forego any of those modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number include and inseparably fused. Whatever belongs to the tree is included: it form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars—all this in its entirety. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity. Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. However, thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
One who knows that one has been ignorant of truth, and still is, has begun to enter the knowledge of truth. This is not for those who are so satisfied with themselves that they want to preserve their egos just as they are. It is for those who feel the need of self-improvement, and feel it so keenly that they are willing to work hard for this objective and to take time for it. The Quest is for those who have looked at their own faults and turned their head away from the unattractive and disconcerting sight with downcast eyes. However, although their weaknesses have clung in the past to them like limpets, philosophy bids them take hope and take to the Quest which can liberate and strengthen them in the future. Those who had had their fills of society, who have found its gaiety and its friendship to be all on the surface, who have evaluated it as bogus, sham, and unreal, may be prepared to listen more heedfully to the description of a life that is offered as being much more worthwhile. In a mortals higher yearnings, in one’s wishes for a better holier calmer self, one shows evidences of intuition. Our capacity as human beings to imagine, to think, to wonder, to be conscious are all degrees of freedom. In the realm of the mind, there is no limits. In our imaginations we can instantaneously transport ourselves back three thousand years and listen to blind antiquated Homer reciting his tales around a campfire in Macedonia. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Or we can take our place, again instantaneously, on a stone seat in the theater of Dionysus in classical Athens and be enthralled by the drama of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Or we can project ourselves into the future any number of years we wish. The fact that all of these acts can be done instantaneously—that we can conquer space and time simultaneously—is itself indicative of the nature of freedom. Personal freedom can be soon as the range of movement possible for the organism. Saint Thomas Aquinas stated that there are four kinds of existence. First are inert things, like rocks, which simply exist. Second are the things that exist and grow, like plants and trees. Third are things that exist and grow and move about, like animals. Fourth are creatures that exist, grow, move, and think, like human beings. (For us the term consciousness would be more accurate.) Each of these stages represent a radically increased freedom, seen in the range of movement, over the preceding one. As Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann phrased it, we are born with freedom in the sense of the potentiality for movement of the infant. “The free play of the limbs, which gives to the human nursling so much richer possibilities than the new-born monkey or ape reminds us that our own state at birth is not simply helpless but is characterized by a significant freedom.” This freedom of movement, which, contemporary experiments demonstrate, begins even in the uterus, is given a great boost when the umbilical cord is cut, and continues as the new born grows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
One leaps ahead in the infant’s range of movement is when the child can crawl, another leap when it learns to walk, another when he or she does off to school. All of these are quantum increases in the range of movement of the human child—in nautical terms, the cruising range. The movement is increasingly psychological as well as physical, the psychological having its roots in the great leap in the child’s learning to talk. All of these leaps from birth on, these events in which one differentiates oneself from parents, can be seen as psychological rebirth experiences. Hence, they are anxiety-creating as well as challenging. At adolescence there are other quantum leaps that increase the young person’s range of movement, most notably in the realm of pleasures of the flesh. One experiences the alarming possibility of being able. Going off to college, marrying, earning a living, moving to a new city—all can be seen as increases in the person’s range of freedom. Freedom is a moving out while retaining the human bond to the persons, particularly the mother, at home. There is a delicate balance between these two poles. If there is too little wandering out and too much dependence on the home, freedom is being surrendered in favor of security, which turns out then to be an escape from freedom. If there is too much wandering out and too little security at home, the person may get pathologically anxious and may retrench in other ways that cut off his or her freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Each of these new levels of movement consists of the enlarging of one’s cruising range by cutting the biological ties with home and mother and father and establishing psychological and spiritual ties in their place. We saw, in the case of Louis de Pointe du Lac, as he came to terms with past and present in his talk with his mother, that he no loner talked about what she should have done for him, but rather what she did do for him. He admired and valued her. Obviously his mother had not changed: the change in memory really came from a change in Louis’s attitude. At his stage in life, the dynamic question is very rarely “What happened?” but rather “What is your attitude toward what happened?” The achievement of freedom now makes it possible for Louis to change the context for viewing his mother. It is freedom of being. The last and ultimate leap in this growth of movement, in this pilgrim’s progress, occurs one’s death bed, when we go through the last stage of differentiation. In therapy—the central purpose being, as I have said, to help the patient discover, establish, and use one’s freedom—I find it important, when the patient pleads total powerlessness, to remind one that one put one foot in front of the other to get to my office. And one can leave. On that range of freedom, minute as it is, we can begin building. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Each step in the growth in differentiation carries a new sense of responsibility equivalent to the new freedom. The sense of response-ability, as the word may be understood, involves an awareness of others’ needs as we live in the community of the family or the village together with a capacity to respond to the needs also of one’s own self. We choose our way of responding to the other people who make up the context in which our freedom develops. The paradox that one can be free only as one is responsible is central at every point in freedom. However, the converse is just as true: one can be responsible as one is free. This is the reason why the argument that we are totally determined breeds irresponsibility. You have to have some sense that your decisions genuinely matter to take responsibility for them. The sense of responsibility begins in the relation of infant to mothers: as he grows older, the infant learns that mother has her own needs. She does not come every time he cries, and he does not inflict pain on his mother because he sees the eliciting look of pain in her face. Thus growth always has two simultaneous sides: freedom and responsibility, one equivalent to the other, one necessary for the other. We do not let our three-year-old child cross Zhongshan Road in Shanghai to get to the Bund by himself; he has not yet developed sufficient responsibility to be permitted this freedom. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The aim of art, the aim of la life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every person and in the World. Since it limits freedom, responsibility is one aspect of the destiny pole. So long as we are born of woman (in contrast to cloning) we shall have to come to terms with mother not only as a source of food, not in the sense Egyptians did before mummification, but increasingly as a person carrying one’s own destiny. Freedom for oneself increases as one’s awareness of the destiny of others increases. It is significant that the new capacity for freedom related to movement is actualized as a form of art. Human beings dance—ballet and folk and jazz and ballroom and the flamingo—as an expression of aesthetic possibilities. Each art form is developed as a ritual to express one’s exhilaration and freedom. To us, rock music represents freedom…the freedom to feel, to be one with a higher collective force, to move together in one cosmic rhythm. One dances for joy, or to express passion or religious feelings, as in the whirling of Aaliyah in the Are You That Somebody music video, to drum up emotion for battle, like the war dances of the Native Americans. Movement and the expansion of freedom are symbolic expressions of the individual’s career from birth to death. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
To Keep Aloof is to Write One’s Name in the Book of Failure—The Lord is Still Existent and Still Eager to Speak with Us Even Today!
I know your arguments. For centuries I have pondered them, as I have pondered so many questions. You think I do what I do with human limitations. I do not. To understand me, you must think in terms of abilities yet unimagined. Sooner will you understand the mystery of splitting atoms or black holes in space. The abyss and light of the World, time’s need and the craving for eternity, vision, event, and poetry are the dialogue with me. When I confront you, God is present. However, if I look away from you, I ignore him. As long as I merely experience or use you, I ignore God. As long as I merely experience or use you, I deny God. Yet, when I encounter you, I encounter God. Loneliness is honesty in one sense. In honesty you have to separate yourself from the impersonal mass—you are saved from conformism. To be honest is to be lonely in the sense that you individuate yourself, you seize the moment to be yourself and yourself alone. There is an initial loneliness about being oneself, speaking out of one’s own center. Some people feel a sadness and despair about being cast loose, alone, into the Word. One may feel life a single red wood tree standing at the North Pole, with nobody or nothing around for a million miles. However, is not the loneliness that we all experience at times, the kind that is inseparable from the human condition? #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
If you dare to be honestly yourself, you will be lonely. At each moment in our self-consciousness we are alone. No one else can genuinely come into our sanctum sanctorum. We pass into Heaven alone. No one escapes. This is destiny in its deepest sense. When we recognize this, then we can overcome the loneliness to some extent. We recognize that it is a human loneliness. It means we are all in the same yacht, and we can then choose to, or not to, let others into our life. Lo and behold, we then have used the aloneness to be less lonely. Sometimes when people have to work in an international community or land where the people who speak their native language are a minority and uninteresting, one can feel painfully lonely, due chiefly to the isolation. And their work may not be that absorbing. Nonetheless, people generally follow the usual defense: they throw themselves into their work with ever greater zeal. However, the harder they work, the more isolated they may feel. Generally, this could lead to an individual collapsing and having to go to bed for a couple of weeks. This is what many call a nervous breakdown. When this happens, one may want to change their lifestyle. Maybe take up a hobby like reading, drawing, gardening, sculpting or a sport. Even learning to cook could be fascinating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Still, giving up your habit of rigidly planning your life and taking the flow of your energy as it comes can have some unintended side effects. Being all without aim or sense of direction, isolated, may lead to one feeling like a nonentity since all one’s old ways of proving their worth are no longer being employed. Seeking a new direction and life and letting go and trusting in God has also been helpful for some people. David Talbot started out on his Summer vacating up toward the Caspian Sea with no plans, no fixed guides to follow. By accident he met a group of fifteen or sixteen artists traveling and doing art as a group, and he got a job with them as a sort of fancy handy man. He traveled and had made sketches with them all through the villages along the Caspian Sea. This was the birth of him becoming an architect. He also fell deeply in love that summer and it was the greatest joy of his life. However, should we call this accident of meeting this group an accident, or was it really an expression of destiny? I think it was. When David gave up his rigid and compulsive demands on life, when he let go and let God, unexpected possibilities opened up in unpredictable ways which would have never been known to him. These are aspects of destiny become conscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
For other people, they may need to support their confidence without taking away the force of their despair, since despair may well lead to the deepest insight and the most valuable change. When in despair or depression, it is true that most people shrink—they tend to retreat into their hopelessness. However, one should try to experience this despair constructively, as an opportunity. The despair can then act upon the person like the flood in Genesis: it can clear away the vast debris—the false answers, false buoys, superficial lighthouses, and phony principles—and leave the way open for new possibilities. That is, for new freedom. We know in psychotherapy that times of despair are essential to the client’s discovery of hidden capacities and basic assets. Those therapists are misguided who feel it incumbent upon themselves to reassure the patient at every point of despair. For if the client never feels despair, it is doubtful whether one ever will feel anything below the surface. There is surely value in the client’s experience that one has nothing more to lose anyway, so one may as well take whatever leap is necessary. That seems to me to be the meaning of the sentence from folklore, “Despair and confidence both banish fear.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The loves of childhood and of adolescence cannot be subtracted from us; they have become part of us. Not a discrete part that could be served. It is as if they had entered our blood stream. Therefore, one cannot let anyone tell them what is best to do, and sometimes when you already have a successful career, consider sticking to it or just transferring to a different office or location. Do not let people prey on your vulnerabilities because even those who seem like well wishers would like to see you fail and may give you faulty advice, whether they be paid consultants, friends, family or coworkers. We ought to be mindful that all human beings we confront are persons. We need a new language, and new poets to create it, and new ears to listen to it. Meanwhile, if we shut our ears to the old prophets who still speak more or less in the old tongues, using ancient words, occasionally in new ways, we shall have very little music. We are not so rich that we can do without tradition. Let one that has new ears listen to it in a new way. To be given direction, to feel an impulsion towards it, and to practice purification is a necessary requisite for the journey. Two warnings are needed here: fall not into the extreme of unbalance, and depend not on what is outside. One reminder: seek and submit to grace. It may be imageless or found anywhere anytime and, in any form, —a work of art, a piece of music, a living tree, or a human being—for in the end it must come from your own higher individuality and in your own loneliness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Before embarking on a new journey in life, one should figure out what attracts them most to this direction? What does one hope to get out of it? And if one is seeking religious satisfaction, spiritual truth or moral power of inner peace or psychic faculties? Consider if you will be satisfied with a theoretical understanding or would one go as far as to put in into practice? And are you will to put in the work and effort and dedication needed for the experience? How far do you think this new path will take you in life, career, and spirituality? The beginnings of this higher life are always mysterious, always unpredictable, sometimes intellectually quiet and sometimes emotionally excited. When first one sets logs of one’s first raft afloat upon these strange waters whose ending can only be somewhere in infinity, as the geometricians say, there are no lights to show one’s frail vessel the way of travel, no Suns or Stars to point a path for it. However, one knows then that one’s head is bowed in homage to a higher power. Later one will know also how utterly right was the intuition which earlier drove one forth. We walk the Quest uncertainly, human nature being what it is, human weakness following us so obtrusively as it does. The decision to embark on this quest—so new, uncommon, and untried to the average Westerner—becomes especially hard to the mortal seeking alone, with no compassion or relative to fortify one’s resolution. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This urge to discover an intangible reality seems an irrational one to the materialistic mentality. However, on the contrary, it is the most completely logical, the most sensible of all the urges that have ever driven a mortal. The instinct which draws mortals to the truths of philosophy, the experiences of mysticism, and the feeling of religion is a sound one. The fact of one’s own self-existence is the innate primary experience of every mortal. It is clear, certain, and incontrovertible. However, the nature of that existence is obscure, confused, and arguable. So much happens in the subconscious before they are quite aware of it that only when a new decision, a new orientation of feeling or thought is firmly arrived at, and openly appears, do they discover and define what they have been led to by outer and inner developments. In each mortal there is a part of one which is unknown and unmolested. It is in the region of consciousness below the normal state that the most powerful forces move the human being—and can be applied to move one. Here only can the radical transformation be made. If one believes that these ideas ring true, then one’s course of duty is plain. To keep aloof in such a circumstance is to write one’s name in the Book of Failure. Mortals have largely conquered their planetary environment. Now one must begin the sterner task of conquering oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
“Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth” is a sentence from that ancient record, the Hebrew Bible. However, any mortal may find that the Lord is still existent and still willing to speak to one even today. Yet, to actualize such an encounter one must take to the secret path and practice inner listening. In mortals, Heaven and Earth unite. One is free to enjoy the one or the other. The first leads to peace of mind, the second ties one to the terrestrial wheel. Whoever sincerely wants access to divinity may find it, but one must make the first move. The fulfilment of the heart’s nostalgic yearning for its true homeland may be delayed, but it cannot be defeated. If experience, reason, or intuition cannot bring one to the conviction that God rules the World, a prophet’s help, grace, or writing may do so. If that fails, one has no other recourse than to keep pondering the question until light dawns. If the quest seems too far from one’s environment or circumstances, it is still a good time to start, for the reward will be better savoured. This search after the soul need not wait until death until it successfully ends. To do so would be illogical and in most causes futile. Here on Earth and in this very lifetime the grand discover may be made. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The quest upon which one has entered will be a long one and the task one has understand a hard one. However, the Ideal will also be one’s support because one’s conscience will endorse one’s choice to the end. Leave aside wrangling, and take up the quest leading to the true goal, the Supreme Overself, which is unique. Push thy enquiry further. Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile Him? All of us have tried and are trying to reconcile God by rites and sacraments, by prayers and services, by moral behavior and works of charity. However, if we try this, if we try to give something to God, to show good deeds which may appease the Lord, we fail. It is never enough; we never can satisfy God because there is an infinite demand upon us. And since we cannot appease God, we grow hostile toward the Lord. Have you ever noticed how much hostility against God dwells in the depth of the good and honest people, in those who excel in works of charity, in piety and religious zeal? This cannot be otherwise; for one is hostile, consciously or unconsciously, toward those by whom feels rejected. Everybody is in this predicament, whether one calls that which rejects one God, or nature, or destiny, or social conditions. Everybody carries a hostility toward the existence into which one has been thrown, toward the hidden powers which determine one’s life and that of the Universe, toward that which makes one guilty and that threatens one with destruction because one has become guilty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We all feel rejected and hostile toward what has rejected us. We all try to appease it and in failing, we become more hostile. This happens often unnoticed by ourselves. However, there are two symptoms which we hardly can avoid noticing: The hostility against ourselves and the hostility against others. One speaks so often of pride and arrogance and self-certainty and complacency in people. However, this is, in most cases the superficial level of their being. Below this, in a deeper level, there is self-rejection, disgust, and even hatred of one’s self. Be reconciled to God; that means at the same time, be reconciled to ourselves. However, we are not; we try to appease ourselves. We try to make ourselves more acceptable to our own judgment and, when we fail, we grow more hostile toward ourselves. And one who feels rejected by God and who rejects oneself feels also rejected by the others. As one grows hostile toward destiny and hostile toward oneself, one also grows hostile toward other people. If we are often horrified by the unconscious or conscious hostility people betray toward us or about our own hostility toward people whom we believe we love, let us not forget: They feel rejected by us; we feel rejected by them. They tried hard to make themselves acceptable to us, and they failed. We tried hard to make ourselves acceptable to them, and we failed. And their hostility grew. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Be reconciled with God—that means, at the same time, be reconciled with the others! However, it does not mean try to reconcile the others as it does not mean try to reconcile the others as it does not mean try to reconcile yourselves. Try to reconcile God. You will fail. This is the message: A new reality has appeared in which you are reconciled. To enter the New Being we do not need to show anything. We must only be open to be grasped by it, although we have nothing to show. Being reconciled—tat is the first mark of the New Reality. And being reunited is its second mark. Reconciliation makes reunion possible. The New Creation is the reality in which the separated is reunited. The New Being is manifest in the Christ because in the him the separation never overcame the unity between him and God, between him and humankind, between him and himself. This gives his picture in the Gospels its overwhelming and inexhaustible power. In him we look at a human life that maintained the union in spite of everything that drove him into separation. He represents and mediates the power of the New Being because he represents and mediates the power of an undisrupted union. Where the New Reality appears, one feels united with God, the ground and meaning of one’s existence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
One has what has been called the love of one’s destiny, and what, today, we might call the courage to take upon ourselves our own anxiety. Then one has the astonishing experience of feeling reunited with one’s self, not in pride and false self-satisfaction, but in deep self-acceptance. One accepts one’s self as something which is eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted. The disgust at one’s self, the hatred of one’s self has disappeared. There is a center, a direction, a meaning for life. All healing—bodily and mental—creates this reunion of one’s self with one’s self. Where there is real healing, there is the New Being, The New Creation. However real healing is not where only a part of body or mind is reunited with the whole, but where the whole itself, our whole being, our whole personality is untied with itself. The New Creation is healing creation because it creates reunion with oneself. And it creates reunion with the others. Nothing is more distinctive the Old Being than the separation of mortals from mortals. Nothing is more passionately demanded than social healing, than the New Being within history and human relationships. Religion and Christianity are under strong accusation that they have not brought reunion into human history. Who could deny the truth of this challenge. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Nevertheless, humankind still lives; and it could not live any more if the power of separation had not been permanently conquered by the power of reunion, of healing, of the New Creation. Where one is grasped by a human face as human, although one has to overcome personal distaste, or racial strangeness, or national conflicts, or the differences of sex, of age, of beauty, of strength, of knowledge, and all the other innumerable causes of separation—there New Creation happens! Humankind lives because this happens again and again. And if the Church which is the assembly of God has an ultimate significance, this is its significance: That here the reunion of mortal to mortal is pronounced and confessed and realize, even if in fragments and weaknesses and distortions. The Church is the place where the reunion of mortals with mortals is an actual event, though the Church of God is permanently betrayed by the Christian churches. However, although betrayed and expelled, the New Creation saves and preserves that by which it is betrayed and expelled: churches, humankind and history. The Church, like all its members, relapses from the New into the Old Being. Therefore, the third mark of the New Creation is re-surrection. The word resurrection has for many people the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images. However, resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the Old. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Resurrection is not even an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time. The Old Being has the mark of disintegration and death. The New Being puts a new mark over the old one. Out of disintegration and death something is born of eternal significance. That which is immersed in dissolution emerges in a New Creation. Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in soul and history, in nature and Universe. Reconciliation, reunion, resurrection—this is the New Creation, the New Being, the New state of things. Do we participate in it? The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality. A New state of things has appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you. There is a great difference between the essence of the Necessary and that of the Good. There is no contradiction between seeking our own good in human being and wishing for one’s good to be increased. For this very reason, when the motive that draws us toward anybody is simply some advantage for ourselves, the conditions of friendship are not fulfilled. Friendship is a supernatural harmony, a union of opposites. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
When a human being is any degree necessary to us, we cannot desire one’s good unless we cease to desire our own. Where there is necessity there is constraint and domination. We are in the power of that of which we stand in need, unless we possess it. The central good for every mortal is the free disposal of oneself. Either we renounce it, which is a crime of idolatry, since it can be renounced only in favor of God, or we desire that the being we stand in need of should be deprived of this free disposal of oneself. Any kind of mechanism may join human beings together with bonds of affection which have the iron hardness of necessity. Mother love is often of such a kind; so at times is paternal love, as in Pere Goriot of Balzac; so is carnal love in its most intense form, as in L’Ecole des Femmes and in Phedre; so also, very frequently, is the love between husband and wife, chiefly as a result of habit. Filial and fraternal love are more rarely of this nature. A person with a good heart can help someone fix a tire, take a roommate to the doctor, have lunch with someone who is sad, or smile and say hello to brighten a day. However, a follower of the first commandment will naturally add to these important acts of service. We need to have compassion and we will be provided opportunities to forget self and lift others. If we are to be more like Christ, we are to be sensitive to the struggles, trials, and challenges faced by so many but that can often be overlooked. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The Way of Life Would be to Love Guardedly and Almost Secretly but the Soul is Perfectly Knowable and Experienceable
It was a more lavish place even than the great hall of the palace; it was stuffed to overflowing with fine things, with a couch made of carved leopards, and a bed hung with sheer silk; and with polished mirrors of seemingly magical perfection. The concept of destiny makes the experience of anger necessary. The kind of person who never gets angry is, we may be sure, the person who also never encounters destiny. When one encounters destiny, one finds anger automatically rising in one, but as strength. Passivity will not do. This emotion is not necessarily negative. Encountering one’s destiny requires strength, the encounter takes the form of embracing, accepting, or attacking. Experiencing the emotional state of anger and conceiving of destiny means that you are free from regarding yourself as too precious; you are able to throw yourself into the game, whatever it may be, without worrying about picayune details. Enkil, a man in his middle twenties, sought the help of a psychotherapist because he was having difficulty in his marriage. One week, after he had had several sessions with the therapist, sudden and dramatic changes occurred in his relationship with his wife, Akasha. Both of them began to talk to each other about events and feelings that they had never discussed before. In some ways it was an agonizing week for them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Anger that had been pent up for months, and even years, poured forth. In the course of their self-disclosures each of them revealed that they had had dates with another since their marriage. More expressions of anger and hurt burst forth, reaching an intensity they had never experiences before. However, when the anger and hurt had been expressed other feelings began to manifest themselves. They became aware that they felt closer and more attracted to each other than they ever had before. As they moved toward each other, they felt more care and warmth. Gaining awareness of our fear of love is often a difficult task, for we tend to disguise it from ourselves and others by employing many defenses against intimacy. Some people have a reservoir of hostility built up over the years that has something to do with their behavior, and the functions that it appears to serve in relation to their spouse and other people one cares for is one of keeping it virtually impossible to experience intimacy. There are many similar defenses against intimacy. We may keep people at a distance by seeming indifferent to them, by being rigid or legalistic, or by playing the role of martyr. As long as we are successful at employing these ways of keeping others away, it is hard for us to become aware of our fear of love, for we make the possibility of intimacy so remote that there is a little danger of our experiencing it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
With the lion so successfully caged, we do not become aware of our fear of it. If we can begin to see what we are doing and begin to give up some of our defenses, then we will be more likely to experience our fear of love directly. Once this occurs, we are in a much better position to do something about it. If we cannot only be aware of our fear of love, but also accept it both in ourselves and in others, it will also be helpful. Here, as elsewhere, caring for ourselves seems to be the starting point for personality growth. If we can experience and accept our fear of love, we will have less need of indirect ways of expressing it, which are almost invariably harmful to relationships. When we experience more intimacy than our fears will permit, instead of finding some pretext for withdrawing, we can admit our fear to ourselves and often to the other person as well. This direct way of responding to our fear will be far less destructive to the relationships. A natural ebb and flow of the experience and expression of love will then be possible, as we experience such intimacy as we are ready for and then withdraw for a time as our fear asserts itself too strongly. As we see this pattern clearly, we will be far more able to take in stride apparent setbacks in our association with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
When we can recognize that when someone we love acts destructively or hurtfully towards us it is almost certainly an indication that one, too, is afraid rather than that one does not care for us, and it makes a big difference to recognize this. If we did not have this insight, we may be just as hurt or express as much anger. The chances of resolving the situation are much better, however, because we ourselves will not be likely to react as though we have been completely rejected and unloved. This is when we often pick one of Mrs. Winchester’s favorite flowers, a daisy, and pluck the petals off as we play that “he or she loves me, he or she loves me not” game in which we tally up what we consider to be indications of how the other person involved feels based on what answer comes up when we get to the last petal. Then no matter the outcomes, we say to ourselves, “There must something the matter with me or my love would not treat me this way.” This game may give up hope, but it might just be pointless, for the problem is usually not possessed in the absence of caring but rather in the fear of love, which leads the person to act as though one does not care. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Anger for some people is a path to freedom. The times when some people become angry are times when one gains valuable insight, which are then expressed constructively—for example, the time when Akasha told Enkil about her plans to marry Lestat and move across the World, which he had called “the craziest plan I ever heard.” Experiences like Enkil’s is analogous to a ship putting out to sea. It is cast loose from the dock, and, sailing in the open wind, it then gets its power from cooperation with wind and sea and stars, as we get our power by living in cooperation with destiny. Our freedom, like the ship’s, thus comes from engaging destiny, knowing that the elements are there all the time and that they have to be encountered or embraced. Constructive anger is one way of encountering destiny. However, often sailors find that they have to fight the elements, as in the case of a storm at sea. We find our freedom at the juncture of forces we cannot control but can only encounter—which often, like the ship fight the storm, takes all the strength we have. Now it is not only sailing with, it is sailing against the sea and the storm winds. The constructive anger we have been speaking about is one way of using our power to choose our way of encountering destiny. The possible responses to destiny range from cooperation with at one end of the spectrum to fighting against the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Our anger empowers us in the struggle against destiny. As Beethoven cried, “I will seize fate by the throat!” And out of that came the Fifth Symphony. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. A woman, for example, might see that her husband belittles her constantly as a means of avoiding intimacy and as a way of coping with his own self-hate. Yet if she saw no crack in the wall of this defense, she might ultimately come to the conclusion that it would be self-destructive for her to continue the marriage. And a child might still have to be taken from a cruel father even though it might be recognized that his brutality is rooted in a terrible fear of love. If we can discover that the potential hurt of not experiencing and expressing love ultimately far outweighs the risk that accompany intimacy, this might also be a helpful revelation. When we dare to love, we can never eliminate the possibility that we will be hurt. The emotional involvement of caring always includes vulnerability; in fact, if we allow ourselves to love someone, we can be certain that we will sometimes be hurt. Someone we love will pass on to Heaven; someone we love maybe injured; someone we love may suffer from an infirmary; someone we love will be so frightened and mistrustful of our caring that they will react in ways that are hurtful or even destructive to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we chose to love, these are painful experiences, and we cannot avoid them. It is quite customary to relegate us, the votaries Christianity, to the asylum of eccentricity, crankiness, gullibility, fraud, and even lunacy. In some individual cases our critics are perfectly justified in doing so. When the Christian losses one’s direct path, one easily deviates into these aberrations. However, to make a wholesale condemnation of all Christianity because of the rotten condition of a part of it is unfair and itself an unbalanced procedure. Wherever and whenever it can, science puts all matters to the test. Christianity welcomes this part of the scientific attitude. It has nothing to fear from such a practical examination. However, there is a drawback here. No scientist can test it in a laboratory. One must test it in one’s own person and over a long period. Owning to the widespread lack of education of the subject, there are some people who are disturbed by various fears of prayer. Prayer has been given by God to mortals for their spiritual profits, not for their spiritual destruction. Hatred and jealousy of the flesh, which is in so many evil spirits, is due to that fact that we have both body and soul, which should not exist on this Earth. There are times when there had been mountains and oceans and forests and no living things such as us. That is why evil believes that to have a spirit within a mortal body is a curse. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
God likes the music and rhythm of the language—the shape of words, so to speak. Yes, there are bad spirits who like to hurt people, and why not? And there are good spirits who love them, too. This is why the Bible stresses righteousness. God requires us to have faith in our soul and requires us to search for it patiently, untiringly, and unremittingly. Because this is a strong Christian experience, one’s who preserve in their search may hold the hope that one day they may find it. Mortals will rush agitatedly hither and thither in quest of a single possession, but hardly one can be induced to go in quest of one’s own soul. Strange as it may seem to our kith and kin who has immersed themselves heavily in the body’s senses, hard to believe as it may be to those who have lost themselves deeply in the World’s business, there is nevertheless a way up to the soul’s divinity. That the divine power is active here, in London or Oakland, and now, in the twenty first century, may startle those who look for in only in Biblical times and in the Holy Land. However, human perceptions in their present stage cannot bring this subtler self within their range without a special training. Its activity eludes the brain. What are the alternatives to a life in which love experienced and expressed? Does such a life hold out the hope of any less hurt? Only two other alternatives appear to be available. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
One of the alternatives, if it possible, would be to cut oneself off completely from the experience of love. Such a person would say in effect to themselves, “I will not allow anyone to mean anything to me. I may have business relationships of one kind or another, but no one will be important to me beyond the immediate dealings in which we find each other useful, and no one will learn anything of personal nature about how I feel or who I really am. I will never allow myself to experience the desire or need for love.” Perhaps this kind of life could be achieved, but it sounds like a desperately lonely existence. Perhaps a person could keep so busy or be so controlled that one could even block the loneliness out of awareness, but what kind of life is that? The viewpoint suggested here does, of course, involve a value judgment that meaningfulness is found above all else in human relationships, although it does not appear that few of us would choose to live so isolated an existence. The other alternative is more often practiced, but it seems almost equally unsatisfying. This way of life would be to love guardedly and almost secretly. Although one may not be aware of it, such a person says to oneself, “All right, so I admit to myself that I care for my children and my partner. And maybe there are a few other people in the World who mean something to me. However, I am going to play it cool. I will never reveal too much of myself or let them know how much I care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
“No sense getting too far out on a limb or being too enthusiastic about our relationship. No use letting them see how much they mean to me. They would be likely to find some way of using it to push me around or hurt me.” A lot of us settle for this approach to love. However, this, too, makes for a kind of loneliness and cheats us out of the deepest and most satisfying experiences of love. And since it involves a guardedness and calculated dullness in our relationships, it cheats us of the free, unburdened feelings that spontaneity in our actions and words could give us all. All of life becomes toned downed and the exhilarating excitement is taken away. The risks of love are ever-present, but the alternatives are not inviting. So from the standpoint of satisfying living it is better even to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. If we postponed the experience and expression of love until we no longer feared it, we would postpone it forever. Some people do appear to use their fear of love as a perpetual excuse for stalemated living—loving and trembling seem to go together. If we desire love we must learn to love in spite of our fears. This process of taking a chance on love might be compared to the experience of a person who wants to make parachute jumps. If one is no a fool, one is frightened. And no amount of prejump training will eradicate that fears. When the time comes to make the leap one will be trembling internally and, quite possibly, externally. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
No amount of reassurance by experienced jumpers will make it otherwise. Making the leap of love is not too unlike this. No amount of advance preparation or reassurance from others will keep us from experiencing fear. If the experience is too frightening, we can make some tentative leaps in the direction of self-disclosure and the involvement of love and withdraw back into the security of emotional distance. In that, it is different, however, as the parachutist, once committed, does not have that option. When we make our first moves toward deeper experiences and more open expressions of love, it may seem at first that our fear is greatly intensified. This is a very critical time, for we may become so frightened that we choose to withdraw permanently and not allow ourselves another chance to feel so deeply. This sometimes happens in psychotherapy. After a few sessions a person may begin to respond to the therapist’s warmth with feelings of caring. Perhaps the individual does not even allow oneself to verbalize these feelings but suddenly discovers one cannot afford the sessions or does not have sufficient time to work them into a busy schedule. At first, when we allow ourselves to love more deeply, it is understandable that the experience of fear is intensified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
In the past our defenses—the devices we used to keep our emotionally distant from others—protected us not only from the experience of love but also from the full awareness of our fear. As we allow the defenses to crumble we stand vulnerable and stark before our fear. One thing that will help as we begin to allow ourselves the experience of love will be the awareness that we no longer in the same circumstances as we were when the fear of love developed within us. When we were first exposed to the risks of love, we were children. And when we experienced the hurts of feeling rejected, we were relatively helpless to do anything about the situation. No wonder we were frightened and built whatever defenses against hurt we could be walling ourselves off emotionally. Every person who does not feel this close intimate fellowship with one’s Overself is necessarily a pilgrim, most probably an unconscious one, but still in everything and everywhere one is in search of one’s soul. The soul is perfectly knowable and experienceable. It is here in mortal’s hearts and minds, and such knowledge once gained, such experience once known, lifts them into a higher estimate of themselves. Mortals then become not merely thinking animals but glorious beings. It is not astonishing that mortals have ever been attracted and captivated by something which the intellect can hardly conceive nor the imagination picture, something which cannot even be truly named? #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Here is something to ponder over: why mortals should have forfeited all that seems dear, to the point of forfeiting life itself, for something which can never be touched or smelled, seen or heard. What is it that turned mortal’s hearts toward religion, Christianity, philosophy since time immemorial? One’s aspiration toward the diviner life is unconscious testimony to its existence. It is the presence within one of a divine soul which has inspired this turning, the divine life itself in one’s heart which has prompted one’s aspiration. Mortals have no escape from the urge to seek the Sacred, the Profound, the Timeless. The roots of one’s whole being are in it. We are neither the originator of this doctrine nor even its prophet. The first mortal who ventured into the unknown within-ness of the Universe and of oneself was its originator whilst every mortal who has since voiced this discovery has been its prophet. The day will come when science, waking more fully than it is now from its materialistic sleep, will confess humbly that the soul of mortals really does exist. Often as adults we still feel helpless, as though we were still children. However, we are not helpless. If we express love and are rejected, we can do something about it—we can express our anger and frustrations. If our loving proves unsatisfying, we can withdraw from that person is we choose to and express our love to others more able to respond. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
When we love them has nothing to do with our value as a person, we can discover that another person’s inability to express love to us. Perhaps most important of all we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while it is never pleasant, it need not be catastrophic. Mortals are free to imprison their hearts and minds in soulless materialism or to claim their liberty in the winder life of spiritual truth. Let them pull aside their mental curtains and admit the life-giving Sunlight of truth. What could be closer to a mortal than one’s own mind? What therefore should be more easy to examine and understand? Yet the contrary is actually true. One knows only the surfaces of the mind; its deeps remain unknown. Our fear of love will never completely disappear any more than would the fear of the parachutist. In both instances there is always a realistic risk of hurt, but as we are able to enter into more and more emotionally intimate relationships, the fear will gradually lessen. If the mind is to become conscious of itself, it can do so only by freeing itself from the ceaseless activity of thoughts. The systematic exercise of prayer is the deliberate attempt to achieve this. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Just as muddied water clears if the Earth is left alone to settle, so the agitated mind clarifies its perceptions if left alone though prayer to settle quietly. There exists a part of mortal’s nature of which ordinarily one is completely ignorant, and of whose importance one is usually sceptical. What is the trust highest purpose of mortal’s life? It is to be taken possession of by one’s higher self. One’s dissatisfactions are incurable by any other remedy. True happiness lay in drawing nearer to the Infinite Being. That which is Infinity is indeed bliss; there can be no happiness in limited thing. Such is the insecurity of the present-day World that the few who have found security are only the few who have found their own soul, and inner peace. We will find it increasingly easy to be ourselves and to express all our feeling, for we will have increasing confidence that people will generally like us as we are. And when we are frightened, we will likely find it comfortable to express that feeling, too—and expressing it will help to dissipate it. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” reports I John 4.18. It is true. There is no fear in love—only fear of love and the vulnerability it involves and the repeated experience of love reduces fear. Whether the central message of the New Testament, which revolves around the crucifixion of Jesus, is regarded as the literal truth or as a myth growing out of mortal’s yearning for meaning in life, the theme is a deeply moving one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The New Testament is often garbled by theological lingo, and possible drafted by William Shakespeare, but it finally comes down to relationships and appears to be essentially this: God risked creating persons so independent they could love him or thumb their noses at him. He went even further and chose to love them. As it always does, the decision to love necessarily included suffering. However, it must have been worth the risk, for perhaps the alternative even for God was the ultimate loneliness of having no one to love. We can discover for ourselves that it is worth the risk to love, even though we tremble and even though we know we will sometimes experience the hurt we fear. Preference for some human being is necessarily a different thing from charity. Charity does not discriminate. If it is found more abundantly in any special quarter, it is because affliction has chanced to provide an occasion there for the exchange of compassion and gratitude. It is equally available for the whole human race, inasmuch as affliction can come to all, offering them an opportunity to exchange. Preference for a human being can be of two kinds. Either we are seeking some particular good in one, or we need one. In general way all possible attachments come under one of these heads. We are drawn toward a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
There Other Two Persons Seemed a Million Miles Away—Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand and Eternity in an Hour
The air so emotionally frigid that when going to be at night, there was a feeling that no other person was in the house. I never in a thousand years would have imagined that would come out. Often times in human beings there is an early attachment of imprinting behavior, where people seem to follow their attachment with a similar blind fidelity. And this behavior may be made stronger by punishment or other difficulties put in their path. Some people spend a lifetime looking for someone to make up for their losses, to bring them justice for their less than pleasant childhoods or adult life. They go through life lonely, yearning for a love that will fill the large area of emptiness in their hearts. However, the struggles these individuals are engaged in is bound to be self-defeating. The first and fundamental challenge is to confront one’s fate as it is, reconcile one’s self to the fact that one did receive a bad deal, know that justice is irrelevant, no one will ever make up for the emptiness and the pain of those years. The past cannot be changed—it can only be acknowledged and learned from. It is one’s destiny. It can be absorbed and mitigated by new experiences, but it cannot be changed or erased. An individual only adds insult to injury by going on the rest of one’s life knocking one’s head against the same stone wall. Fortunately, psychotherapy can be a vehicle through which human beings may become more aware of and compensate for such implanted destiny. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some people hang on to the past as a way of hanging on to someone they cared deeply about. It is an expression of the hope that someday this coveted individual will reward one, someday one will find the Holy Grail. Now one will get the original care one was missing; now one will get that restored! However, there is no way to restore it, no matter how much of a loss it is. Bad fate, yes. Yet, that is just the way it is. The lost idol image, the lost change, the great emptiness within one—they are all going to remain there. These things are the past; there is no way of changing them. You can change your attitude toward these tragic happenings, as the ultimate freedom is a command over one’s own attitude. However, you cannot change the experiences themselves. If you hang on to an illusion of such change, always hoping for pie in the sky by and by and by you cut off your possibilities. You then become rigid. You do not let yourself take in the new possibilities. You trade your freedom for a mess of emotional pottage. And this way, as a corollary, you never use your anger constructively. You lose a tremendous amount of power, energy, and possibility. In short, you lose your freedom. However, is there no constructive value in coming to terms with one’s early fate? Yes, there is—and a value potentially greater than what one gives up. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The struggle to come to terms with acrimonious relationships and lifestyles has much to do with the emergence of creativity. For example, a man who had an unpleasant childhood ended up developing talents which led to his high status in the World of architecture. Because he had such a disturbed family life, that the creativity was compensation for such an early trauma. We know that creative people often come out of such unfortunate family backgrounds. Why and how they do is still one of the mysteries the answer to which the Sphinx of creativity has not revealed. We do know that some people have been unfortunate and never have been able to take life lightly. They learn from the hour of birth that it is best to take life easily, as many may. They cannot coast along or rest on their laurels. This exceptional achievement following a disturbed childhood or adulthood had been documented in many cases. Such freedom of the artist is not born. It is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability, or, perhaps, the smug superiority of inherited title. The freedom that permits generation of possibilities is the beginning of a creative product. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous situations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, it is clear that these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievements, many after having experienced the most deplorable traumatic childhoods. The tension in these personalities between high aspiration and disappointment may well be the necessary matrix out of which creativity—and, later, civilization—is born. This type cannot slide into any well-adjusted syndrome. There is the outstanding exception of J.S. Bach, but his contentment—if it was that—seems to have been a combination of fortunate social conditions. The well-adjusted person rarely make great painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians. Coming out of such a confused early childhood allows the creative capacity to be considered a later compensation. The question is: Can a person seize these possibilities—these new reaches of freedom not without cruel fate, but despite fate—and weld them into a significant building, house, a statue, a painting, or some other creative product? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If one can accept the deprivation of the care one rightfully expected, if one can engage this loneness face to face, one will have achieved a strength and a power that will be a foundation more solid than one ever could have achieved otherwise. If one can accept this aspect of one’s destiny, the fates will work rather than against one. In this way one lives with the Universe rater than against it. One must learn to engage and accept these cruel things in one’s background. It is, therefore, inevitable that the questions “Is there a need for self-control” arises when a way of life is being espoused that encourages freedom of thought and action. And it is vital that no glib, easy answer be given, for it is an important question. Situations do exist where it can be said without equivocation “Yes, do exercise self-control.” Wen, for example, individuals have the desire to destroy the life or property of others or when they have the urge to take their own lives or act in obviously self-destructive ways, it is important that they control these impulses. Society has found it necessary and desirable, when it has the opportunity, to impose control on such persons by limiting their freedom by restraining them. One of the most painful tragedies in American life today is the suicides that occur among high school and college students—frequently those of great promise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It could be said those planning to end their own lives to please, please, hold on! Life may seem painful and meaningless. Perhaps you feel suddenly and terribly disillusioned. However, at least bear with the struggles and give yourselves the perspective of a few more years before you make such an irrevocable decision. It is not enough simply to develop self-control, even though we may need to use it to curb destructive impulses. The ultimately satisfying answer is to deal effectively with problems that underlie our destructive impulses so that we can move beyond the need for self-control. The basic problem is self-hate, for self-destructiveness and destructiveness directed toward others go hand and hand. The nation, for example, that sets out to destroy other nations is bent on a self-destructive course. The personal who assaults another person and follows one’s impulses is not benefiting one’s self. And, of course, one’s self-hate is evident in the obvious lack of confidence on one’s ability to relate to individuals in other ways that would be more pleasant. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
So let us be clear about one thing. The violent or destructive acts we are so often afraid we will do if we do not control ourselves are not the result of true freedom or spontaneity. The murderer is not free. One is an enslaved, tormented person who is driven by pent-up feelings of self-hate that have been projected outward onto other individuals or onto society at large. The superheated steam of this hatred builds up in one’s internal pressure cooker until whatever self-control one possesses is bypassed in an explosion of violence. To exhort such a person to control one’s self may be a necessary stop-gap measure, although it is likely to be futile. Any thorough-going help must deal with the mortal’s self-hate. Most of us may feel some impulses within ourselves to be destructive to others or to ourselves, which we sense the seen to curb by self-control. Often the inner pressure is not too great and we can be successful in this control if we choose to go that route, but the more such self-control we need to impose on ourselves the less able we will be to be carefree and spontaneous. And spontaneity is a deliciously desirable way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we can discover why we feel destructive and through this exploration reduce the self-hate to the point where we have relatively little need for self-control, it will be a far more freeing experience. A professional therapist can often be very helpful here, for one can provide a relatively secure environment where hatreds (both toward the self and others) can be expressed and explored with a minimum of danger. Often in therapy people discover that they are not nearly as dangerous to themselves or others as the feared. They find they had been so frightened of freedom that they had imagined themselves far more potentially harmful than they were as a way of keeping themselves rigidly controlled. However, some people like to deceive themselves. To be rejected makes a better excuse—to tell everyone how misunderstood they are, and how they triumphed over great odds. The misunderstood genius, nobody to help them, and so on. We all live in the old state of things. We belong to the Old Creation, and the demand made upon us by Christianity is that we also participate in the New Creation. We have known ourselves in our old being, and we shall ask ourselves in this hour whether we also have experiences something of a New Being in ourselves. The union with God is when the New Reality is present. God is the ultimate truth and demands complete devotion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is important to experience the birth in consciousness of a new—though old—part of the self. One may consider it a dawning of awareness of new possibilities which have in effect been there all the time. This is a giant step toward personal freedom. This New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called Christ. And it is actually the beginning of accepting acceptance, the uniting of one’s self with that early self that one had had to lock up in a dungeon in order to survive when life was not happy but threatening. Although this does not alter the original lack of basic trust, it does surmount it in the literal meaning of that term. We hear about the psychology of anger and how it clouds our vision, causes us to misunderstand each other, and in general interferes with the calm necessary for a rational, clear view of life. People point out that their anger curtails one’s freedom. All this is true. However, it is one-sided; it omits the constructive side to anger. In our society, we confuse anger with resentment, a form of repressed anger that eats steadily away at our innards. In resentment we store up ammunition to get even with our fellows, but we never communicate directly in a way that might resolve the problem. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This transformation of anger into resentment is the sickness of the middle class. It corrodes our stature as human beings. Or we confuse anger with temper, which is generally an explosion of repressed anger; with rage, which may be a pathological anger; with petulance, which is immature resentment; or with hostility, which is anger absorbed into our character structure until it infects every act of ours. I am not referring to these kinds of hostility or resentment. I am speaking, rather, of the anger that pulls the diverse parts of the self together, that integrates the self, keeps the whole self alive and present, energizes us, sharpens our vision, and stimulates us to think more clearly. This kind of anger brings with it an experience of self-esteem and self-worth. It is the healthy anger that makes freedom possible, the anger that cuts one loose from the unnecessary baggage in living. However, people who are romantically involved with others that do not share their values will find there is a conflict of two different value systems, and it will feel like a red hot poker being shoved into your heart. Some people take their issues they have with their absentee parents out on their partner or a family member of the same gender as the parent they have an issue with. They take revenge by punishing innocent people as a whole. The individual being targeted has to admit one’s own cruelty—cruelty to one’s self most of all for allowing someone like that to be in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Do not cover up what you really feel and become deceitful just to survive. Do not surrender your freedom. Many people always try to foresee that the other person’s reaction will be before they speak. These types of individual hide behind such laudable words as responsibility, dutiful, noble member of society, and so on. However, one must hate these roles they play with people who are taking advantage of them. Occasionally being honest with people and venting your anger will give you partial freedom. At least one starts to know one can say what one feels. However, it may still be a freedom within a jail. There is the lacking surge of anger that leads to a changing of one’s life, the willingness to cut loose all the barges one is pulling, to throw aside all one’s luggage and one’s overscrupulous cares. It is not a good idea to always prefer to be hurt rather than to take care of yourself even if it hurts someone else. Another vital question remains to be discussed in regard to living spontaneously. Can we be deeply involved in a love relationship and still be free to be spontaneous? A great many people act as though love and spontaneity are incompatible. There are two frequent feelings that contribute to this reaction that love and freedom cannot coexist. And, of course, they help to make love that much more frightening to us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
One of these feelings has to do with the idea that the revealing of ourselves, which intimacy involves, gives the other person power over us, thereby limiting our freedom to do what we want to do. Have you noticed that when you talk to people sometimes it is like you have an invisible wall between your eyes and theirs—a wall that has never been absent in all the time you have know them? Well, some of us are always on guard. There is the feeling that one can never let anyone see one completely—know all about who we are. That is because it would give the other person too many strings on one. It would allow one to become their puppet. Many develop these defenses of withdrawing into one’s self and permitting others to see as few of one’s real feelings as possible as a way of avoiding manipulation by them. This is because some feel if one allows others to really know one, one will be helpless to avoid being manipulated. The other feeling that leads us to shy away from love because it appears to threaten our freedom is probably even more common. This is the idea that love is inescapably tied up with obligation and responsibility. Among other ways in which this duty theme operates is the idea that if we really love another we will cease doing what we want to do and concentrate on pleasing the one we love. Such feelings often strike a death blow to the experience and expression of love. Men and women talk about their lack of freedom to do what they would like to do because of the necessity of providing adequately for their families. So work becomes noxious, tolerated duty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
We also hear could saying their partner would not like it if they did this or that and that they would like to go out, but the children have to come first, you know. So all of life become hedged about with responsibilities and the necessity of pleasing others brought about by love. And virtually everything in life, from daily work, fidelity, pleasures of the flesh, and second honeymoons to family picnics, walking in the park, and holding hands in the movie, becomes a dutiful and essentially joyless act that we do in hope that spouse and children will be pleased. When approached this way, it is no wonder that love seems like slavery and many splendored things! When so many people view love this way, it is not surprising that a playboy (and playgirl) philosophy would develop in our culture in which physical intimacy without emotional intimacy would become very attractive to us as a way of life. The essential message of the philosophy seems to be, “As long as I can remain indifferent to my pleasures of the flesh partners I can retain my freedom and individuality. Once I begin to allow myself to care for someone, I have had it! I am on my way to becoming a slave.” The joker in this deck is that the moment we embrace this philosophy we have walked out on the freedom to have the most deeply satisfying fun of all—a love relationship freely experienced and expressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The basic problem underlying our feeling that love and freedom are incompatible is our old nemesis, self-hate. If we act freely and do what we want to do, we assume, and often we have been taught to assume, that we will destroy relationships that are important to us. However, this involves a colossal distrust of ourselves. We are, in effect, saying to ourselves, “If you do not watch yourself carefully, you are such a miserable creature and so self-destructive that you will alienate everyone you care for and end up all alone.” The reality is that one of the quickest ways of alienating another person is to put every effort into pleasing them. When we try to put their wishes foremost, we are likely to become a nonentity in their eyes. It is not particularly pleasing to attempt to relate to a person who has no apparent desires of one’s own, who always bends to accommodate our wishes, and who makes an uncomplaining doormat of one’s self for us to walk upon. Furthermore, when we deny our own desires, we quickly come to resent that person for talking advantage of us. That resentment will then likely be expressed in any number of ways. Perhaps we begin to take on martyr posture and express by word or attitude the feelings: “After all I have done for you, the least you could do would be to try to please me once in a while.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It is much more straightforward and ultimately satisfying to be what we want to be and do what we want to do. As we learn that we can value ourselves and respond to our own desires, it is unlikely we will act in ways that destroy relationships with those for whom we care—because this will be destructive toward ourselves, too. It is true that more flare-ups of disagreements and anger may occur, because our wishes and those of others will not always agree, but two individuals in this situation are likely to respect each other for being sufficiently independent to express feelings openly, and the way is then clear to battle through to some agreements. If we do find ourselves acting in ways that constantly hurt those we love and destroy our relationships with them it would be advisable to seek professional help, for it would be an indication that we have so much self-hate that we have a need to hurt ourselves, since hurting others is self-destructive. Love God and do as you please. This is a profound idea, but it can be carried an additional step and be developed into a philosophical phrase which is more complete. If you truly value yourself, love yourself and do as you please for you will not hurt people unnecessarily. To do so would be to hurt yourself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This seems too good to be true to most of us. We are so connived that to live spontaneously is to live dangerously toward others and ourselves, but if we can begin, perhaps a little at a time, to be more responsive to our inner selves, we will discover that living spontaneously is exciting and rewarding to ourselves and to those we care for. Once having made that discovery we will not be content with less than an ever-increasingly spontaneous life. Moving toward the right attitude is passionate and infinite longing. The New Being is not something at simply takes the place of the Old Being. However, it is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed. Yet, not wholly destroyed. Salvation does not destroy creation; but it transforms the Old Creation into a New one. Therefore we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold “re,” namely, re-condilation, re-union, re-surrection. The message of reconciliation is: Be reconciled to God. Crease to be hostile to the Lord, for God is never hostile to you. The message of reconciliation is not that Good needs to be reconciled. How could he be? Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile the Lord? The sacred is here and now. God is present in all elements. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
All I Do to My Disciples is to Free them from their Own Bondage by Any Means their Case May Need
Try always to treat humanity, in our person as well as that of others, as an end and never only as a means. Even when you treat me only as a means I do not always mind. A genuine encounter can be quite exhausting, even when it is exhilarating, and I do not always want to give myself. Even when you treat me only as a means because you want some information, I may feel delighted that I have the answer and can help. However, mortal’s attitudes are manifold, and there are many ways of threatening others as ends also. There are many modes of I-You. You may be polite when asking; you may show respect, affection, admiration, or one of the countless attitudes that mortals call love. Or you may not ask but seek without the benefit of words. Or you may speak but not ask, possibly responding to my wordless question. We may do something together. You may write me. You may think of writing me. And there are others ways. There are many modes of I-You. The total encounter in which You is spoken with one’s whole being is but one mode of I-You. Obscurity is fascinating. One tries to puzzle out details, is stumped, and becomes increasingly concerned with meaning—unless one feels put off and gives up altogether. We pay a price of all the activities in our lives. When it is Life loses much of its color, its adventure, and its satisfaction in relationships wen it is lived in these terms. Take legalism, for example. Thus church, though it has to exclusive domain on legalism, provides many examples of people who are essentially legalists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
A certain Mrs. Rice gained considerable prestige and power in her denomination. This was largely because she was a tireless and efficient worker for the church since her husband, a successful businessman, had died and left her financially independent while she still had many active years left. She devoted them mainly to the church. She was also, of course, in a position to make large donations to her favorite projects in the denomination, which did not diminish her influence among denominational leaders. Mrs. Rice wore her increasing stature in the church well. Correctness in behavior was important to her, and she was every inch the gracious lady. She was charming and friendly. She did not throw her weight around in any obvious fashion. If she has any secret sins they were well hidden, and everyone would have been greatly surprised had any come to light. In spite of her friendliness and her habit of befriending many younger people, however, it would have been hard to have imagined her to be very close to anyone. She was the patroness of many, the confidante of none. Not too long after the death of her husband, a minister came to the local church of which she was a member. She appeared to develop a deep respect, perhaps even affection, for this man, who had great talents. Toward the end of his ministry in that perish the relationship between Mrs. Rice and the minister, while still cordial, seemed perceptibly more distant, a fact that was puzzling to the minister. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When the minister had been in another church in the denomination for some time, his name began to appear as a candidate for various positions of importance within the church on the basis of his demonstrated abilities. However, it also became apparent that his name was being dropped from consideration each time it came up. It eventually came to him through friends that there was a persistent rumor for a reliable source that he had had a sexual affair with one of the women of his former parish. With characteristic directness he traced the rumor to its source, the church’s wealthy benefactress. When he confronted her, Mrs. Rice admitted that she was responsible for the rumor, although, as she said, “There may have been one or two others who thought the same thing.” She said she was convinced that what she had reported was true and that she felt it was her duty to prevent such a person from achieving eminence in the church. Even if he were innocent, she felt, the fact that he could bring on such suspicious by his actions indicated he was a person of questionable judgement. The minister had traced the rumor, he was only able in a small way to lessen its harmful effect on his career. It seems almost irrelevant to report that he had not be sexually involved with the woman in question though it had been a deeply significant relationship for him and filled a need for emotional intimacy he had not experienced elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The wealthy widow serves as an example of the essential barrenness of the legalistic approach to life. True intimacy was unquestionably frightening to Mrs. Rice, and living by the rules protected her from it. In a very practiced and not unpleasing way she was proper and friendly. Always the friendliness was within bounds. To have revealed enough to herself to have been emotionally close to another would probably have seemed like an impropriety to her. It is probable that her adherence to the rules made it difficult, if not impossible, to see herself clearly. No doubt she was sexually attracted to the minister, but this would be so untenable a thought that she would not allow herself to feel it. When faced with the decision as to whether or not to betray her friend, perhaps she was faced with some brief doubts. However, this was no doubt quickly, if sadly, resolved by her dedication to the rules. So it became her Christian duty to pass on her knowledge to others, and she willingly became judge, jury, and executioner. Is there no place for rules in life? Yes, of course there is. Society provides many examples. We agree that we will drive on one side of the street rather than on the other and thus eliminate mass chaos. In a complex society we need such rules. And no doubt we have a responsibility to ourselves to see that helpful ones are enacted and that destructive or overly restrictive laws are not enacted, or, if they have been enacted, to see that they are repealed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, when rules become a way of life, they become a problem. When we constantly judge ourselves and other people good or bad, the rules become distancing devices. We tend to classify people, including ourselves; and we give up our freedom to accept, enjoy, and respond to people, including ourselves, as they are. Almost always in rule-dominated lives, a hierarchy of sins tends to develop, and those sins we tend to find most frighteningly desirable but unacceptable in ourselves tend to head the list. We are likely to be most condemning of sins of passion—expressions of anger, pleasures of the flesh, unrestrained expressions of love and warmth, unconfined creative thinking that threatens changes in the established order. Far down on the list and sometimes the subject of polite discussion but never accorded the passionate condemnation given the fist order of sins are such things as indifference, coldness, prejudice, unscrupulous business practices, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and the like. Of these we tend to be tolerant, for this, as we say, is “just the way people are”! Becoming less legalistic helps us to love more spontaneously. If we move beyond self-control into a more creative relationship with ourselves, it will also help us. If we allow ourselves to be responsive to our impulses and desires, many of us have deep-seated fears that we will in one way or another run amuck and be destructive to those about us and perhaps ultimately to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Because of this pervasive mistrust of ourselves, we feel it necessary to clamp lids of self-control on our lives. We set up a kind of inner boarder of censorship through which most of our impulses to act or speak must pass and be voted upon before action can be permitted. Obviously, much of our potential spontaneity is lost in the process. In one of Grimm’s stories there is a competition between a giant and a little tailor to see which is the stronger. The giant throws a stone so high that it takes a very long time before it comes down again. The little tailor lets a bird fly and it does not come down at all. Anything without wings always comes down again in the end. It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves. The Roman caricature of Stoicism also appears to the muscular will. However, true Stoicism, the Stoicism of the Greek, from which Saint John, or perhaps Christ, borrowed the terms Logos and Pneuma, is purely desire, piety, and love. It is fully of humility. The Christianity of today has let itself become contaminated by its adversaries, on this point as on many others. The metaphor of a search for Go is suggestive of efforts of muscular will. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is true that Pascal contributed to the spread of this metaphor of the search for God. He made several mistakes, notably that of confusing faith and autosuggestion to a certain extent. In the great symbols of mythology and folklore, in the parables of the Gospel, it is God who seeks mortals. “Quaevens me sedisti lassus.” Nowhere in the Gospel is there question of a search undertake by mortals. Mortals do not take a step unless one receives some pressure or is definitely called. The role of the future wife is to wait. The slaves waits and watches while one’s master is at a festival. The passer-by does not invite oneself to the marriage feast, one does not ask for an invitation; one is brought in almost by surprise; one’s part is only to put on the appropriate garment. The mortal has found a pearl in a field sells all one’s goods to buy the field; one does not need to excavate the entire field with a spade in order to unearth the pearl; it is enough for one to sell all one possesses. To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save us. The conditions of modern civilized society are not helpful to the Christian self-culture, although they will serve intellectual self-culture. What is first needed is a recognition of the value of retreat, of times and places where every many and woman may periodically and temporarily isolate oneself or whilst withdrawing attention from Worldly affairs and giving it wholly to spiritual ones. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The attitude that brings about salvation is not like any forms of activity. It is the waiting or attentive and faithful immobility that lasts indefinitely and cannot be shaken. The slave, who waits near the door so as to open it immediately when the master knocks, is the best image of it. One must be ready to die of hunger and exhaustion rather than to change one’s attitude. It must be possible for one’s companion to call one, talk to one, hit one, without one even turning one’s head. Even if one is told that the master is dead, and even if one believes it, one will not move. If one is told that the master is angry with one and will beat one when he returns, and if one believes it, one will not move. Active searching is prejudicial, not only to love, but also to the intelligence, whose laws are the same as those of love. We just have to wait for the solution of a geometrical problem or the meaning of a Latin or Greek sentence to some into our mind. Still more must we wait for any new scientific truth or for a beautiful line of poetry. Seeking leads us astray. This is the case with every form of what is truly good. Mortals should do nothing but wait for the good and keep evil away. One should make no muscular effort except in order not to be shaken by evil. In the constant turning and returning of which our human condition is made up, true virtue in every domain is negative, at least in appearance. This waiting for goodness and truth is, however, something more intense than any searching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
These words will make no appeal to the materialist mentality which still regards all spiritual experiences as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when first I embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than in the past. The Christian who sits in an hour-long prayer session is not wasting one’s time, even though one is indulging in something which to the sceptic seems meaningless. On the contrary, one’s prayer is of vital significance. The Father is aware of us, knows our needs, and will help us perfectly. One aspect of that perfect love is our Heavenly Father’s involvement in the details of our lives, even when we may not be aware of it or understand it. We seek the Father’s divine guidance and help through heartfelt, earnest prayer. When we honor our covenants and strive to be more like our Savior, we are entitled to a constant stream of divine guidance through the influence and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The notion of grace, as opposed to virtue depending on the will, and that of inspiration, as opposed to intellectual or artistic work, these two notions, if they are well understood, show the efficacy of desire and of waiting. Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation of religious practices. That is why no system of mortality can take their place. The mediocre part of the soul has, however, a great many lies in its arsenal that are capable of protecting it, even during prayer or the participation of the sacraments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The soul outs veils between our eyes and the presence of perfect purity, and it is clever enough to call them God—such veils, for instance, as states of the soul, sources of sensible joy, of hope, of comfort, of soothing consolation, or else a combination of habits, or one or several human beings, or perhaps a social circle. It is difficult to avoid the pitfall of striving to imagine the divine perfection religion invites us to love. Never in any case can we imagine something more perfect than ourselves. This effort renders useless the marvel of the Eucharist. A certain formation of intelligence is necessary in order to be able to contemplate the Eucharist only what by definition it enshrines, that is to say, something which is totally outside our experience, something of which we only know that it exists and that noting else can ever be desires expect in error. The trap of traps, the almost inevitable trap, is the social one. Everywhere, always, in everything, the social feeling produces a perfect imitation of faith, that is to say perfectly deceptive. This imitation has the great advantage of satisfying every part of the soul. That which longs for goodness believes it is fed. That which is mediocre is not hurt by the light; it is quite at its ease. Thus everyone is in agreement. The soul is at peace. However, Christ said that he did not come to bring peace. He brought a sword, the sword that serves in two. It is almost impossible to distinguish faith from its social imitation. All the more so because the soul can contain one part of true faith and one of imitation faith. It is almost but not quite impossible. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Under present circumstances, it is perhaps a question of life of death for faith that the social imitation should be repudiated. The necessity for a perfectly pure presence to take away defilement is not restricted to churches. People come with their stains to the churches, and that is all very well. It would, however, be more in conformity with the spirit of Christianity if, besides that, Christ went to bring his presence into those places most polluted wit shame, misery, crime, and affliction, into prisons and law courts, into workhouses and shelters for the wretched and the outcast. Every session of bench or courts should begin and end with a prayer, in which the magistrates, the police, and the accused, and the public shared. Christ should not be absent from the places where work or study is going on. All human beings, whatever they are doing and wherever they are, should be able to have their eyes fixed, during the whole of each day, upon the service of bronze. Is should also be publicly and officially recognized that religion is nothing else but a looking. In so far as it claims to be anything else, it is inevitable that it should either be shut up inside churches, or that it should stifle everything in every other place where it is found. Religion should not claim to occupy a place in society other than that which rightly belongs to supernatural love in the soul. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Moreover it is true also that many people degrade charity in themselves because they want to make it occupy too large and too visible a place in their soul. Our Father lives only in secret. Love should always be accompanied by modesty. True faith implies great discretion, even with regard to itself. It is a secret between God and us in which we ourselves have scarcely any part. The love of our neighbor, the love of the beauty of the World, and the love of religion are in a sense quite impersonal loves. This could easily not be so in the last case, because religion is connected with a certain section of society. The very nature of religion is connected with a certain section of society. The very nature of religious practices must remedy this. At the center of the Catholic religion a little formless matter is found, a little piece of bread. The love directed toward this particle of matter is necessarily impersonal. It is not the human person of Christ such as we picture him; it is not the divine person of the Father, likewise subject to all the errors of our imagination; it is outwardly only a fragment of matter, yet it is at the center of the Catholic religion. Herein is possessed the great scandal and yet the most wonderful virtue of this religion. It all authentic forms of religious life alike, there is something that guarantees their impersonal character. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The love of God ought to be impersonal as long as there has not been any direct and personal contact; otherwise it is an imaginary love. Afterward it ought to be both personal and impersonal again, but this time in a higher sense. There is however a personal and human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and a reflection of divine love. This is friendship, provided we keep strictly to the true meaning of the word. And keep in mind that God is at this moment aware of you, your feelings, and the spiritual and temporal needs of everyone around you. This great and comforting truth can be found in daily life. The closer we draw to our Heavenly Father, the more his light and joy will shine from within us. Others will notice that there is something unique and special about us. And they will ask about it. We have to try to fill our hearts with love for others and truly see everyone around us as a child of God. Laugh with them, rejoice with them, weep with them, respect them, heal, life and strengthen them. Strive to emulate the love of Christ and have compassion for others—even to those who are unkind, who mock and wish to cause harm. Love them and treat them as fellow children of Heavenly Father. As our love for God and his children deepens, so does our commitment to follow Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 