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Do Not Try Indulging in Overoptimistic Claptraps!
Leadership is a people process. The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. It calls for the application of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that allow each of us to successfully influence thins. We know what a person thinks not when one tells us what one thinks, but by one’s actions. In the twenty-first century it is not easy to comprehend the views that prevailed a few hundred years ago as to the nature of life and living creatures. Then as now every person, every day of one’s life, was bombarded by evidence for the orderly operation of cause and effect in biological phenomena. If the body was cut with a knife, blood would flow; if food was long withheld, weight would decrease; if the nostrils and mouth were tightly closed, death would result. Nevertheless, in the nonscientific intellectual climate that prevailed during the Middle Ages, such clear-cut evidence that living creatures, like inanimate objects, are controlled in at least some aspects of the behaviour by regular natural laws had little effect on popular ideas about biology. Vitalism in its most extreme form governed whatever thought there was on the subject. Living creatures, and especially humans, were thought to lie outside the realm of subject matter suitable for investigation and understanding; life and the living body were believed to be replete with mysteries that must forever lie beyond the comprehension of mortal humans. Not only was it therefore hopeless to try to make careful observations and deductions on life process, it was also, in some dark and frightening way, wrong to do so. Magic potions and incantations were employed to combat disease and injury, not just because nothing better was available but also because such techniques were clearly best suited to deal with the nonphysical mysteries believed to underlie the afflictions under treatment. It is likely that the gradual emergence of biology as a field of study and activity appropriate to its name—the science of life—would have commenced many years earlier than it did had it not been for the delaying effect of mystical belief in an unbridgeable chasm separating animate and inanimate processes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Nevertheless, a start was finally made. It came in the early 1600s, when William Harvey made his observations and put forth his deductions upon the movements of the heart and blood. While every schoolboy learns William Harvey to be called “the father of modern biology.” Harvey’s great fame rests on two bases, one of one’s own making and the other a philosophic consequence of his discovery. Harvey’s first claim to fame was based on the thoroughly scientific method he employed in arriving at his conclusions. Not only had preceded him (unsound though many of them were), but her performed a long series of experiments of his own. He dissected and minutely described what he saw in dogs, pigs, serpents, frogs, fishes, slugs, oysters, lobsters, and insects. He watched fluid circulating in the transparent shrimp and the unhatched chick. He traced the arteries and veins of valves in both heart and blood vessels. He actually calculated the capacity of each ventricle and estimated the resulting rate of flow of the blood. He observed the results of obstructing the flow of blood in selected arteries and veins and performed other experiment to test his theories. In short, Harvey employed the same sequence of careful observation, hypothesis formation, testing of hypothesis by new observation, and modification of hypothesis to fit the new data that describes all modern scientific research. In the early seventeenth century this was unique in biological investigation. It was a tremendous departure from the mixture of unsupported speculation and religious mysticism that had permeated the work of most of Harvey’s predecessors. Although the introduction into biology of the scientific method was accomplishment enough to justify Harvey’s fame, the philosophic implications of his discovery were probably even more important to future of biology. For Harvey had shown that ordinary physical laws—in particular, those governing the pumping and flow of liquids—were capable of accounting for the functions performed by the heart, an organ that had previously clearly belonged in the realm of the unknowable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Harvey’s explanation of the properties of the circulatory system constituted the first important evidence that the principles of physical science were relevant to at least some of the process underlying the phenomena of life. It would carry us too far afield to trace in detail the historical development of understanding the functions of the various organs of the body tht has followed the pioneering work of William Harvey. Suffice it to say that faith in the hypothesis that such functions can be understood through the applications of the principles of physics has not led to disappointment. In addition to knowledge that the heart is a pump, we now know that the lungs comprise a mechanism for the introduction of oxygen into the body’s chemical plant and for the extraction of gaseous waste products; we understand a great deal about the digestive process in the stomach and intestines; we can follow the transport of oxygen, food, waste products by the blood; the chemical purification activities of the kidneys and the liver are pretty well detailed; the glandular secretion of hormones and the resulting stimulation of specific chemical reactions in remote organs of the body are no longer the mystery they once were. The validity of our understanding of the functioning of the organs of the body is evidenced by spectacular recent developments in surgery. The employment of heart/lung machines to substitute for the natural organs during lengthy operations on the respiratory or circulatory system is one modern example. The surgical implantation into the body of battery-powered electronic pulse generations that supplement the inadequate muscle-contracting capabilities of a defective heart is another. The artificial kidney machines, which prolong indefinitely the lives of patients with defective kidneys by periodic chemical removals of the accumulated impurities in the blood, are yet another example of success of the mechanistic approach to body function. Most spectacular of all are the transplantation of organs into human patients from other humans or animals. Despite the great difficulties occasioned by the body’s rejection mechanism, which causes a chemical reaction that frequently attacks and destroys organic transplants from others individuals, the medical literature now includes numerous reports of successful transplants of kidneys from one human to another. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
In 1953, the first successful first temporarily successful transplantation of a human kidney was performed by Dr. Jean Hamburger in Paris. A 16-ear-old boy received the kidney of his mother as living donor transplantation. In 1954, Dr. Joeseph E. Murray and his colleagues at Peter Bent Bingham Hospital in Boston performed that first truly successful kidney transplant from one twin to another. This was done without any immunosuppressive medication. Since then, kidney transplantation has become a rather standard procedure. In 1961, immunosuppression advancements allowed for the development of powerful immunosuppressives. They became widely available and, in combination, helped decreased the chance for kidney rejection. In the past patients had even lived for weeks after the implantation of kidneys from monkeys to substitute for their own nonfunctioning organs. There have been lung transplants in humans. In there 1950, there was also a report attesting to the current good state of good human health of a Brooklyn puppy more than six months after its heart had been replaced by a transplant from another, unrelated dog. Around this time, there was at least one cause on record of the transplantation of a heart in a human patient dying from failure of his own organ. Unfortunately, a human heart was not available for transplantation, and the heart of a monkey had to be used. It was inadequate and the patient died, but not for an hour or so. From the viewpoint of the patient the operations was clearly unsuccessful, but as an indication of the essential soundness of the modern understanding of the functions of the body and organs, even the temporarily successful operation of human’s circulatory system by the heart of a money must be considered to be an important accomplishment. We have dedicated this portion of the report as an inquiry into the adequacy of the purely physical laws of nature for explanation of the properties of living organisms, the successful interpretation of the functions of the body organs in terms of machinelike processes is of the greatest significance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Our twenty-first century familiarity with current medical events such as those just cited can easily blind us to their philosophic importance. We should not forget that, before the thread of development initiated by Harvey’s pioneering work on the circulatory system, there was general belief in the essential inapplicability of physical principles to body processes. Today the population point of view is entirely different. With the possible exception of “mental” activities, most of us now would subscribe to the thesis that the essential functions of the parts of the body are all ultimately understandable in terms of the same physical las that govern the operations of inanimate machines. If we are to attain the goal of a physical interpretation of all life processes, this removal from the essential functions of the body organs of any claim of dependence on nonphysical explanation, important though it is, is only the first of many steps. As our next step, let us consider the material out of which living organisms are constructed to inquire whether non-physical, vitalistic principles are needed to account for their existence and properties. We shall commence by going back in history and tracing the development of understanding of the similarities and difference between organic and inorganic matter. With all the changes and challenges society faces, there has never been a greater need to determine our priorities, and within renewed focus, align our daily actions with our purpose or goals. When Plato said that the telos of man is “to become as much as possible similar to the God,” such a telos gives unconditional character to the more imperative. If, however, the telos is, as in the hedonistic school, the greatest possible amount of pleasure to be derived from life, no unconditional imperative is at work, but merely the very much conditioned advice to calculate well what amount of pain must be suffered in order to attain to the greatest possible amount of pleasure. Between these two extremes of the definition of man’s inner telos are several definitions which set a finite aim according to the formulation, but in which something unconditional with respect to the moral imperative shines through. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This is true of utilitarianism, in which the moral imperative demands work for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Here pleasure is replaced by “happiness,” and above all, it is not the individual happiness, but that of the many, which is the aim. And the happiness of the many is not possible without self-restraint in the individual’s search for happiness. Therefore, a demand appears that cannot be derived from the merely natural trends of the individual, a demand that implies the acceptance of the other person as a person, and an unconditional element besides, whether acknowledged or not. The Epicurean deal with the problems of the telos and the moral imperative from another angle. They also use the term “happiness,” but for them happiness consists in the life of the spirit in community with friends, and in the creative participation in the cognitive and aesthetic values of their culture. The relationship to friends as well as to cultural creativity demands unconditional subjection to the norms and structures of friendship, knowledge, and beauty. Nearest to Plato’s definition of the human telos is Aristotle’s though that man’s highest aim is participation in the eternal divine self-intuition. This state can be fully reached only be entering the eternity through the “theoretical” life, the life of intuition. Wherever this state of participation is reached, there is eudaimonia, fulfillment under the guidance of a “good daimon,” a half-divine power. To reach this goal is an unconditional imperative. And since the practical virtues are the precondition for fulfillment through participation in the divine, they also have unconditional validity. We have used the Greek word eudaimonia (badly translated as “happiness”) in order to point out the moral aim as described in several ethical schools. Eudaimonia belongs to those words that have suffered a marked deterioration in meaning. Most responsible for this process were the Stoic and Christian polemics against Epicureanism, which often unjustly confused Epicureanism with hedonism. The word in itself means fulfillment with divine help, and consequent happiness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
This happiness does not exclude pleasures, but the pleasure is not the aim, nor is happiness itself the aim. It is the companion of fulfillment with divine help, and consequent happiness. This happiness does not exclude pleasure, but the pleasure is not the aim, nor is happiness itself the aim. It is the companion of fulfillment, reached together with it. If we derogate this concept of eudaimonia, we must also derogate the Christian hope for eternal blessedness. For, even though the Calvinist names the glory of God as the aim of one’s life, one experiences blessedness in fulfilling this aim and serving the glory of God. The same, of course, is true of theosis (“becoming Godlike”), fruitio Dei (“enjoying the intuition of the divine life”), or working for and participating in the “Kingdom of God” described as the aim of the individual human, of humankind, and the Universe. Happiness or blessedness as the emotional awareness of fulfillment is not in conflict with the unconditional, and therefore religious, character of the moral imperative. A conflict exists only when the function of self-transcendence in one’s finitude. However, this diminution of human to finite process has rather rarely occurred in the history of thought. Even highly secularized philosophers were conscious of the function of self-transcendence in human’s spirit, and consequently of dimension of the unconditional or the religious dimension. There are two concepts in the preceding discussion that have been frequently used without having been thoroughly discussed. The one is “conscience,” the channel through which the unconditional character of the moral imperative is experienced, and the other is the term “religious.” Regarding the concept of religion, I cannot restrict myself to the following summary: the fundamental concept of religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, by an infinite interest, by something one takes unconditionally seriously. It is in view of this concept that we have formulated the main proposition, namely, that there is a religious dimension in the moral imperative itself. Derived from the fundamental concept of religion is the traditional concept that religion is a particular expression, in symbols of thought and action, of such ultimate concern within a social group as, for example, a church. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
If the moral imperative were derived from religion in the traditional sense of the word, secular ethics would have to sever any ties with religion, for it rejects direct dependence on any particular religion. If, however, the religious element is intrinsic to the moral imperative, no conflict is necessary. Babylonia had cloisters of wealth women—the naditus—dedicated to Sama, the Sun God. Though many cities had these convents, only the nadistus of Sippar were celibate. The naditu institution existed in the Old Babylonian era and peaked under Hammurapi and his son Samsuiluna (1792-1712 B.C.). In fact, Hammurapi had a personal stake in it, because his sister Iltani was a naditu. Naditus dedicated to Samas, as opposed to other gods, enjoyed the highest status of any nuns and, like the vestal virgins, had unusual economic clout for women Becoming a naditu was a family decision, never a question of religious vocation. First daughters were designated at birth as future naditus and were “raised to the god” until they entered the cloister. Naditus were initiated when they were about fifteen years old, always in the first three days of the Babylonian month of Tebet, our December-January. On the first and third days, offerings were made to Samas and his wife, Aja. Day two was a festival in memory of deceased naditus and ended with a banquet. On this day as well, a thread symbolic of her future union with the god Samas was placed on the naditu’s hand, and the cloister made her a bridal gift or food, drink, and silver. Additional ceremonies were performed for high-ranking naditus, such as the Princess Iltani, to obtain divine consent before the initiates could be consecrated. The initiation, like that of the vestal virgins, included important financial transaction between the naditu’s family and the cloister. The family provided an impressive dowry consisting of a portion of the father’s estate, jewelry, furniture, dishes, looms, cows, and sheep. One naditu also received nine slave girls, twenty-four gowns, forty-two headdresses, and even the shroud for her far-off funeral. Initiated naditus gained the legal authority to administer their own property or they could appoint their brothers to do so. A naditu whose dowry did not include property had the right to share her father’s estate equally with her brothers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Oddly, many of the initiates could not enter the cloister until years later, when space became available. It was, in fact, unlike any other cloister. Instead of communal buildings, such as the Atrium Vestae, the naditus lived in individual houses within a walled compound. The houses were expensive, and though some naditus bought more than one, others had to be content with renting rooms. The cloister housed one hundred to two hundred naditus, and though they were not forbidden to leave, this rarely happened. Several male administrators also lived there, and male relatives visited. Nonetheless, the naditus were expected to maintain lifelong celibacy, though the penalty for lapses was less severe than it was for unchaste high priestesses or wives, who were executed. In fact, during Hammurapi’s reign, two naditus gave birth and were neither disgraced nor expelled from the cloister. Naditus who lived outside its walls, however, or who entered a tavern, were sentenced to death by burning. The daily life of a naditu was a mixture of religious and secular activities. She made twice-daily offerings, and on the twentieth of each month, a say sacred to Samas, she had to provide a heartier oblation of met and beer. She also participated in some of the seven annual festivals and in various religious banquets. A typical naditu also devoted much energy to managing her estate, trading in silver and barely, and renting out fields, orchards, houses shops, slaves, and oxen. One naditu, for instance supervised 117 employees. Many naditus were involved in cooperative ventures, and they often acquired lands adjacent to each other’s own and co-owned fields. Though the naditus were an economic force, their power and privileged status embittered some male business associates. After business had been transacted, it was not uncommon for these men to turn on the naditus and pummel them. Because the celibate naditus remained childless, they were permitted to adopt younger naditus or slave girls to care for them in their old age. This was an important consideration, for naditus were typically long-lived. The Princess Iltani, for instance, served for over sixty years before her gods invited her to a feast, the happy euphemism for a naditu’s death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The cloistered naditus survived for over three centuries. Their dedication to Samas and Aja provided religious security for their families because of their intimate connection to these important deities. The secular benefits were equally significant. Their celibacy was a guarantee against the overpopulation that divided inherited Babylonian estates into puny strips. In return, the naditus were rewarded with status and privilege, and financial independence unique among Babylonian women. People have always believed—have seemed driven and determined, in the face of overwhelming countervailing evidence, to believe—that moral society as well as moral individua life is possible; that however rare or partial its actual achievement, it is in principle possible for individuals to live morally with the advantages of security, order, and opportunity provided by a powerful state, and for that state itself to behave morally with its constituent’s and with its neighbours. It was the accomplishment of Machiavelli, in a kind of Godel’s proof of political economy, to show that such is not the case, that the good and moral life within an orderly society is contingent on the amorality of the state that males in possible. When individuals come together to form a social entity, there must be a period during which the association is revocable; the individuals may find themselves subject to more constraint than they are willing to accept, and may opt out. This revocable period is the hinge of life or death for the social organism; for if the individuals disperse, the larger entity disappears. This larger entity, driven by its own will to power, will therefore do everything it can to end this period of revocability as quickly as possible; for so soon as the association achieves such specialization as to make it impossible for the parts to opt out and survive, at just that point the association becomes irrevocable, and the organism no longer in danger of perishing by virtue of the wiled dispersion of its components. Aggregates, therefore, always act to increase the dependence of member components. The aggregate wants to bring it about that when the aggregate itself is endangered, its components parts will have no choice but to remain loyal. My country is right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
When the mountain men came down out of the Rockies in the nineteenth century and took up life in the village, there was a period in which, if community constraints proved too onerous, they could pack back into the mountains and resume their isolated and independent existences. The present-day citizen of Denver or Butte or Taos has lost this option, is no longer capable of wilderness survival, and is held, moreover, by ties to the union or the grange, to the American Legion or the Rotary Club, and by Social Security, whence will come one’s pension. The aggregate is not satisfied, however, to have its component parts stick together only because they could not survive on their own. Such allegiance is halfhearted. (“We have a terrible president, the country is on a disastrous course, but I guess we have to rally behind him. We have no choice.”) The aggregate wants to generate patriotic fervour, to being it about that individuals lose sight of their separate lives, lose awareness of their ubiquitous conflict with the state, that their identification with the state expunge the purview of individual life with its joys and sorrows, its hopes, its ideals, and particularly its ability to criticize the state in terms of reason, of common sense, and of the discrepancy between the announced aims of the state and the actions the state is undertaking. The unison of Sieg Heil by the packed and disciplined masses at Nuremburg, that is what the state wants; or the faith of Nikolai Rostov, who in holy warlike exaltation charges forward alone, an embodiment of the Russian spirit, against the massed French forces at Austerlitz. Think not of what your country can do for you, said President Kennedy, but of what you can do for your country. There is, therefore, a constant struggle between the individual and the state. For the state would like to eat up all individual power, all independence, discretion, freedom, autonomy. The individual opposes this demand, insists that the state not take any more. In times of danger to the state, however, individual can be persuaded to relinquish additional bits of freedom, since the security of the individual rests ultimately with the security of the state. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
In the state, knowing this, is always tempted to create crises that will justify arrogating to itself additional increments of the independence of its components. In this continuing struggle, the last century has witnesses a decisive shift in favor of the state. The Fascists and Communist movements since 1917 managed to appropriate vastly more power than citizens had ever in the past been willing to give up. The values of art, of individual conscience, of personal preference and belief, all presumably secure withing the private realm, have in our times been confiscated by the state. Nor is this a vicissitude; it is a tendency. A tendency made almost invincible by modern technology, which by virtue of its ever-increasing size, cost, complexity, and power, is, in this conflict, intrinsically on the side of the state. The nature of modern commerce and communication automatically empower the state at the expense of the individual. Television exerts a steady pressure on the private person to live in the public World, in the ambience of the aggregate, with the values and the assumptions of the aggregate, rather than in the private sphere. Whatever is being shown on the screen, whether debates or advertising or talk shows, the viewer is always being instructed on how to live in the public World, while the private World is being subtly and insidiously impugned, is being made to disappear. We in America like to think that our government is accountable. We are relieved when the president, though gaining power at an alarming rate, is reined by Congress or the courts. However, as we take comfort in the prudence of our constitutional checks and balances, we fail to note that nothing limits the action of the state as whole. If the president and Congress concur in an action then, thought it be a monstrous crime, we will do it. At no time has this nation been willing to subject itself to the authority of a World court. We are willing to given an accounting of our actions to the United Nations, but if that body brands our account as lies—as at times it is—we will ignore and go our own way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The deplorable state of the World today testifies silently to the widespread spiritual ignorance which is at the root of the trouble. Class hates class, group strives against group, selfishness is prevalent everywhere—this situation could only arise amongst creatures ignorant of the higher purpose on this Earth. Consequently, to help make available knowledge of the truth and to elevate moral character constitute the noble task to which nay human could devote oneself. The ways of arbitration—like the way of contractual treaties—for the purpose of avoiding war presupposes a loyal respect for promises and a level of simple honesty, an expression of obligations in deeds rather than oratory which, we know now from painful experience, does not exist in imperfect humanity. It is merely wishful dreaming to propose it as the practical alternative to war. The brutal realities of our situation have to be squarely seen without illusion. Nor is the bringing of the system of military naval and air defense to ever-increasing magnitude an effectual alternative. The same procedure is sure to be followed in the opposite camp. The result one day in some moment of emotional reaction to tragedy or of national cupidity will be an explosion of all these massed and concentrated engines of violence. Sloppy sentiments about human brotherhood are not t all needed to pad out the plain fact that all of us ought to work with goodwill for the general good. The dark possibility tht destroys our future can give place to a brighter one only when enough philosophically illumined people are to be found in each country. Nor need that be many—a few in each city would throw out enough influence to bring about this charge. It is the tragedy of our own age that philosophical thoughts should be classed with idle dreams when they are the most practical of all today. The present situation shows the utter failure of religion to control humans; it will never be more than a temporary palliative; TRUTH alone can solve all national and international problems as much as it solves the personal one. However, truth is based on intelligence and humankind’s intelligence still lags remarkably behind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
So the adepts contribute their little will come through evolution, and then humans will learn one’s personal responsibility for all deeds under the laws of re-embodiment and compensation; later one will learn that one cannot separate oneself from the ALL, that the same Mind runs though us all, and that humanity is just a big family wherein the older members are responsible for the welfare of the younger ones, the rich for the poorer, and so on. Universal compassion will then be the only right outlook for a properly educated humans. Where would the crude racial separatism or the equally crude hatred of the bourgeoisie be then? This divine consciousness dissolves intenerate prejudice and removes embittered passion. However, no human will can manufacture it. The World must acknowledge a higher authority than fleshly desire and evolve by self-striving beyond its present materiality before the Overself’s grace will confer such an exalted state. Without trying to indulge in overoptimistic claptrap, it may nevertheless be predicted that, as the twenty-first century advances, human life will change both physically and culturally in an astounding way. It is true that no particular war can possibly end all war. It is the untamed animal in humans which causes all their personal fights, tribal aggressions, and national wars. It is the spiritual nature of humans which urges them to live peaceably and harmoniously with one’s fellows. That humans can rid themselves of external bloodshed without troubling to rid themselves of its internal causes within oneself, is one of their intellectual-born illusions. It may be kept at a distance for a longer time than before but it cannot be kept there permanently while the passions of hatred, anger, and greed thrive in one’s heart. However, it is also true that one’s instruments of collective violence have now become so destructive, so terrible, and so cruel that their very results are forcing one to contemplate abandoning such violence altogether, and to turn towards peaceful discussion for the settlement of one’s disputes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
At the very simplest and most immediate level, why not create a cadre of professional and paraprofessional “life-organizers”? For example, we probably need fewer psychotherapist burrowing molelike into is and ego, and more people who can helps us, even in little ways, to pull our daily lives together. Among the most widely heard do-you-not-believe-it phrases in use today are: “Tomorrow I will get myself organized” or “I am getting my act together.” Yet structuring one’s life under today’s conditions of high social and technological turmoil is harder and harder to do. The breakup of normal Second Wave structures, the overchoice of lifestyles, schedules, and educational opportunities—all, as we have seen, increase the difficulty. For the less affluent, economic pressures impose high structure. For the middle class, and especially their children, the reverse is true. Why not recognize this fact? Some psychiatrists today perform a life-organizing function. Instead of years on the couch, they offer practical assistance in finding work, locating a girl or boyfriend, budgeting one’s money, following a diet, and so forth. We need many more such consultants, structure-providers, and we need feel no shame about seeking their services. In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. However, how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life—the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the World of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city’s economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools—even universities—are structured, let alone how such structures are changing under the impact of the Fourth Wave. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
We also need to take a fresh look at structure-providing institutions—including cults. A sensible society should provide a spectrum of institutions, ranging from those that are free-form to those that are tightly structured. We need open classrooms as well as traditional schools. We need easy-come-easy-go organization as well as rigid monastic orders (secular as well as religious). Today the gap between the total structure offered by the cult and the seemingly total structutrelessness of daily life may well be too wide. If we find the complete subjugation demanded by many cults to be repellent, we should perhaps encourage the formation of what might be called “semi-cults” that lie somewhere between structureless freedom and tightly structured regimentation. Religious organizations, vegetarians, and other sects of groupings might actually be encouraged to form communities in which moderate to high structure is imposed on those who wish to live that way. These semi-cults might be licensed or monitored to assure that they do not engage in physical or mental violence, embezzlement, extortion, or other such practices, and could be set up so that people in need of external structure can join them for a six-month or one-year hitch—and then leave without pressure or recriminations. Some people might find it helpful to live within a semi-cult for a time, then return to the outside World, then plug back into the organization for a time, and so forth, alternating between the demands of high, imposed structure and the freedom offered by the larger society. Should this not be possible for them? Such semi-cults also suggest the need for secular organizations that lie somewhere between the freedom of civilian life and the discipline of the army. Why not a variety of civilian life and the discipline of the army. Why not a variety of civilian service corps, perhaps organized by cities, school systems, or even private companies to perform useful community service on a contract basis employing young people who might live together under strict disciplinary rules and be paid army-scale wages. (To bring these paychecks up to the prevailing minimum wage, corps members might receive supplementary vouchers good for university tuition or training.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
A “pollution crops,” a “public sanitation corps,” a “paramedic corps,” or a corps designed to assist the elderly—such organizations could yield high dividends for both community and individual. In addition to providing useful services and a degree of life-structure, such organization could also help bring much-needed meaning into the lives of their members—not some spurious mystical or political theology but the simple ideal of service to community. Beyond such measures, however, we shall need to integrate personal meaning with larger, more encompassing World views. It is not enough for people to understand (or think they understand) their own small contributions to society. Even if inarticulate, they must also have some sense of how they fit into the larger scheme of things. As the Fourth Wave arrives we will need to formulate sweeping new integrative World view—coherent syntheses, not merely blips—that tie things together. No single World view can ever capture the whole truth. Only by applying multiple and temporary metaphours can we gain a rounded (if still incomplete) picture of the World. However, to acknowledge this axiom is not the same as saying life is meaningless. Indeed, even if life is meaningless in some cosmic sense, we can and often do construct meaning, drawing it from decent social relations and picturing ourselves as part of a larger drama—the coherent unfolding of history. In building Fourth Wave civilization, therefore, we must go beyond the attack on loneliness. We must also begin providing a framework of order and purpose in life. For meaning, structure, and community are interrelated preconditions for a livable future. In working toward these ends, it will help to understand that the present agony of social isolation, the impersonality, structurelessness, and sense of meaninglessness from which so many people suffer are symptoms of the breakdown of the past rather than intimations of the future. It will not be enough, however, for us to change society. For as we shape Forth Wave civilization will in turn shape us. A new psycho-sphere is emerging that will fundamentally alter our character. And it is to this—the personality of the future—that we next turn. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
However, let us return to our theme of vocation and develop it a step further. Perhaps the young fellows really want to do something, that is, something worthwhile, for only a worthwhile achievement finishes a doing. A person rests when one has finished a real job. (The striking illustration of this is that, statistically, the best mental health used to be found among locomotive engineers, and is now found among air-line pilots! The task is useful, exacting, it sets in motion a big machine, and when it is over, it is done with.) If the object is important, it gives structure to many a day’s action and dreaming—one might even continue in school. Unfortunately our society balks us, for it simple does not take seriously the fact, or the possibility, that people want this; nor the philosophic truth that excepts in worthwhile activity there is no way to be happy. For instance, in a standard questionnaire for delinquents, by Milton Barron, in a hundred headings there do not appear the questions, “What do you want to be? What do you want to work at? What do you want to achieve?” (But Donald Taft’s Criminology, which Barron is adapting, has the sentence: “Absence of vocational interest at the age when it is normal…is tell-tale of a starved life.”) In despair, the fifteen-year-olds hand around and do nothing at all, neither work nor play. Without a worthwhile prospect, without a sense of justification, the made-play of the Police Athletic League is not interesting, it is not their own. They do not do their school work, for they are waiting to quit; and it is hard, as well shall see, for them to get part-time jobs. Indeed, the young fellows (not only delinquents) spend a vast amount of time doing nothing. They hang around together, but do not talk about any thing, nor even—if you watch their faces—do they passively take in the scene. Conversely, at the movies, where the real scene is by-passed, they watch with absorbed fantasy, and afterward sometimes mimic what they saw. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If there is nothing worthwhile, it is hard to do anything at all. When one does nothing, one is threatened by the question, is one nothing? To this insulting doubt, however, there is a lively response: a system of values centering around threatened grownupness and defensive conceit. This is the so-called “threatened masculinity,” not in the sense of being called a girl, but of being called, precisely, “boy,” the term of insult to some cultures. With this, there is an endless compulsion to prove potency and demand esteem. The boys do not talk about much of interest, but there is a vast amount of hot rhetoric to assert that oneself is “as good as anybody else,” no more useless, stupid, or cowardly. For instance, if they play a game, the interest in the game is weak: they are looking elsewhere when the ball is served, there are lapses in attention, they smoke cigarettes even while playing handball. The interest in victory is surprisingly weak: there is not much glow of self-esteem. However, the need for proof is overwhelming: “I won you, didn’ I? I won you last week too, didn’ I?” During childhood, they played games with fierce intensity, giving themselves as a sacrifice to the game, for play was the chief business of growth, finding and making themselves in the World. Now when they are too old merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since they have not been used up. The proving behaviour is endless. Since each activity is not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen and it does not bear much repetition. Its value as proof quickly diminishes. In these circumstances, the inevitable tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive useless activity that proves one is potent and not useless. (This analysis applies equally to these juveniles and to status-seeking junior executive in business firms and on Madison Avenue.) It is not surprising then, that, as Frederic Thrasher says in The Gang, “Other things being equal, the imaginative boy has an excellent chance to become the leaders of the gang. He has the power to make things interesting for them. He ‘thinks up things for us to do.’” At this point let us intervene and see what the Official Spokesmen say. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Come before the Father in prayer, wearing the breastplate of righteousness. Then you can stand in the throne room and say, “Father, I stand before You because of the righteousness of Your Son Jesus Christ. I come boldly before You without fear or condemnation or a sense of inferiority.” Someone may say, “You mean you think you are not inferior to God?” I did not say I was not. It is His righteousness that is not inferior. I am a partaker of that righteousness. (A Corinthians 5.21.) The Word says I am a joint-heir with Jesus. Do you think Jesus is inferior? We are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. God’s righteousness cannot be inferior or unworthy. When you put all this armour on, you will have on God’s clothes. When you stand before the devil to resist him, he thinks God is inside that armour and He really is. (John 14.23.) With God’s armour on, Satan does not see you; he sees God’s clothes. However, the minute you raise up your helmet and say, “I prayed, but it is not working out” or “I do not feel healed,” Satan knows that it is not God because He does not talk that way. Put on the prayer armour. Gird your loins with the Truth for this part holds all the armour in place. If you do not have the Truth, you are defeated going somewhere to happened! If you do not have the Truth, you do not know how to pray accurately. If you do not have the Truth, you will not know who you are in Christ Jesus. Prayer is your legal right to come to God’s throne, wearing the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation with your loins girt about with the Truth, your feet shod with the gospel of peace, holding up the shield of faith, and having the Sword of the Spirit in your mouth. “The heart of the wise teacheth one’s mouth,” reports Proverbs 16.23. Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their happiness, do not work against God’s intent. Humans, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the Earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traced of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
O God, I thank thee for all the creatures thou hast made, so perfect in their kind—great animals like the elephant and the rhinoceros, humorous animals like the camel and the monkey, friendly ones like the dog and the cat, working ones like the horse and the ox, timid ones like the squirrel and the rabbit, majestic ones like the lion and the tiger, for birds with their songs. O Lord give us such love for Thy creation, that love may cast out fear, and all Thy creatures see in man their priest and friend, through Jesus Christ our Lord. I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a mist thy sins; return unto Me, for I have redeemed thee. Sing, O ye Heavens, for the Lord hath done it; shouted aloud, O depths of the Earth; break forth into singing, ye mountains and forest, and every tree therein; for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and doth glorify Himself in America. Our redeemer, the Lord of Hosts is His name, the Holy One of America. O America, that art saved by the Lord with an everlasting salvation, ye shall not be ashamed nor confused, World without end. And ye shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and shall praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you; and My people shall never be put to shame. And ye shall know that I am in the midst of America, and that I am the Lord your God, and there is none else; and My people shall never again be put to shame. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Behold is my salvation; I trust Him and I will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and song; and He is become my salvation. Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. And in that day shall ye say: Give thanks unto the Lord, proclaim His name, declare His doings among the peoples, record that His name is exalted. Sing unto the Lord, for He hath done gloriously; let this be made known in all the Earth. Sing for joy, O inhabitants of America; for the great is the Holy One of America in your midst. And it shall be said on that say: Lo, this our God in whom we placed our hope that He might save us; this is the Lord for whom we have waited; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Fear, as Well as Morality, Opposes the Individual Will to Power!
Most people ask for happiness on condition. Only if you do not set conditions, happiness can be felt. The purpose of life, after all, is to live it. One of our innate characteristics, as terrestrial beings, appears to be a need to “understand” what goes on around us. Because of the way our minds are constructed, we cannot avoid seeking “causes” for the “effects” that we observe through our sensory mechanism. Since physiological limitations prevent our holding in mind and dealing simultaneously with more than a few related concepts, we continually strive to reduce to a minimum the number of fundamental causes or principles that we employ to explain what we observe. There is more than a little of the scientist built into the genetic specifications of each human individual. The fact that the universe in which we live is largely susceptible to understanding in terms of the kind of cause/effect principles that humans naturally search for no longer seems to be the mysterious coincidence that it once appeared. We not appreciate how the operation of evolution and natural selection must automatically, in time, bring to dominance animal species with behaviour and thought patters that adapt them to their environment. If the universe operates largely on the basis of cause/effect relationships, we would expect that the dominant species would owe its dominance largely to its evolutionarily developed ability to deal competently with cause/effect situations. A paradoxical consequence of man’s natural predilection for logical thought was his invention of the important concept of the supernatural. Humans had a compulsion to explain what they observed, but their ability to trace cause/effect relationships was limited to the simpler, more immediate phenomena of their environment. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
To provide an “explanation” for matters they despaired of understanding, humans invented the concept that these matters lay outside the domain of the natural cause/effect principles—that, in short, they were “supernatural.” This was appealing to the orderly human mind: it provided a neat means of differentiating between the aspects of life that ought to be dealt with rationally and those which should be just accepted but not analyzed. Humans have a World, namely, a structured whole of innumerable parts, a cosmos, as the Greeks called it, because of its structed character which makes it accessible to humans through acts of creative receiving and transforming. Having a World is more than having environment. Of course, humans like any other being, has environment; but in contrast to the higher terrestrial beings, for example, they are not bound to it. Humans beings can transcend it in any direction, in imagination, thought and action (exempli gratia, social utopias or ontological concepts or space exploration). Humans have “World” through every part of their environment. Their ways encounter with any of the objects surrounding them are always an encounter with the universe manifest in a particular object. Humans never encounter this tree, but also as a tree, one of many trees, as an example of the species tree (in itself a special manifestation of the universal power of being). Such an encounter presupposes freedom from the particular, and the ability to see the universal within the particular. The manifestation of this freedom is language. Language lives in universals. It is one and the same thing to have World, to transcend environment, and to speak in concepts and meaningful proposition. All this constitutes human’s essential freedom and is the presupposition of human’s experience of the moral imperative. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The moral imperative is the demand to become actually what one is essentially and therefore potentially. It is the power of human’s being, given to them by nature, which they shall actualize in time and space. Their true being shall become their actual being—this is the moral imperative. And since one’s true being is the being of a person in a community of persons, the moral imperative have this content: to become a person. Every moral act is an act in which an individual self establishes itself as a person. Therefore, a more act is not an act in obedience to an external law, human or divine. It is the inner law of our true being, of our essential or created nature, which demands that we actualize what follows from it. And an antimoral act is not the transgression of one or several precisely circumscribed commands, but an act that contradicts the self-realization of the person as a person and dries toward disintegration. It disrupts the centeredness of the person by giving predominance to partial trends, passions, desires, fears, and anxieties. The central control is weakened, often almost removed. And when this happens, another partial trends also aspire to predominance, the self is split, and the conflicting trends also aspire to predominance, the self is split, and the conflicting trends make it their battlefield. The “will,” in the sense of a self that acts from the centered totality of its being, is enslaved. Freedom is replaced by compulsion. Deliberation and decision, the hallmarks of freedom, become mere facades for overwhelming drives that predetermine the decision. The voice of human’s essential being is silenced, step by step; and their disintegrating self, their depersonalization, shows the nature of the antimoral act and, by contrast, the nature of the moral act. The moral acct as the self-actualization of the centered self or the constitution of the person as a person, has analogies in the realm of all living beings, including humans from the biological point of view. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The analogy to the diminution or loss of centeredness in human beings is the psychosomatic phenomenon of disease. In some diseases, some processes that are necessary elements in the whole of a life process take an independent course and endanger the functioning of the whole. The cancerous growth of parts of the body is the most illuminating analogy to what happens in the centered self when particular trends conquer the center and destroy the unity of balanced trends. The analogy between the antimoral act and bodily disease is in many (somehow in all) cases more than an analogy. Both are expressions of the universal ambiguity of life, according to the processes of self-integration are continuously combated by movements toward disintegration. For the ethical problem this means that the moral act is always a victory over disintegrating forces and that its aim is the actualization of humans as the centered and therefore free person. While celibacy was one tool for greater thing for the actualized Christian, in a society that demanded premarital virginity of its daughters, religion defined celibacy as a precondition for salvation, and many were famous for defending their chastity against a vicious and lascivious public. When people speak of the Law of Chastity, they often define it as remaining celibate until marriage. In actuality, it would be more properly defined as remaining abstinent until marriage. Today, the words abstinent and celibate are frequently used interchangeably, but in practice they are quite different. Abstinence, as practiced in the Church, is the abstaining from all pleasures of the flesh activity until marriage. Celibacy, however, is the lifetime sacrifice to voluntarily forgo all pleasures of the flesh activity and remain unmarried for the entirety of your life. Most people never make any particular distinction between abstinence and celibacy because there is no longer an expectation for them to commit to celibacy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Elder Holland taught, “You serve yourself poorly when you identify yourself primarily by your sexual feelings. That isn’t your only characteristic, so don’t give it disproportionate attention. You are the first and foremost son (or daughter) of God, and He loves you.” With the stakes so infinitely high (entera marriage on one hand and suicide and depression on the other), let of not minimize the significant theological and emotional war in the heart of people who choose to define themselves by their sexuality. However, our beliefs regarding eternal marriage and families being sealed together throughout eternity is an integral, beautiful part of being saved. All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of Heavenly Parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose. We have a divine nature and destiny, and gender is part of our spiritual identity. God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye may be able to bear it. For those who do choose celibacy, that is a very respectful way of life. You are living a law not asked of anyone else in the Church. You are living a commitment that is only paralleled by the Law of Consecration. It is beyond the laws of sacrifice, the gospel and marriage, you have laid your hops, dreams, and future and family on the alter and given it all to the Lord. Eroticism seems to be a far greater challenge than hunger, illness, social alienation, and loneliness. Surprisingly, sometimes older people fall victim to their erotic feelings even more than the young men they counseled. Since the sixteenth century, the metaphysical importance of celibacy has lost none of its force, however. The extent to eradicate lust actually underscores the centrality of celibacy. Some preserve in their ongoing struggle to stifle their sensuality, helped by watchful experienced colleagues. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Celibacy is emphasized as an instrument to achieve relinquishing Worldly pleasures and desires, including the desire for possessions and, through lust, for other people. Celibacy is central to nonviolence. Some religious people taught human organs are aswim with dangerous microbes, and so pleasures of the flesh becomes a murderous activity. I wonder if the reason boys and girls consider the other gender to have germs and be icky is because they are closer to the premortal life and were indoctrinated more recently. However, as they grow up and become more indoctrinated in human culture, and become adults, pleasures of the flesh, to them, seems safer than drinking tap water. Celibacy is linked to the vow to extinguish all sensual desire. For that reason, intercourse has to be avoided as a great evil. The object of religious life is the Kingdom of Heaven, which can only be achieved in slow stages. The precepts of nonviolence, nonpossiveness, and celibacy are so intertwined that each partially defines and explains the other. When celibates are tempted by unbidden lust, they remember that the organs of pleasures are hotbeds of microbic life that, in copulation, one would be responsible for pulverizing. In any case, from their perspective, celibates believe that the unchaste cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Celibacy is a form of mental discipline and an instrument of nonviolence, and an absolute prerequisite for achieving the Kingdom of Heaven by spiritual liberation. Given the paramountcy of celibacy in some religions, people in the New World might wonder how they expect to shore up their numbers, already relatively small. The internal logic of the religion answers this nicely. Their scriptures teach that membership will shrink until nearing the end of times. An apocalyptic inferno will consume the debased remnants of humanity, and the World as we know it will cease to exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We must now look at another scripture, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil,” reports Ephesians 6.10-11. Notice did not say, “Be strong in your own might,” but “in the Lord.” It is His might. It is not something we have to work up to. We must simply be obedient and be clothed in His might. Put on the whole armor or, as the Greek says, the complete armor of God. If you saw it, would you know the armor of God? It is God’s clothes and He is clothed in righteousness. He gave you His clothes to wear. Our problem has been that when we get ready to pray, we take off our breastplate of righteousness and throw it in the corner, saying, “Lord, I am so unworthy. I am so no good.” I can just imagine how God feels about such statements. He probably says, “Can you believe what they are saying! I sent My Son. He suffered and died to make them righteous. I gave them My clothes to wear.” That must grieve the heart of God after all He has done to clothe us with righteousness. Be obedient and put on His armor. You need it. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace: Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked,” reports Ephesians 6-12-16. Did you ever notice it says, “All the fiery darts of the wicked”? Someone may say, “Yes, but I just cannot do it.” I beg your pardon! The Word says you can. “Yes, but you see, I am so unworthy.” Now you have told off on yourself. You do not have on the whole armor of God. You left off the breastplate of righteousness. “Yes, but I do not feel righteous, so I must not be.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
You may not feel like getting dressed in the morning before you go to work, but believe me, it is the thing to do! God has told us to put on all of His clothes. If you do not feel righteous, it is because you do not have on your breastplate. The Church has been too sin conscious. We need to become righteous conscious. There is not a Christian that does not know about sin, but how many know that they are the righteousness of God? Renew your mind to the fact that you are the righteousness of God in Christ. When it becomes a revelation in your spirit, sin will cease to be a problem for you. It will be as Paul said, “Sin shall not have dominion over you.” It is not unusual for people, particularly teenagers, to try to commit suicide after observing or reading about someone else who has done so. Perhaps these people have been struggling with major problems and the other person’s suicide seems to reveal a possible solution; or they have been thinking about suicide and the other person’s suicide seems to give them permission of finally persuades them to act. Either way, one suicidal act apparently serves as a model for another. Suicides by celebrities, other highly publicized suicides, and suicides by co-workers or colleagues are particularly common triggers. Suicides by entertainers and political figures are regularly followed by unusual increases in the number of suicides across the nation. During the week after the alleged suicide of Marilyn Monroe in 1963, for example the national suicide rate rose 12 percent. Suicides with bizarre or unusual aspects often receive intense coverage by the news media. Such highly publicized accounts may lead to similar suicides. During the year after a widely publicized, politically motivated suicide by self-burning in England, for example, 82 other people set themselves on fire, with equally fatal results. Inquest reports revealed that most of the people had histories of emotional problems and that none of the suicides had the political motivation of the publicized suicide. The imitators seemed to be responding to their own problems in a manner triggered by the suicide they had observed or read about. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Even a media program that is clearly intended to educate and help viewers may have the paradoxical effect of spurring imitators. One study found a dramatic increase in the rate of suicide among West German teenagers after the airing of a television documentary showing the suicide of a teenager who jumped under a train. The number of railways suicides by male teenagers increased by 175 percent after the program was aired. Some clinicians argue that more responsible reporting could reduce this undesirable aftereffect of highly publicized suicides. A careful approach to reporting was seen in the media’s coverage of the suicide of Kurt Cobain. MTV’s repeated theme on the evening of the suicide was “Don’t do it!” In fact, thousands of young people called MTV and other radio and television stations in the hours after Cobain’s death, distraught, frightened, and in some cases suicidal. Some of the stations responded by posting the phone numbers of suicide prevention centers, presenting interviews with suicide experts, and offering counseling services and advice directly to callers. Perhaps because of such effort, the usual rate of suicide both in Seattle, Mr. Cobain’s hometown, and elsewhere held steady during the weeks that followed. “Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the World of God,” reports Ephesians 6.16-17. The Sword of the spirit. The spoken Word of God is the Sword of the Spirit. We call the Christian Bible our sword, but it is not really the sword. It may be the substance the sword is made of, but it is not the sword until it proceeds out of your mouth. There is no life in the Bible until it comes out of you mouth. You can lay the Bible on someone that is sick and it will not heal them. There is no power in the book, as far as we know. When you believe it and speak it, the power is released. You breathe life into it and the Spirit of God rises up in you when you dare to say, “Father, Your Word says that my need would be supplied according to Your riches in glory. I have given, and now it is given to me good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. In the name of Jesus Christ, I receive it.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Order derives from authority. When authority is lost, we are free, everything is permitted, nothing is worthwhile, and we live in chaos. When the police disappear, looting sweeps through the streets. We can stand evil and cruelty; what we cannot stand is a lack of order. If the reigning scheme of things is intact, that is, believed in, and thereby endowed with authority, then we can tolerate murder and mayhem to uphold it. However, if the scheme of things falls, leaving us in unlimited freedom, we churn about in chaos until rescued by some other creed that claims our allegiance, takes our freedom and restores order. Evil springs up here, there, everywhere, all the time, flows, equally, from the breaking of rules and from the too careful observance of old rules in a changed society. The evil wrought by those who intended evil is negligible. The greater evil is wrought by those who intend good, and are convinced they know how to bring it about; and the greater their power to bring it about, the greater the evil they achieve while trying to do it. Not content modestly to oppose evil, they in their arrogance undertake to eliminate it completely, there by creating greater evil. The war to end all wars prepares the way for bigger wars, for destructions more vast. AN animal lives its life according to its nature and its circumstances, and therefore is never in the position of having to conclude that it has wasted its life. However, a human being, out of fear of breaking the rules, may waste one’s life, may observe oneself being afraid to live it. We live within limits. We know that life must be lived, and experience must be confined, within these limits. Fear God is the command sounding throughout the Old Testament. Fear God and respect God and bow down before God—these injunctions mean: Keep away from those boundaries. Murder is the privilege of God, not of humans. The burning cities, the turning of a woman into a pillar of salt, the destruction of the World by flood—all this is at the discretion, or the whim, of God, but not of humans. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We should note, however, that it is only human beings as individuals who are required to observe these limits. Human collectives have always ignored them. Heinous crimes and the burning of cities, proclaimed as activities reserved to God, are routinely undertaken by sovereign human collectives. Fear, as well as morality, opposes the individual will to power, and often it is unclear whether it is morality setting the limit, or fear masquerading as morality. Because we are afraid, we live in groups. Alone one is weak; in the crowd one will become strong. If the crowd grows rapidly and achieves great density, a moment of discharge will arrive, leveling hierarchies of power, making all equal; there will be no one above giving orders, making us feel weak and afraid, because everything above will be destroyed; we will surge through the streets, smashing windows and doors, overturning police cars, burning palaces. This was all predicted in 2006, and you see it had some to fruition by 2020. Let us sum up again. The majority of young people are faced with the following alternative: Either society is a benevolently frivolous racket in which they will manage to boondoggle, through the less profitably than the more privileged; or society is serious (and they hope still benevolent enough to support them), but they are useless and hopelessly out. Such thoughts do not encourage productive life. Naturally young people are more sanguine and look for man’s work, but few will find it. Some settle for a “good job” most settle for a lousy job; a few, but an increasing number, do not settle. I often ask, “If you have the chance, what do you want to work at? When you get out of school, college, the service, et cetera.” Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects, highly approved by Papa. I am pleased for them, but it is a bit boring, because they are such squares. Quite a few will, prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as becoming a movie actors when they are “discovered”—“like Will Smith, but in my own way.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that one knows very well what one is going t do; it is something great; and one is indeed already doing it, which is the real test. The unusual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is “I do not know,” meaning, “I am looking; I have not found the right thing; it is discouraging but not hopeless.” However, the terrible answers is, “Nothing.” The young man does not want to do anything. –I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner’s Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say: “Nothing.” They did not believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they could not care less. I turned away from the conversation abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). At the level of longer-term social policy, we should also move rapidly toward “telecommunity.” Those who wish community restored should concentrate attention on the socially fragmenting impact of commuting and high mobility. Building a sense of community in the Fourth Wave is the selective substitution of communication for transportation. Imagine how popular a train would be if in ran alongside the freeways in major cities. Not only would it significantly reduce traffic, but it would save lives, reduce pollution, decrease accidents, improve workers moods, and lessen the strain on the plant and animal life. The popular fear that computers and telecommunications will deprive us of face-to-face contact and make human relations more vicarious is naïve and simplistic. In fact, the revere might very well be the case. Most people complain about being upset at work by someone they do not like, wish they could decrease contact with people in their office and on the street. They do not want to be bothered by people they do not like or do not know. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
While some office or factory relationships might be attenuated, bonds in the home and the community could well be strengthened by these new technologies. Computers and communications can help us create community. If nothing else, they can free large numbers of us to give up comminuting—the centrifugal force that disperses us in the morning, throws us into superficial work relationships, while weakening our more important social ties in the home and community. By making it possible for large numbers of people to work at home (or in close-by neighborhood work centers), the new technologies could make for warmer, more bonded families and a closer, more finely grained community life. The electronic cottage may turn out to be the characteristic mom-and-pop business of the future. And it could lead, as we have seen, to a new work-together family unit involving children (and sometimes even expanded to take in outsiders as well). It is not unlikely that couples who spend a lot of time working together in the home during the day will want to go out in the evening. (Today the more typical pattern is for the commuter to collapse on retuning hoe and refuse to set foot outside.) As communications begin to replace commuting, we can expect to see a lively proliferation of the neighborhood restaurant, theaters, pubs, and clubs, a revitalization of church and voluntary group activity—all or mostly on a face-to-face basis. Nor, for that matter, are all vicarious relationship to be despised. The issue is not simply vicarious, but passivity and powerlessness. For a shy person or an invalid, unable to leave home, or fearful about meeting people face to face, the emerging info-sphere will make possible interactive electronic contact with others who share similar interest—chess players, stamp collectors, poetry lovers, or sports fans—dialed up instantly from anywhere in the country. Vicarious though they may be, such relationships can provide a far better antidote to loneliness than television as we know it today, in which the messages all flow one way and the passive receiver is powerless to interact with the flickering image on the screen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Communications, selectively applied, can serve the goal of telecommunity. In short, as we build a Forth Wave civilization there are many things we can do to sustain and enrich, rather than destroy, community. If anything is to be done to save the World, it must be done through those in power—the masses of humans will be more likely to follow where they go–the few statesmen, rulers, or politicians by whose decisions history itself is now being made, who control tremendous power, are the ones who need guidance and wisdom, prophetic warning and personal awakening. If you say that the problem is too big for anyone to solve, you imply that nothing ought to be done to help these leaders find right direction. If you say, with Aldous Huxley’s Grey Eminence, that “mystics who interfere in politics only make matters worse,” I reply that unpractical visionaries, unbalanced fanatics, narrow sectarians, and inexperienced meddler certainly do so, but practical, balanced, and mature mystics do not. History proves this point. Philosophy rejects both objections. Even where there is only a small hope of avoiding the tragic outcome of present conditions, it must take the chance offered. When monsters devoid of human pity, inspired by terrifying hate, become leaders of a people, and are followed by them, the presence of the dark opposing principle in nature becomes very evident. The fact is that the situation has arisen for which the military leaders are totally unprepared, one which was never foreseen in all their courses in strategy and tactics, and before which the political leaders also are bewildered. In former times, compromise was a prudent and practical proposition. However, in our time it will not succeed. The leaders of humanity must either adjust themselves to truth or find themselves, and their nations, smitten with disaster or catastrophe. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The makers of war cannot alter themselves suddenly into the makers of peace. It is useless to look to politics for the cessation of strife when it is itself based on strife. It is wiser and more logical to look to those who have found their own inner peace. The need of a twenty-first century leader to guide the people of the present and future is plain. For people are seeking truth and yearn for happiness where is have never been and never can be found—that is, in materialistic thinking and selfish living. The extent to which any single human is able to force World events today is small. Unseen forces of universal law are, on the contrary, using gifted individuals to control, influence, and fulfill the destiny of humankind. No leader will appear to set the whole World in order for no human has any other answer that will be more effective than the Golden Rule, which humankind has known since before Jesus’ days but failed to apply. If such a human is to be more successful one will have to demonstrate more spiritual Power. The people who compose a community and the leaders whom they follow make its character as good or as bad as they themselves are. Only wild fanatics can expect to build a perfect society out of imperfect materials. When the name of democracy is used as a shield to destroy democracy—while claiming its freedom—it is ridiculous to play the simpleton and ignore the reality of what is actually happening. By using the wrong methods, or even by using right methods at the improper time, the leaders of a nation attain the very opposite of what they strive for. It is for this reason that today the search after peace is bringing them farther from it. A very old Far Eastern text, the Book of Changes, declares, “If the military defense of a state is carried to such extreme that it provokes wars which annihilate the state, there is failure.” If the rulers do not respond to this last chance which has been offered them, they will not be given another. For there is a limit to the length of Universal Law which keeps the nations in an uneasy peace. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, if they do respond to the warning uttered and accepted the counsel offered, help will come—miraculous and abundant help. For if there is no tragedy graver than the tragedy of such rejected Grace, there is equally no blessing happier than the blessing of accepted Grace. Too many of history’s great leaders were at the same time humankind’s great misleaders. For they took too many people down the easy but evil path of violence, which revealed destruction and dealt out death at its end. Humanity does not want to live in darkness and madness; it cannot go on like that. The dictator, the politician, and the journalist must take part of the responsibility for leading the masses to this lugubrious situation. It would be a mistake to believe that salvation in any crisis depends on a quantitative element. Humanity could be helped by only a handful of humans who found and lived in the higher consciousness, provided it were willing to follow the guidance and respect the enlightenment of these humans. If it were not for the presence of a few human lights in our World, and for their mostly silent but sometimes open activity, that World would have deteriorated spiritually, morally, to an extent far below what it has done. Humankind has entered a new cycle, one wherein each human must learn something of the truth for oneself. In former cycles they did not need to bear this responsibility. In the present one, one must accept it. A time like the present should not be used as an excuse to escape into the past but as an inspiration to bring in the future. The economic and political reconstruction of the World is a vitally important task, but its ethical reconstruction is immeasurably more important. The former touches the surface of life only, the latter touches its very core. While our mental attitude remains what it is, no solution is possible. We meet hatred with hatred, suspicion with suspicion, fear with fear. Even nuclear disbarment would only ease the World’s crisis and not end it, would put off the urgency and acuteness and still leave the problem of enmity where it is. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Hatred ceases not by hatred but by love. And the New World has heard often enough (but does not practise) what Jesus taught on this matter. The word “nature” was first used to signify the generation of living things, which is called nativity. And because this kind of generation comes form an intrinsic principle, this term is extended to signify the intrinsic principle is either formal or material, both matter and form are commonly called nature. And as the essence of anything is completed by the form; so the essence of anything, signified by the definition, is commonly called nature. And here nature is taken in that sense. Nature is the specific difference giving its form to each thing, for the specific difference completes the definition, and is derived from the special for of a thing. So in the definition of “person,” which means the singular in a determined “genus,” it is more correct to use the term “nature” than “essence,” because the latter is taken from being, which is most common. The soul is a part of the human species; and so, although it may exist in a separate state, yet since it ever retains its nature of unibility, it cannot be called an individual substace, which is the hypostasis or first substance, as neither can the hand nor any other part of human; thus neither the definition nor the name of person belongs to it. Life in itself can make one strong because it is so noble, so full of pleasures and so powerful. Let those who bring about wonderful things in their big, dark books take an animal to help them. The life within the animal will give them strength in turn. For equality gives strength, in all things and at all times. Mayest thou be blessed by the God of thy father, who shall help thee, and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of Heaven above, blessings of the deep that coucheth beneath and blessings of fecundity. The blessings of thy father are mighty beyond the blessings of my forefathers unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills; such blessings shall be on the head of Joseph and on the crown of the head of the prince among his brethren. “Thus you will be enriched in all things and in every way, so that you can be generous, and [your generosity as it is] administered by us will bring forth thanksgiving to God,” II Corinthians 9.11. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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It Was the Control Spirit–Shall I Never be Delivered from this Mystery?
The Christian Bible tells us plainly there will be a great increase in demon activity as we approach the end of human history. The Apostle makes specific reference to this in 1 Timothy 4.1. The Book of Revelation, chapters 16 and 18, predicts almost universal demonic domination in the final days of God’s judgments on the Earth. This surge of demonism will be amazingly deceptive, luring the masses and even converting nominal Christians. Veneration for the evil spirits will lead to depraved conduct, and the pinnacle of demonic achievement will be their control of World leaders. As incredible as it may seem, this revelation from the Word of God assures us that dependence on these unseen spiritual forces will increase even as scientific knowledge increasing. There is a lot of reality and power that evil spirits possess. Many people have become involved in communication with evil spirits, these spirits—both appealing and loathsome—enslave them, but Jesus Christ can set them free. There are people in this World that have firsthand experience dealing with spirits. Spiritualism is very attractive because it promises knowledge of the future and communication with dead loved ones. Many people will be influenced by demonic spirits in this way without realizing it. However, the only sure guide into the shadowy spirit World is the Christian Bible, and we neglect it at the peril of our souls. The person who denies the phenomena of spiritism today is not entitled to be called a skeptic, one is simply ignorant. A finial, clinching reason for our refusal to consider any of today’s seers as divinely inspired is our conviction that the gift of prophecy ceased when the Scriptures were completed. Prophets uttered truths they had received directly from God, and the Lord used this means of revelation during the years from the creation of man until the time of Malachi. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
From Malachi until John the Baptist can on the scene, Israel had not prophets. Then, in the brief period between Christ’s ascension and the completion of the gospels and epistles, the gift of prophecy was present in the Church. However, gradually the New Testament writings took the place of a prophetic ministry. The apostles were aware that God had given them special authority when they wrote, and that believers were to place greater value upon these gospels and epistles than so-called prophetic declarations. For example, although Paul was not speaking primarily of prophets, he definitely asserted the authoritative nature of his writings when he made the demand, “if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him,” reports 2 Thessalonians 3.14. Again, writing to the Christians in Corinth, he said that his words were they very commandment of God, and that they constituted the standard by which God’s people could evaluate the declarations of men considered to be prophets. “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord,” reports 1 Corinthians 14.37.” The priority of these apostolic writing over the declarations of other humans who claimed to be prophets is further indicated by the apostle John as he brought the book of Revelation to a close. He know that he was writing the authoritative message of God, and therefore could issues this strong warning: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book,” reports Revelations 22.18, 19. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
No one claiming a prophetic gift had any right to tamper with the written Word. It is obvious, therefore, that the inspired writing of the apostles gradually superseded prophetic utterances in the early church. Special gifts like prophecy, knowledge, wisdom, healings, and tongues were gradually withdrawn, and in 1 Corinthians 13 Paul declared that the quiet, unselfish pursuit of love is a far more excellent path than that of always desiring the more spectacular activities. He continued, “whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; where there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophecy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, the that which is in part shall be done away,” reports 1 Corinthians 13.8-10. When Paul writes these words, the New Testament as a whole was not yet in existence, but he declared that special gifts of the Holy Spirit such as prophecy and tongues would become a thing of the past. They would merge into the complete revelation of the New Testament and no longer be needed. They belonged to the childhood state of the Church; therefore, we conclude that the gift of prophecy cannot be in existence today. God has spoken in the Scriptures, and it is to them that we must turn to find His message to us. No one today can rightly claim that he speaks a message by direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We do not believe that anyone today who claims to receive visions directly from the Lord should be acknowledged as a spiritual leader. None of these so-called prophets are correct in every single prediction they make, and therefore they do not meet the test the Lord prescribed in Deuteronomy 18. Most of them are also guilty of disobeying the Biblical warnings of Paul against occultism. In addition, they tend to speak ambiguously and manifest an ignorance of what the Bible really teaches. Finally, we believe that we have logical, historical, and Biblical grounds for affirming that the gift of prophecy was temporary, and that it gave way and disappeared from the Church when the New Testament was completed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In the year, 1663, a quaintly humorous story of a most persistent and troublesome ghostly visitant comes from the Ireland, though in this particular instance its efforts to right the wrong did not produce a lawsuit: the narrator was Mr. Alcock, who appears in the preceding story. One David Hunter, who was neat-herd to the Bishop of Down (Jeremy Taylor) at his house near Portmore, saw one night, as he was carrying a log of wood into the dairy, an old woman who he did not recognize, but apparently some subtle intuition told him that she was not of mortal mould, for incontinent he flung away the log, and ran terrified into his house. She appeared again to him the next night, and from that on nearly every night for the next nine months. “Whenever she came he must go with her through the Woods at a good round rate; and the poor fellow look’d as if he was bewitch’d and travell’d off his legs.” Even if he were in bed he had to rise and follow her wherever she went, and because his wife could not restrain him she would rise and follow him till daybreak, although no apparition was visible to her. The only member of the family that took the matter philosophically was Hunter’s little dog, and he became so accustomed to the ghost that he would inevitably bring up the rear of the strange procession—if it be true that the lower classes dispensed with the use of night-garments when in bed, the sight must truly have been a most remarkable one. All this time the ghost afforded no indication as to the nature and object of her frequent appearances. “But one day the said David going over a Hedge into the Highway, she came just against him, and he cry’d out, ‘Lord bless me, I would I were dead; shall I never be delivered from this misery?’ At which, ‘And the Lord bless me too,’ says she. ‘It was very happy you spoke first, for till then I had no power to speak, though I have followed you so long. My name,’ says she, ‘is Margaret—-. I lived here before the Wat, and had one son by my Husband; when he died I married a soldier, by whom I had several children which the former Son maintained, else we must all have starved. He lives beyond the Ban-water; pray go to him and bid him dig under such a hearth, and there he shall find 28s. Let him pay what I owe in such place, and the rest to the charge unpay’d at my funeral, and go to my Son that lives here, which I had by my latter Husband, and tell him that he lives a very wicked and dissolute life, and is very unnatural ad ungrateful to his Brother that nurtured him, and if he does not mend his life God will destroy him.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
David Hunter told her he never knew her. “No,” says she, “I died seven years before you came into this Country”; but she promised that, if he would carry her message, she would never hurt him. However, he deferred doing what the apparition bade him, with the result that she appeared the night after, as he lay in bed, and struck him on the shoulder very hard; at which he cried out, and reminded her that she had promised to do him hurt. She replied that was if he did her message; if not, she would kill him. He told her he could not go now, because the waters were out. She said that she was content that he should wait until they were abated; but charged him afterwards not to fail her. Ultimately he did her errand, and afterwards she appeared and thanked him. “For now,” said he, “I shall be at rest, and therefore I pray you lift me up from the ground, and I will trouble you no more.” So Hunter lifted her up, and declared afterwards the she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms; so she vanished, and he heard most delicate music as she went off over his head. In the late 19th century, Mrs. Winchester used to have séances in the Blue Séance Room in her mansion, which was constantly being expanded and remolded for 38 years. It once stood nine stories high, had 500 rooms, and was approximately 65,000 square feet. Here is the transcript from one of her sessions: “I could hardly wait for the next séance to take place so I could talk to my departed husband….six more days seemed like an eternity. I had not doubt that William would be present, though we had failed on the first attempt. I had talked with the spirit World many times in in my forty-four years, just as I talked with anyone else. I had listened to the spirits give lectures, sermons, exhortations, and counsel to the construction crew assembled at the seances in my mansion. However, I never tired to talk with a dead person. My family, especially my mother’s relatives, had been involved with spiritualism for several generations. They came to the United States of America on the Mayflower. My father was a very religious mand. He often remarked that if any of his children were to die, he would become a spiritualist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
“On March 7th 1881, my brave forty-four-year-old husband died, and soon afterward a family from New Haven, Connecticut, told me they had contacted the spirit of my dead husband and the he was eager to talk to me. I was very excited, and I agree to let the spiritus to come to my home at the appointed time for a séance in the Bule Séance Room. There were perhaps thirteen people gathered in my home for the séance. We sat quietly, meditatively, and expectantly. The medium sat at one end of our circle of chairs and led us in singing hymns and prayer. It did not seem strange to us to open the séance by saying the Lord’s Prayer. We even ended: ‘…in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ A prayer for a séance went like this: ‘Eternal God and Father of Lights, we gather as thy expectant children. We are eager to communicate with the spirit World and the spirits of our departed friends and loved ones. We pray that you would look favorably upon us. Bless us this night with communications from our friends in the spirit World. In the name of the great Father of Lights. Amen.’ Then we sang familiar church hymns such as: ‘Face to Face,’ ‘In the Garden,’ ‘Beautiful Isle of Somewhere,’ and ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ While we were singing, the medium slumped into unconsciousness, and before long a strange voice spoke through the medium’s lips; it was the control spirit. ‘Good evening, my children. There are many of the departed here, and all are eager to speak with you. The spirit World welcomes you to another opportunity to contact your departed loved one.’ We listened eagerly to the spirit as the medium sat limply, eyes closed, in her chair. The spirit said that a family was present whose departed loved one wanted very much to speak with them, but since he had been in the spirit World so short a time he was still adjusting to his new spiritual dimension and would have to communicate the following week. That was a terrible disappointment, and the whole family could hardly wait until the next séance when we could contact my beloved husband. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
“At the second meeting we encountered another phase of spiritualism, the gold key séance (sometimes called a séance of vocal revelation). A metal key, made of solid gold, stood upright in a damp saucer on a table in the middle of the room. When the medium entered her trance, the solid gold key rose slowly from the table and dipped into a horizontal position. Eerily, it began spinning with a soft whir and moved around the room, stopping at intervals in midair. I sat rigid in amazement. I saw the floating key, but I could not believe it. The others in the séance seemed to accept the experience as a very common thing. The key went first to my father and then to other members of our family. And we heard a voice, supposedly my departed husband’s, but at first we could not distinguish the words. Then the key came to me. My first reaction was to grab it, and I snatched at the key, but it darted away with amazing swiftness. I tried again, but it moved faster than I did. The key finally settled directly in front of me, just out of my reach. Then the control spirit launched into a lecture about my unbelief, speaking through the unconscious medium. She said if I were to get anything for this meeting, I must conduct be patient. As my emotions subsided, the golden key hovered closer and closer to me until it was near my ear, the key was stroking my hair in the way my husband used to comb it. A voice flowed from the key saying, ‘I love you; I love you.’ It was supposed to be my husband’s voice, but it did not sound like him to me. Everyone else accepted it as William’s voice, but I was disappointed; it was not William. That was the first of many occasions when he supposedly spoke to the family, but I was never convinced. At later séances my niece and I were told we could become gifted spirit mediums. By following the instructions of the spirit voice in the séance of passivity we would in time be able to contact the spirits in our own home. My niece and I began to practice the séance of passivity for thirteen minutes each evening. During these periods we tried to blot out every conscious thought from our minds. Eventually we could sit for an hour and thirteen minutes without being distracted by a single conscious thought. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
“In one of the longer periods, the phenomenon finally took place that we had been waiting for. I witnessed the spirit taking control of my niece as she lost consciousness and a voice completely foreign to her soft contralto boomed out: ‘My child, be not afraid. You have done well. If you only believe, greater things than these you will do. Continue in this way, and the marvels of the spirit World will be revealed to you.’ With that, the spirit departed and my niece regained consciousness. She asked what had happened, and I told her the words of the spirit. She was thrilled! She had arrived at a coveted place of spiritual development, and from that time on we held séances in my mansion in private, with my young niece as the gifted medium. Some people say this is all a hoax, that spirits do not talk with human beings and that floating objects are mere trickery. I would agree that a great many of the eerie demonstrations we hear about are clever illusions, but I believe on the basis of personal experience and the plain words of Scripture that spirits of the invisible World do communicate with humanity and do wield supernatural power in our visible World. And the ominous truth is that these spirits are not from God, but fallen angles controlled by Satan. Their unholy mission is to lead human beings—by refined or gross means—away from dependence on God, their Creator, and they are active in spiritualist churches, séances, psychic phenomena, witchcraft, and idol-worship. However, some of these spirits are good and convey helpful messages. Yet, individuals and nations who reject God, no matter how educated and prosperous they are, fall prey to the other god, Satan.” Believe it or not, the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of this Eight Wonder of the World filled two water buckets. One day, Mrs. Winchester stood at the sitting-room window, after the butler left her, looking at the dull grey of the January sky and the yellowing pastures of the dairy county. There was no rain, but also no gleam of sunshine. I always wanted a private tour of her mansion. My father was on the construction crew and he promised one day when Mrs. Winchester was away, I would get my chance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
One morning Mrs. Winchester went off in her carriage for a trip to San Francisco, California. My father let me in the mansion and told me I could look around, but warned me not to touch anything and not to get lost. I walked through the beautiful jewel crested front doors, and they closed behind me. I did not think anything of it. However, suddenly, I stumbled, tripped over the carpet, and fell on my hands and knees, managing—and only just managing—to save the lantern which I carried from being extinguished in the fall. The floor of the mansion was very uneven in that part, and I had inadvertently walked into a sort of loose floor board, more or less I was pulverized. I rose and looked about me. evidently, I had strayed from the direct track, thanks to my old habit of indulging in reverie, and had mechanically taken a wrong turning among some of the many passages. The place where I now found myself was by no means similar to the part of the mansion that was in full yield, and from which I had wandered. Instead of being dry, airy, and full of life and bustle, the passage where I stood was damp, and quite silent, not a sound being audible except the drip, drip of blood that oozed through the roof in fifty places, and fell splashing into the little pools of bright red blood that lay among the bricks. The floor was of brick, not wood. It was plain that I was in some neglected corner of the mansion; it was plain, to, that I had lost my way. Now the warning my father gave me came back to me with unwelcome emphasis, and as I breathed with difficulty the clammy and heavy air of the mansion, a shudder ran through my whole frame. In the next instant, I rallied my courage, laughed contemptuously at my own fears, and stepped out manfully along the passage. I knew I must have entered the mansion from the right. But alas! On emerging from the hallway into a sort of square chamber, in which some rude benches, carved out of mahogany, were cut in the gleaming walls, I found that no less than thirteen openings gave access to different parts of the mansion, and I was fairly at fault. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
How I had strayed so far without paying any attention to the bearings of my heedless course, is what, perhaps, none but an absent man can understand; and I, unluckily, was an absent man. It was strange to be lost, or to roam in circles among the great hallways of this estate, and to be lost in what seemed to be an underground tomb, which had dank air and darkness for miles to come. I remarked, too, that the candle in my lantern would not last very long—from one to two hours perhaps, but certainly not longer. It was annoying, very annoying, to be left thus alone. I did not like to own to myself that it was dangerous. How strange it was, I thought, that I did not hear the very faintest sound from the scene of all those busy construction workers working on the Winchester mansion. I listened—listened intently. Not a sound; not so much as the faint hammer; not the welcoming sound of a human voice; not the tramp of one of those shaggy ponies that drew the wood. I had never before realized what the weight of solitude—enforced solitude—could be. I listened; I waited. Not the faintest indication that any other mortal but myself was below ground, reached my ears. Angry with my own fears, vexed with my own carelessness, that had brought me to this pass, I selected at hazard one of the passages opening into the mansion, and entered it, walking fast, but holding the lantern well in front, to avoid any fresh trip falls which might lie in wait for the unwary foot. The hallway was but some thirteen yards long, and then into two narrower corridors, the widest of which led me to a narrow pathway of tiny stairs that seemed to zigzag up the mansion. I entered it stooping, but soon found it was so dizzying that I should be obliged to proceed on hands and knees, if at all, so I retraced my steps: and, tracing them to another stairwell, and found myself atop of the stairs, but unable to proceed any further for the top was cut off by the ceiling. I was wondering aimlessly, as in a labyrinth, unless my candle was spent, and then I should be indeed in sorry case. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Already my feet were cold and wet with the tenacious brine; the cold moist air had brought back my cough, and I shivered in the chill atmosphere of the vault where were I stood. Yet, perhaps there were people near me, within earshot all the time, for I could not believe that the mansion had been suddenly deserted. I shouted, and shouted again, the many hallways and rooms giving back the sound of my voice with strange and sullen dissonance. Presently, though no answering call was returned, I saw a light, far off and dim, but rapidly advancing towards me along the gallery that lay on my left, and which was one of the six I have mentioned. Nearer and nearer it came; no flare of torches, but the steady gleam of a small lamp; and then, to my surprise, I saw that the human figure that soon became visible was not that of a construction worker. The light of the lantern fell faintly on the pale face, colourless as marble, but delicate and pretty enough, of a young and slender girl—a lady, evidently, by her dress, and whom I instantly conjecture to have been one of the staff. However, how she came there, and alone? Was she lost, like me? or—“Did you not call a minute ago? I can show you the way, if you like.” Common-place words these; but they were spoken with a peculiar quiet intonation, that impressed me in spit of myself. The voice was sweet and low, but almost solemn in its calm. There was something strange, too, in the composure and the unsmiling gravity of one so young, while her very presence in the out-of-the-way part the mansion perplexed me. My first idea was, that the young lady, like myself, had lost her way in the intricacies of the mansion; but this supposition her confidence of bearing seemed to contradict. No doubt she knew the mansion well, or she would scarcely have offered to guide me to safety. This was an additional proof the she could not have been one of the merry, rosy-cheeked servants in the mansion. Most likely, some young lady had entered the mansion to see the mysteries inside, and she was some resident in the neighbourhood. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Nonetheless, the beauty in this place was in the infinite variety of fantastic columns, some of pure white marble, others of mahogany, and shimmering gold wallpaper, that composed the walls. As the feeble light of the lanterns flashed on the pellucid surfaces and frail, some more elaborate in the intricacies of their mouldings than the than the Corinthian or Byzantine, I could not restrain my exclamations of surprise and delight. For a moment I forgot the cold, the damp, the discomfort, and said, half to myself: “What a wonderful sight! If a human artist had carved those delicate capitals and rich decorations, what a rush would there be to see his handiwork! But I dare say even the county handbook does not condescend to describe this place, which is worthy to be the palace of the king of gnomes.” “Few know of this place,” said my conductress, in the same measured, passionless voice as before. She had stopped when I stopped, and she stood motionless as a statue, and as pale as if she had been a figure hewn out of alabaster, rather than a creature of flesh and blood. It was the first word of the nature of a remark which had fallen from her, and I tried to draw her into conversation by descanting on the beauty of the singular grotto, and the spaciousness of the mansion. She said very little, but her reticence sis not seem to be caused by any poverty of intellect. There was, however, a peculiar want of warmth or enthusiasm, whether the subject were are or nature, in what little my fair guide could be induced to say. Nor was she by any means communicative as to herself. My attempts to discover whether she really lived in the neighbourhood, were quietly baffled, and when I said that “doubtless her friends would begin to be alarmed at her long absence for which I feared that my own stupid blundering was to blame,” she was merely bowed, and led the way as before. On we went, through a network of hallways, that only seemed to grow more Daedalian every moment, but through which my companion glided along the as unswervingly as if she held in her hand an unfailing clue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Many of these galleries were evidently the work of man. In all, however, the air was heavy, chill, and moist, and blood dripped from the walls, and fell gurgling down hidden fissures into some unseen depths below. I was confident that I had passed none of these places that day, and began to suspect that my guide was leading me a long round, so as to shew me all the lions of the mansion, instead of taking a short-cut to the workings. At another time, this desire to impress a stranger with a full notion of local marvels would have amused me; but my cough got worse; I shivered, and longed for the excursion to come to a close. Yet there was an awkwardness in suggesting this. I ventured on a safe remark. “It is bitterly cold,” said I, with a shudder, for the damp seemed to be piercing to the very marrow of my bones. “Do you not find it so?” “Very cold!” She said no more; but those two common-place words were spoken in a voice that awed me, somehow, in spite of myself, and seemed to freeze me into silence. On we went, and I trusted that we may be approaching the work-part of the mansion, for the candle in my lantern was reduced to a mere morsel, and must soon be burned out. However, ill as I felt, and hard as it was for my weak lungs to endure the unwholesome air, I almost forgot this in my perplexity as to my conductress. I could not make her out at all. I have met with romantic young ladies, silly young ladies, sensible young ladies, even haughty and vain young ladies, but never with anyone like my guide. Why was she leading me thus, what I felt must be a circuitous course through the mansion? Why—She came to a dead stop, slowly-turned, and confronted me. The hood of her grey cloak, an old-fashion article of attire, such as I had not seen for many years, was drawn over her head, and it threw her pretty face partly into shadow; but her eyes were bright and clear, though there was something in their cold steady look that made me shiver afresh, as if the air of the mansion had grown even more icy and oppressive than before. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
“Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you are going to do. What are your plans, I mean,” she said in the same manner as before, like a sleepwalker unconsciously uttering words that volition does not prompt. I laughed, and blurted out some could-be witty rejoinder on my own good-fortune in having inspired so charming a person with sufficient interest in my fate to suggest the question; but the flippant words died away on my lips half spoken, as she waved her hand, not impatiently, not coquettishly, but with a calm dignity of bearing that matched well her bloodless cheek and the carriage of her proud head. “You are to sail in the Chester—is it not so?” said this singular girl, without a smile or a falter in her low but very distinctive voice. I owned the fact, in so slight surprise. I had not mentioned to no one at the Winchester Mansion the name of the ship in which my passage was taken. The idea of a mystification, of a trick, dawned upon me, but I was at a loss to guess how my beautiful nightmare of a guide could have obtained the information she evidently possessed. Did she know more of men than this? My name, for instance, my profession, and my reason for quitting the Bank of Italy? If so, at any rate she made no parade of her knowledge. She merely raised her hand for a moment—it was ungloved, and there were rings of price sparkling on the thin white fingers—and her eyes seemed to gather a new expression of sadness and warning as she said: “Beware of the Chester! If you love your life—and on, it is bitter to die young—do not sail in that ship.” Slowly the hand she had lifted in warning fell to her side, and holding up the lamp as before, she turned away, and preceded me along the galleries. I followed her, perplexed, half angry, half alarmed. I began to fear that I was the sport of a mad woman. And then a new fancy sized me. Perhaps I myself might be delirious, and the mansion, the endless galleries, and my beautiful nightmare guide, were visions of a disordered brain, a sweet dream or a frightful nightmare, from which I vainly strove to awake. Presently, it occurred to me for the first time that my new-found friend’s feet made no sound as they trod the wooden floor, and twisted stairways. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Certain it was that she moved firmly and swiftly on, without any sign of difficulty or fatigue, while I stumbled and slipped, slipped and stumbled, and at times found it hard to keep up with her. However, as regarded the noiselessness of her tread, I could not solve the doubt. If I stopped, she stopped too, not after a pause, but instantly. And I heard nothing but my own labouring breath and hacking cough, and the sound of my own weary feet. A little while, and even this was forgotten in a new source of apprehension. I had for some time vaguely conceived the idea that, as in labyrinth, we were walking in a circle; and gradually I began to fancy that I had seen this or that sofa and parlour table or that mahogany arch before, and that I had passed through some of the corridors at least once before. However, suspicion was changed to certainty when I suddenly espied, lying on the ground in one of the galleries, one of my own gloves. I had dropped this glove some time before, for I had missed it soon after the arrival of the Unknown. As I picked it up, I glanced keenly around me, and thought I recognized the opening that led into the hall of fires. I was right; in another moment I had followed my mysterious guide into the hall of fires itself. More than an hour’s weary toil, for my candle was all but spent, had brought us back to the point from which we had started. I was angry at last; all my involuntary awe for my strange conductress was lost, and I stamped my foot hard upon the floor as I asked if she had been amusing herself at my expense, or whether she, too, were unaware of the topography of the mansion, and had misled me by accident. I spoke in wrath, and almost in menace; but there was no reply, save one long moan, as from a child in pain, that rang sadly through the mansion. I turned my head, but I could see nothing; and when I again confronted what I now deemed my treacherous guide, a sort of mist seemed to dim my eyes, and I saw, or thought I saw, her form grow faint and indistinct, fading and fading like breath upon a mirror, but with still the same calm face, the same grave look of sorrow and warning, until that too faded, and nothing was left opposite to me—nothing but a masonry wall. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
I sprang forward, incredulous, and touched the wall with my hand. As I did so, a repetition of the moaning cry made me start, and far down the passage where I had seen her first, I saw her again—the pure, pale outline of the young face, the tall slender form in the grey mantel, with the hood drawn over the head, the lamp shining in the outstretched hand. How came she there? “This is too much!” cried I passionately, and convinced that I was the victim of a trick, though how such a trick could have been effected, I did not care to consider. “I will not bear this juggling. I will not—” As I spoke, I darted forward to overtake the receding figure, and my foot tripping among the loose stones of the floor, as I ran, I fell heavily, crushing the lantern beneath me, and being instantly involved in the demonic darkness. Bruised and hurt, I have no heed to the pain of the fall from the door to nowhere, but sprang up, and strained my eyes in the direction where the lamp had been last seen. There was not a spark—not a sound. No light, no rustle of her dress, no faint sound of a distant footfall, nothing but darkness and silence. Eagerly I listened, eagerly I watched, but in vain. I tried to call aloud, but my tongues refused its office; and when I did raise a weak shout, I felt natural repugnance to the darkness deepen as no answer came. “She is doing this to frighten me,” I murmured; “she is hiding behind some bush. Whoever she is, she could be cruel enough to leave me here in the dark alone, to perish.” Silence, still silence. Any sound, even that moan, at which my very heartstrings had quivered, would have been better than that. Darkness, blank, blank darkness. I tried to shout, tried to group my way back in, but I was limp. I had not the strength to rise. Oh, it was very cold, cold and dark. This must be death. “A drop more brandy, Jim; the last did him good, I cannot feel any pulse yet, though. Do not crowd so about him, lads. Give him air! That is enough brandy, do not leave off the chafing the hands. He will come round!” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
With my dulled ear, I heard these words, but scarcely understood them, and from between the half-closed lids my weak eyes could feebly distinguish a glare of torches, and several rough me in construction garb, and one in black with a kind, shrewd face—the doctor, no doubt. I saw all his, in a stupid sort of indifferent way, as if he had been a pageant, and then I seemed to sink down into a black sea of roaring water, and fainted for the second time. I was in bed at last. I had been in bed some days, very ill, and with a brain too deadened, and a frame too exhausted, to take note of time. When my senses returned, I asked what was the date, and hearing it, knew that the Chester had sailed without me, and that my passage-money was lost. It was not for weeks, and until my slow convalescence had ripened into recovery from the illness brought on by cold and the wetting I had experienced, that the doctor asked me how I came to separate myself from the construction crew, and to get lost in the Winchester Mansion. “It so happened,” he said, “that work was suspended unusually early on that day, as there was a wake at Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, and the construction workers had a sort of half-holiday by annual custom. The mansion was therefore abandoned, and but for the lucky chance, that when you were missed at home, and inquiries were made, and intelligent boy, the son of another construction worker, declared that you have never left the estate at all, it is probable that no search would have taken place. As it was, long hours passed before a party started in quest for you; and it is fortunate they there were in time. The Winchester has witnessed more than one tragic incident, even in my day.” “To what do you allude, doctor?” asked I eagerly. “Three year ago, a young lady, a Miss Mary Seward, because separated from her friends, as you did, in that mansion,” answered the doctor. “I had not as yet settled in the district, and only know the details from report, and very imperfectly. I believe, however, that the poor girl, who had made one of a large family art, was bound on a visit to an aunt who lived in England; her own parents then residing at the Rengstoff House, near here. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“The day was a stormy one; the carriages drove off in a heavy fall of rain; and I believe the missing one was understood by her mother to be staying at her aunt’s, and vice versa, for there was no alarm till help was impossible. The poor girl’s body was found—for she perished of cold and hunger in that maze of galleries. Bless me, how pale you look, my dear sir. Take some cordial, and lie down, and no more talking—not a word more, I insist.” I have no explanation of the above facts to offer. I have endeavoured, far from San Jose, to set down every detail of the occurrence as simply and succinctly as possible. If I could disabuse my mind of the ghastly doubt and horror that cling to it, and which haunt me when I recall the events of that day in the Winchester Mansion, I should be very thankful. The good doctor, when he heard my statement, did his best to convince me that what I saw was a mere hallucination, due to my disordered health and excited nerves. I wish I could think so; but further inquiries, made before I left San Jose, served to assure me that I was not the only person who was supposed to have seen the presence that I had beheld in the disused portion of the mansion. One word more. The warning was no idle one, though I doubt whether I should have been ashamed to have heeded it, had not illness chained me to my sick-bed. Before I was able to quit the Winchester Mansion, news came that a dense fog enveloped the iron and wood steamship City of Chester and its 106 passengers as they began the slow journey north from San Francisco Bay to Eureka. It was 1888, and family members bid their loved one’s safe passage from the Broadway dock as the vessel disappeared into the pea soup fog. Moments later, the Chester was split in two by a ship more than twice its size, killing 16 people—13 passengers, including two children and three crew members—and becoming the bay’s second-worst maritime disaster. Some people may believe all spirituals are evil and trying to harms us or that they are demonic, but it seems some are good and really trying to save our lives. Perhaps some of these spirits are our guardian angels. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Winchester Mystery House
What a lovely weekend for a bit of mystery👻 winchestermysteryhouse.com
I Felt, My God, I Could Not Face this thing!
There are risks and costs to a program of action. Make sure that what you aspire to accomplish is worth accomplishing, and then throw your whole vitality into it. Excellence in education is the key to our nation’s future. Celibacy, of course, is a fundamental dimension of moral purity, and it provides disciplines that enhance mental and spiritual qualities. This allows one to sublimate the creative force into a God-directed, selfless love, the chaste joy of longing for the untouched beloved, a pure passion much like the agape ideal of many early Christian nuns. The focus on celibacy and the conservation of the creative force, allows the source of one’s spiritual power and their mystical ability to partake in God’s transcendental nature by transforming one’s energy into spiritual energy. Celibacy, therefore, is a critical instrument for achieving spiritual goals. All people are souls coupled with physical bodies, and they exist withing the chronological context of historical cycles of moral and physical decline. At the beginning, the ages were perfect and pure. Men and women were equal, and neither adversity nor affliction existed. The principal cause of this flawlessness was the absence of pleasures of the flesh. However, pleasures of the flesh entered the scene. Gradually, these Godly folk deteriorated, morally and physically, until corruption and torment prevailed. Heaven became hell, and the fleshly desires of the body came to dominate the World. Hand in hand with the degeneration of human standards came the bondage of humans, enslaved by another’s lust. The goal of the celibates is to end this cycle and purify themselves on Earth so they may be reborn at or soon after the pristine beginning of each successive cycle. They wish to be liberated from sinful births rather than rebirth itself. The only was they can achieve this is by renouncing the evil that is pleasures of the flesh and adopting complete celibacy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Celibacy promises enormous reward. To begin with, it fulfills the theological condition for assuring perfect future births. It also relives people from the chains of marriage. Cleansed of pleasures of they flesh, some find their true spiritual identities and such off their ties with the ungodly, material World. It religious terms, it promised unheard-of opportunities that allowed individuals to move to positions of power. Inspired with these new ideas, people explained to their significant other that they should live together chastely, loving each other with a pure and spiritual devotion. Pleasures of the flesh, conversely, has overpopulated and made a slum of the planet. Some liken pleasures of the flesh as to foraging about in a sewer. Pleasures of the flesh love has no vindicative features, either. True love is loving someone’s essence—one’s soul. Pleasures of the flesh expends previous energy. Lust renders people powerless and demands for its fulfillment. Celibacy allows people to be pure and liberates individuals from bondage and frees them to achieve the enormous power of absolute chastity. Ethics is treated separately only as a matter of experience. Morality is grounded in our essential being. In this respect, these principals of ethics stand in continuity with traditional Roman Catholic natural law ethics and other forms of moral realism. What is morally right and good is the realization through action of human natural potentialities. These ethics are not judgmental, but verge on intuitionism because of its appeal to the “silent voice” of conscience about essential nature. Ethics on this point deals with how to specify the precise relation between casuistry, that is, reasoning about moral cases, and claims about human nature. If we are going to reason rightly about moral cases, must we assume something about the nature of human beings? #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
If we cannot reach agreement about the nature of human life or its good—a consensus difficult to reach in wildly pluralistic societies—does this invalidate casuistic thinking? Theologians and philosophers currently have attempted to server the connection between casuistry and claims about human nature. Ethics, while itself deficient on matters of casuistry, challenges this move by questioning the point of morality itself. If morality is about the realization of human potentialities, the come conception of human nature seems required in addressing practical moral questions. The demand on the casuist is either to show that this is not the point of morality so that no claim about human nature is needed in ethics or, conversely, to provide a different account of human nature, such as the found in traditional natural law ethics. Morality, then, is grounded in our essential being. What is means, is that morality finds its source in God as the ground and power of being. Ethics is in this respect necessarily theological in character. However, this raises two questions. First, how is the idea of God related to some conception of what is morally good? That is, even if one grants the claim about the religions character or morality, it is another question to ask about the content of claims about God and goodness. How does a conception of the good, whether grounded in claims about human nature or historically specific beliefs, relate to Christian ideas about God and agape? Some moral theorists argue that in ethics we need only a thing theory of the good, because the point of the moral life in a pluralistic society is just relations between persons rather than establishing the human good. At issues then are the substance of claims about the human good, the status of those claims, their place in ethics, and the relation between those claims and discourse about God. This leads to the second question: Given the fact of moral diversity on this planet, can one sustain the claim that morality is theistic? #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Indeed, is that claim actually needed in ethics? Is an appeal to agape morally adequate in our time? Put differently, the concern to combat moralism and relativism must be rethought in terms of the reality of moral pluralism and also of debates about how to understand moral goodness. The final challenge to this thought poses to theological ethics is at the level of basic moral problems. The moral problem is the fragmentation of life; the moral act is a victory of self-integration against forces that lead to human estrangement. This means that the power to act is essential to how one conceives of the human good because only through exercise of power in action is life realized. Now in our time, technology has radically increased human power to the point that we can alter the environment and even the human species. This makes the reality of power and human responsibility basic to contemporary ethical reflection. These concerns have been addressed in matters of terms of the dominance of technical rationality in the modern World and also theologically by understanding the term God as symbolizing the power of being itself. The question that remains open, however, is the extent to which claims about rationality and the symbol God can contribute to current ethical reflection on the reality of human power and the demands of responsibility. Thus one challenges theological ethics in terms of patterns of practical moral reasoning, the relation between claims about God and those of moral goodness, and also the contribution of theological discourse to reflection on human power and responsibility. Any assessment of these ethics in terms of the history of thought or contemporary ethical reflection must engage one’s work on each of these points. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
God as the Ground and Aim of our being has been transformed into a multiplicity of laws, partly doctrinal and partly ethical. The moral “yoke” that Jesus wished to make easy had only been made heavier, and the message of grace has largely been lost, despite the numerous liturgical prayers for the forgiveness of sins. They do not express the vision that appears in Paul’s Letters and John’s Gospel, or is expressed in the seventh petition of the Lord’s Prayer—“save us from the evil one”—namely, the image of a demonic power ruling the universe and driving humans into separation from God and into hostility against Him. The prayers for forgiveness have, for many people, only the function of relieving the uneasy conscience produced by trespasses against traditional and often absurd rules of behaviour, mostly a prohibitive character. However, they do not express the great paradox, that there is a reunion with the eternal “Ground of our being” without “right” action on our part, without being “good people,” or the “people of good will.” Therefore, despite liturgical formulae, hymns, and the reading o lessons from the Pauline Epistles, the message of grace has been lost. Grace as the power of accepting the person who is unacceptable, and of healing the person who is mortally sick, has disappeared behind the preaching of the religious and moral laws. It is understandable that people, in view of this graceless moralism turn to secular ethics. However, when they find nothing more than the logical analysis of ethical theory, they turn easily to a cynical relativism or to a totalitarian absolutism in ethics, each often a consequence of the other. The question that is implicit in this situation is: Can we point to something that transcends both graceless moralism and normless relativism in ethical theory and moral action? #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The response of Christianity is the message that a new reality has appeared with the coming of the Christ, a power of being in which we can participate, and out of which true thought and right action can follow, however fragmentarily. We find analogous affirmations in other religions and even in secular movements of an implicitly religious character, such as nationalism, socialism, and liberal humanism. Being precedes action in everything that is, including man, although in man as the bearer of freedom, previous action also determines present being. This answer stand in opposition to both moral legalism and amoral lawlessness. It affirms morality and points beyond it to its religious foundation. If morality is intrinsically religious, as religion is intrinsically ethical, neither is dependent on the other, and neither can be substituted for the other. Power is protean. When, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States of American and the Soviet Union squared off against each other, the power of each was a function of bombs, ships, missiles, planes, tanks, armored divisions. These were the factors that each had to reckon with as it braced itself for struggle. However, within each nation the enormous power, respectively, of Kennedy and of Khrushchev was charismatic, depending upon the ability of each to inspire belief that one dividually did possess those magical powers which the peoples of those countries had as children experienced in their fathers and now unconsciously imputed to their leaders. When a profound patriotic passion is aroused, it will make people weep, and evokes and shapes in them a mood of fervent devotion and self-sacrifice. As people listen, more and more will they want to go into the battle field. It is considered a great honor to die for such a powerful leader. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Most significant power is composite, being both instrumental and charismatic. Instrumental power is that which accrues in consequence of competence at the work of the World—the growing of wheat, the building of houses, the designing of an airplane, the composing of a sonnet. The smaller the extent of power, the more likely it is to be instrumental. The greater the power, the more likely it is to be charismatic. Many of the greatest World leaders have held power primarily by virtue of their ability to embody protection from our deepest fears and gratification of our primitive and grandiose fantasies, and perhaps not at all by virtue of competence at directing the affairs of a nation. Indeed, some such leaders, far from being competent to govern, lead the nations for which they are responsible straight to destruction. Once nature was the danger and the challenge. The cave drawings of Stone Age man bear witness to his preoccupying concerns with animals as a source of food and as a source of danger. The ability to elude these animals, to capture or to kill them, was the locus of power. Now anyone can shoot a rifle, no animal poses a threat, the ability to fell a charging elephant wins us no fame, perhaps even contempt, and we know that we may, if careless, destroy animals utterly. Most significant power now is power over people. The ability to win the respect, the belief, the support, the allegiance, the following, the obedience, of people—this is power. Morality, law, and custom comprise the rules by which the group expect us, as individuals, to live. These rules allow for a modest accumulation of power by way of instrumental competence. If we respect the rules, we cannot hope for more. We shall be conformists, the salt of the Earth but never its giants. A more venturesome order of normality calls for one to be as free in pursuit of power as a prudent, though often but nominal, regard for rules will permit. With less than that prudent regard, one is likely to land in disfavor or in jail—though sometimes, with a little luck, an adventurous thug may become a ruler. With more than a prudent regard one is disabled in the race. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Neurotics are those who are crippled in the pursuit of power by internal constraints, impediments built into character by childhood experience. All of us start out weak in the hands of the strong, and a parent inclined to exploit that discrepancy can teach a child that any transgression of rules will yield pain and humiliation. Such an early education can bring it about that in later life, long after the tyrant is dead, any tentative reaching for power will be aborted by anxiety. The awareness of vulnerability prompts one to look about carefully, to take the measure of things. It leads to knowledge, is essential to good judgement. Without it one’s vision of one’s self and the World is determined, not by the way things are but by one’s will, one’s desire. When power is absolute, distortion is extreme; the real World is replaced by fantasy. When one possesses greater power than any despot of the past, one will ask for ultimate power: Every individual will henceforth follow this person’s personal order of suffer death. The congressional deputies will enthusiastically and unanimously approve the measure. One will now, legally, be above any law. That is why it is important that we do not have one party with a supermajority. However, people are so unwillingly to talk about politics to the extent that they ignore what is going on, and this can eventually become the result. So empowered, and thereby more and more out of touch with the reality one is imperiously undertaking to shape and to control, and with no compunction to heed the advice of one’s general, who are in touch, one will proceed to make those disastrous mistakes which will led to the destruction of the army and the loss of the war. Nothing within the state impedes the pursuit of power by the state. Empires expand. Any of them, are it able, will encompass the World. They go as far as they can, stop only where the lines of communication and supply are stretched too thin, where the conduits of power can no longer deliver effective force. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
In the individual, however, morality is a brake and may at any point set a limit. A truly Christian position calls for the abnegation of power, requires one to give all one has to the poor, to be meek, to love one’s enemy, to turn the other cheek. A measure of the instinctual force of the drive for power is given by the rarity with which such an ethic has in fact been practiced. The other internal obstacle is fear. One can go quite far in the acquisition of instrumental power without struggling with another human being and hence without encounter fear, power growing as a function of one’s kill in becoming a good pianist, carpenter, bookkeeper, or surgeon. However, the point is reached eventually beyond which any further gain can be achieved only in struggle with another person, in defeating or besting or outmaneuvering someone. In such contest one is vulnerable, there is no sure win. One may show one’s self a fool, may be humiliated. Fear may become so intense that one’s life comes to be structed around it. Whoever arranges for oneself an isolated life (a write, an artist, a forest-fire watcher, a drawbridge keeper) or a vocation with built-in advantages over the people with whom one deal (a psychoanalyst, and anesthesiologist) is likely to be the who feels keenly the danger of pursuing power through interpersonal struggle. The hurdy-gurdy plays, and around and around they go, the charioteer, the legionnaire, the cuirassier, up and down, sailing around, the president, the foreign minister, the chiefs of staff, varnished faces frozen in arrogance and disdain, the bombardier, the cavalryman, the machine gunner, around and around, as the band plays on. When the oppressed take up arms and rebel, they do so in the name of principles that asset basic human rights and so constitute an insurgent morality which justified the overthrow of the existing order. The existing order has a morality of its own, an establishment morality, which holds that the security and welfare of each individual are contingent on the state, that the state therefore is owed allegiance, that its laws must be obeyed, its leaders respect it. It labels the leaders of the rebellion as traitors, criminal, fanatics, and will crush them if it can. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
As rebels confront government troops, so insurgent morality confronts established morality. If government troops prevail, the insurgent morality is discredited, disappears. If the rebels are victorious, the establishment morality is discredited, succeeded by the insurgent morality. In the latter event the insurgent morality comes to be allied with power, becomes the new establishment morality, ancillary to the safeguarding and expansion of power. In this new role it sanctifies power, reassures the now newly oppressed that their oppression is in the nature of things, perhaps ordained by divine will, that no protest is indicated but rather patience and cooperation, that all must make sacrifices, that the leaders act for the welfare of all, that laws must be obeyed. Thus a morality which began as protest against power becomes the servant of power. The insurgent morality in its insurgency declares that power is corrupt and tends to corrupt everyone and everything allied to it; and when the revolution succeeds, it proves the truth of its indictment by corrupting first those exalted principles under whose banners it rode to power, along with the warriors who bore them. The striking way in which the modern World is moving toward its doom is not accidental but predetermined. Yet this terrible inevitability is not imposed from without by arbitrary power. It arises from within, from the World’s own characteristics. During the First World War, a civilization ridden by pleasures of the flesh which had sought intense pleasures found intense pain. Did it learn the implicit lesson? No! It plunged more wildly than ever in the quest for joy involving pleasures of the flesh, only to find still worse agony in the Second World War. The more it has wasted the gift of life, the creative force, the more it has lost the essence of life, blood. The creative force of life is white blood. Nature has punished human’s careless dissipation of the one with a forced loss of the other. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
The time has come to teach the lesson of responsibility about pleasures of the flesh in clear words. If humanity refuses to learn and obey spiritual laws, the horror of a third World War, compared with which the second will be mere child’s play, cannot be escaped. It would be agreeable and pleasant to share such optimism about the non-inevitableness of war, but it would also be self-deceptive. When the terrors and horrors of one war fail to have the effect of arousing people to thinking for themselves instead of in a mass, that is to say, of seeking truth individually, then the war will repeat itself again and again. If the war comes, it will have been brought by the erring nations upon themselves. If the war is not to come, they must change their ideas and their actions now. Some believe that war might come in a few years’ time; it might also come in only one year’s time; but it would be folly to deny that it might not even come at all. If no efforts at all had ben made on both the physical and mystical planes to counteract the threatened conflict, it could have broken out in the Cuban crisis year. The situation is still an anxious one but it is not a hopeless one. Piety alone will not suffice to meet it, just as politics alone has already failed to do so. However, the mystical efforts are being kept up. War is not inevitable. No one knows the outcome of the tremendous struggle going on between the atheistic hate forces and the constructive love forces on the mental level. The intercessory and contributory meditations of a few knowledgeable sages afford whatever real hope exists today. If the peoples and leaders fail to respond to those contributions, they will then have to carry the responsibility for its destruction. It is folly not to see that war is inevitable, folly to blind oneself deliberately to what is coming merely because one dreads it. While our human interest and nature shudder at the though of such war, our human wisdom and insight have no doubt it will take place. The dander is not only that a Third World War will come, but that it will come during an inconvenient time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
None of the wars which humankind have hitherto suffered was Armageddon, for the last war was fought out fully and extended its devastations only in three continents and partly on the fourth, but the fifth was not affected in the same way. When Armageddon comes, it will devastate five continents. The mass of people does not take to truly spiritual concepts. Extroversion, egoism, and preoccupation with personal or Worldly affairs keep out any interest or attention in such concepts. Only the crushing shock of atomic war will provide an impulsion toward them from without. Even the new polarization of attitudes which is emerging as a consequence of the war, is confused rather than clear-cut. The ghastly tragedy of this confusion would show itself at its very worst in Armageddon. In the Second World War the issues between good and evil were clear-cut and easily discernible. However, in the Third World War they would be confused, chaotic, and mixed. It does not require much perceptiveness to perceived the inevitability of Armageddon. This fear haunts millions today and is one of the impulsions to the search for spiritual comfort, in one group, and the search for forgetfulness in pleasures, with the larger group. We may face the tragic inevitability of a Third World War with fear and gloom or with calm and resignation. Many suicide attempts are preceded by a change in mood. The change may not be severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of mental disorder, but it does represent a significant shift from the person’s past mood. The most common change is an increase in sadness. Also common are increases in feelings of anxiety, tension, frustration, anger, or shame. In fact, the key to suicide may be “psychache,” a feeling of psychological pian that seems intolerable to the person. Suicide attempts may also be preceded by shifts in patterns of thinking. Individuals may become preoccupied with their problems, or mood will not change. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Some clinicians believe that a feeling of hopelessness is the single most likely indicator of suicidal intent, and they take special care to look for signs of hopelessness when they access the risk of suicide. Many people who attempt suicide fall victim to dichotomous thinking, viewing problems and solutions in rigid either/or terms. Indeed, the “four-letter word” in suicide is “only,” as in “suicide was the only thing I could do.” In the following statement a woman who survived her leap from a building describes her dichotomous thinking at the time. She saw death as the only alternative to her pain. “I was so desperate. I felt my God, I could not face this thing. Everything was like a terrible whirlpool of confusion. And I though to myself: There is only one thing to do. I just have to lose consciousness. That is the only way to get away from it. The only way to lose consciousness, I thought, was to jump off something good and high.” Studies indicate that as many as 60 percent of the people who attempt suicide drink alcohol just before the act. Autopsies reveal that about 25 percent of these people are legally intoxicated. In fact, considering that coroners are more likely to classify deaths as accidental when they detect high alcohol levels, the excessive use of alcohol just before death by suicide is probably much higher. Such statistics suggest to many clinical researchers that alcohol often helps trigger suicidal behaviour. A variety of factors may account for this relationship between alcohol use and suicide. Alcohol’s disinhibiting effects may allow people who are considering suicide to overcome the fears that would otherwise restrain them. Alternatively, alcohol may contribute to suicide by lowering an individual’s inhibitions against violence and helping to release underlying aggressive feelings. Yet another possibility is that alcohol further impairs a suicidal person’s judgment and problem-solving abilities. Research suggests that the use of other kinds of drugs may have a similar tie to death by suicide, particularly in teenagers and young adults. A high level of heroine, for example, was found in the blood of a popular musician at the time the individual died by death from suicide. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Holiday effect—studied in countries throughout Europe indicate the suicide rates tend to drop before Christmas and Easter but then increase after those holidays. Seasonal violence—although findings are sometimes mixed, many studies suggest that suicides committed by violent methods are highest during the spring and lowest in the late fall. Most common killings—more suicides (31,000) than homicides (23,000) are committed in the United State of America each year. Yet, economically and vocationally, a very large population of the young people are in a plight more drastic than anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are not enough worthy jobs. However, if our society, being as it is, were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present nearly full employment and there may be for some years, yet a vast number of young people are rationally unemployable, useless. This paradox is essential to explain their present temper. Our society, which is not geared to the cultivation of its young, is geared to a profitable expanding production, a so-called high standard of living of mediocre value, a so-called high standard of living of mediocre value, and the maintenance of nearly full employment. Politically, the chief of these is full employment. In a crisis, when profitable production is temporarily curtailed, government spending increases and jobs are manufactured. In “normalcy”—a condition of slow boom—the easy credit, installment buying, and artificially induced demand for useless goods create jobs for all and good profits for some. Now, back when the pandemic started, when the stimulus attempted by hook or crook to put people back to work and give them money to revive a shattered economy, there was an outcry of moral indignation from the conservatives that many of the jobs were “boondoggling,” useless made-work. It was insisted, and rightly, that such work was demoralizing to the workers themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
It was insisted, and rightly, that such work was demoralizing to the workers themselves. It is a question of a word, but a candid critic might certainly say that many of the jobs in our present “normal” production are useless made-work. The tail fins and built-in obsolescence might be called boondoggling. The $64,000 Question and the busy hum of Madison Avenue might certainly be called boondoggling. Certain tax-dodge Foundations are boondoggling. What of business lunches and expense accounts? fringe benefits? The comic categories of occupation in the building trades? the extra stage hands and musicians of the theater crafts? These jolly devices to put money back to work no doubt have a demoralizing effect on somebody or other (certainly on me, they make me green with envy), but where is the moral indignation from Top Management? Supposed we would cut out the boondoggling and gear our society to a more sensible abundance, with efficient production of quality goods, distribution in a natural market, counterinflation and sober credit. At once the work week would be cut to, stay, twenty hours instead of forty. (Important People have already mentioned the figure thirty.) Or alternately, half of the labor force would be unemployed. Suppose too—and how can we not suppose it?—that the automatic machines are used generally, rather than just to get rid of badly organized unskilled labor. The unemployment will be still more drastic. (To give the most striking example: in steel, the annual increase in productivity is 4 percent, the plants work at 50 percent of capacity, and the companies can break even stop producing at less than 30 percent of capacity. These are the conditions that forced the steel strike, as desperate self-protection.) Everybody knows this, nobody wants to talk about it much, for we do not know how to cope with it. The effect is that we are living a kind of lie. Long ago, labor leaders used to fight for the shorter work week, but not they do not, because they are pretty sure they do not want it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Indeed, when hours are reduced, the tendency is to get a second, part-time, job and raise the standard of living, because the job is meaningless and one must have something; but the standard of living is pretty meaningless, too. Nor is this strange atmosphere a new thing. For at least a generation the maximum sensible use of our productivity could have thrown a vast population out of work, or relieved everybody a lot of useless work, depending on how you take it. (Consider with how little cutback of useful civilian production the economy produced the war goods and maintained an Army, economically unemployed.) The plain truth is that at present very many of us are useless, not needed, rationally unemployable. It is this paradoxical atmosphere that young persons’ grow up. It looks busy and expansive, but it is rationally at a stalemate. A new civilization is forming. However, where do we fit into it? Do not today’s technological changes and social upheavals mean the end of friendship, love, commitment, community, and caring? Will not tomorrow’s electronic marvels make human relationships even more vacuous and vicarious then they are today? For example, so many people are impressed by the new BMW IX M60, which can change exterior paint colors by the push of a button, and also has the technology to heal the kidney grill if it is injured. Nonetheless, these are legitimate questions. They arise from reasonable fears, and only a naïve technocrat would brush them lightly aside. For if we look around us, we find widespread evidence of psychological breakdown. It is as though a bomb had gone off in out communal “psycho-sphere.” We are, in fact, experiencing not merely the breakup of the Second Wave techno-sphere, info-sphere, or socio-sphere but the crack-up of its psycho-sphere as well. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Throughout the affluent nations the litany is all too familiar: rising rates of juvenile suicide, dizzying high levels of alcoholism, widespread psychological depression, vandalism, and crime. In the United States of America, emergency rooms are crowded with “potheads,” “speed freaks,” “Quaalude kids,” “coke sniffers,” “heroin junkies,” “fentanyl fires,” “molly malfunctions,” “ecstasy electrocutes,” “lean limps,” and not to mention people having “nervous breakdowns.” Social work and mental healthy industries are booming everywhere. In Washington a President’s Commission on Mental Health announces that fully one fourth of all citizens in the United States of America suffers from some form of severe emotional stress. And a National Institute of Mental Health psychologist, charging that almost no family is free of some form of mental disorder, declares that “psycological turbulence is rampant in an American society that is confused, divided and concerned about its future.” It is true that spongy definitions and unreliable statistics make such sweeping generations suspect, and it is doubly true that earlier societies were such sweeping generations suspect, and it is doubly true that earlier societies were scarcely models of good mental health. Yet something is terribly wrong today. There is a harassed, knife-edge quality to daily life. Nerves are ragged, and—as the scuffles and shootings in subways or on gas queues suggest—tempers are barely under hair-trigger control. Millions of people are terminally fed up. They are, moreover, increasingly hassled by an apparently swelling army of heavy breathers, kooks, flakes, weirdos, and psycho whose antisocial behavior is frequently glamorized by the media. In the West at least, we see a pernicious romanticization of insanity, a glorification of the “cuckoo nest” inmate. Best-sellers proclaim that madness is a myth, and a literary journal springs up in Berkeley decided to the notion that “Madness, Genius, and Sainthood all lie in the same realm, and should be given the same name and prestige.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Meanwhile, millions of individuals search frantically for their own identities or for some magic therapy to re-integrate their personalities, provide instant intimacy or ecstasy, or lead them to “higher” states of consciousness. By the late 2000’s a human potential movement, spreading eastward from California, had spawned some 8,000 different “therapies” consisting of odds and ends of psychoanalysis, Eastern religion, experimentations with pleasures of the flesh, game playing, and old-time revivalism. In the words of one critical survey, “these techniques were neatly packaged and distributed coast to coast under like Mind Dynamic, Arica, and Silva Mind Control. Transcendental Meditation was already being peddled like speed reading; Scientology’s Dianetics had been mass-marketing its own popular therapy since the fifties. At the same time, America’s religious cults got into the swing, fanning out quietly across the country in massive fund-raising and recruitment drives.” More important than the growing human-potential industry is the Christian evangelical movement. Appealing to poorer and less educated segments of the public, making sophistical use of high-powered radio and television, the “born again” movement is ballooning in size. Religious huckster, riding its crest, send their followers scrambling for salvation in a society they picture as decadent and doomed. This wave of malaise had not struck all parts of the technological World with equal force. For this reason, readers in Europe and elsewhere may be tempted to shrug it off as a largely American phenomenon, while in the United States of America itself some still regard it as just another manifestation of California’s fabled flakiness. Neither view could be further from the truth. If psychic distress and disintegration are most strikingly evident in the Untied States of America, and especially in California, it merely reflects the fact that the Fourth Wave has arrived a bit earlier than elsewhere, causing Third Wave social structures to topple sooner and more spectacularly. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Indeed, a kind of paranoia has settled over many communities, and not just the United States of America. In Rome, Turin, and even in America, terrorists stalk the streets and secretly are employed in many communities. They have become like the old day klan, where many of their members hold jobs in the TV new media, at law firms, in the courthouses, in law enforcement, property management and the supermarket. They are everywhere. In Paris, and even in once peaceful London, muggings and vandalism increase. In Chicago, San Francisco, and Downtown Sacramento, elderly people are afraid to walk the streets after the street lights come on. In New York, schools and subways crackle with violence. And back in California, a magazine offers its readers a supposedly practical guide to “handguns and gun courses, attack-trained dogs, burglar alarm in door and outdoor home surveillance audio and visual, personal-safety devices, self-defense courses and computerized security systems that update homeowners on their mobile devices if fire or other danger is detected.” There is a sick odor in the air. It is the smell of a dying Third Wave civilization. Thank God, I found out Satan is no match for the believer who knows his authority, and position in Jesus Christ! When you are born again, you become the righteousness of God and a joint-heir with Jesus Christ. All that Jesus has is yours. His righteousness is imputed to you. “For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,” reports 2 Corinthians 5.21. He hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in Heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” reports Ephesians 2.6. When you stand before Satan, he does not see you—he sees the authority of Jesus. The Word says you are the righteousness of God, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God ordained. We have sung those old unbelieving songs so long that we thought it was true. “Jus a weary pilgrim, struggling through this World, I know not today what tomorrow will bring, shadows, sunshine or rain.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Do not just show up for work. Do not just go through the motions. No, be passionately fulfilling your destiny. That is the way we should be. Have some enthusiasm. Choose to be happy; live with excellence and integrity, and put a spring in your step. Put a smile on your face, and let the World know that you are enjoying the life God has given you! If you want to see God’s favor, do everything with your whole heart. Do it with passion and some fire. Not only will you feel better, but that energy will spread, and soon other people will want what you have. Do you want your life to make an impact? You can change the atmosphere of your home or your entire office with a little bit of enthusiasm. You may have to live or work around people who are prone to being pessimistic, who tend to drag you down. However, do not let them throw mud on your shine. Do not their lack of enthusiasm squelch your passion. If you live with a deadbeat spouse, make a decision tht you are going to be happy and enthusiastic anyway. If you work around people who are always negative, try to overcome that negativity by being optimistic, encouraging, and uplifting. Polish your shine more than usual to make sure the glow does not go out. When everybody else is down and defeated, when you are all alone with nobody nearby to encourage you, simply encourage yourself. Your attitude should be: It does not matter what anybody else does or does not do, I am going to live my life with enthusiasm! I am going to stay on fire. I am going to be aglow. I am going to be passionate about seeing my dreams come to pass. Stay full of zeal. Stay passionate about seeing your dreams come to pass. Stay on fire and aglow. Whatever you do, do it with enthusiasm! The Holy Bible says, “If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land,” reports Isaiah 1.19. Notice, we have to be more than obedient; we must be willing—willing to do the right thing, willing to live with a good attitude and with enthusiasm. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
God does not want you to drag through life defeated and depressed. No matter what you have been through, no matter whose fault it was, no matter how impossible your situation may look, the good news is that God wants to turn it around and restore everything that has been stolen from you. He wants to restore your marriage, your family, your career. God wants to restore your joy and give you a peace and happiness you have never known before. Most of all, He wants to restore your relationship with Him. God wants you to live a satisfied life. God does not want you simply to feel a little better for a few days. No, God is in the long-term restoration business. He wants you to have a life filled with an abundance of joy, an abundance of happiness. God does not want you simply to survive that marriage. God wants to turn it around and restore you with a strong, healthy, rewarding relationship. God does not want your business to merely make it through the murky economic waters. He wants your business to sail and to excel! When God restores, He always brings you out better, improved, increased, and multiplied. He has a vision of total victory for your life! Hold on to that new, enlarged vision of victory that God has given you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. Dare to boldly declare that you are standing strong against the forces of darkness. You will not settle for a life of mediocrity! Raise your level of expectancy. It is our faith that activates the power of God. Let us quit limiting Him with our small-minded thinking and start believing Him for bigger and better things. You can start to day to live a successful life now. Remember, if you obey God and are willing to trust Him, you will have the best this life has to offer—and more! Animals, referred to by John Muir as our horizontal brothers, have long been recognized as essential to our development and well-being. Throughout history they have played a major role in human thought and culture. They inhabit our myth, fables, proverbs, and stories. There is a profound, inescapable need for animals among all peoples, for while animals have inhabited a World without people, we have never lived without the companionship, example, and practical help of animals. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Today, because of the wide-spread pollution of air and water, the rapid expansion of cities, and the destruction of wilderness habitat, we are seeing an imminent and irreversible loss of untamed animal life. We can only guess at the future effect on our children of living in a World in which elephants exist only in zoos, the great whales no longer fill the seas with their song, and the remaining forests are silent. The fact that so many of us are increasingly isolated from the presence of animals may contribute to the growing despair we feel. Direct encounter with animals, meeting them eye to eye on their own ground, evokes a sudden wonder and respect. Their vivid life brings us alive to the source that creates and sustains all beings. Without such encounters we risk losing that part of ourselves which most deeply resonates with nature—the heart of compassion. In safety and in Bliss, may all creature be of a blissful heart. If our greatest loss with the animals have been to lose touch with the reality of their existence, our second loss has been to banish them from our minds. We assume they have nothing to teach us about the predicaments of our existence. We no longer know how to listen to the wisdom of the various four-legged, six-legged, finned and winged creatures that share our life on this Earth. We forget they are ancestors as well as kindred. Long before we existed, they worked out the round of life in thousands of variations, as though anticipating the experiments of human cultures. We must remember how to call upon our powers of empathy and compassion. We are asked to awaken to the plight of our animal relatives, to let their beauty and power come alive for us once more. Humanity has long been a pandemic on this Earth, on nature, and on the animals. We are members of a human family and society, but the presence of animal “others” enlarges our perception of the self beyond the city and opens us inward to that ground of being where live the lizard and monkey, the fish and the bear. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
These are our relations. These are, like us, offspring of the great mystery, and necessary parts of a balanced and living whole. Dear Lord in Heaven, thank You, Father, for giving me this amazing, incredible life, and for making it possible to enjoy every part of it, even the tough times. Thank You for being my Future; I know You have good things in store. I will praise You now and forever for all that You have done for me! O Lord, God of our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, keep this forever in the inward thoughts of the heart of Thy people, and direct their heart unto Thee, for Thou being merciful, full of compassion, forgives iniquity and destroyest not; yea, many a time Thou turnest anger away. For Thou, O Lord, art good, and ready to forgive, and abounding in mercy unto all who call upon Thee. Thy righteousness is everlasting and Thy Law is truth. Thou wilt show faithfulness to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, as Thou hast promised unto our fathers from the days of old. Blessed be the Lord who day by day bears our burden. He is the God of Jacob be a stronghold unto us. O Lord of hosts, happy is the man that trusteth in Thee. Save, O Lord; O King, answer us on the day when we call. Blessed be our God hath created us for His glory, and hath separated us from them that go astray by giving us the Torah of truth, thus planting everlasting life in our midst. May He opened our hearts unto His Law, and with love and reverence may we do His will and serve Him with a perfect heart that we may not labour in vain, nor bring forth confusion. May it be Thy will, O Lord, our God and God of our fathers, that we keep Thy statutes in the World to come. May my soul sing Thy praise and not be silent; O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto Thee, forever. Blessed is the man that trusteth in Thee, O Lord, and whose trust Thou art. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord is an everlasting Rock. And they that know Thy name put their trust in Thee; Thou hast not forsaken them that seek Thee. Thou, O Lord, desirest for the sake of Thy righteousness to make the Torah great and glorious. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Wise people never fall in love, so how are they to know when I first saw my Cresleigh Home, I felt my life begin. So open up your heart to Cresleigh Homes and feel the love rush in. I found you just in time, and changed my lonely life that day.
You Understand that Harsh Night Was Only a Comedy!
We judge ourselves by what we are capable of doing; try not to become a human of success but rather a human of value. There are many reasons celibacy was so population in the 18th century. Youth were sometimes exposed to adults involved in pleasures of the flesh and they did not like seeing that, and these adults when then prey on the youth and try to get them involved. Because of how disgusted they were, a lot of women did not want to marry, but it was not just because of what they were exposed to, but some other things as well. Mother Ann Lee, the founder of American Shakerism, was born in 1736 into misery and degradation of Manchester, England. As a child, she did have the luxury of attending school, and joined the racks of child labour with her job in a textile factory. Against her repeated pleas, her father forced Ann into marriage—and its dread conjugal duties—with blacksmith Abraham Stanley. Sadly, the union produced three babies, who died soon after birth, which was the fate of half Manchester’s children, and this was a true depression. Nothing is more sad than the loss of life. Ann had a fourth child called Elizabeth, who lived for only six years. This left her tormented by grief and guilt. Ann concluded that the root of her personal tragedy, and indeed of all human depravity was pleasures of the flesh. As if it had embers in it, Ann’s shattered psyche inspire her to avoid her own marriage bed. Despite Stanley’s passion for his beautiful, blue-eyed, chestnut-haired wife, he was willing to forgo pleasures of the flesh and accepted her religion and celibacy. With her new found freedom, Anne became a preacher. She was so passionate and enthusiastic that she converted her faither and two brothers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
However, Ann’s new found freedom did not last for long. Patriarchal England was hostile to women preachers. Persecution, including imprisonment began. While in a brutal dungeon, Ann had a vision. Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, fornicating, whereupon God flung them out of sight. This was, Ann believed, a divine revelation. Just as the regimen of healthy people is not suitable for the sick, one should not want to govern a corrupt people by means of the same laws that are suited to a good people. Pleasures of the flesh had caused humankind’s alienation from God. We are told that people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable. Celibacy, therefore, was essential for spiritual rebirth. We have based our words about virginity on the fact that it is first of all a charism, a gift received from God and, consequently, a vocation. Virginity must be received as a gift—an offering to God’s majesty, a living sacrifice and imitation of the imitation of the Eucharist of Christ. Ann’s version of the Fall of Man differed radically from the Church’s. God had punished Adam and Eve equally, so their longings for pleasures of the flesh, not Eve’s special wickedness, were at the crux of His fury. Maybe God wanted humans to procreate like the Virgin Mary, spontaneously and without indulging in pleasures of the flesh. Ann wasted no hatred on womankind but spent it all on the great evil, pleasures of the flesh. The Fathers of the Church were not content to observe the commandments, but also offered God gifts. Christ’s commandments have been given to all Christians, and every Christian is obliged to observe them. The most beautiful thing we can do is renew this gift of ourselves. What makes a gift beautiful and precious is its integrity. The object must be new and intact. We must all nothing in ourselves—in thoughts, looks, or actions—to offend His presence or “grieve” the Spirit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
It was Ann’s startling message—celibacy, even after marriage—that converted people. Women had their own special reasons to welcome celibacy. With no effective birth control or it not being allowed by the Church, abstinence was a great idea. Many people still enjoyed bearing children, but they also feared what could happen, so some dreaded it. Childbirth could be agonizing and often fatal: morality rates for mothers and newborns were sky-high. Women delivered squatting over filthy birthing stools or straw, and postpartum puerperal fever killed them in droves. Poor nutrition deformed pelvic bones so bad that babies were trapped in misshapen birth canals. Midwives used hooks to extract the babies, often in bloody chunks. Those children who survived into adulthood faced only the same bleak poverty their parents could never escape. Abstinence was a woman’s main defense against these prospects, but husbands, churches, and society would not tolerate it. Mother Ann’s style of celibacy was different. It was a form of devotion, a duty to God, a conscious renunciation of odious carnal indulgence. It bestowed on the believer the moral authority to resist opposition, including irate husbands. Slowly, the number of Shakers grew. The idea that one had a higher self, the conviction that on had a soul, broke in upon their little existence with great revelatory force, and the people felt it emerging into glorious lighter after a dreary journey though a long dark tunnel. The Overself was enthroned. The disciples realized its presence in their inmost feelings. Nothing on their experience, intellectual or emotional, had possessed for the member such satisfying ecstasy, such as paradisical contentment. For the delight of the higher levels of spiritual experience, unlike the delight of passionate Earthly experience, never palls but remains ever fresh and vivid as through encountered for the first time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
The World took on the texture of a lovely half-dream. God’s feet treaded air. Blissfully, wondrously, and overwhelmingly the disciple became that which one sought. The delight of these exalted moments and the fragrance of these Heavenly visitations lingered in the Shaker’s memories for years after they themselves had vanished, and the influence on subsequent life and thought was as long and they themselves were short and beautiful. The experienced would slip away, but the memory of its certitude would remain. This all happened deep in the secret places of one’s own heart. As Ann’s fame increased, so did the hatred of civil authorities. They imprisoned her time and again and did little to prevent enraged citizens from chasing, kicking, and stoning her. Ann’s sufferings simply strengthened her faith and honed her theology. Ann saw her marriage to Christ as evidence of her own greatly exalted status as a person entrusted with divine truths and wisdom. Shaker celibacy was not only its own reward but also the precursor of other, tangible offices and honours. Something similar happens in the life of a young man or woman when they really fall in love. While they were “free” and open to various possibilities, any man or woman who passed by might have drawn their attention and “distracted” them, just as a sheep always leaves a scrap of its wool on the thorns of a hedge when it comes too close. However, one true love for someone has taken hold, every other person and in fact the whole World, respectfully steps back and even fades away entirely for a while. Their hearts are not fixed on one person. A kind of catharsis happens: the new relationship does not destroy all others—companions, relatives or friends—but puts each one in its proper place. Something similar happens to the consecrated soul on the day when, moved by the uncreated love which is the Holy Spirit, one chooses Jesus as Lord and Spouse. The heart is no longer “free,” no longer wanders, and is no longer so easily “distracted” this way and that. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
This is true virginity for the sake of the Kingdom. God grant that we may desire it, even if from a distance, and make our way towards it, albeit haltingly, with the steps of a child. To encourage one to do this and to strengthen one’s willingness to turn away from the lower nature, the higher self alternately reveals and hides itself at intervals. Once the Overself has vouchsafed to one its Grace, one must make oneself increasingly worthy of the gift. The aspirant should regard the glimpse afforded one in the glow of one’s best moments as a working blueprint. One has to make oneself over again according to the mental picture thus placed before one. The purpose is to call one to more serious, more frequent, and sterner efforts, and to arouse one in increased ardours of moral self-improvement. Mother Ann designed Shaker society so that even its physical plant reflected the celibacy at its ideological core. Men and women lived in segregated quarters and were never alone. At religious services, they sat apart. However, Mother Ann was too wise to suppose that forced separation could, by itself, forestall all lapses in conduct. Lust, she knew all too well, was a powerful force: her husband, Abraham, for one, had lusted after he for years. In fact, his unquenchable longing for a carnal relationship was one of the first things she dealt with in America. Somehow, she managed to convince him that she would never relent about pleasures of the flesh, and her grieving husband finally walked out, leaving his wife alone in her splendid celibacy. To that diviner self thus glimpsed, one must henceforth address all one’s prayers; through its remembrance one must seek succor; in its reliance one must perform all one’s endeavours; by its light one must plead for grace. For the Overself to give itself wholly and perpetually to a human is a rare and wonderful event. Most often it gives itself only for a short time. This serves to intensify and enlarge his love and attraction for it, and to provide one with beautiful memories to support and sustain one in faithfulness to the quest in the fatiguing long-drawn years of struggle and darkness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
When the Grace has led one sufficiently far, one will be distinctly aware of an inner presence. It will think for one, feel for one, and even act for one. This is the beginning of, and what it means to have, an egoless life. Just as the sun’s rays are reflected on a burnished silver plate, so the Overself’s attributes are faithfully reflected on a purified and egoless mind. For socializing, the Shakers enjoyed thrice-weekly “union meetings” where men and women sat face-to-face, talking or reading or singing. They released their tensions by speaking in tongues: we can only guess what streamy yearnings were dissipated in the babel. No great sexual scandals ever surfaced. Sexual sublimation, orchestrated into daily life, made celibacy joyous for many believers, tolerable for those with aching loins. However, celibacy was not enough: even loyalty between celibate spouses threatened the tightly knit Shaker community. As late as 1810, an Ohio Shaker meeting-house was mobbed by five hundred angry men. It took six bitter years to establish equilibrium in the commune. By then Shaker core had become Americanized. New rituals and traditions replaced the lost ones, and internal harmony developed. And, thanks to Shaker industry and ingenuity, poverty gave way to prosperity and financial security. However, they failed to interest their growing children into staying. The most serious point of dissension was the most fundamental: celibacy, which dictated the Shaker’s architecture, regulations, and way of life. The Shaker’s worst failure was with their children, most of whom rejected the austere religion and lifestyle. At New Lebanon between 1821 and 1864, of 144 boys admitted, some foundlings but most with their parents, 8 died, 10 were “carried away,” 2 were sent away, 22 became Shakers, and 102 left “for the World.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Many suicide notes go undetected or unconfirmed because the only people who could tell us the truth are gone from the World. Many other people who commit suicide, however, an estimated 12 to 33 percent—leave notes that reveal their intentions and psychological state only hours or minutes before they died. “Bill: I am sorry for causing you so much trouble. I really did not want to and if you would have told me at the first time the truth probably both of us would be very happy now. Bill I am sorry but I cannot take the life any more, I do not think there is any goodness in the World. I love you very very much and I want you to be as happy in your life as I wanted to make you. Tell your parents I am very sorry and please if you can do it do not ever let my parents know what happened. Please, do not hate me Bill, I love you. -Mary.” “Dear Jean, Unfortunately this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humanity, I love you. -Paul (You understand that hash night was only a comedy.)” Each suicide note is a personal document, unique to the writer and the circumstances. Some are barely a single sentence; others run several pages. People who leave noted clearly wish to send a powerful message to those they leave behind, whether it be “a cry for help, an epitaph, or a last will and testament.” Most suicide notes are addressed to specific individuals. Survivours’ reactions to suicide notes vary. A note can clarify the cause of death, thus saving relatives the ordeal of a legal investigation. Friends and relative may find that it eases their grief to know the person’s reasons for committing suicide. Yet some suicide notes add to the confusion, guilt, or horror that survivours experience, as was the following case. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Rather than permit his wife to leave him, twenty-year-old Mr. Jefferson hanged himself in the bathroom, leaving a note on the front door for his wife, saying, “Cathy I love you. You’re right, I am crazy…and thank you for trying to love me. Phil.” Mrs. Jefferson felt and frequently insisted that she “killed Phil.” She attempted suicide herself a week after. Clinical researcher have tried to improve their understanding of suicide by studying differences between genuine and fake suicide notes, the age and gender of note writers, the grammar of notes, the type and frequency of words used, conscious and unconscious contents, handwriting, and emotional, cognitive, and motivational themes. One important finding is that suicide notes vary significantly with age. Younger persons express more hostility toward themselves and site more interpersonal problems in their notes; those between 40 and 49 report being unable to cope with life; those between 50 and 59 tend not to cite a reason for their suicide; and those over 60 are motivated by such problems as illness, pain, disability, and loneliness. Studies of notes have also revealed that the nature of suicide had changed little since the 1940s, except that we are seeing more “suicide by police officers,” which is when people do things to intentionally get killed by a law enforcement officer. Suicide notes written in the 1940s, and the 1950s, are similar in content to modern notes, with one exception: modern notes show less confusion and more limited thinking. A number of studies have also been conducted on writings that are similar to suicide notes. For example, one team of investigators compared poems by nine poets who committed suicide to those written by nine poets who did not commit suicide. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
The poets who experienced death by suicide used more first-person self-references in their works, such as “I” and “me,” as well as more words associated with death. In addition, the poets who experienced death by suicide used fewer communication terms (such as “talk” and “listen”) in the poems they had written close to the time of their death by suicide, while nonsuicial poets actually increased their use of such words during this same period of time. Thus, it may be that people who are contemplating suicide tend to use language in distinct ways—ways that may eventually help clinicians identify and distinguish a person’s risk for suicide. A suicide note (or similar offering) provides only a partial picture of the writer’s experiences, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions. Moreover, the writers themselves may not be fully aware of their motives; their desperate thinking prevents them from being truly insightful. Suicide notes are not the royal road to an easy understanding of suicidal phenomena, but in combination with other sources they can point clinicians and researchers in the right direction. Research use a strategy to determine who is at risk of death by suicide by studying people who survive their death by suicide attempts. It is estimated that there are 8 to 20 nonfatal suicide attempts for every fatal suicide. However, it may be that people who survive death by suicide differ in important ways from those who do not. Many of them may not really have wanted to die, for example. Nevertheless, suicide researchers have found it useful to study survivours of suicide; and we shall consider those who attempt death by suicide and those who experience death by suicide as more or less alike. To help address the psychological trauma experienced by many fans of celebrities who have recently experienced death by suicide, postvention” approached are often employed, including counseling sessions in schools and special media programs. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
In the days following the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, a candlelight vigil in Seattle was attended by 5,000 people. What triggers death by suicide? Sometimes people are trying to silence a victim or witness, and faking a suicide is a way to cover up a murder. Often times if the family does not press for an investigation, if it looks like death by suicide, that is how it is labeled, even though it may not be. Suicidal acts may be connected to recent events or current conditions in a person’s life. Although such factors may not be the basic motivation for the death by suicide, they can precipitate it. Common triggering factors include stressful events in the recent lives of suicide attempters than in the lives of matched control subjects. In one study, suicide attempters reported twice as many stressful events in the year before their attempts as nonsuicial depressed patients or patients with other kinds of psychological problems. One form of immediate stress seen in cases of suicide is the loss of a loved one through death, divorce, or rejection. Another is the loss of a job. Still another is the stress experienced during pandemics, hurricanes or other natural disasters, even by young children. A suicide attempt may also be precipitated by a series of recent events that have a combined impact, rather than by a single event, as in the following case. Aaliyah’s suicide attempt took place in the context of a very difficult year for the family. Aaliyah’s mother and father separated after 9 years of marriage. Father the father moved out, he visited the family erratically. Four months after he loved out of the house, the mother’s boyfriend moved into the house. The mother planned to divorce her husband and marry her boyfriend, Robert, who had become the major disciplinarian for the children, a fact that Aaliyah intensely resented. Aaliyah also complained of being “left out” in relation to the closeness she had with her mother. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
Another problem Aaliyah had was that she and her mother looked alike, so people thought Robert was her boyfriend. Also, Aaliyah had experienced two changes in schools in the last two years which left her feeling friendless. In addition, she received a 4.0, but it was totally overshadowed by rumors of a marriage and a new baby sibling. China’s 300,000 annual suicides, 10 times the United States of Americas’ toll, represents 40 percent of all suicides in the World. China is the only country in which female suicides are more common than male suicides, account for more than 50 percent of suicides by women Worldwide. Research finds that fans of heavy metal rock consider suicide more acceptable then do people who are not fans. However, this attitude does not seem to result from the music or the lifestyle it espouses. Rather, heavy metal fans tend to be low in religiosity, and low religiosity relates to greater acceptability of suicide. Those fans who are religious rate suicide just as unacceptable as nonfans do. There is authority in faith-filled words. The authority in the widow’s words changed the unjust man’s decision. Though he would not do it for a while, her words—the authority in those words—troubled him, and he finally gave in. Many have thought Jesus Christ was teaching us to keep pestering God until we finally wear him down. This could never be representative of God. This was an unjust judge, who had all the qualities of Satan. The authority in the window’s voice changed the decision of the unjust judge. Her words changed his mind. Jesus said, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life,” reports John 6.63. The words that Jesus Christ spoke are not just printed pages. They are spirit life. When you get them on the side of you, they will transform your spirit. They will cause you to speak words of faith, driving out defeat and bring victory. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
Jesus said, “Hear what the unjust judge saith.” People try to relate the unjust judge to God, but how can you compare an unjust judge to God? Rome perished in the same way, and the excessive power of the tribunes, which they had gradually usurped, finally served, with the help of the laws that were made to protect liberty, as a safeguard, with the help of the laws that were made to protect liberty, as a safeguard for the emperors who destroyed it. As for the Council of Ten in Venice, it is a tribunal of blood, equally horrible to the patricians and the people, and which, far from proudly protecting the laws, no longer serves any purpose, after their degradation, beyond that of delivering blows in the dark which no one dares notice. If we do that, we have missed the whole point of what Jesus was teaching. Let us rightly divine the Word of Truth: “Though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, least by her continual coming she weary me.” In other words, “That woman meant what she said. I know by the tone of her voice, she will be back.” The unjust judge is only troubled. He is not weary yet. However, her continual coming would cause him to be weary. Since he is not weary yet, evidently she had not been coming. She only came once. He said, “I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.” The unjust judge granted her request so she would not come back. The Lord said, “Shall not God avenge His own elect, which cry day and night unto Him, though he bear long with them? He is not saying they were crying day and night over the same thing; yet we have read that into it. We have had the same idea here as in the first verse when Jesus said, “Men ought always to pray, and not faint.” In other words, “You have a need this morning, pray about it. If it is not manifest and you have another need tonight, do not sit around wringing your hands saying, ‘Since God did not answer my first prayer, He will not answer this one.’” #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
God has to bear long with us at times. However, that is because we are not in line with the Word of God and we try to do it our way. There have been times when I have prayed about everything and just thrown out a scatter load, hoping to God some of it would work. Once in a while, some of it would and I would be surprised. That is what you call a “faith accident.” You finally come across something that you believe, and it happens. Jesus said, “I tell you that He (God) will avenge them speedily.” The unjust judge did not avenge speedily, but Jesus said that God would avenge us speedily. “Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on Earth?” Will He find the kind of faith this woman possessed? Even though she was so insignificant in the eyes of the public, she went to the unjust judge—a man who feared neither God nor man—and her request was granted. Will the Son of man find that kind of faith when He comes back? “There was a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man.” As we have noted, he would qualify for the devil. It certainly could not be God. The unjust judge is representative of the evil one or Satan. The widow represents that individual believer. Jesus is showing us the power of speaking boldly. Without Christ, we can not do nothing; but, praise God, we are not without Him! Jesus said, “Hear what the unjust judge saith.” Now when Jesus says hear something, He means to pay special attention to it. Hear what Satan will say when a believer comes to him and demands boldly, “Avenge me of my adversary.” As believers today we would say, “I demand my rights in Jesus’ name.” This little woman was coming in the authority of her faith and not by sight. The unjust judge is representative of Satan who is subject to the authority of faith-filled words. When the Son of man returns, will He find this kind of faith on Earth—that a believer would dare to stand before the unjust one and tell him what to do? #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
This not only portrays the individual believer using his authority, but also the Church using the name of Jesus. Isaiah 54.4-5, says she shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name. Ephesians 3.9-10, outlines the role of Church is to play: “And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the World hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in Heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.” What principalities and powers is he talking about? The same principalities and powers mentioned in Ephesians 6.12, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” He is saying, “For we wrestle…against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” He is talking about the devil, his angels, and all his evil forces. To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers might be known by the church manifold wisdom of God. The Church is going to reveal the manifold wisdom of God, showing that God was in Christ reconciling the World to Himself, declaring His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past and bestowing on us His righteousness. The Church can come forth wearing the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation, having our loins grit with the Truth and our feet sod with the gospel of peace, with the shield of faith in our hands and the Sword of the Spirit in our mouths. We can come boldly before the unjust judge and say, “In the name of Jesus, get your hand off me, off my finances, off of God’s property! I am redeemed from the curse and delivered from the powers of darkness!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Experience teaches us every day the causes that lead to the revolutions of empires. However, since peoples are no longer being formed, we have almost nothing but conjecture to explain how they were formed. The majority vote in each tribe determined the tribe’s vote; the majority vote of the tribes determined the people’s vote; and the same went for the curia and the centuries. This custom was good so long as honesty reigned among the citizens and each was ashamed to give one’s vote publicly in favour of an unjust proposal or an unworthy subject. However, when the people became corrupt and votes were bought, it was fitting that they should give their votes in secret in order to restrain the buyers through distrust and to provide scoundrels the means of not being traitors. Only the greatest dangers can counterbalance the danger of altering the public order, and the sacred power of the laws should never be suspended except when it is a question of the safety of the homeland. In these rare and obvious cases, public safety can be provided for by a special act which confers the responsibility for it on someone who is most worthy. Hence this the judgment whose regulation is the point at issue. Whoever judges more judges honour; and whoever judges honour derives one’s law from opinion. The opinions of a people arise from its constitution. Although the law does not regulate mores, legislation is what gives rise to them. When legislation weakens, mores degenerate; but then the judgment of the censors will not do what the force of the laws has not down. It follows from this that the censorship can be useful for preserving mores, but never for reestablishing them. Establish censors while the laws are vigorous. Once they have lost their vigour, everything is hopeless. Nothing legitimate has any force once the laws no longer have force. The censorship maintains mores by preventing opinions from becoming corrupt, by preserving their rectitude through wise applications, and sometimes even by making a determination on them when they are still uncertain. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
What is honour for the one, what is shame for the other; and without having given praise of blame to either of the two! By the mere fact that a god was placed at the head of every political society, it followed that there were as many gods as there were peoples. Two peoples who were alien to one another and nearly always enemies could not recognize the same master for very long. Two armies in combat with one another could not obey the same leader. Thus national divisions led to polytheism, and this in turn led to theological and civil intolerance which are by nature the same. However, if asked how in pagan cultures, where each state has its own cult and its own gods, there are no wars of religion, it was for this very reason that each state, having its own cult as well as its own government, did not distinguish its gods from its laws. Political war was theological as well. The departments of the gods were, so to speak, fixed by national boundaries. The gods of one people had no rights over other peoples. The gods of the pagans were not jealous gods. They divided dominion over the Word among themselves. Moses himself and the Hebrew people sometimes countenanced this idea in speaking of the god of Israel. It is true they regarded as nothing the gods of the Canaanites, a proscribed people destined for destruction, and whose land they were to occupy. However, note how they spoke of the divinities of neighbouring peoples whom they were forbidden to attack! Is not the possession of what belongs to you god Chamos, said Jephthah to the Ammonites, lawfully yours? By the same right we possess the lands our victorious god has acquired for himself? It appears to me that here was a clear recognition of the parity between the rights of Chamos and those of the god of Israel. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
The Romans having spread their cult and their gods, along with their empire, and having themselves often adopted the gods of the vanquished by granting the right of the city to both alike, the peoples of this vast empire gradually found themselves to have multitudes of gods and cults, which were nearly the same everywhere. And that is how paganism finally became a single, identical religion in the known World. Such were the circumstances under which Jesus came to establish a spiritual kingdom on Earth. In separating the theological system from the political system, this made the state to cease being united and caused internal division that never ceased to agitate Christian peoples. However, since this new idea of an otherworldly kingdom had never entered the heads of the pagans, they always regarded the Christians as true rebels who, underneath their hypocritical submission, were only waiting for the moment when they would become independent and the masters, and adroitly usurp the authority they pretended in their weakness to respect. This is the reason for the persecutions. What the pagans feared happened. Then everything changes its appearance. The humble Christians changed their language, and soon this so-called otherworldly kingdom became, under a visible leader, the most violent despotism in this World. However, since there has always been a prince and civil laws, this double power have given rise to a perpetual jurisdictional conflict that has made all good polity impossible in Christian states, and no one has ever been able to know whether it is the priest or the master whom one is obliged to obey. Nevertheless, several peoples, even in Europe or nearby have wanted to preserve or reestablish the ancient system, but without success. The spirit of Christianity has won everything. The sacred cult has always remained or again become independent of the sovereign and without any necessary link to the state. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
Christianity is a completely spiritual religion, concerned exclusively with things Heavenly. The homeland of the Christian is not of this World. One does one’s duty, it is true, but one does it with a profound indifference toward the success or failure of one’s efforts. So long as one has nothing to reproach oneself for, it matters little to one whether anything is going well or poorly down here. If the state is flourishing, one hardly dares to enjoy public felicity, for fear of becoming puffed up with one’s country’s glory. If the state is in decline, one blessed the hand of God that weighs heavily on one’s people. For the society to be peaceful and for harmony to be maintained, every citizen without exception would have to be an equally good Christian. However, if, unhappily, there is a single ambition human, a single hypocrite, a Cataline, for example, or a Cromwell, one would quite undoubtedly gain the upper hand on one’s pious compatriots. Christian charity does not readily allow one to think ill of one’s neighbours. Once one has discovered by some ruse the art of deceiving them and of laying hold of a part of the public authority, behold a human established in dignity! God will that He be respected. Soon, behold a power! God wills that he be obeyed. Does the trustee of His power abuse it? He is the rod with which God punishes his children. It would be against one’s conscience to expel the usurper. It would be necessary to disturb the public tranquility, use violence and shed blood. All this accords ill with the meekness of a Christian. And after all, what difference does it make weather one is a free human or a surf in this value of tears? The essential thing is getting to Heaven, and reignation is but another means to that end. What is a foreign war breaks out? The citizens march without reservation into combat; none among them dread of deserting. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
Christians do their duty, but without passion for victory; they know how to die better than how to be victorious. What difference does it make whether they are the victors of the vanquished? Does not providence know better than they what they need? Just imagine the advantage a fierce, impetuous and passionate enemy could draw from their stoicism! Set them face to face with those generous peoples who were devoured by an ardent love of glory and homeland. Suppose your Christian republic is face to face with Sparta or Rome. The pious Christians will be beaten, crushed and destroyed before they realize where they are, or else they will owe their safety only to the scorn their enemies will conceive for them. To my way of thinking, the oath taken by Fabius’ soldiers was a fine one. They did not swear to die or to win; they swore to return victorious. And they kept their promise. Christians would never have taken such an oath; they would have believed they were tempting God. However, I am deceiving myself in talking about a Christian republic; these terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is too favourable to tyranny for tyranny not to take advantage of it at all times. True Christians are made to be slaves. They know it and are hardly moved by this. This brief life has too little value in their eyes. Christian troops, we are told, are excellent. Crusades were soldiers of the priest; they were citizens of the church; they were fighting for its spiritual country which the church, God knows how, had made temporal. Properly understood, this is a throwback to paganism. Since the Gospel does not establish a national religion, no holy war is possible among Christians. Under the pagan emperors, Christian soldiers were brave. All the Christian authors affirm this, and I believe it. This was a competition for honour against the pagan troops. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Once the emperors were Christians, this competition ceased. And when the cross expelled the eagle, all Roman valour disappeared. The doctrines and covenants of the civil religion ought to be simple, few in number, precisely worded, without explanations or commentaries. The existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent divinity that foresees and provides; the life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contact and of the laws. These are beneficial doctrines and covenants. As for the negative doctrines and covenants, I am limiting them to just one, namely intolerance. It is part of the cults we have excluded. Those who distinguish between civil and theological intolerance are mistaken, in my opinion. Those two types of intolerance are inseparable. It is impossible to live in peace with those one believes to be damned. To love them would be to hate God who punishes them. It is absolutely necessary either to reclaim them or torment them. Whatever theological intolerance is allowed, it is impossible for it not to have some civil effect; and once it does, the sovereign no longer is sovereign, not even over temporal affairs. Thenceforward, priests are the true masters; kings are simply their officers. Now that there are no longer is and never again can be an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be shown to all those that tolerate others, so long as their doctrine and covenants contain nothing contrary to the duties of a citizen. However, whoever dares stay outside the church there is no salvation ought to be expelled from the state, unless the state is the church and the prince is the pontiff. Such a doctrine and convent is good only in a theocratic government; in all other forms of government it is ruinous. The reason why Henry IV is said to have embraced the Roman religion should make every decent man, and above all any prince who knows how to reason, leave it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
I should always set my sights on things that are nearer at hand to me. The Fourth Wave society, unlike its predecessor, must (and will) draw on an amazing variety of energy sources—hydrogen, solar, geothermal, tidal, biomass, lightning discharges, ultimately perhaps advanced fusion power, as well as other courses not yet imagined in 2022. Fourth wave civilization will rely on a far more diversified technological base as well, springing from biology, genetics, electronics, materials science, as well as on outer space and under-the-sea operations. While some new technologies will require high energy inputs, much Fourth Wave technology will be designed to use less, not more, energy. Nor will these new technologies be as massive and ecologically dangerous as those of the past. Look how much smaller computers, hot water heaters, heaters, and many other things have become and how efficient LED lights are, and how long they last. Many of our new technologies will continue to be small in scale, simple to operate, with the waste of one industry predesigned for recycling into primary materials for another. For Fourth Wave civilization, the most basic raw material of all—and one that can never be exhausted—is information, including imagination. Through imagination and information, substitutes will be found for many of today’s exhaustible resources—although this substitution, once more, will all too frequently be accompanied by drastic economic swings and lurches. With information becoming more important than ever before, the new civilization will restructure education, redefine scientific research and, above all, reorganize the media of communication. Today’s mass media, both print and electronic, are wholly inadequate to cope with the communications load and to provide the requisite cultural variety for survival. Instead of being culturally dominated by a few mass media, Fourth Wave civilization will rest om interactive, de-massified media, feeding extremely diverse and often highly personalized imagery into and out of the mind-stream of the society. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
Television has already given way to “indi-video”—narrow-casting by the Internet of thousands of shows that have never aired on television, images addressed to a single individual at a time. We may also eventually use medication, direct brain-to-brain communication, and other forms of electrochemical communication only vaguely hinted at until now. All of which will raise startling, though not insoluble, political and moral problems. The fusion of Fourth Wave energy forms, technologies, and information media will speed revolutionary changes in the way we work. Factories are still being built (and in some parts of the World they will continue to be built for decades to come), but Fourth Wave factory already bears little resemblance to those we have known until now, and—in the rich nations—the number of people in factor jobs will continue to plummet. The factory will no longer serve as a model for other types of institutions. Nor will its primary function be that of mass production. Even now the Fourth Wave factor produces de-massified—often customized—end products. It relies on advanced methos such as wholistic or “presto” production. It will ultimately use less energy, waste less raw material, employ fewer components, and demand far more design intelligence. Most significantly, many of its machines will be directly activated not by workers but as a distance, by consumers themselves. Those who do work in Fourth Wave factories will perform far less brutalizing or repetitive work than those still trapped in traditional jobs. They will not be paced by mechanical conveyor belts. Noise levels will be low. Workers will come and go at hours convenient for them. The actual workplace will be far more humane and individualized, often with flowers and greenery sharing the space with machines. Within fixed limits, payment and fringe benefit packages will be increasingly tailored to individual preference. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
As we are seeing, many jobs will shift of work from both office and factory back into the home and remain there. However, not all jobs can, will, or should be caried out in people’s homes. Some doctors and dentists may even buy mansions and work out of their homes like in the Victorian days. As low-cost communications are substituted for high-cost transportation, as we increase the role of intelligence and imagination in production, further reducing the role of brute force or routine mental labour, a significant slice of the work in Fourth Wave societies will perform at least part of its work at home, factories remaining only for those who must actually handle physical materials. With information increasing in importance, universities will replace the factory as the central institution. Multinational executives, for their part, see the executive suite as the pivot of today. The new profession of “information manager” pictures their computer rooms as the center of the new civilization. Scientists look to the industrial research laboratory. A few remaining hipsters dream of restoring the agricultural commune to the center of a neo-medieval future. Others may nominate the “gratification chambers” of a leisure-drenched society. Yet, it is unlikely that any institution—not even the home—will play as central a role as the cathedral or the factory did in the past. For the society is likely to be built around a network rather than a hierarchy of new institutions. Corporations will stop towering over other social institutions and will be recognized as complex organizations that pursue multiple goals simultaneously—not just profit or production quotes. These managers will watch over (and be held personally responsible for) multiple “bottom lines.” #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
Executive paychecks and bonuses will gradually come to reflect this new multi-functionality, as the corporation, either through voluntary means or because it is compelled to, becomes more responsive to what today are regarded as non-economic and hence largely irrelevant factors—ecological, political, social, cultural, and moral. This society will also be built on segmentation and diversity. Instead of a society that concentrates population, energy flows, and other features of life Fourth Wave Society will understand the meaning of “appropriate scale.” Many new organizations will do away with the old insistence on one person is the boss—all of which suggests a work World in which more people share temporary decisional power. Vast increases in white-collar and service work will be absorbed who had been previously laid off by the shrinking manufacturing sector. The sufferings that World War II brought to so many have deeply shocked us but the significance of those sufferings must also be examined from a fresh standpoint. In all theories offered to a bewildered World concerning it own woes, there is much anxiety and alarm at the symptoms but little search for the causes. If people accept a deceptive World-view as the Germans did and as the Russian do, or a defective one as so many others did and do, they must also accept the troubles and disaster which go with it. We must push the spade of enquiry deep down into the Earth that surrounds the roots of this problem of wars and riots, aggression and crimes, rather than be content with a mere surface view. The evils that menace our existence will then be found to grow out of two roots: ignorant egoism and unchecked emotion. The one is unnecessary, the others unreasonable. Each of the World Wars which afflicted humankind was the inevitable self-earned effect of causes previously set going. The unerring law of Karma brings whatever good or evil recompense is deserved. The debit account of wrong done is allowed to run on until the end of the page and then it has to be totalled and the balance entered to adjust the total. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
The great famines, like the great wars, which afflicted and still afflict humankind, constitute part of this adjustment, part of the payment which humankind is forced to make by the higher governing law of karma. Their causes are as plural as the causes of the wars, although on the deepest level there is only the same single cause of human ignorance leading to human wrong-doing. One of them is the refusal of humankind to utilize the Earth’s grain harvests for its own direct use, diverting them instead to the use of animals deliberately bred for slaughter and then eating the grain indirectly in the form of those animals’ corpses. Such a way of supporting life is both utterly unnecessary and utterly cruel. The life of innocent creatures cannot be taken upon such baseless grounds with impunity. Retribution has hit humankind again and again in the past, with the weapons of hunger, disease, and war, and it is hitting them again in the present. If it does not face the real challenge and meet it, no reorganization of agricultural methods on more efficient and more productive lines, no re-arrangement of trading relations, no governmental subsidies in cash, tractors, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, or equipment will save humankind from suffering famines and enduring starvation. A radical change of life is demanded from humanity, a repentant change of heart is the only way to win back Nature’s smile. It must stop this unjustified murder of helpless living beings, murdered merely because they are considered to be less important on the scale of evolution. It must accept the perfectly sufficient diet of grains, cereals, vegetables, pulses, fruits, nuts, and dairy produce which will enable it to live with less suffering and more healthy, less punishment and more conscience, than other diets permit. All praise be yours through Brother Sun. All praise be your through Sister Moon. By Mother Earth, the Spirit be Praised. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
By Brother Mountain, Sister Sea, through Brother Wind and Brother Air, through Sister Water, Brother Fire, the Stars above give thank to Thee, all praise to those who live in Peace. All praise be yours, through Brother World. All praise be yours, through Sister Whale. By nature’s song, the spirit be praised. By Brother Eagle, Sister Loon, though Brother Tiger, Sister Seal, let creatures all give thanks to Thee. All praise to those who live in peace. Ask of the beasts and they shall teach you the beauty of the Earth. Ask of the Trees and they shall teach you the beauty of the Earth. Ask of the Flowers and they shall teach you the beauty of the Earth. Ask of the Wind and it shall teach you the beauty of the Earth. A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, but it shall not come near you. You shall behold only with your eyes, and see the recompense of the wicked. Because you have made the Lord your fortress, and the Most High your refuge, no evil shall befall you, neither shall any plague come near your tent. For He will give His Angels charge over you, to guard you in all your ways. They shall bear you upon their hands, lest your strike your foot against a stone. You shall tread upon the lion and asp, you shall trample on the young lion and serpent. Because he has set his love upon Me, I will deliver him, I will protect him because he has known my name. He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and bring him to honour. I will give him abundance of long life, and he shall witness My salvation. Thou art holy, O Thou that art enthroned upon the praises of America. And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. [And they receive sanction one from the other, and say: Holy in the highest Heavens, the place of His abode; Holy upon Earth, the work of His might power, Holy forever and to all eternity is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of the radiance of His glory.] #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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The Kingdom on Earth Would be Uncontaminated!
Life is not a destination; it is a journey. Accept life unconditionally. Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to accept the truth. Do the right things. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity. Even abbreviated celibacy purifies the soul and clears that channel of communication between the celibate and God. The next logical stage, of course, is extending the rule of celibacy to infinity—this is knowns as a spiritual marriage. Some people cherish spirituality above all else and wish to live a pure life, undefiled by the bestial urges of eroticism. Multitudes of men and women have been attracted to monasticism as a way of dedicating their lives to their religious ideals. Within these cloisters they strive for spiritual growth and depth, union with God, communion with their saints, and in general, to shun worldliness. Celibacy is, as we have seen, an integral part of the monastic system, exalted as an absolute good and exacted as an essential instrument for achieving spiritual purity. It is seldom, however, what motivates people to enter cloisters. They merely accept it, even embrace it, as an essential component of their determined pursuit of godliness. Occasionally, however, celibacy by and of itself is one of the bedrock principles that inspires religious movements. Often, devotees forsake mainstream society for celibate communal life. The Essenes were one such group. More recently, various Christian sects including the Shakers, Peace Mission angels, Koreshan Unity, and Sanctificationst Commonwealth have celebrated celibacy as the cornerstone of their belief systems. These groups concur wholeheartedly with the orthodox Christian theology premise that pleasures of the flesh are the root of evil, but they draw quite contrary conclusions about what this means. Not for them the corrosive, postlapsarian vision of a bifurcated humanity, Eve’s seductive daughters forever tempting Adam’s weak sons. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Instead, these sectarians zero in on the evils of pleasures of the flesh, glorify celibacy as redemptive, and develop cogent doctrines with feminists values at their core. Femtech is actually one of the fastest growing sectors in the economy. In 2018, the global femtech market was worth $4 billion. By 2025, that number is projected to grow to $50 billion. Nonetheless, one assistant to living virginity for the sake of the Kingdom is community. Men and women are “relational beings.” Relationships constitute the person (as we say today), just as in the Trinity it is the “relationships” (of the Father to the Son, of they Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son, et cetera) that constitute the three divine “Persons.” No-one can live and grow harmoniously without real and deep inter-personal relationships. Community is often precisely what constitutes our “hundredfold” in this life. When it is healthy and genuine, community enables us to have (and to be) fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Friendships too with people of the other gender (which can easily become danger if they are cultivated exclusively and furtively) are a great gift, if they are shared in some way with one’s community. For some time now, new forms of celibacy and consecrated virginity have come to exist in the Church, know as “secular institutes.” Their members each live in their own home and environment, yet the fact of sharing the same spirituality and observing the same rule, and the strong human bonds between them, reinforced by the days and weeks they spend together during the year, can be for them the equivalent of a community. On the other hand, there is a question about diocesan priests and pastors who live entirely along. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Is this a suitable situation in which to live in celibacy? I believe we must have the courage to face up to this problem. They very example of secular institutes today shows that it is possible to achieve a type of community and communion without living together under the same roof. The natural community where a diocesan priest finds nourishment and support, and is also challenged when necessary, is the “presbyterium.” When this ministry first appeared in history, alongside bishops and deacons, the term indicated the community of presbyters gathered around their bishop—a community which the martyr St. Ignatius compares to the college of apostles gathered around Jesus. Every reform of the clergy has felt the need to tackle this problem, by creating forms of common life for the clergy, some of which are still actively functioning today. A presbyterium whose members know one another, who cultivate the bonds of brotherhood established during the years spent together in the seminary, who meet for monthly retreats and spiritual exercises, together with their bishop, and who exchange news and experiences, especially in these days of easy communications, is already a form of community which must be strengthened at all costs. Jesus’ words about celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom are preceded, as often happens in the Gospel, by the fact. And the fact is Jesus Himself, Who not only remained a virgin but was also born of a virgin mother. After Jesus, called by the Fathers “the-Arch-Virgin” (Archiparthenos), there is Mary, who the Church calls “the Ever-Virgin” (Aeiparthenos). “The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a virgin,” reports Luke 1.26. Notwithstanding all the discussions, the words are there, in the Bible, firm as a rock. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Exegetes point out that on this point Luke’s account depends on the prophecy of Isaiah 7.14: “The virgin is with child, and will give birth to a son.” This is true, but it changes nothing, in fact it heightens the importance of the Gospel account by demonstrating its long prophetic preparation and rootedness in the history of salvation. It is the literary presentation of the fact, the account of the event, which depends on Isaiah, not the event that is recounted. If in fact, behind the account, there had not been a new event that actually happened, why would the evangelist and the Christian community have thought of that very prophecy, which (at least in the Septuagint text) contained the idea of virginity, so foreign to the Jewish mentality of the time? Why not copy, for example, the mode of Isaac’s birth—much more acceptable and biblically convincing—or that of Moses or some other Old Testament celebrity? The answer is given: in order to mark Christ’s difference and superiority over any others human who came before Him. However, that is something we can say, after the event, and the Fathers did say so from the second century onwards, once the superior value of virginity for Christians had been affirmed. However, the community in which this account was formed was not yet in a position to say so. It did not yet have the elements to enable it to give precedence to virginity—especially in its feminine version—over marriage. To suppose, already in this initial stage of the Christian faith, a knowledge and influence of pagan myths about the miraculous births of the gods, would be altogether artificial and without foundation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The most important thing to note is, therefore, not that the Gospel account depends on the prophecy of Isaiah, but that both the account and the prophecy depend on a certain event that God had first pre-announced and later accomplished in the fullness of time. I have never understood those biblical scholars who recognize the prophetic value of the Old Testament as a proclamation of the preparation for the New, but who then refuse to recognize any such prophetic character in any actual text, including this text of Isaiah, which the Gospel itself explicitly relates to the birth of Christ from the Virgin Mary (Matthew 1.23). At the dawn of the new times, May, in her virginity, embodies the new form of life which has been made possible precisely by the coming of the Kingdom. One could see a symbolic significance in the counter between Mary and Elizabeth in the Visitation. Elizabeth, representing the Old Testament economy (Matthew 11.13: “For all the Prophets and the Torah up to John prophesied”), was married; Mary, representing the New Testament economy, is a virgin. In Mary appears all the splendor of the biblical motivation for virginity, expressed in the words “for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven” and “for the Lord.” She was chosen; the Kingdom “overcame” her, took possession of her, and she let herself be possessed. Jeremiah would say: she let herself be “seduced.” St. Paul is the man “set apart for the service of the Gospel” (Romans 1.1); Mary is the woman singled out and set apart for the Author of the Gospel. I believe that the idea of a “vow” of virginity taken by Mary, apart from being biblically unfounded, actually diminishes rather than enhances Our Lady’s virginity, because it would then depend more on the personal initiative of a creature than on the sovereign and free initiative of God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It would there be an ascetical practice, rather than a work of grace. Mary did not “find favour with God” because she was a virgin; she was a virgin because she had found favour with God, and she was chosen so that through her the beginnings of the Kingdom on Earth would be uncontaminated. Certainly Mary responded perfectly, with absolute faith, to call to virginity. She accepted all its consequences joyfully and without discussion, saying: “Here I am!” She thus became the model for all the countless hosts of young men and women who, through the centuries, were to receive the same call to be “virgins and mothers,” “virgins and fathers.” After the title of “Theotokos” (Mother of God), that of “Ever-Virgin” is the one by which Mary is most often invoked by the liturgy, both Latin and Orthodox. The latter, in its finest Marian hymn, the Akathistos, never tires of greeting her with the refrain: “Hail, Virgin Spouse,” invoking her as the model and protector of virgins: “Hail, mother and nurse of virgins! Hail, you who lead souls to the Bridegroom! Hail, Virgin Spouse!” Saint Gregory of Nyssa brings out the profound affinity that exists between Mary and every Christin virgin, which in turn is based on an analogous relationship to Christ. He writes: “That which came about physically in Mary Immaculate, when the fullness of Godhead shone in Christ through virginity, is also repeated in every soul who follows reason and remains a virgin, even though the Lord no longer makes Himself materially present.” Mary is not only the model but also the “advocate” and protector of virgins. She does not confine herself to pointing out the way of virginity, but helps them to follow it by her intercession and watchful care. Saint Basil writes: “Just as clear and transparent bodies, when struck by a ray of light, themselves become resplendent and reflect a different ray, so do those Spirit-bearing souls, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, themselves become fully spiritual and shed grace other others.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Mary is, quintessentially, the “Spirit-bearing” soul, bearer of the Holy Spirit; she is the shining body who casts light over others. So true is this that even Luther was obliged to write of her: “No image of woman gives a man such pure thoughts as this virgin does.” Mary is truly a unique creature, the “blessed one among women.” All other women in the Church are either virgins physically and mothers spiritually, or physically mothers and spiritually virgins. She alone is both, in other words physically and spiritually both “virgin and mother.” God could choose no more eloquent language than this by which to honour both marriage and virginity, and to make us accept both as His handiwork. These two charisms, coming “from the same Spirit,” before dividing into two categories of persons in the Church, found themselves united in Mary, who is the first cell and model of the entire Church. Thus, no state of life in the Church is deprived of the glory of having, in Mary, its own beginnings and model, and no state of life can boast of imitating Mary by itself, with no need of the other. “All creatures,” writes the poet we met earlier, “lack something. Those who are carnal lack purity. [Instead of “carnal” and “pure,” read “virgin” and “mother,” and all will be clear.] She, on the contrary, lacks nothing, because, though carnal, she is pure. However, though pure, she is also carnal. So it is that she is not simply a woman unique among all women. She is a creature unique among all creatures. Literally the first, after God.” Until the human psyche is equilibrated it cannot gain durable peace or solid wisdom, and the aspirant must turn one’s attention to those aspects of one’s psyche the development of which has not kept pace with those with which one has been most concerned. Balanced living does not overdevelop one phase and underdevelop another. If an individual’s advance is an unbalanced one, if its various points do not meet on the same even level, then there is no alternative but to go backward and bring up the laggards. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
If one has purified one’s emotions of grossness and selfishness but failed to purge one’s intellect of errors and illusions, then one will have to undertake this task. One has to build up the other sides of one’s nature, where they have been neglected in the building of the mystical side. And this will enable one in one’s mystical attainment to “bring it down to Earth,” as it were, and adjust it to the body, intellect, and environment. It is very encouraging to one to have the “Witness Self” experience quite a number of times. It speaks more for itself than any descriptive words could do. The student’s meditation may have been unfruitful on the surface for many years, yet if one remains loyally patient, and persistent, one may have at last in this experience the definite and discernible fruits of seeds sown long before. The experience does help to make the burden—and it is such to old souls—of the body more bearable. It helps in the understanding of what Spirit means, and gives testimony of its existence. It demonstrates what the quest is trying to reach, and how real is its divine goal. It is very important that the disciple should have this experience, and it is a favourable augury for one’s future progress. The vision of truth is one thing, its durable realization is another. The felicitous experience of the Overself may come briefly during meditation. It comes abruptly. At one moment the student is one’s ordinary egoistic self, struggling with one’s restless thoughts and turbulent feelings; at the next the ego suddenly subsides, and every faculty becomes quiescent. Al the disciple has to do is to be nonresistent to the divinity which is taking possession of one, to receive lovingly and laboriously. The oncoming of this experience will be marked by various other signs: the intellect becomes suspended; will, judgment, memory, and reasoning slip gently into abeyance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
A deep serenity unknown before takes possession of one, and an exquisite calm settle over one. In these moments of joyous beauty, the bitterest past is blotted out, and the ugliest history redeemed. With the mind deep-held by the Overself in an atmosphere of exaltation, the harassments and burdens of life beat but faintly at the portals of attention; the troubles of a lifetime recede to nothingness, the fears of the future decline into triviality. The disciple’s outlook on the World becomes enlarged, ennobled, and illumined, and is no longer bounded wholly by commonplace interests. The veils hiding truth from one are lifted for a time. The idea that one has a higher self, the conviction that one has a soul, breaks in upon one’s “little existence” with great revelatory force, and one feels one is emerging into glorious light after a dreary journey through a long dark tunnel. Attributions do not occur in an interpersonal vacuum. Common interpersonal processes in depression such as reassurance seeking may be interpreted as a way of gathering information for the formation of attributions. Hopelessness common to depression may generate interpersonal stressors. Other types of expectations may be closely linked to interpersonal processes. A child who is abused or neglected may come to expect other people to neglect or abandon one. A depressed individual who experiences a great deal of interpersonal rejection is likely to expect further rejection from other people. Parents who pressure their children for inappropriate levels of achievement may inadvertently teach perfectionist attitudes to their children, who then become prone to eating disorders as a maladaptive means of achieving these standards. In cases such as these, the distorted cognitive process that contributes to the psychological problems have interpersonal origins. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The tradition of behaviourism places the focus not on the internal “unobservable” cognitive processes, but rather on the observable behaviours and the resultant rewards or punishments that they receive from the environment. With a moment’s thought, it ought to be apparent that many of the maladaptive behaviours that contribute to and even define psychopathology are interpersonal behaviours. Similarly, the behaviours whose extinction can be implicated in the development of psychological problems also tend to be interpersonal in nature. Perhaps most prominently, the sources of reward and punishment are typically found in the social environment. If a person becomes lonely and depressed because one no longer finds pleasure in relations with other people, and therefore withdraws, one’s feeling of reward or punishment tells only half of the story. The other half concerns what other people do or fail to do to create that sense of reward or punishment. Admittedly, not all behaviours that play a role in poor mental health are interpersonal in nature. However, the behaviours with the greatest capability for producing feelings of reward or punishment tend to be inherently social, involving a transaction between two or more people. Advances in the medical sciences have brought a tremendous amount of attention to the potential for understanding psychopathology through such biological mechanisms as genetics, neurochemical agents, and neurophysiological structures and functions. The identification of numerous such agents in most problems we have discussed, coupled with the documented efficacy of pharmacological treatments for them, has brought great acclaim to the biological paradigm. How could an interpersonal paradigm possibly be integrated into a biological perspective on mental illness? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The ultimate resolution of the mind-body debate is that biology affects psychology and psychology affects biology. It can now be stated with equal certainty that interpersonal interaction affects biological functions. When people are reared in social isolation, there are clear biological consequences. Individuals reared in social isolation have lower brain weights that those reared in a socially enriched environment. Males exposed to aggressive behaviour from another over a long period, exhibit adrenal hypertrophy and an increase in basal corticosterone. These biological signs of stress indicate that exposure to aggressive interpersonal behaviour can affect physiological structure and neurochemical action. Early adverse experiences (exempli gratia, exposure to maternal depression, inadequate parenting) in neonates produce changes in corticotrophin-releasing-factor containing neurons and the sympathetic nervous system; these changes may be immediately protective, but are detrimental in the long run by creating an increased sensitivity to stress. Adults who experience marital distress exhibit a variety of immunosuppressive effects and changes in endocrine function. These are only a few of the findings that unequivocally establish a connection between interpersonal experiences and subsequent changes in biological structures and functions. There is considerable plasticity in both human and nonhuman brains well into the lifespan. One of the agents responsible for changes in brain development, as well as other neurological actions, is interpersonal interaction. Therefore, when a biological agent or action is identified in association with a particular psychological disorder, it is essential to bear in mind that interpersonal experiences may be partially or largely responsible for the biological disturbance that some are tempted to conclude “caused” the problem. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Finally, the psychodynamic paradigm seeks to explain psychopathology through largely unconscious motivations and drives that are imbalanced or otherwise maladaptive. Early experiences with the mother and father, as well as siblings, projection, and transference, all figure prominently in psychodynamic explanations. Various factions of the psychodynamic school, such as object relations theorists and attachment theory, as even more explicitly interpersonal in their orientation. Indeed, the “object” in object relations is “people.” The “attachment” in attachment theory is attachment to caregiver (id est, another person). Although the interpersonal paradigm takes a more behavioural perspective, and the psychodynamic paradigm is more psychological in its orientation, the two actually share many similar interests when it comes to explaining psychopathy. The biopsychosocial model recognizes that biology, cognition, affect, and social behaviour are mutually influential. A complete understanding of any health problem, whether physical or psychological, cannot be attained without granting attention to biological, psychological, and social factors, according to this model. This intelligent recognition is long overdue, and should be something of a wake-up call to advocates of a monolithic paradigm in mental health. Though the interpersonal paradigm has its own core assumptions, explanations, and predictions that are distinct from other schools of thought, its component fit well within the superordinate biopsychosocial model. Historically, scientific inquiry into mental health problems has emanated from a variety of perspective. Patterns of reinforcement and punishment can affect mental health. Close relationships may cause or be caused by mental health problems. Interpersonal interactions play a causal role in mental health. Interpersonal issues are also recognized as vulnerability factors that make people susceptible to the ill effects of stress, as well as potential stressors themselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Disturbances in interpersonal relations are viewed as inevitable consequences of most psychological problems. Interpersonal interactions are known to maintain psychopathology and to have significant impact on the course and outcome of mental disorders. However, psychology cannot comprehensively deal with mental illness and humanity. Because sometimes the community is afflicting the individual, like during the Salem Witch Trials. It is not always the individual that is the afflicter. However, psychology tends to assume that most people are rational, so the individual is to blame from the problems. And that is where religion comes in. Religion realizes the human nature can be sinful and often times groups of people do afflict individuals, so it teaches one how to deal with this on a spiritual level. We are also to pray and live a righteous life and pray to Jesus Christ and the devil will flee from you. Not only is mental illness cognitive, it is also spiritual. Some people have a mental and spiritual sickness. “Let the word [spoken by] Christ (the Messiah) have its home [in your hearts and minds] and dwell in you in [all its] richness, as you teach and admonish and train one another in all insight and intelligence and wisdom [in spiritual things, and as you sing] psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, making melody to God with [His] grace in your hearts,” reports Colossians 3.16. Have you ever felt as though somebody was watching you? Guess what? Whether you realize it or not, people are watching you. They are watching how you dress, how you take care of your home, how you treat other people. They are watching you at play and at work. They are trying to determine whether your words and your walk—your lifestyles—are consistent. What do they see? Are you a good representation of our God? Are you striving for excellence? Or are you compromising in so-called insignificant areas? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
God wants us to be people of integrity, people of honour, people who are trustworthy. A person of integrity is open and honest. One does not have any hidden agendas or ulterior motives. A person of integrity is true to one’s word. One keeps one’s commitments. One does not need a legal contract to force one to fulfill one’s promises; one’s word is one’s bond. People of integrity are the same in private as they are in public. They do not go out and treat their friends and coworkers kindly and then go home and treat their family rudely or disrespectfully. No, when you have integrity, you will do what is right whether anybody is watching or not. Every day our integrity is tested. If the bank teller gives you too much money in return, are you going to have integrity and go back and make things right? Or are you going to go out of there saying, “Thank You, Jesus! You did it again!” Do you call in sick at work so you can stay home and take care of your personal business, go to the beach, or go play golf? When the boss asks how things are going, do you inflate the figures in your favour? When the phone rings and it is somebody you do not want to talk to, do you tell your child to lie? “Tell them I am not home!” Lies are not coloured in the Bible. In God’s sight, there is no such thing as a white, gray, or black lie. A lie is a lie. If you are not telling the truth, that is being dishonest. Sonner or later, it will catch up to you. What you sow you will eventually reap. Understand this: If you will lie about the little things, before long you will lie about bigger things. We read about the large companies that have come tumbling down because of fraud and financial misdeeds. Those people did not start off stealing millions of dollars. Most likely, they started off compromising a hundred dollars here, a thousand dollars there. Then, when the opportunity came, they compromised millions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Do not kid yourself, if you will compromise in something small, eventually you will compromise in more serious matters. Compromise is a downhill slide. And theft is theft, whether it is a dollar, a thousand dollars, or a million dollars. If you are taking home your company’s office supplies, that is being dishonest. If you are not giving your company a full day’s work, that is wage theft, not integrity. If you are having to stretch the truth in order to get that new account, that is deceit, and God will not bless that. We need to live honestly before our God and before other people. I heard somebody put it this way: “Do not do anything that you would not feel comfortable reading about in the newspaper the next day.” If you do not have integrity, you will never reach your highest potential. Integrity is the foundation on which a truly successful life is built. Every time you compromise, every time you are less than honest, you are causing a slight crack in your foundation. If you continue compromising, that foundation will never be able to hold what God wants to build. If you do not first have integrity, you will never have lasting prosperity. Oh, if you do not take the high road and make the more excellent choices, you may enjoy some temporary success, but you will never see the fullness of God’s favour. On the other hand, if we settle for nothing less than living with integrity, God’s blessings will overtake us. Of course, we all want to prosper in life. However, the real question is: Are we willing to pay the price to do the right thing? It is not always easy. Are we paying our honest debts? Are we being above board in our business decisions? Are we treating other people with respect and honour? Are we being true to our word? Integrity and prosperity are flip sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
God may be reminding you about something such as paying a bill that you have swept under the rug. Maybe it is about getting to work on time consistently; maybe you know you should be more truthful in your business dealings. Start making things right. Step up to a higher level of integrity in those areas. God is calling us out of mediocrity and into excellence. The Christian Bible says if we will be faithful in little things, then God will trust us with more (see Matthew 25.21). If I will not do the right thing with a hundred buck, how can God trust me to do the right thing with millions of dollars? Yet how often have we heard of instances in which a person’s upward progress was thwarted because of one’s mismanagement o something seemingly minor and insignificant? You may not think it makes any difference when you do not pay your bills on time, or when you tell those “little white lies.” If you treat your friends one way, and your family another, you may think it does not make a difference. If you do not learn to do what is right in the little areas, God cannot trust you with more. Remember, our lives are an open book before God. He looks at our hearts. He looks at our motives. God sees every time you go the extra kilometer to do what is right. He also sees the times that you compromise and take the easy ways out. Be open and honest and tell the whole truth. Learn to listen to your conscience. God put that inside you so you would have an inner rule by which to know right from wrong. When you start to compromise, you will hear that alarm go off in your conscience. Do not ignore it. Do what you know in your heart is the right thing. Is someone watching you? Oh, yes; people are watching, and so is your Heavenly Father. Live this day to please Him, and you will be pleased with yourself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Let us look at this passage of scripture, so often misinterpreted and misleading to many in their praying: “And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not faint,” reports Luke 18.1. The Amplified Bible says, “And not turn crowd.” We ought always to pray. Obviously, God does not mean for us to crawl around on our knees, praying all the time; but you can be in an attitude of prayer continually. Here is what the Spirit of God revealed to me as I mediated and considered this scripture prayerfully: “If you have a need this morning and you prayed over it, believing that you received when you prayed, then tomorrow when some other need arises, do not faint, or turn coward and give up. they ought to pray about each need as it arises.” In Luke 18, verse 2, Jesus begins the parable: There was in a city a jungle, which feared not God, neither regarded man: And there was a window in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the Earth? (Luke 18.2-8). You would not take away from that scripture, nor would you really add to it, if you said, “Will He find that kind of faith on the Earth when He comes?” The widow was an insignificant person. She had no authority or political power. She had no support and no one to take care of her. She was at the mercy of the people. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Listen to what Jesus said: And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him (the unjust judge), saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. From this, some have inferred that the window just kept coming. The only indication for this interpretation is that it says, she came unto him, saying. You can interpret it two ways, but I choose to believe that the widow came to the unjust judge with fire in her eyes and authority in her voice; that while she was walking toward him, she was saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. The literal Greek says, “She was coming to him saying.” To me, this indicates she was coming and saying at the same time. She was talking as she was walking. The literal Greek says of Jesus that on one occasion “He was coming to them saying.” It does not really mean that He kept coming and saying the same thing. He was speaking to them as He was walking toward them. Of the judge, Jesus said, And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself. Notice this did not happen outwardly. It happened on the inside of him. Though I fear not God, nor regard man; Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. The words she spoke troubled him. Her words were filled with the authority of faith. Notice what she said: Avenge of mine adversary. She did not waste words. She did not say “maybe so” or “please” or “if it would not be too much trouble.” She demanded it. There was something about the words this widow spoke that troubled the unjust judge. It was the faith in the woman’s voice that troubled him, and her request was granted. Suppose this little widow had said to the unjust judge, “Those folks are giving me lots of trouble; let me tell you all the mean things they have done,” and then had gone back homes. What do you think would have happened? The unjust judge would have said, “I wonder why the woman came up here and told me all that.” No, she went to him with the answer. She did not mention the problem. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Neurosis is inhibition and anxiety. And what is normality? The freedom to love and to work. So we say. However, is there not something disingenuous about this jaunty loftiness? What are we hiding? Normality is the free pursuit of power—curbed, in deference to prevailing morality, only enough to maintain appearances and to keep us out of trouble. The child grabs for power in whatever ways spontaneously suggest themselves to him, and is so doing encounters disapproval, punishment, loss of love—so brining it about that the mere indication toward forbidden behaviours causes fear, counsels caution. Eventually the parental prohibitions, installed as conscience, operate from within, honoured as duty, enforced by guilt, elevated as right and as good. Morality is fear that has been transformed into conscience. The morality that is observed, as distinct from the morality that is but professed, measures the freedom that individuals have surrendered to the collective in return for security. The will to power impels the rush of life; mortality and fear constitute the barrier; the outcome in behaviour is a compromise. If the barrier is massive, the inhibition or deflection of drive may be so great that no trace of power will sustain the goal in view. But however masked or attenuated or denied, hunger for power is the source—for the selfless, the anchorite, the martyr, and the saint, no less than for the man on horseback. We say we want freedom and justice, and surely we do; but when the tyrant is overthrown and the palace ransacked, the triumphant leaders of the revolution proceed to consolidate that power which was, all along, the unavowed aim ulterior to freedom and justice. We sicken of power, would give it up, forsake it. We push it away, avert our faces. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
We try to locate the moving principle of life in love or spirit or service or sacrifice. However, power is inalienable. Renounced, it turns out to have been not renounced but cloaked. One simply reaches a point in the pursuit of power at which fear or scruple calls a halt. And there, at that point, inhibited from further pursuit, holding fast to what one has, one arrives at an uneasy equilibrium, alert to depredations equally from those who have more and from those who have less. Each of us, all of us, every moment of our lives, eating or trying not to be eaten, pursuing or fleeing, struggling to achieve power or dodging its hammer blows—or huddled uneasily at some halfway position. The way to live should issue, not only from our nature, but also from the nature of the World in which we live, the World that is shaped by the will to power groups. Waking up this morning, I see the blue sky, I join my hands in thanks for the many wonders of life; for having twenty-four brand new hours. The sun is rising on the frost and so is my awareness. I walked across the field of sunflowers. Tens of thousands of flowers waving at me; my awareness is like the sunflower; my hands are sowing seeds for the next harvest. My eat is hearing the sound of the rising tide on the magnificent sky. I see clouds approaching with joy from many directions. I can see the fragrant lotus ponds of my homeland; I can see coconut trees along the rivers; I can see rice fields stretch their shoulders launching at the sun and the rain. Mother Earth gives me coriander, basilicum, and celery. Tomorrow, the hills and mountains of the country will be green again. Tomorrow, the buds of life will grow quickly; the folk poetry will be as sweet as the songs of the children. The whole family of humans will sing together with me in my work. God will deliver you from the snare of the fowler, and from the destructive pestilence. He will cover you with His pinions, and under His wings shall you take refuge; His truth is a shield and armour. You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, now of the arrow that flies by day; of the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor of the destruction that ravages at noonday. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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This is a World of Struggle—We Live in a State of Perpetual War!
Always do the right thing. We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge. Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. As a ruling scheme of things is modified by inroads from outlying existence, it loses authority, is less able to banish dread; its adherents fall away. Eventually it fades, exists only in history, becomes quaint or primitive, becomes finally, a myth. Our myths were once blueprints of the architecture of reality. The Church, as defender of the regnant scheme of things, was right to stop Galileo; activities such as his import into the social order new orientations will destroy that order. For some, asceticism was a magnetic attraction because, carried to extremes and combined with proofs of divine favour, it could lead to sainthood. For the religious celibate who was exceedingly ambitious, this spiritual route had infinitely more appeal than that of complaint parenthood in a marriage. Some determined people indulged in marathon bouts of asceticism, fasting to starvation, mortifying their flesh, depriving their senses, even devising humiliations so repulsive that they could be assured few could replicate them. However, no individual would dream of drinking cancerous pus or the wash water of rotting, leprous limbs. Achieving sainthood was a serious business. Only 3,276 people who died from the beginning of Christianity to 1500 became saints, with only 87 successful candidates from 1350 to 1500. On the plus side for women, in that same period the male-to-female ratio of saints went from five to one to about two and a half to one. From 1350 to 1500—and this statistic is the most pertinent here—laywomen saints overtook males, though the greater number of clerical males gave male saints a clear lead over women in orders. For aspiring female saints, this was the most promising era ever. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Sainthood was that era’s great challenge, akin to aspiring to the Olympics or a Noble Prize today. For women severely limited in vocations other than drudging labour or motherhood, the stretch to being the very best practitioner of religion was appealing, especially to highly intelligent perfections such as Catherine of Siena, whose brief, bursting life won her the eternity of sainthood. I think these days we must particularly insist on that of the eyes. “The eye is the lamp of the body,” Jesus Christ says. “Now if your eye is clear, your whole body will be filled with light. But if your eye is not, your whole body will be darkness,” reports Matthew 6.22-23. In a civilization dominated by images, as our is today, images have become the privileged vehicle of ideology of a World saturated with sensuality, which has made human pleasures of the flesh its favourite theme, detaching it completely from the original meaning given to it by God. Today, healthy fasting from images has become more important than fasting from food. Food and drink, in itself, is never impure, but certain pictures and images are. St. John places “disordered desires of the eyes,” reports 1 John 2.16, among the three fundamental appetites, and St. Paul in turn exhorts us to “keep our eyes on what is seen rather than on what can be seen, for what can be seen is transitory but what is unseen is eternal,” reports 2 Corinthians 4.18. Visible things exert their formidable power of seduction over us precisely by making us forget that they are transitory. Their beauty is such that they appear, to a spirit still enslaved by matter, to be everlasting, although we can see with our own eyes that they wither and decay from one day to the next. St. Augustine, who was all too familiar with this struggle against the lure of material things and of deceptive beauty, can help us with his testimony. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
“Behold, You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for You. In my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things which You created. You were with me, but I was not with You. Created things kept me from You; yet if they had not been in You, they would not have been at all. I resist the allurements of my eyes, lest they entangle my feet. What countless seductions have men added to the things which entice the eyes, through the various arts and the works of craftsmen, in the form of clothes, shoes, vessels, and other artefacts of this kind, even in paintings and all sorts of representations—these things far overreach the bounds of necessary utility, moderation and faithful representation. Now I, who am speaking and seeing things clearly, get my steps entangled in these beautiful things…yet You pluck me out in Your mercy.” The best way to overcome the seductive power of images is not to “fix our gaze” on them, not to become “enchanted” by them. If you look at them, they have already won a victory over you. That, in fact, was all they wanted from you: that you would look at them. “Avert my eyes from pointless images,” we are taught to pray by one of the psalms (Psalms 119.37). The benefit derived from such mortification of the eyes is wonderful indeed! Through it we can experience something of tht ideal, so dear to the Fathers of the Church, of a “return to paradise,” to a time when all was pure and fresh and crystal-clear, as on a summer’s morning, “and the youthful body was so chaste that its manly gaze had the depths like a lake.” The motivation “for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven” is precisely the reason why we—especially we priests—are required to have this commitment to keep our eye and our whole body “in the life,” as Jesus Christ says. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
When brothers or sisters come to us, struggling, weak, and tempted by the flesh, they expect to find a safe hand to help them out of the quicksands of sensuality. However, to do this we need to have our feet on solid ground, otherwise we will tend to be drawn in after them ourselves. We are now seeing the spread of a repulsive impurity that threatens the very sources of human life. The Church, today as in the past, needs people who are austere with themselves, humble but sure of the inherent strength of grace, to oppose this flood of “debauchery, desire, revelry, carousing, and disgusting idolatry,” as Scripture calls in in 1 Peter 4.4, which is rushing the World to ruin. Today this is one of the most urgent services we must render, not only to the Kingdom of Heaven but to society itself. The “quality of life” truly is at stake! However, if we ourselves are defiled, or worse still engulfed and inflamed, by those quicksands, what help can we give? I believe that no motives of prudence or closing of ranks should silence the cry that is rising from the heart of our Mother the Church. If we have no qualms about denouncing the sins of others and of society, we should be equally frank in denouncing our own. There are too many priestly lives compromised, too many failures, too much depletion of energies in the Church, caused by the weaknesses of priests in this area! My brother priests, we with fear and trembling act quickly to put things right, as far as is necessary, because great is God’s pain and anger over these things. It is written that our God is a “jealous God,” reports Exodus 20.5. Who are we to defy God’s jealousy? We are the “friends of the Bridegroom,” and this title should fill us with joy, but also with a holy trepidation and with infinite respect for souls. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
It is a kind of blessed mortification of the flesh, that gains for us, with the Holy Spirit’s help, the grace of being truly “fathers,” our hearts free to love everyone without wanting to possess anyone. No price should seem to high to us, for a vocation that someone has summarized in the following words: “To live in the midst of the World, with no desire for its pleasures; to be a member of every family, yet belong to none; to share all sufferings, to penetrate all secrets, to heal all wounds; to go daily from men to God, to offer Him their homage and petitions, to return from God to men, to being them His pardon and His hope; to have a heart of iron for chastity and a heart of flesh for charity; to teach and to pardon, console and bless and to be blessed forever. O God, what a life is this, and it is thine, O priest of Jesus Christ.” When the ruling scheme of things comes to seem untrue or unimportant, one’s efforts within it become meaningless. One’s whole life becomes meaningless. The Heavenly City falls into ruins. The avenue to immortality ends on an abyss. One is cast back on one’s individual life, stares ahead through a transparence of days to death, which stands at the end. One enters a state of dread. Life then is borne forward on waves of cynicism and despair. One seeks distraction, death-defying games perhaps which invoke the specter from which one flinches. By surviving the heightened risk, one may achieve briefly the illusion of mastery. However, not for long. Within the confines of a single life death is unmasterable. Sometimes the distraction is less desperate and may contain creative possibilities. What began as a distraction from the loss of meaning and the dread of death may come to itself to have meaning and to protect against dread. The distraction, that is, becomes a new scheme of things. A committed chess player may finally lose awareness that life contains anything other than chess. A new defense against Ruy Lopez may be monument enough. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In such a recovery one may move to a scheme of things larger than the one that has crumbled; the crumbling itself may then be seen in a perspective that makes it meaningful, perhaps even inevitable. So the Marxists of the thirties become the Freudians of the forties, and the politics is subsumed under psychology. A. A. Brill was able to comprehend the rash of strikes during the Depression as rebellious sons acting out their defiance of fathers. For a thousand years Christianity was for the New World the scheme of things organizing man’s Worldview. It stood at the apex of a hierarchy within which were included all other schemes, fraternal, artistic, scholastic, political. That World order is now irretrievably lost. I come back to Eliot’s dictum that culture is the incarnation of religion. If that is true—and I believe it is true—a culture cannot forever survive the loss of its religion; for the lesser scheme of things which that culture will still be able to offer will, whatever their merits, lack that element of the sacred which previously had derived from religion, and without which no one of the lesser schemes will be able to achieve the unification of the whole. Science, like religion, is a scheme of things hierarchically ordered, including many subordinate schemes. The compelling paradigm of one age may, like phlogiston, be but a quaint superstition for the next, without disturbing the overriding rational-scientific scheme of things of which the varying paradigms are subordinate schemes. However, science has never, not even in its greatest ascendancy, claimed such cosmic scope as Christianity. Some of the joys and sorrows of man’s condition have not, within science, found a place or an accounting. Most particularly now do they find no place; for the rational-scientific scheme of things is itself on the decline. Fewer people now see it as coextensive with reality. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
More and more frequently people look away from science, or around its edges, in search of some new vision, some new scheme of things with which to order their lives. When there is not enough man’s work, it is hard to grow up. There is “nearly full employment” (with highly significant exceptions), but there get to be fewer jobs that are necessary or unquestionably useful; that require energy and draw on some of one’s best capacities; and that can be done keeping one’s honour and dignity. In explaining the widespread troubles of adolescents and young men, this simple objective factor is not much mentioned. Let us here insist on it. By “man’s work” I mean a very simple idea, so simple that it is clearer to ingenuous boys than to most adults. To produce necessary food and shelter is man’s work. During most of economic history most men have done this drudging work, secure that it was justified and worthy of a man to do it, though often feeling that the social conditions under which they did it were not worthy of a man, thinking, “It is better to die than to live so hard”—but they worked on. When the environment is forbidding, as in the Swiss Alps or the Aran Islands, we regard such work with poetic awe. In emergences it is heroic, as when the bakers of Paris maintained the supply of bread during the French Revolution, or the milkman did not miss a day’s delivery when the bombs recently tore up London. Many also for get about the labour of the enslaved Africans. For some reason, they are always depicted working in the hot sun, as if they only had to do forced labour during the summer, but they also had to work in the winter without shoes or shirts. Just something to consider. At present there is little such subsistence work. In Communitas my brother and I guess that one-tenth of our economy is devoted to it; it is more likely one-twentieth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Production of food is actively discouraged. Farmers are not wanted and the young men go elsewhere. (The farm population is now less than 15 percent the total population.) Building, on the contrary, is immensely needed. California needs 200,000 new units each year to keep up with expected population growth and prevent prices from further increasing, and needs increase that rate of production to 400,000 new units of housing production over the next seven years in order for prices to decline. However, because of rising house costs, the California population is seeing a decline. From 2020 to 2021, California lost 350,000 people. One would think that ambitious boys would flock to work. However, here we find that building, too, is discouraged. In a great city, for the last twenty years, hundreds of thousands in Sacramento have been ill housed, yet we do not see science, industry, and labour enthusiastically enlisting in finding the quick solution to a definite problem. The promoters are interested in long-term investments, the real estate men in speculation, the city planners in votes and grafting. The building craftsmen cannily see to it that their own numbers remain few, their methods antiquated, and their rewards high. None of these people is much interested in providing shelter, and nobody is at all interested in providing new manly jobs. Once we turn away from the absolutely necessary subsistence jobs, however, we find that an enormous proportion of our production is not even unquestionably useful. Everybody knows and also feels this, and there has recently been a flood of books about our surfeit of honey, our insolent chariots, the follies of exurban ranch houses, our hucksters and our synthetic demand. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Many acute things are said about this useless production and advertising, but not much about the workmen producing it and their frame of mind; and nothing at all, so far as I have noticed, about the plight of young fellow looking for a manly occupation. The eloquent critics of the American way of life have themselves been so seduced by it that they think only in terms of selling commodities and point out that the goods are valueless; but they fail to see that people are being wasted and their skills insulted. (TO give an analogy, in the many gleeful onslaughts on the Popular Culture that have appeared in recent years, there has been little thought of the plight of the honest artist cut off from his audience and sometimes, in public arts such as theater and architecture, from his medium.) What is strange about it? American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless. Faced by the failures of the Second Wave strategy, rocked by angry demands by the poor countries for a total overhaul of the global economy, and deeply worried about their own future—the rich nations hammered out a new strategy. Almost overnight many governments and “development agencies,” including the World Bank, the Agency for International Development, and the Overseas Development Council, switched to what can only be called a First Wave strategy. This formula is almost a carbon copy reverse of the Second Wave strategy: Instead of squeezing the peasants and forcing them into the overburdened cities, it calls for a new emphasis on rural development. Instead of concentrating on cash crops for export, it urges food self-sufficiency. Instead of striving blindly for higher GNP (Gross National Product) in the hopes that benefits will trickle down to the poor, it calls for resources to be channeled directly into “basic human needs.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
That makes sense because if the poor have no cash, they need an infusion of money, over a short-term duration, not just sporadically, and then a percentage increase to sustain them over the long term. It is the say way a trickle charger/battery maintainer works. Instead of pushing for labour-saving technologies, the new approach stresses labour-intensive production with low capital, energy, and skill requirements. Instead of building giant steel mills or large-scale urban factories, it favours decentralized, small-scale facilities designed for the village. Turning Second Wave arguments upside down, the advocates of the First Wave strategy were able to show that many industrial technologies were a disaster when transferred to poor communities. Machines broke down and went unrepaired. They needed high-cost, often raw materials. Trained labour was in short supply. Hence, the new argument ran, what was needed were “appropriate technologies.” Sometimes called “intermediate,” “Soft,” or “alternative,” these would lie, as it were, “between the sickle and the combine harvester.” Many less affluent communities actually preferred low technology equipment. Farmers and trucking companies still reeling from oil and fertilizer price hikes and from disappointments with supply chain shortages and the pandemic, actually banded further expansion into new industries and regions and urged increased production of products they knew how to produce and handle well. The intent was not merely to increase employment but to stifle urbanization by favouring rural cottage industry. There is much about this new formula that admittedly makes excellent sense. It confronts the need to slow down the massive migration to the cities. It aims to make the villages—where the bulk of the World’s less affluent live—more livable. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
This method is more sensitive to ecological factors. It stresses the use of inexpensive local resources rather than expensive imports. It challenges conventional, all-too-barrow definition of “efficiency.” It suggests a less technocratic approach to development, taking local customs and culture into account. It emphasizes improving the conditions of the poor rather than passing capital through the hands of the rich in the hopes some will trickle down. Yet after all due credit is given, the First Wave formula remains just that—a strategy for ameliorating the worst of the First Wave conditions without ever transforming them. It is a Band-Aid, not a sure, and it is perceived in exactly these terms by many governments around the World. The sudden love affair with labour-intensivity is also subject to the charge that it is self-serving for the rich. The longer the poor countries and communities remain under First Wave conditions, the fewer competitive goods they are likely to shove onto an overloaded World market. The longer they stay down on the farm, so to speak, the less oil, gas, and other scare resources they will siphon off, and the weaker and less troublesome they will remain politically. There is also, built deep into the First Wave strategy, a paternalistic assumption that while other factors of production need to be economized, the time and energy of the labourer need not be—that unrelieved backbreaking toil in the field or rice paddies is fine—so long as it is done by somebody else. Labour-intensive techniques have suddenly been rendered attractive, thanks to a medley of hippie ideology, return to the myth of the golden age and noble savage, and criticism of the reality of the capitalist World. Much of what we now call “advanced science” was developed by scientists in rich countries to solve the problems of the rich countries. Precious little research has been addressed to the everyday problems of the World’s poor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Nonetheless, any “development policy” that begins by blinding itself to the potentials of advanced scientific and technology knowledge condemns hundreds of millions of desperate, hungry, toiling peasants to perpetual degradation. In some places, and at certain times, the First Wave strategy can improve life for large numbers of people. Yet there is painfully little evidence to show that any sizable country can ever produce enough, using premechanized First Wave methods, to invest in change. Indeed, a mass of evidence suggests the exact opposite. However, the World already has 8 billion people. If we are having problems feeding and housing all these people, perhaps more communities and countries need to promote abstinence and celibacy. We want to reduce everything from having a strain on the planet, from cows to automobiles, but maybe humans need to practice self-control and realize it is a good idea to stop reproducing because they are fruitful, but no longer prospering. In a World of exploding diversity we shall have to invent scores of innovative strategies and stop looking for models ether in the industrial present—or in the preindustrial past. It is time we began to look at the emergent future. Once the legislative power has been well established, it is a matter of establishing the executive power in the same way. For this latter, which functions only by means of particular acts, not being of the essence of the former, is naturally separate from it. Were it possible for the sovereign, considered as such, to have the executive power, right and fact would be so completely confounded that we would no longer know what is law and what is not. And the body of politic, thus denatured, would soon fall prey to the violence against which it was instituted. Since the citizens are all equal by the social contract, what everyone should do can be prescribed by everyone. On other hand, no one has the right to demand that someone else do what one does not do for oneself. Now it is precisely this right, indispensable for making the body politic live and move, that the sovereign gives the prince in instituting the government. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Several people have clamed that this act of establishment was a contract between the populace and the leaders it gives itself, a contract by which are stipulated between the two parties the conditions under which the one obliges itself to command and the other to obey. It will be granted, I am sure, that this is a strange way of entering into a social contract! However, let us see if this opinion is tenable. First, the supreme authority cannot be modified any more than it can be alienated; to limit it is to destroy it. It is absurd and contradictory for the sovereign to acquire a superior. To obligate oneself to obey a master is to return to full liberty. Moreover, it is evident that his contract between the people and some or other persons would be a particular act. Whence it follows that this contract could be neither law nor an act of sovereignty, and that consequently it would be illegitimate. It is also clear that the contracting parties would, in relation to one another, be under only the law of nature and without any guarantee of their reciprocal commitments, which is contrary in every way to the civils state. Since the one who has force at one’s disposal is always in control of its employment, it would come to the same thing if we were to give the name contract to the act of a human who would say to another, “I am giving you all my goods, on the condition that you give me back whatever you wish.” There is only one contract in the state, that of the association, and that alone excludes any other. It is impossible to imagine any public contract that was not a violation of the first contract. The act that institutes the government is not a contract but a law. The trustees of the executive power are not the masters of the populace but its officers; the populace can establish and remove them when it pleases; for them there is no question of contracting, but of obeying; and in taking on the functions the state imposes on them, they merely fulfill their duty as citizens, without in any way having the right to dispute over the conditions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Thus, when it happens that the populace institutes a hereditary government, whether it is monarchial within a single family or aristocratic within a class of citizens, this is not a commitment it is entering. It is a provisional form that it gives the administration, until the populace is pleased to order it otherwise. It is true that these changes are always dangerous, and that the established government should never be touched except when it becomes incompatible with the public good. However, this circumspection is a maxim of politics and not a rule of law [droit], and the state is no more bound to leave civil authority to its leaders than it is to leave military authority to its generals. Again, it is true that in such cases it is impossible to be too careful about observing all the formalities required in order to distinguish a regular and legitimate act from a seditious tumult, and the will of an entire people from the clamour of a faction. And it is here above all tht one must not grant anything to odious cases except what cannot be refused according to the full rigour of the law [droit]. And it is also from this obligation that the price derives a great advantage in preserving his power in spite of the people, without anyone being able to say that he has usurped it. For in appearing to use only his rights, it is quite easy for him to extend them, and under the pretext of public peace, to prevent assemblies destined to reestablish good order. Thus he avails himself of a silence he keeps from being broken, or of irregularities he causes to be committed, to assumes that the opinion of those who are silenced by fear is supportive of him, and to punish those who dare to speak. This is how the decemvirs, having been first elected for one year and then continued for another year, tried to retain their power in perpetuity by on longer permitting the comitia to assemble. And it is by this simple means that all the governments of the World, once armed with the public force, sooner or later usurp the public authority. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The periodic assemblies I have spoken of earlier are suited to the prevention or postponement of this misfortune, especially when they have no need for a formal convocation. For then the prince could not prevent them without openly declaring himself a violator of the laws and an enemy of the states. The opening of these assemblies, which have as their sole object the preservation of the social treaty, should always take place through two propositions which can never be suppressed, and which are voted on separately: The first: Does it please the sovereign to preserve the present form of government? The second: Does it please the people to leave its administration to those who are now in charge of it? I am presupposing here what I believe I have demonstrated, namely that in the state there is no fundamental law that cannot be revoked, not even the social compact. For if all the citizens were to assemble in order to break this compact by common agreement, no one could doubt that it was legitimately broken. Grotius even thinks that each person can renounce the state of which one is a member and recover one’s natural liberty and one’s goods by leaving the country. (On the understanding that one does not leave in order to evade one’s duty and to be exempt from serving the homeland the moment it needs us. In such circumstances, taking flight would be criminal and punishable; it would no longer be withdrawal, but desertion.) However, it would be absurd that all the citizens together could not do what each of the can do separately. Looking at Census facts, what I found interesting were the demographics. In California, 72 percent of the population is White alone, 6.5 percent is Black, alone. 1.6 percent is American Indian. 15.5 percent is Asian alone. Less than 1 percent is Native Hawaiian. 4 percent is two or more races. 40 percent is Hispanic. We have seen a huge decline in the Black population. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Psychological problems are entangled with interpersonal problems beyond those in the family of origin or orientation. This is a point that is sadly overlooked by those who seek to explain psychopathology by looking back to early childhood experiences with parents. For example, young adults who are unmarried place a great deal of importance on dating/romantic relationships and platonic friendships. For such people, social support from family members can do little to minimize their loneliness; what they seek are rewarding relationships with dating/romantic partners and friends. When these relationships are unavailable or distressed, psychological problems are often evident. The ill effects of conflict on personal relationships are well established. The experience of excessive and hostile conflict can have equally severe intrapersonal consequences. Themes of destructive conflict are evident in the findings on eating disorders, personality disorders, alcoholism, schizophrenia, psychogenic sexual dysfunction, and somatoform disorders. Conflict is an interpersonal phenomenon that appears heightened in both family and other relationships. In a very fundamental way, most people appear to seek and desire some form of harmony with at least a few other people with whom they share their lives. When this harmony is corroded by conflict, mental health problems often emerge. At the same time, the experience of a mental healthy problem such as alcoholism or a personality disorder can also disrupt the harmony inherent in close personal relationships. This itself has the potential to propagate intense interpersonal conflict. Interpersonal rejection is a social phenomenon that purses most mental health problems. Although depression is one of the problems that has focused most attention on interpersonal rejection, thanks to Coyne’s interactional theory, this phenomenon is evident among people with schizophrenia, eating disorders, and personality disorders. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Human beings can be remarkably intolerant of those who present a less than “normal,” competent, or personal image. The social-interactional goals of most people leave little room for significant communication with others who have obvious symptoms of psychopathology. Consequently, psychologically distressed individuals are often shunned and rejected by others—even those with whom they have share close relationships. The phenomenon of interpersonal rejection can be devastating to one’s sense of self-worth. The realization that others do not like, care for, or want to spend time with the self is profoundly distressing for all but the most pathologically avoidant individuals. The anguish that is perpetuated by interpersonal rejection can exacerbate minor psychological frailty into full-blown mental disorder. Of course, as the symptoms of poor mental health become more prominent, the likelihood of eliciting further rejection is increased. Again, the potential for a vicious cycle between psychological and interpersonal problems is clearly evident. Interpersonal rejection may play a role in more macroscopic interpersonal issues, such as availability of close relationships. One of the most fundamental and basic interpersonal problems associated with psychopathology is a lack of general personal relationships. The social networks of people with schizophrenia, depression, social anxiety, and eating disorders, for example, are notoriously impoverished. Once again, there is reason to suspect that this interpersonal problem is both a cause and a consequence of psychological problems. By their social nature, most humans have a very basic need to seek out and form relationships with others. Mental health appears to deteriorate in parallel with the disappearance of opportunities for experiencing the pleasures of personal relationships. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Like interpersonal rejection, experiencing the unavailability of personal relationships can lead to feelings of worthlessness, despair, and grief. Over time, situational attributions for such a state of affairs may be difficult to sustain and eventually give way to feelings of personal blame and responsibility. A deficiency in personal relationships may be taken as evidence of personal deviance or defectiveness. This mental anguish—coupled with the absence of opportunities to share optimistic or negative affective states with other people, and to enjoy their company and social support—is a potent recipe for serious psychological problems. Certain interpersonal processes that have been implicated in mental health problems, such as rejection and conflict, are fairly ubiquitous in that they occur in both family and other relationship context. However, other processes, such as unavailability of personal relationships and loneliness, appear to be largely unrelated to family issues. In many cases, these processes are present in the lives of people with psychological problems, maintaining, prolonging, and exacerbating their condition. The fears which war engenders and the deprivations which it causes are painful. Yet for those who are too attached to outward things they are often necessary teacher. Out of the fears, great heroism has been learned; out of the deprivations, great unselfishness; but those who respond to such lessons are too few, the influence of the lessons themselves too ephemeral. When it is said that way is a purifying agent, it is not meant that our morals are purified; on the contrary, war notoriously makes them temporarily worse. By enthroning passion and displacing reason, by generating wild fears and brutal hatreds, the very smoke of war tends to smother those civilized self-disciplines which make for a decent living during the normal times of peace. This is a World of struggle. The word “peace” has only a relative meaning. The notion that a society, a civilization, or an individual can exist in a continuously inert state is an illusory one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
As soon as one kind of war ends, another kind of war begins. A peace of endless stagnation is impossible. That last kind of peace is that wherein the forces which must inevitably contend against each other are properly balanced. A great war brings humanity to an emotional crisis. Such a crisis shakes it out of complacency and indifference toward religious values. War, with its frightful threat to life and possessions, its dreadful menace to personal relations, forces humankind to revise long-established attitudes for better or worse. If it opens one door to atheism, it also opens another door to religion and still another to mysticism. We live in a state of perpetual war. Like the Winchester Mansion, back and forth go the ghostly armies of construction and destruction. Sometimes one and sometimes the other holds the field in triumph. Death seekers clearly intend to end their lives at the time they attempt suicide. This singleness of purpose may last only a short time. It can change to confusion the very next hour or day, and then return again in a short order. Dave, a middle-aged executive, was a death seeker. He was devoted to his wife and two teenage sons who respected him. They lived in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood, had a spacious house, and enjoyed a life of comfort. He had many misgivings about suicide and was ambivalent about it for weeks, but on Tuesday night he was a death seeker—clear in his desire to die and acting in a manner that virtually guaranteed a fatal outcome. Death ignorers do not believe that their self-inflicted death will mean the end of their existence. They believe they are trading their present lives for a better or happier existence. Billy never truly recovered from his mother’s death. He was only 7 years old and unprepared for such a loss. His father sent him to live with his grandparents for a time, to a new school with new kind and a new way of life. In Billy’s mind, all these changes were for the worse. He missed the joy and laughter of the past. He missed his home, his father, and his friends. Most of all he missed his mother. He did not really understand her death. His father said that she was in Heaven now and at peace, happy; that she has not wanted to die or to leave Billy; that an accident had taken her life. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Billy’s unhappiness and loneliness continued day after day and he began to put things together in his own way. If he could join his mother, Billy believed that he could be happy again. He felt she was waiting for him, waiting for him to come to her. These thoughts seemed so right to him; they brought him comfort and hope. One evening, shortly after saying good night to his grandparents, Billy climbed out of bed, went up the stairs to the roof of their apartment house, and jumped to his death. In his mind, he was joining his mother in Heaven. Billy was a death ignorer, like many other adult believers in a hereafter who experience death by suicide to reach another form of life. To further highlight this illustration, in 1997, the World was shocked to learn that 39 members of an unusual cult named Heaven’s Gate had experienced death by suicide at an expensive house outside San Diego, California. It turned out that these members had acted out of the belief that their deaths would free their spirits and enabled them to ascend to a “Higher Kingdom.” It is a simple yet profound truth: Happiness ins a choice. When you get up in the morning, you can choose to be happy and enjoy that day, or you can choose to be unhappy and go around with a sour attitude. It is up to you. If you make the mistake of allowing your circumstances to dictate your happiness, then you risk missing out on God’s abundant life. You might as well choose to be happy and enjoy your life! When you do that that, not only will you feel better, but your faith will cause God to show up and work wonders. God knows that we have difficulties, struggles, and challenges. However, it was never His intention for us to live one day “on cloud nine,” and the next day down in the dumps, defeated and depressed because we have problems. God want us to live consistently. He wants us to enjoy every single day of our lives. To do so, one must learn to live in today, one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment. It is good to have a big picture outlook, to set goals, to establish budgets and make plans, but if you are always living in the future, you are never really enjoying the present in the way God wants you to. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
When we focus too much on the future, we are often frustrated because we do not know what is coming. Naturally, the uncertainty increases our stress level and creates a sense of insecurity. We need to understand, though, that God has given us the grace to live today. He has not yet given us tomorrow’s grace. When we get to tomorrow, we will have the strength to make it through. God will give us what we need. However, if we are worried about tomorrow right now, we are bound to be frustrated and discouraged. By an act of your will, choose to start enjoying your life right now. Learn to enjoy your family, your friends, your health, your work, the blue sky, green grass, and trees; enjoy everything in your life. Happiness is a decision you make, not an emotion you feel. Certainly there are times in all our lives when bad things happened, or things do not turn out as we had hoped. However, that is when we must make a decision that we are going to be happy in spite of our circumstances. God would not let us go through something that is too difficult to handle. And if your desire is great enough, you can stay calm and cool no matter what comes against you in life. God gives us His peace on the inside, but it is up to us to make use of that peace. Especially in the pressure points of life, we have to learn how to tap into God’s supernatural peace. The way you do that is by making a conscious choice, a calculated decision if you will, choosing to stay happy. Life is flying by, so do not waste another moment of your precious time being angry, unhappy, or worried. “This is the day which the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” reports Psalm 118.24. When we are blessed with grace, we find ourselves loved and affirmed in such a way that we love God and others more than ever. The Christian may receive this grace through prayer, inspiration from the Scriptures, meditation, church services, or daily Spirit-led interactions with others. However, the essential ingredient, which then becomes an irreversible aspect of our own core, is that such love is by nature unmerited—we are loved by the grace of God, not because of our achievements or what we do. We are simply loved. And such love radiates outward in the same way. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Others need not merit our love—we simply love them, too. One is most grace-full when one experiences others in their essential core, loving them as purely as God does. God has the power to do anything. He has the ability to destroy the devil, but He cannot do it now because of His Word. His Word is out and He will not go against it. We know what the end is going to be because the overall picture is in the Bible. Read the back of the book—we win! The devil will be put in the pit for a thousand years, then loosed for a little time, and finally cast into the lake of fire. However, until that time, God has done all He is going to do about the devil. It is your responsibility to take care of him. You have dominion. You are to cast him out. God’s Word gives us instructions on how to use our authority to defeat satan: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,” reports James 4.7. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist steadfast in the faith,” reports 1 Peter 5.8-9. God walks in His garden still, not necessarily with soupy intellectuals from the University, but with salt-of-the-Earth people from everyday life. He reveals Himself as a long-lost friend to the Humble. He teaches the Terrible Tots their Aleph-Beth’s, as He taught the Psalmist his (119.130). He filters human knowledge for the Pure of Mind, as Luke recorded (24.25). The Curious and the Proud—well, they require special attention. He gives them grace, yes, but He just makes it harder for them to find. In conclusion—and I do have a conclusion—Human Reason is frail and fallible; True Faith, however, never fails, never falls. Every ratiocination and investigation into the nature and work of the Sacrament ought to follow the guidelines established by Faith. That is to say, they should preempt Faith’s prerogatives; nor should they infringe on any Faith’s boundaries. Why? In the realm of this Most Holy Superexcellent Sacrament, Faith and Love rule. And it is quite clear to Me that not all of their machination are clear to you. “Peace I leave you; My peace I give to you; not as the World gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful,” reports John 14.27. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Dear Lord in Heaven, when things happen that would normally bother me, please help me to put my foot down and says, “No, I am not going to let that take my peace. I am not going to rule over my emotions. I am not going to allow myself to get upset and aggravated. I am going to choose to be happy.” The completeness of the mystic experience is proportionate to and measurably by, intensity. So long as it remans a passing and temporary state, so long ought it be regarded by the human who has had it as affording an incomplete enlightenment. The mystic experience is not necessarily complete in itself when it happens to a human for the first time—or for the fourth time. Nor are its effects necessarily permanent. They may disappear even after a whole year’s existence. Unless the personal human has matured in brain and heart and balance, the efforts to transcend ego will necessarily be premature and the glimpse, if it happens, will be of a mixed character. We return thanks to our mother, the Earth which sustains us. We return thanks to the rivers and streams, which supply us with water. We return thanks to all the herbs, which furnish medicines for the cure of our aliments. We return thanks to the corn, and to her sisters, the beans and squashes, which give us life. We return thanks to the wind, which moving the air has banished diseases. We return thanks to the moon and stars, which have given us their light when the sun was gone. We return thanks to the sun, that he has looked upon the Earth with a beneficent eye. Lastly, we return thanks to the Great Spirit, in whom is embodies all goodness, and who directs all things for the good of His children. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people America and please accept their prayer. Restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. Our God and God of our Fathers, may our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers comes before Thee. Please remember the Messiahs of the house of America, Thy servant, and Thy Holy City, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and well being, lovingkindness, life and pace on this day of the New Moon; the Feast of Unleavened Bread; the Feast of Tabernacles. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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You are Not Worthy and I Do Not Value My Relationship with You!
Success come from knowing that you did the best and are courageously living each moment as fully as possible. When one thinks about it, it is only the existence of marriage that makes virginity a choice, and only the existence of virginity that makes marriage a choice. Without either of them there would no longer be any “choice,” or, if there were (as between marriage and so-called free love, or getting married and staying single solely for the sake of freedom and an undisturbed life), it would be morally unacceptable. In saying this we are not saying anything new and revolutionary, but are only correcting a certain conditioning bound up with particular cultures and historical moments, and getting back to the ideas and attitudes of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit never ceases to guide the Church, in every area, to a knowledge of the complete truth. By the working of the Holy Spirit, revelation, like a precious spirit in a valuable temple, constantly renews its youth and also makes the temple grow younger. The Holy Spirit—as I said above—does not do new things, but makes new things. He makes them young again, restores them to their original splendour, and He does the same with the charism of consecrated virginity. When difficult things are asked of us, even things contrary to the longings of our heart, remember that the loyalty we pledge to the cause of Christ is to the supreme devotion of our lives. Of course, we all have some habits or flaws or personal history that could keep us from complete spiritual immersion in this work. However, God is our Father and is exceptionally good at forgiving and forgetting sins we have forsaken, perhaps because we give Him so much practice in doing so. In any case, there is divine help for every one of us at any hours we feel to make a change in our behaviour. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
On the subject of getting back to the spirit and thought of Jesus, I have been struck by the fact that in Matthew’s Gospel, immediately after those sayings of Jesus about those who do not marry for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, comes His words about children—without any break, in fact linked to them by a temporal adverb: “Then (!) children were brought to Him so He could lay His hands on them and pray, but the disciples rebuked them. Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me,” reports Matthew 19.13-14. In this way, Jesus’ words about voluntary chastity are enclosed between two major sayings of His about marriage: one regarding the indissolubility of marriage (“Have you not read that He Who created them from the beginning made them male and female?”), the other about children. Children are the fruit of marriage; they are the love of the two spouses made flesh. To welcome children, as Jesus does, is to welcome in the fullest way and in its most profound implications, the reality of marriage. To say, “Let the little children come to Me” is like saying, “Let the spouses, let the fathers and mothers come to Me.” Parents know very well that to welcome their children is to welcome them, in fact it is more. Naturally, all this is true when the marriage itself is lived in faith and in harmony with the will of God. Only in faith do the two charisms meet and shed light on one another. This is why the martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch, whom we heard warning virgins to be humble, admonishes married people in the same text to marry “in the Lord.” “It is proper,” he writes at the beginning of the second century, “that spouses should enter their union with the bishop’s consent so that the wedding takes place according to the Lord and not according to concupiscence, and that everything is done for the honour of God.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Everything is always brought back to the same source, the lordship of Christ. If it is embraced “for the Lord,” virginity has value. If it is celebrated and lived “according to the Lord, matrimony has value. However, let us advance still further in our teaching about charisms. A charism—says St. Paul—is a particular “manifestation of the Spirit given to each one for the common good,” reports 1 Corinthians 12.7. St. Peter says the same thing when he writes “to the extent that each of you has received a gift (charisma), use it to sever one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace,” 1 Peter 4.10. What does all this mean when we apply it to our case? It means that celibacy and virginity are also for the married, and that marriage is also for virgins, in other words for their benefit. Consecrated virginity, therefore, is not a private matter, a private choice of perfection. On the contrary, it is “for the common good” to be used “to serve” others. The gift is destined only for some, for those who are called, but all are its beneficiaries. Such is the essential, apparently contradictory nature of a charism. It is something specific and individual—“a manifestation of the Spirit given to each one,” but at the same time it is something which is to be placed at the service of all (“for the common good”). In the Church, virgins and married people mutually “edify” one another. The married are reminded by virgins of the primacy of God and of the things that do not pass away. They are introduced to love of God’s Word, which consecrated persons, having more time and being more available, are able to study in greater depth in order to “break” the bread of the Word for their brothers and sisters who are more taken up with the occupations of the World. However, even virgins and celibates also learn something from married people. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
What they learn is to be generous, to forget themselves, to serve life and often to have a certain humanity that comes from direct contact with the events of life. Some people find it difficult to pray or even dedicated an hour of their day to God. However, if one looks at married people, young mothers and fathers have to get up not once but five, six or more times a night to feed or nurse or rock a crying child, or watch at one’s bedside to see if he or she has a fever. And in the morning, at the same time each day, one of the two, or both of them, having taken the child to a grandparent or to the nursery, would rush to work in time to clock in, come rain or shine, good health or sickness. Then I said to myself: if we do not do something about it, we are in grave danger here! Our lifestyle, unless it is supported by a genuine observance of the Rule and by a certain rigour in its schedule and customs, is in danger of becoming a rose-water existence which will eventually make us uncaring. Do we have the right to feel offended when someone calls us “parasites”? We certainly do have that right, but only if we spend ourselves unreservedly for the Kingdom, if we are truly “united to the Lord without distractions.” Otherwise, we have no such right. What good parents are able to do for their children according to the flesh, the degree of self-forgetfulness they are capable of attaining in order to provide for their children’s health, studies and happiness, must be the measure of what we ought to do for our spiritual children who are our brothers and sisters in the Lord. Our example in this is the apostle Paul himself, who said he wanted to “spend what he had and to be spent” for the sake of his children in Corinth (2 Corinthians 12.15. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
This shows how useful it is tht there should be a healthy integration of charisms in the Christian community, whereby married people and celibates do not live in strict separation from one another, but in such a way that they can help and encourage one another to grow. It is not true that the proximity of other genders and of families is always necessarily a danger or a dark threat for the unmarried. It can be, if one has not yet accepted one’s vocation freely, joyfully and definitively, but this is true for a married person too. Today we are called to work pastorally in a society no longer organized along the lines of the separation of the genders, but one where both genders constantly interact and are present together in every area of life and work. We need to adapt the way we live our charism to this new situation. In no way does this mean that each person has to give up one’s own lifestyle and surroundings. In the earliest days of the Church, virgins and celibates—as we can deduce from Paul, Tertullian, Cyprian and others—were integrated into Christian homes as part of the fabric of the whole community. However, very soon, certainly by the fourth century, they felt the need for a place apart where they could organize their time, with its rhythm of silence and activity, in accordance with their own special vocation. And so monasteries were born, like those founded by St. Ambrose in and around Milan. Today new types of community are coming into being, in which families and consecrated persons live together in the same location and share the same rule of life. Together they profess and practice poverty and obedience. The one thing that distinguishes them is whether they are married or celibate. This manifests an important aspect of the Church: the fact that it is a body with “many members,” each different from the other yet moved by the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12.12-27). #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In this particular form of life there is a need on both sides for space and freedom. The married need it in order to attend to their children, join in their games, solve the inevitable family tensions and cultivate mutual love. Virgins need it in order to cultivate silence and to study, and to be “united to the Lord without distractions.” While respecting the lifestyles of each, there are many ways in which married people and celibates can be spiritually united within a community. I once attended a meeting of the clergy and pastoral councils of a local Church and I remember the spiritual boost, the joy an the unity caused by the reading of a letter from the cloistered nuns of a convent in the same diocese, by which they showed they were present at the meeting, contributing to it through their prayers. Clearly the possibility of change and living at a more elevated level has always been one of the gifts of God to those who seek it. What is the key to a breakthrough in contented, happy living? It is embedded in one sentence: “The love of God…dwells in the hearts of the people.” When the love of God sets the tone for our own lives, for our relationships to each other and ultimately our feeling for all humankind, then old distinctions, limiting labels, and artificial divisions begin to pass away, and peace increases. Of course, we are speaking here of the first great commandment given to the human family—to love God wholeheartedly, without reservation or compromise, tht is, with all our heart, might, mind, and strength. This love of God is the first great commandment in the Universe. However, the first great truth in the Universe is that God loves us exactly that way—wholeheartedly, without reservation or compromise, with all His heart, might, mind, and strength. #RandolpHarris 6 of 20
When those majestic forces from God’s heart and ours meet without restraint, there is a veritable explosion of spiritual, moral power. Fathers of the church and actualized Christians, who were seekers after spirituality and for whom celibacy was an ongoing test of their commitment devoted their entire lives to their own salvation. However, until the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven, what about everyone else’s soul? Who would teach, guide, scold, punish, and condemn sinning humanity? For the vast majority of humankind, priests are needed. Lifetime celibacy was, as we seen, a primarily Christian reoccupation. However, some people took false vows of celibacy to protect their jobs, then contrived, in unpriestly stealth, to creep into another person’s bed at night and prayed—if they dared—that no children would arrive to give the lie to the supposedly chaste marital arrangement. However, what underlay the mammoth battle over clerical celibacy? Foremost was the conviction that celibacy was a fundamental component of “good” Christianity. The Church Fathers strongly influenced this perception, reaching a wide, receptive audience through their writings, their preaching, and their teaching. They set personal examples as well, for most were unmarried celibates. In or survey of their theology, we saw how they evoked the Scriptures as proof of their arguments, quoting the words of the apostles and of Christ, and the Old Testament tale of Adam and Eve, as irrefutable evidence. One major consequence of all these theological, spiritual, and political contortions was that, increasingly, lay Christians adopted celibacy, so tht a core of many communities lived as spiritually pure a life as the Fathers of St. Augustine could have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Often, they put professional religious to shame, and during the periods of widespread “lapsing” and apostasy in monasteries and women’s cloisters, these chaste and committed Christians shone—metaphorically, at least—with the pristine glow of a guiding star. However, some Christians argued strongly against clerical celibacy on the grounds that it was too difficult for most men. Yet, the growing wealth of monasteries, other cloisters, and the Church in general was another important reason to implant clerical celibacy. Bachelors leave no heirs, so would not be tempted to divvy up the property they administered, which would pass intact to the next generation of church men. They also suspected that unmarried candidates would be favoured in the Church, and that celibacy would be a good career move. Over the years, the celibacy campaign pressed on. In 401, priests at carthage were required to swear an oath of celibacy, the first-ever instance of this. Churchwide, a priest’s private life was now—theoretically—heavily monitored. His wife had to be virginal at the time of marriage and remain so forever. She could not share his bedroom, much less his bed. Instead, she passed her nights elsewhere, with a chaperone, while he lay with other clerics. Should her husband die, the widowed virgin was not permitted to have another go at marriage. A later edict went further: married clergymen had to leave their wives at their ordination. However, consider not the highborn clerics with access to fortunes but the lowly priests who constituted the greatest part of the clerical corpus. Material life in the postclassical West was so brutishly difficult that, while it also drove some unreligious men into ostensibly celibate monasteries as havens from hunger, it drove some sincere priests to marry as a form of economic survival. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Alongside the children they produced, wives could cultivate the parish landholdings and in other ways arrange to feed and clothe their priest husbands. More ambitions priests contrived to marry women with dowries, property, or small business, even if the latter consumed so much of the couple’s time that the business of religion was secondary to the exigencies of commerce. Some tattling, of course, was justified, particularly when priests and bishops fathered children. The great fear, entirely vindicated by subsequent events, was that the clerics would then use Church property as a family business, a personal legacy to provide for their sons and daughters. Expecting them to live with their wives “as if they were not wives” assumed as well that they would manage their church’s possessions as if they were men who had no possession, which was literally the case. Informing on priests and bishops who flouted Church policy with even a single infant was not motivated by personal spite but by a grave concern for the material future of the Christian community. Defiantly uncelibate clergymen were harassed and some lost their jobs, while the covertly uncelibate must have exercised discretion. In 1171, the abbot-elect of St. Augustine at Canterbury fathered seventeen children in a single village, but this was a puny production compared to a twelfth-century bishop of Liege who was unseated because he had sired sixty-five. The most ludicrous, later-century case was Pope Innocent VIII, a proud father who publicly acknowledged his brood of “bastards” and was then forgiven because he had been honest. Martin Luther believed strongly that God bestowed the gift of celibacy on some people. “This was Christ’s way,” he wrote in explanation of celibacy. Martin Luther’s views on celibacy, like St. Augustine’s and the earliest Church Fathers’, have had a profound doctrinal effect on Christian life. However, the agreed that celibacy should never be imposed nor pledged rashly by people, lay or religious, unable to fulfill their commitment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
A family-of-origin pattern every bit as dominant as abuse in the mental health literature is an absolute corrosive combination of parenting behaviours: parental overinvolvement or overprotectiveness coupled with lack of parental care. When parents are overly intrusive in the lives of their children, but at the same time emotionally distant, there is a high potential for serious psychosocial consequences that can include depression, eating disorders, schizophrenia, personality disorders, and social anxiety. The ubiquity of this parenting pattern in the mental health literature is as remarkable as the range of problems with which it appears to be associated. This pattern of parenting may stem from serious problems with boundary regulations and ambivalence about parenthood. Overinvolvement and overprotection reflect a form of boundary dysregulation that may adversely affect the child’s ego development and sense of self in relation to other people. A person exposed to parental overinvolvement may form either unrealistic expectations for care that simply cannot be met during later adulthood, or preoccupation with fear of interpersonal intrusion. In either case, relational problems are likely to follow, contributing to any of a variety of psychological symptoms. A lack of parental care reflects a parent’s ambivalence about or rejection of one’s role. Even young children have an extraordinary aptitude for detecting acceptance or rejection from a caregiver. A lack of parental care sends messages such as “You are not worthy,” and “I do not value my relationship with you” to a child. When this is coupled with overinvolvement, a child’s (or even an adult’s) ability to make sense of these interpersonal experiences may be taxed beyond its limits. The bewilderment, confusion, self-blame, and damaged self-esteem produced by such childhood experiences surely contributes to later psychosocial problems. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
One of the primary means by which children learn attitudes and behaviour is modeling. No agents are more readily available and credible than parents. Many of the behaviours and cognitions that constitute mental disorders may in fact be socially learned. Parental modeling of dysfunctional attitudes and behaviours has been implicated in such problems as social anxiety, eating disorders, alcoholism and other substance use problems, somatoform disorders, and psychogenic dysfunctions in pleasures of the flesh. In all cases, evidence indicates that children may learn maladaptive behaviours and cognitions that later come back to cause them substantial distress in their adult lives. Critics who are sympathetic to the biological paradigm might prefer to explain parent-child similarities in psychological symptoms with a genetic hypothesis. Indeed, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of genes and the social environment, as they come from the same source—the family of origin. However, it is now becoming clear that genes can only explain a portion of this concordance. Furthermore, such problems as somatoform disorders and psychogenic sexual dysfunctions are at least assumed, by definition, to have nonbiological bases (id est, if such a problem could be explained by biological factors, a person could not receive the diagnosis). In such cases, it appears that people learn the attitudes and behaviours underlying these problems through parental modeling, at least in part. The effects of family processes on offspring do not end with adulthood. In reality, many adult psychiatric patients still reside in their families of origin. Particularly among the more profoundly affected individuals, such as those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, independent lives outside of their families of origin may simply be unattainable because of problems with employment, maintaining stable relationships, managing finances, and so on. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
For such people, caustic family processes can still devastate psychological well-being, and foreclose the possibility of a complete recovery and functional independent life. When adult patients reside in households with a great deal of expressed emotion (EE), negative affective style (AS), and communication deviance (CD), symptoms become aggravated and relapses becomes accelerated. EE and negative AS reflect a critical and overinvolved orientation between a parent and a child. These family processes have been implicated in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders. Even many adults are still sensitive and susceptible to the ill effects of parental criticism. Throughout the animal kingdom, parents either nurture their offspring or simply leave them alone. Aside from humans, it is difficult to locate species in which some patents actively meddle with or torment their young during critical periods of psychosocial development. However, many parents may (albeit subtly and with their best intentions) aggravate their children’s mental health through criticism and overinvolvement, even into stages of adulthood. Some parents also communicate with their family members in ways that are peculiar, splintered, and difficult to grasp. This may create a bizarre template for the construal of social interaction that makes rewarding socialization with other people a near-impossibility, in the same way that extreme isolation or neglect can permanently mar the capacity for interpersonal relations. For most people, interpersonal and psychological development launched and guided by the family. When normal family processes such a nurturance, education, and self-esteem support go awry, psychological distress often follows. Even well into adulthood, the family of origin has a powerful impact on its offspring’s psychological health or illness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Unfortunately, for many people, their means of coping with disordered family processes (exempli gratia, substance misuse, binge eating, somatization, and dissociation) are themselves maladaptive and abrasive to mental health. I remember a spring night in a school auditorium, during the rehearsal of a play. I am thirteen. I am weary of the farce, weary of the silliness of the cast, of our endless horseplay, mindlessness. A scene in which I have no part is being rehearsed; I stand in an open door at the rare of the dark and empty hall. A storm is under way. The door is on the lee of the building, and I step out under the overhang. The rain swirls and beats. Lightning reveals a familiar schoolyard in a ghostly light. I feel a sudden poignancy. Images strike in my mind. The wind is the scream of a lost spirit, searching the Earth and finding no good, recalling old bereavements, lashing the land with tears. Consciousness leaves my body, moves out in time and space. I undergo an expanding awareness of self, of separateness, of time flowing through me, bearing me on, knowing I have a chance, the one chance all of us have, the chance of a life, knowing a time will come when nothing lies ahead and everything lies behind, and hoping I can then look back and feel it well spent. How, in the light of fixed stars, should one live? So begins the hunger for meaning. Is the scheme of things the creation of humans? A charismatic leader who achieves a new vision of lice secures a following? Did Christ invent Christianity? I think not. He created disorder, led a rabble, was an irritant to existing schemes of things. The scheme of things which is Christianity, of which His teachings are the nucleus, was the creation of many people over a span much longer than His life. Indeed, by the time it could have been called Christianity it has taken on a character He would have repudiated. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
A scheme of things is a social creation, something offered to the individual by society as a system of significance. One’s ambition may be secret, but the pattern of meanings that makes possible the ambition and within which it may be realized is social. Even if one’s entire hope of meaning in life hinges on acquiring a complete set of American stamps, that vision still is social, depends upon others being similarly engaged; for such an endeavour could mean nothing in a World without stamp collecting. When a society offers at its apex a scheme of things, inclusive and integrative of all subordinate orientations, and when that scheme by virtue of being generally accepted as true holds great authority, then that society is unified and cohesive, is an organism. Every leader seeks to embody such a scheme of things, and charismatically to make it even more powerfully appealing, binding on the loyalties of all. When society offers, at the top, contending schemes, none of compelling authority, that society is fragmented. Nevertheless, we see groups of boys and young men disaffected from the dominant society. The young men are Angry and Beat. The boys are Juvenile Delinquents. These groups are not small, and they will grow larger. Certainly they are suffering. Demonstrably they are not getting enough out of our wealth and civilization. They are not growing up to full capacity. They are failing to assimilate much of the culture. As was predictable, most of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization. They say that background conditions have interrupted socialization and must be improved. And, not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging, there must be a better bait or punishment. However, perhaps there has not been a failure of communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
However, socialization to what? to what dominant society and available culture? Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized, perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up? If this is so, the disaffection of the young is profound and it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of socializing. Instead, there will have to be changes in our society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and capacities of human nature, in order to grow up. Growth, like any ongoing function, requires adequate objects in the environment to meet the needs and capacities of the growing child boy, young, and young man, until he can better choose and make his own environment. It is not a “psychological” question of poor influences and bad attitudes, but an objective question of real opportunities for worthwhile experience. It makes no difference whether the growth is normal or distorted, only real objects will finish the experience. (Even in the psychotherapy of adults one finds that many a stubborn symptom vanishes if there is a real change in the vocational and sexual opportunities, so that the symptoms are no longer needed.) It is here that the theory of belonging and socializing breaks down miserably. For it can be shown—I intended to show—that with all the harmonious belonging and all the tidying up background conditions that you please, our abundant society is at present simply deficit in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worthwhile goals that could make growing up possible. It is lacking in enough man’s work. It is lacking in honest public speech, and people are not taken seriously. It is lacking in the opportunity to be useful. It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity. It corrupts ingenuous patriotism. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles science. It dampens animal ardour. It discourages the religious convictions of Justification and vocation and it dims the sense that there is a Creation It has no honour. It has no community. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Just look at that list There is nothing in it that is surprising, in either the small letters or the capitals. I have nothing subtle or novel to say in this report; these are the things that everybody knows. And nevertheless the leaders of the church says, “We must give young men a sense of belonging.” Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves; this is the beautiful shaping power of our human nature. Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. However, on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominate society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted. (I say the “young men and boys” rather than the “young people” because the problems I want to discus in this report belong primarily, in our society, to the boys: how to be useful and make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, “make something” of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act. With this background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married. The quest for the glamour job is given at least a little substance by its relation to a “better” marriage. Correspondingly, our “youth troubles” are boys’ troubles—female delinquency is sexual: “incorrigibility” and unmarried pregnancy. Yet as every woman knows, for if the body do not grow to be men, where shall the women find men? If the husband is running the rat race of the organized system, there is not much father for the children.) “A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed,” reports Proverbs 11.25. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
There reason many people are not growing is because they are not sowing. They are living self-centered lives. Unless they change their focus and start reaching out to others, they will probably remain in a depressed condition, emotionally, financially, socially, and spiritually. The Scripture says, “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap,” reports Galatians 6.7. All through the Christian Bible, we find the principle of sowing and reaping. Just as if one hopes to reap the harvest, a famer must plant some seeds, we, too, must plant some good seeds in the fields of our families, careers, businesses, and personal relationship. What if the farmer decided that he did not really feel like planting, that he was tired, so he “felt led” to sit around and hope the harvest would come in? He would be waiting around his whole life! No, he must get the seed in the ground. That is the principle God established. In the same way, if we want to reap good things, we, too, must show some good seeds. Notice, we reap what we sow. If you want to reap happiness, you have to sow some “happiness” seeds by making other people happy. If you want to reap financial blessings, you must sow financial seeds in the lives of others. If you want to reap friendships, you should sow a seed and be a friend. Some people say, “I have a lot of problems of my own. I do not are about sowing seeds. I want to know how I can get out of my mess.” This is how you can get out of your mess. “If you want God to solve your problems, help solve somebody else’s problem. In biblical times, great famine struck the land of Canaan. People did not have any food or water, and they were in desperate need. So Isaac did something that people without insight may have thought rather odd: “In the middle of that famine, Isaac sowed a seed in the land. And in that same year he received one hundred times what he planted and the Lord rewarded him greatly,” reports Genesis 26.12. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In his time of need, Isaac did not wait around, expecting someone else to come to his rescue. No, he acted in faith. He rose up in the midst of that famine and sowed a seed. God supernaturally multiplied that seed, and it brough him out of his need. Maybe you are in some sort of famine today. It could be a financial famine, or maybe you are simply famished for friends. It is possible you need a physical healing. Perhaps you need peace in your home. Whatever the need, one of the best things you can do is to get your mind off yourself and help meet someone else’s need. Sow some seeds of happiness. That is the way to receive a huge harvest. The Bible says, “In times of difficulty, trust in the Lord and do good,” reports Psalm 37.1-3. It is not enough to say, “God I trust You. know You are going to meet all my needs.” That is like the farmer not planting any seeds and expecting a fabulous harvest. Scripture says there are two things we must do in times of trouble. First, we must trust in the Lord: and second, we must go out and do something good. Go out and sow some seed. If you need a financial miracle, go by someone a cup of coffee tomorrow morning, or give a little extra in the offering at church. If you do not have any money, do some physical work for somebody; mow somebody’s lawn, pull some weeds, wash their windows. Make someone a pie. Do something to get some seed in the ground. If you are lacking in friends, do not sit at home alone month after month, feeling sorry for yourself. When you make other people happy, God will make sure that your life is filled with joy. We need to be more seed-oriented than need-oriented. In your time of need, do not sit around thinking about what you lack. Think about what kind of seed you can sow to get yourself out of that need. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
My dear Devout, to avoid those dreary discussions, those shaggy syllogisms, about the inner workings of this most profound Sacrament. Why? Because they come up with such funny conclusions. And frankly, because they tend to induce doubt rather than increase faith. Which is another way of saying their conclusions may be curiouser, but are the necessarily seriouser? A good text for this might come from Proverbs: “The person who undertakes an intellectual investigation of Majesty may well find it only to be blinded by its glory,” reports Proverbs 3.21, 25.27. Another way of putting it is that the Godhead has more modes of operation than Humankind has of intellection. Nonetheless, always tolerable is the pious and humble inquiry to the Truth. It is prepared to learn something and strives to entertain the sane and sound opinions of the Fathers. Blessed is the simplicity that can free itself from the intellectual entanglements of University thinking and forge ahead down Faith’s plain and firm path, where every paver’s a command or a commandment. All of which is another way of saying that many Devouts in higher studies—that is to say, as Jesus son of Sirach has said, studies beyond one’s competence (3.22)—lose their devotion while striving too hard to succeed intellectually. What is needed in life, My dear friend, is faith as well as sincerity. Not depth or height, nor breadth or sweep of intellect. Ans certainly not mastery of the Mysteries of God. If you do not come to grips with the World within, how do you expect to comprehend the World without? Let God be your tutor and give your senses a good schooling in faith. Then the light of knowledge will come. Perhaps not the full flood, but certainly flickering enough for you to complete your studies without losing your sight. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Dear Lord in Have, today I choose to focus on the needs of others rather than my own I believe that as I plant seeds of goodness in other people’s lives, You will do something similar in my own life. Thank You, Father, for the blessings that are coming! Awakening in a moment of peace, I give thanks to the source of all peace as I set forth into the day. The beautiful birds sing with new voices and I listen with new ears and give thanks nearby. The flower called Angels’ Trumpet blows in the breeze and I give thanks. My feet touch the beautiful emerald green grass, still wet with the morning’s dew, and I give thanks, both to my mother Earth, for sustaining my steps, and to the seas, cycling once again to bring forth new life. The dewdrops become jewelled with the morning’s sun-fire and I give thanks. When the vision is clear, you can see forever. In this moment, each moment, I give thanks. Please send dew and rain for a blessing upon the Earth. Please satisfy us out of Thy bounty, O Lord. Do Thou bless this year, that it be for us a year of abundance. Praised by Thou, O Lord, who doest bless the years. Sound the great Shofar proclaiming our freedom. Raise the banner to assemble our exiles, and gather us together from the four corners of the Earth. Blessed art Thou, O God who wilt gather the dispersed of Thy people America. Restore our judges as of yore, and our consellors as aforetime, and thus remove from us grief and suffering. Reign Thou over us, O Lord, Thou alone in lovingkindness and mercy and vindicate us in judgment. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Thou King, who lovest righteousness and judgement. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the King of judgment. You have been given a glimpse of the goal. Now you must strive to attain that goal. The glimpse itself has enable you to understand the consciousness and the characteristics to strive for. Both are so subtle that words merely hint at them and may be meaningless. In receiving an experience beyond words, you have therefore been so fortunate as to be favoured with the Overself’s Grace. The momentary feeling of peace one experienced may be an intimation of the still greater peace one may know if one takes the trouble to purse the opportunity of developing it through the Quest. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
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Don’t want to boast but I know my Cresleigh Home is a toast. Wait until you see her, you’ll agree, a Cresleigh Home is the only one for me. I’ll make my bed for a chance to live in Meadows Residence 2! Happy Holidays comes to you courtesy of Meadows Residence 2!
I am on My Way to the Next City and I Have Already Been Delayed!
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Be bold in what you stand for and careful in what you fall for. Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries. Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of wait. These ascetics are living answers to the question that nobles and intellectuals in the New World eagerly posed to their physicians: Can one achieve permanent celibacy, and if so, how? Accounts of the lives of celibates became popular. Scholars did fieldwork, living with and observing celibates in Egypt. They collected and published sayings of the fathers, which readers fell upon and cherished for their great truths. By the end of the fifth century, the New World had transplanted and modified this Old World, desert-based asceticism so that in the sixth century, monasteries also appeared there. Like their Eastern counterparts, these, too, had rules. St. Benedict’s Rule, seventy-three chapters long, made Benedict Western monasticism’s patriarch. Benedict’s ideal monastery was a single edifice with the elected abbot, whose brothers renounced all private property and swore perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience to the rules of their community. However, unlike the Eastern retreats, Benedict’s was the training ground for Christian soldiers. “We must create a scola [unit of the militia] for the Lord’s service,” he wrote. Benedict’s goal was to form a school of divine servitude in which nothing too heavy or rigorous would be established, and effectively eliminate what Westerns considered excessive Eastern asceticism. How can a actualized Christian in today’s World of secure Christendom be expected to tolerate the privations of the era of pagan persecutions? #RandolphHarris 1 of 27
Homosexuality became rampant in some permissive cloisters where celibacy was a flickering light at best, an extinguished wick at worst. Benedict’s Rule had attempted to forestall it by forbidding obvious temptations. Two actualized Christians were never to sleep in one bed. Lights were to be kept burning the night long, and the actualized Christians had to sleep fully clothed. Bathing, involving as it does the allure of the unclothed body, was discouraged and was permitted only as a complicated procedure in which concealing garments were never removed all at the same time, so that various body parts were never exposed, even to their owner, in one enticing expanse of moistly glistening flesh. A large part of the problem with celibacy is that many people in the church forgot the primacy of their religion focus. Wealth, sometime great wealth, stole into their collectivities, preoccupying and seducing them. They became major landowners with vast agricultural capacity and committed, unpaid workforce. Some celibates and their relatives from wealthier families, along with other devout Christians, willed the monasteries fortunes and more property. The holdings remained intact, protected from division between two or more legatees, as secular possession were. Abbots of these empires had to be saints—and a few were—to resist the pull of power and the lure of luxury their position offered. And once a monastery’s Old Man sacrificed spirituality and wisdom for savior faire and cynicism, his celibates’ souls went unprotected from the Devil’s best efforts. Many monasteries eventually became huge, wealthy corporations without temporal protection, so feudal nobles and kings preyed on, attacked, terrorized, dismantled, and robbed them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 27
If the monasteries were to survive, the truth was, alliances with temporal powers became essential. Perhaps they ought not to have, for in surviving by compromise rather than unenviable asceticism, they were transmogrified into travesties of what monasteries had once been. They even began to own churches, evidence of how they now accommodated to the Church, whose scrambling conformities and squabblings they had originally escaped by running away to the desert. The tortuous historical development of monasteries and the Church piloted actualized Christians away from the celibate ideal and lifestyle. Reform of the sorry and chaotic mess that was medieval monasticism led back to it. In 1073, the Benedictine monk Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII and unleashed his own burning agenda on his extended flock: perfect celibacy for all Christians. Many laypeople celebrated and also adopted celibacy. If it was strictly for procreation, other Church’s taught that pleasures of the flesh within marriage was acceptable. Centuries after monasticism was corrupted by the riches and the slack values of the World, monasteries were again returning to the asceticism that originally assisted monks who strove to achieve both carnal and spiritual celibacy. If therefore virginity is essentially a charism (compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others), then it is a particular “manifestation of the Spirit,” because that is how a charism is defined in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 12.7). If it is a charism, then it is more a gift received from God than a gift given to God. Jesus’ words: “You have not chosen Me; on the contrary, I have chosen you,” reports John 15.16. That Scripture applies to virgins in an altogether special way. One does not choose celibacy and virginity in order to enter into the Kingdom, but because the Kingdom has entered into one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 27
In other words, one does not remain a virgin to save one’s soul more easily, but because the Kingdom, or rather the Lord, has taken possession of one, chosen one, and one feels the need to remain free to respond fully to that choice. We can already begin to see the need for a conversion in connection with virginity and celibacy. This conversion consists in moving from the attitude of someone who thinks they have given a gift or made a sacrifice, a big sacrifice, to the quite different attitude of someone who is aware of having received a gift, and a great gift, and needs most of all to give thanks. We must admit that sometimes that feeling is present in consecrated persons, at a more or less conscious level Sometimes our married brothers and sisters encouraged such a view without realizing it, by comments like: “What a sacrifice, what courage it takes to give up the chance to have your own family and live alone, to give up such a brilliant future and lock yourself up in a seminary or a convent!” And possibly we end up believing it ourselves. Whereas if our vocation is genuine we know that precisely the opposite is true and that they ought to exclaim: “How fortunate!” I believe that there is no one called to this way of following Christ who at some time—especially at the beginning, when the vocation begins to blossom—has not clearly seen, or at least glimpsed, that what they were receiving was for them the greatest grace of God, after Baptism. If virginity or celibacy is a charism, then it must be lived charismatically, and to live it charismatically means, quite simply, living it as one usually lives a gift. First of all, with humility. The great martyr Ignatius of Antioch, living very close to the apostolic era, wrote: “If a person manages to live in chastity in honour of the Lord’s flesh, let one live it with humility, because if he boasts of it, he is lost, and if he considers himself greater than a bishop he is ruined.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 27
Some Fathers, such as St. Hermon, St. Augustine and St. Bernard, even said “better an unchaste, humble person than a proud virgin.” There is a great affinity between humility and chastity, just as there is between pride and lust. Lust is carnal pride and pride is spiritual lust. Celibates and virgins are particularly exposed to the temptation of pride. They are people who have never knelt to a creature, or recognized their incompleteness and their need for another person by saying: “Give me your being, because my own is not sufficient for me!” “Man—it has been said with profound truth—is a proud being. There was no way to make him understand his neighbour, except by making that neighbour enter in to his flesh. There was no way to make him understand dependency, necessity and need, except through the law of submission to another, for no other reason than that the other exists.” The first and most radical form of submission is that of man to woman and woman to man. In a different, non-conjugal way, celibates and virgins also live this form of submission, which is so valuable for overcoming self-sufficiency, pride and independence. However, they are certainly less “conditioned” by the other gender and therefore more exposed to the spirit of pride. A visitator sent by the ecclesiastical authorities to a certain community of very austere and cultured virgins (I think it was the famous Port Royal community) had occasion to write in his report: “These women are as pure as angels, but as proud as demons.” So, the first way to live the gift of chastity is humility. The second is joy and peace, because it is written that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy and peace,” Galatians 5.22, and if perfect chastity for the sake of the Kingdom is a “charism,” it must manifest the fruits of the Spirit. #RandolphHarris 5 of 27
Furthermore, if virginity is a charism it must be lived with freedom, because again it is written that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” reports 2 Corinthians 3.17. Interior freedom, obviously, not exterior: it means the absence of complexes, taboos, embarrassment and fear. Certainly, great harm was done to Christian virginity in the past by surrounding it with a great mass of fears, suspicions and warnings: “Be careful of this watch out for that!”, thereby turning the vocation into a kind of highway where all road signs read: Danger! Danger! This is a repetition of the mistake made by the lazy servant in the Gospel who, having received a precious talent, is afraid to lose it, so he goes off and buries it rather than making it bear fruit. We have allowed the World to think that the principle at work in it is stronger than the principle at work in us, whereas St. John tells Christians clearly: “He Who is within you is greater than the one who is in the World,” reports 1 John 4.4. At times we really have put the lamp “under the bushel” when it should be put on the lampstand to give light to all who are in the house, in other words, in the Church. We have seen that virginity for the sake of the Kingdom is both a paschal detachment from the World and a prophecy about the future life. In the past, religious men and women chose to give witness, through the colour and cut of their habits and by other signs, especially in their renunciation of the World and their separation from it. If some new religious communities—and traditional ones, too, in some way—also showed the World the other, more important, aspect of their charism: the fact that they are an anticipation, in faith and hope, of the shining joy of the Heavenly American, when the bride will wear a robe of “fine linen, pure and bright” (Revelation 19.8), would it not be a fine and timely thing? #RandolphHarris 6 of 27
Even if it is good to remember that the best witness to this joy is the light in one’s eyes and the unction of one’s speech, rather than the colour of one’s clothes, such witnesses, so absolute in its eloquence of a different beauty and a different hoy which do not decay, is perhaps more necessary for the World than the negative testimony which speaks of flight from the World. However, perhaps the most important result of speaking about virginity and celibacy in terms of charism is that the latent opposition between virginity and marriage, which has so beset both Christian vocations, is finally laid to rest. Virginity is a charism, and marriage is a charism too. Both are therefore particular “manifestations of the Spirit.” If both come “from the same Spirit,” how can they be incompatible or opposed to each other? In the notion of a charism, and that of vocation, which is closely related to it, the two forms of life can finally be fully reconciled and can even strengthen one another. The one conforms the other, it does not destroy it. Precisely because in the Christian view marriage is considered to be something good, and a spiritual gift, so, for that very reason, virginity and celibacy are beautiful and noble. If marriage were something bad or simply dangerous and inadvisable, indeed, what merit would there be? To abstain from it would be a duty and nothing more, like abstaining from any occasion of sin. However, precisely because marriage is good and beautiful, the renunciation of it for a higher motive is even more beautiful. A person who goes to listen to a fine concert is doing something good and wholesome, but if, even though they really wanted to go, they forgo the concert out of love—for example, so they can be close to someone they love and help them feel less lonely—it is an even better thing. In this sense Paul says that “the one who marries does well; and the one who does not marry does better still,” reports 1 Corinthians 7.38. #RandolphHarris 7 of 27
Another dimension of maintaining balance in relationships is giving up our need to be “right” all the time. We must become more willing to express ourselves, listen to others, and learn from one another, rather than always judging who is “right” and who is “wrong.” However, the World system is mostly based on right and wrong. If one admits fault, they are penalized. Therefore, people are taught to deny the truth to protect themselves and their assets. If we can learn to “agree to disagree” with one another, then love will flow freely even when there are great differences among people. One measure of the strength of love is the extent to which it, like glue, brings the most diverse elements together in a common bond. The actualizing Christian learns to relate respectfully to other people without judging them harshly or rejecting them. Love enables us to seek to understand others, and every person is worth understanding. The actualizing Christian recognized the privilege of Americans, the Old World, and other Christians to be different. Openness to others who are different replaces defensiveness; yet in one’s own core, the Christian can still radiate the presence of Christ in the World. However, the opposite of love is fear of loving. As we stressed in the past, fear can constrict one into nonliving. To be committed to the well-being of ourselves and others means cutting through fear to make a commitment, without guarantee that our love will be returned. This requires the courage to risk possibly facing some pain and disappointment, because there will be many who will not return the love or will even return disdain instead. We must have the courage to accept that we will occasionally be hurt in our attempts to truly love others. Yet, ewe can realize that the joy and fulfillment of love in our life makes it worth coping with the hurt and vulnerability that sometimes happens. #RandolphHarris 8 of 27
Here is what the Spirit of God has been saying to me for some time: There is coming a day when the people of God will even take authority over the pestilence that we know in this hour. The World will say, “Who are these that the pestilence never touch?” Some of this has already happened. I know of a family who, when they built a patio on the back of the house, said, “The mosquitoes and files are not going to keep us from using it.” They took the Word of God and marched around the backyard, quoting what the Word said about being redeemed from the pestilence. People who have been there say you can be in the backyard or on that patio and you will never be bitten by a mosquito, nor will a fly bother you. However, you better not try the front porch! That may sound silly to some, but you cannot argue with success! Learn to use your words accurately, whether in prayer or in speech. Now you do not learn to operate in this overnight, just as you do not learn to drive an Ultimate Driving Machine or fly an airplane overnight. It is a process of learning, then putting into practice what you have learned. Learn from the Word of God; then put it into practice. Practice your faith. The Word says that whatever you do will prosper (Psalm 1.3) and that no weapon formed against you shall prosper (Isaiah 54.17). Learn to use these scriptures to destroy defeat. The Word says that humans have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air. When I began to see this, I started using my confession of the Word to catch more dish. When I first learned about confession, I did not want to get in over my head, so I said, “I will just start using it in the little things.” I would advise one to do the same. Start believing God for your next parking place when you go downtown. #RandolphHarris 9 of 27
Just so, Jesus Christ’s blessed precursor, most excellent of Saints, John the Baptist—if Luke is to be believed (1.44)—somersaulted in the joy of the Holy Spirit while still enjoying the comfort of his mother’s womb. Years later as a grown man, he was able to pick Jesus out of a crowd and, according to John (3.29), speak about Him with admiration and affection. “Do not look at me! I am only the Bridegroom’s friend. He is the Bridegroom! Stop! Listen to Him! His are the words of the Joy of the joys.” So to should I stop and listen. And with great and holy desire should I be spitted and broiled and presented to You en brochette. Whence, I offer up to You all of my fellow Devouts, with their Dulce Jubilo’s, their inflamed hearts, their ecstasies, their vision. I offer also all Virtues and Lauds, from every creature in Heaven and on Earth that has been celebrated and will be celebrated. I offer them for myself and for everyone who has been commended to me for prayer. That prayer is, may You be worthily praised by everyone and glorified in every age. Accept my vows, Lord my God. You are Laudation and Benediction; You are Infinity and Immensity; You are Multitude and Magnitude—these are the sorts of things the Psalmist would say (150.2). You are all of these divine attribute and virtues, and more, and I offer them back to You, every single day, every single moment. And with prayers and affections, I invite and beseech all the Celestial Spirits and all Your faithful to thank You and to praise You, as You have come to expect. Some exclamations! May all the peoples, tribes, languages praise You! May they magnify Your Holy and Mellifluous Name with jubilation and devotion! May all of you celebrate the highest Sacrament with full reverence and receive it with full faith! #RandolphHarris 10 of 27
May they deserve to find grace and mercy in Your presence! May they pray successfully for my sinfulness! May they have the devotion they have desired, the union they have enjoyed, the consolation they have longed for, the refections they have tasted! Then may they leave the Holy and Heavenly Table. Then and only then may they remember me for my poverty. Joseph Smith and several elders left Kirtland Missouri on June 19, 1831. They traveled by wagon, canal boat, and stagecoach to Cincinnati, Ohio. Here they boarded a steam boat for St. Louis. Boat transportation between St. Louis and the western borders of Missouri was hazardous, infrequent, and very slow. Rather than wait for river transportation, for they were anxious to get to western Missouri, they walked the two hundred and fifty miles from St. Louis to Independence, arriving the middle of July. It was a joyful meeting between these men and the Saints who had been in Missouri since the beginning of the year. Shortly after his arrival, Joseph received a revelation from the Lord: This is the land of promise, and the place of the city of Zion. Behold, the place which is now called Independence, is the center place, and the spot for the temple is lying westward upon a lot which is not far from the courthouse. Wherefore it is wisdom that the land should be purchased by the Saints; and also every tract lying westward. An also every tract bordering by the prairies, inasmuch as my disciples are enabled to buy lands. Behold, this is wisdom, that they may obtain it for an everlasting inheritance. In this revelation the Lord indicated that the land of Missouri would be Zion, and that the city of Independence would be the Center place. This revelation made several assignments of responsibility to the various elders. Sidney Gilbert was to be the agent in purchasing the land, which was to be bought according to the laws of the land. #RandolphHarris 11 of 27
Sidney Gilbert was also to establish a store and sell goods honestly so he might obtain money to buy more land for the Saints. Edward Partridge was to assign the land to the Saints as they came to Zion. William Phelps was to become the church printer, and also to do printing for those of the community who wished him to do work for them. Oliver Cowdery was to assist William Phelps and help select the things to be printed for the use of the church. The bishop and his agent (Edward Partridge and Sidney Gilbert) were to make preparations for the families who were soon coming to the land of Zion. Toward the end of July about sixty people from Colesville, New York arrived. With them were Sidney Rigdon, his wife, and other elders. The settlement of Zion was now begun in earnest! The Colesville Branch settled about twelve miles west of Independence (near where the Central Church of Kansas City now stands). At that time there was no Kansas City, only a few crooked paths and several log houses scattered throughout a dense forest. Quite a ceremony was held as Colesville Branch built the first house. Twelve men carried the first log. Each man represented one of the twelve tribes of America. Sidney Rigdon, prayed, dedicating the land of Zion for the gathering of the Saints. On August 2, 1831, Sidney Rigdon stood before a meeting of the Saints and asked, “Do you receive this land for the land of your inheritance with thankful hearts from the Lord?” They all answered, “We do.” He then asked, “Do you pledge yourselves to keep the laws of God on this land?” All answered, “We do.” To his third question, “Do you pledge yourselves to keep the laws of God on this land?” All answered, “We do.” All knelt in prayer to the Lord. Then Sidney Rigdon stood up and said, “I now pronounce this land dedicated to the Lord for inheritance of the Saints in the name of Jesus Christ, and for all the faithful servants of the Lord forever. Amen.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 27
The following day eight elders met together for a special dedication service. These men were Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, Peter Whitmer, Edward Partridge, William Phelps, Martin Harris, and Joseph Coe. Sidney Rigdon dedicated the ground for the city of Zion. Joseph Smith laid a stone in the name of Jesus Christ at a corner of the place where the temple they planned to build would stand. Joseph Smith, Jr., was not too happy with living conditions as he found them in Missouri. Life in Missouri was in sharp contrast to the settled, ore genteel conditions of life he had experienced in the East. This was rough pioneer country where schooling, religion, and refined manners were not considered essential; and the pioneers did not welcome the “Mormons,” as they called them, and were as uncongenial to them as the people from the east were to the Missourians. However, when the land itself, Joseph Smith was well pleased. He thought that is the Saints would bring a better grade of cattle, good grain, and farming tools, along with the will to establish and maintain schools, conditions would improve, and Missouri would indeed become the promised land of their highest hopes. The failure to sustain this glimpse is not due to one’s personal demerit but to one’s system’s limitation. For only by passing from an actualized Christian philosophy, or rather by widening it, can permanence of result be had. If it soon fades away, it is a glimpse. If one can stay in it every minute of one’s waking life, it is illumination. An intermittent enlightenment which comes like this in moments is only a step on the way. One should not be satisfied with it. Nothing short of total enlightenment which is permanent, constant, and ever-present ought to be one’s goal. The continued existence of this experience, the lengthening of this glimpse into perpetual vision, is something that cannot be brought about without patience, care, effort, guidance, and grace. #RandolphHarris 13 of 27
It is one thing to secure an enthralling glimpse, but it is another thing for this, native to Heaven and alien to Earth, to endure through the prosaic routine and belittling affairs of everyday living. The ability to maintain oneself in the high state reached during these glimpses is ordinarily lacking in a human, for it requires the whole power of one’s being. In these glimpses one only looks at the Infinite Beauty, but in the final realization one becomes unified with it. Once one has experienced the glimpse one will understand why one’s next goal is to experience it again, and why one’s final goal is to attain it in permanence. That initial realization has henceforth to be established and made one’s own under all kinds of diverse conditions and in all kinds of places. Hence one’s life may be broken up for years by a wide range of vicissitudes, pains, pleasures, test, temptations, and tribulations. If it be asked why these momentary revelations come and go all too quickly, the answer may be given by saying it is because the nature remains untransformed. Only when fully transformed can it be illuminated. Until the whole nature is transformed, it cannot hold the Light but must let it go eventually. Few can continue in the glimpse, for the lesser nature soon rises to the surface again and overwhelms them. Since there are no negative emotions in the Overself, how can it stay in the same breast as an ego filled with them? This is why the glimpse can be only a brief one, and why it can be stretched into permanency only by first cleansing the nature of al negatives. Let us value these encounters with the divine and be glad and truly grateful when they happen. They are significant and important. However, they are special events. The quest does not run through them alone. It runs just as much through ordinary daily life in which our experiences are shared in common with so many people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 27
Social and behavioural scientist have for a long time appreciated the fact that early childhood experience in the family of origin will set the stage for later adult functioning. Within certain schools of thought, the influence of early childhood experiences has, frankly, been taken too far. One can use the metaphour of the woolly mammoth to characterize the function of early childhood experiences postulated by psychoanalytic theory. Some clinicians are critical of the assumption that our interpersonal and psychological constitutions are frozen in ice, forever preserved, once our childhoods are over. It is essential to bear in mind that scientist have yet to isolate any deterministic relationships between childhood interpersonal experiences and later adult psychosocial functioning. The implications of experiences within the family of origin for later mental health must be interpreted with this caveat in mind. In it widely understood and accepted that parental neglect and abuse are precursors to numerous mental health problems, including alcoholism, depression, loneliness, personality disorders, eating disorders, somatoform disorders, and psychogenic dysfunctions involving pleasures of the flesh, to name just some. Abuse or some form of neglect (exempli gratia, low parental care) has been conclusively identified as either a contributory factor, or a phenomenon that occurs with remarkable prevalence, in the vast majority of psychological problems examined. The data that link childhood physical and sexual abuse to later adult psychosocial problems are virtually overwhelming. What are particularly impressive are both the range and severity of problems occurring in the wake of such noxious interpersonal maltreatment. One might speculate that children, even those at a very young age, understand and desire the caregiving role and behaviour of their parents. When a provider of care and support turns on a child through either neglect or more overt abuse, a corrupted interpersonal architecture is produced that in many cases will never support the construction of functional and satisfying personal relationships in the future. #RandolphHarris 15 of 27
The avoidance or alleviation of unpleasant internal states becomes a dominant goal for people who have experience childhood abuse from the perspective of emotional avoidance. Many of the psychosocial problems that follow, such as substance use disorders, bulimia nervosa, dissociation, social phobia, dysfunctions in pleasures of the flesh, and somatoform disorders, could be interpreted as a mechanism for escape or distraction from memories of such painful experiences, and perhaps a means of reducing the likelihood of further abuse. The binge eating offers an escape from self-awareness by narrowing attention to the immediate stimulus (id est, food). It is plausible to assume that many of other destructive behaviours implicated in the eating disorders, such as drug and alcohol consumption, could similarly serve as mechanisms for escape from self-awareness. Unfortunately, for many people, a sad feature of the maladjustment that follows childhood maltreatment is a propensity to be situated in interpersonal contexts in which further maltreatment is likely (exempli gratia, socializing with drug-using peers). It is a lesser-known fact that excessive parental attention and caregiving may have equally devastating consequences for later personal relationships and mental health When parents fail to maintain the delicate balance between a secure, nurturant environment and a healthy dose of reality and responsibility, the child may develop a self-image that simply cannot be sustained by future relational partners. A gross failure to develop a sense of altruism is a potential consequence. Once again, the blueprints for disaster, ultimately manifested in problems such as loneliness and personality disorders, may well be drawn before a child even leaves the home. #RandolphHarris 16 of 27
As we have seen, depression can result from marital discord, and recovery from depression is often slower for people who do not receive support from their spouse. In fact, as many as half of all depressed clients may be in a dysfunctional relationship. Thus it is not surprising that many cases of depression have been treated by couple therapy, the approach in which a therapist works with two people who share a long-term relationship. Shared responsibility—when the client’s disorders occur within the context of a troubled marriage or relations, couple therapy has proved to be an effective treatment for depression. Therapists who offer behavioural martial therapy help spouses change harmful marital behaviour by teaching them specific communication and problem-solving skills. When the depressed person’s marriage is laden with conflict, this approach and similar ones may be as effective as individual cognitive therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy, or drug therapy in helping to reduce depression. In addition, depressed clients who receive couple therapy are more likely than those in individual therapy to be more satisfied with their marriages after treatment. “Live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble,” reports 1 Peter 3.8. Everywhere you look these days, you can see people who are hurting. Some people are extremely discouraged; many have broken dreams. Others have made mistakes, and now their lives are in a mess. Because more people needed medication to help them through their problems, in 1962 came about the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments: In the spirit of consumer protection, Congress passed a law requiring that all pharmaceutical drugs be proved safe and effective. The law also transferred still more authority for prescription drug ads from the Federal Trade Commission (which regulates most other kinds of advertising to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). #RandolphHarris 17 of 27
In addition to medication and therapy, often times, people need to also feel God’s compassion and His unconditional love. They do not need somebody to judge and criticize them, or to tell them what they are doing wrong. (In most cases, they already know that!) Many people need someone to bring hope, healing, and to show God’s mercy. Really, they are looking for a friend, someone who will be there to encourage them, who will take the time to listen to their story and genuinely care. We are all so busy. We have our own priorities and important plans and agendas. Often, our attitude is: I do not want to be inconvenienced. Do not bother me with your problems. I have got enough problems of my own. However, the Scripture says, “If anyone sees one’s brother (or sister) in need yet closes one’s heart of compassion, how can the love of God be in one?” reports 1 John 3.17. Interesting, is it not? God’s Word implies that we each have a heart of compassion, but the question is whether it is open or closed. Furthermore, the Holy Bible says, “We are to continually walk in love, being guided by the love and following love,” reports 2 John 6. When God puts love and compassion in your heart toward someone, He is offering you an opportunity to make a difference in that person’s life. One must learn to follow that love. Do not ignore it. Act on it. Someone needs what you have to give. God has placed in you the potential to have a kind, caring, gentle, loving spirit. One has the ability to empathize, to feel what other people are feeling. Because one was created in the image of God, one has the moral capacity to experience God’s compassion in one’s heart right now. However, too often, because of one’s own selfishness, many people choose to close their hearts to others. #RandolphHarris 18 of 27
If your heart is opened or closed, how can you tell? Easy. Are you frequently concerned about other people, or are you concerned about yourself? Do you take the time to make a difference, to encourage others, to lift their spirits, to make people feel better about themselves? Do you follow the flow of love that God puts in your heart toward someone in need? Or are you too busy with your own plans? If you want to live a successful life now, you must make sure that you keep your heart of compassion open Be on the lookout for people you can bless. If it means you can help to meet someone else’s need, please be willing to be interrupted and inconvenienced every once in a while. If you study the life of Jesus Christ, you will discover that He always took time for people. He was never too busy with His own agenda, with His own plans. He was not so caught up in Himself that He was unwilling to stop and help a person in need. He could have easily said, “Listen, I am busty. I have a schedule to keep. I am on my way to the next city, and I have already been delayed.” However, no, Jesus had compassion for people. He was concerned what they were going though, and He willingly took the time to help. He freely gave of His life. I believe He demands nothing less from those who claim to be His followers today. Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they have closed their hearts to compassion. They are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they are an ulterior motive or goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered. However, if you want to experience God’s abundant life, you must get your focus off yourself and start taking the time to help other people. #RandolphHarris 19 of 27
Sometimes if we would just take the time to listen to people, we could help initiate a healing process in their lives. So man people today have hurt and pain bottled up deeply in their bowels. They have nobody they can talk to about mental hygiene; they do not really trust anyone anymore. If you dare to care and open your heart of compassion and be that person’s friend or sponsor—without judging or condemning—and simply have an ear to listen, you may help lift that heavy burden. You do not have to know all the right answers. You just need to care, but never let anyone drag you down. We need to learn to be better listeners. Do not always be so quick to give your opinion. Be sensitive to what the real need is in the person you hope to help. Too frequently, what we really want to do is just give them a quick word of encouragement, a semi-appropriate Scripture verse, and a fifteen-second prayer; then we can go one and do what we want to do. Instead, take the time today to hear someone with your heart, to show that person you are concerned, and that you really care. As humans evolved, there must have been a period of transition during which the carriers of the process could not have known what was happening to them or even that a change was taking place. Now in retrospect we can see it as an expansion of awareness which brought into being freedom and choice. The knowing mind begins to know itself and to perceive, along with the freedom to do this or that, a horror about which it has no freedom at all. As soon as we become able, floating down the river of life, really to see the remarkable scenery and to enjoy the newly acquired freedom to move this way or that in the current, at just that moment we hear the roar of the cataract ahead. This is the human condition. Amid the luscious fruits we see the coiled asp. We become, at one stroke, gods and food for worms. #RandolphHarris 20 of 27
Changes that come about glacially in the transformation of species are reenacted in a flash in the lives of individuals. Thus we may catch a glimpse, each in one’s own past, of that moment which recapitulates the birth of human, the beginning of that exaltation and anguish which has become for us the condition of life, the air we breathe. Human nature is invoked to prove the necessity of change, for “human nature” has been thwarted or insulted by the dominant system. “Man” can no longer be defined as what suits the dominant system, which the dominant system apparently does not always suit men or women or children. I think many social scientists have been making an error in logic. Certainly only society is the carrier of culture (it is not inborn). However, it does not follow that socialized and cultured are synonymous. What follows, rather, is that, since culture is so overwhelmingly evident in observing humankind, social properties must be of the essence of original “human nature, and indeed that the “isolated individual” is a product of culture. Many people tend to exaggerate the social nature of humanity by reading into it preformed traits of their own society. From the earliest infancy, imitation and emulation, love, striving to communicate, rivalry, exclusiveness, and jealousy, punishment, introjected authority, identification, growing up on a model, finding safety in conforming—these were among the conflicting elementary functions of “human nature” that must grow into culture. Every step of education is the resolution of a difficult social conflict. The techniques for harmoniously belongs to the organized system of society! If you use the right techniques, you can adapt people to anything. #RandolphHarris 21 of 27
Our social scientists have become so accustomed to the highly organized and by-and-large smoothly running society that they have begin to think that “social animal” means “harmoniously belonging.” They do not like to think that fighting and dissenting are proper social functions, not that rebelling or initiating fundamental change is a social function. Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it has been improperly socialized; there has been a failure in communication. The animal part is rarely mentioned at all; if it proves annoying, it too has been inadequately socialized. “Convulsive shudders” … “Unexpected uprising” … “wild swings” … The headline writers search frantically for terms to describe what they perceive as mounting World disorder. The democratic uprising in America stuns them. The sudden reversal of Maoist policies in China, the collapse of the dollar, the new militancy of the less affluent countries, outbreaks of rebellion in America or Afghanistan are all seen as startling, random, unconnected events. The World, we are told, is careening toward chaos. Yet mush that appears anarchic is not. The eruption of a new civilization on Earth could not but shatter old relationships, overthrow regimes, and send the financial system spiraling. What seems like chaos is actually a massive realignment of power to accommodate the new civilization. We will look back on today as the twilight of Third Wave civilization, and be saddened by what we see. For as it is coming to a close, the age of information is leaving behind a World in which one quarter of the species lives in relative affluence, three quarters in relative poverty—and 900,000,000 in what the World Bank terms “absolute poverty.” Fully 800,000,000 people are underfed and 1,100,000,000 illiterate. An estimated 550,000,000 human beings remain without access to public health facilities or even safe, drinkable water, as the age of information is ending. #RandolphHarris 22 of 27
While many Americans are still waiting for President Biden’s promised $2,000.00 a month and forgiveness of student loan debt to help get them through the pandemic, 522,808 Americans filed bankruptcy, and another variation of the COVID-19 Virus is sweeping the World, which could flatten humanity. On 22 December 2021, nearly a quarter of a million Americans were infected with COVID-19, approximately 1,900 died. America, with some of the harshest COVID-19 restrictions is leading the World in infections and deaths. As of 22 December 2021, 52,510,978 Americans have been infected with COVID-19, 833,029 have died. That means 16 percent of Americas have been infected with COVID so far. The age of information is leaving behind a World population 8 BILLION human beings, when it was reported that the World was considered overpopulated at 5 billion. In addition, the World is being left with some 20 to 30 developing nations depending on the hidden subsidies of cheap energy and cheap raw materials for their economic success. A global infrastructure—the International Monetary Fund, GATT, the World Bank, and COMECON—which regulate trade and finance for the benefit of the Third Wave powers are in control. Many poor countries are being left with one-crop economies twisted to serve the needs of the rich. The rapid emergence of the Fourth Wave is not only foreshadowing the end of the Third Wave imperium, it also is exploding all over our conventional ideas about ending poverty on the planet. Once the populace is legitimately assembled as a sovereign body, all jurisdiction of the government ceases; the executive power is suspended, and the person of the humblest citizen is as scared and inviolable as that of the first magistrate, for where those who are represented are found, there is no longer any representative. #RandolphHarris 23 of 27
Americans need financial help and they need it now! Mr. Biden is not keeping his promises! He cheated to get in office and lied to quail the people. Under the leadership of Mr. Biden, due to ignorance or neglect of the United States Constitution, all jurisdiction has been suspended and the World is back to being the Wild, Wild West. This interval of suspension, during which the president recognizes or ought to recognize an actual superior (the people), is disturbing to him. And these assemblies of the people, which are the aegis of the body politic and the curb on the government, have at all times been the horror of leaders. Thus they never spare efforts, objections, difficulties, or promises to keep the citizens from having them. When the citizens were greedy, cowardly, and pusillanimous, more enamoured of repose than with liberty, they did not hold out very long against the redoubled efforts of the government. Thus it is that, as the resisting force constantly grows, the sovereign authority finally vanishes, and the majority of the cities fall and perish prematurely. However, between the sovereign authority and arbitrary government, there sometimes is introduced an intermediate power about which we must speak. Although war itself is full of horrors it must not be forgotten that it has an obverse side. In some ways it acts like the old-fashioned surgical operation of blood-letting. All the moral scum in humanity’s character rises to the surface, concentrated mostly amongst the totalitarian gangsters, but it rises only that it may be seen for what it is and cleared off. The sufferings of humankind have an educative vale and tend to adjust the sins and excesses of humankind. It is the ultimate tendency of evil forces to destroy themselves from within as well as to suffer destruction from without through the mysterious operation of Universal law. Materialism reaches its final culmination in the social and personal crises generated by war. #RandolphHarris 24 of 27
By displaying its own horrible results before humanity’s very eyes, it is, by reaction, awakening many sleeping mentalities to the need of a spiritual outlook. In a World which has the conflict of opposites as part of its inherent nature, peace is an illusory goal. Nor in reality is there even such a thing as neutrality and nonalignment. If brute force really ruled this World then the Romans would still be ruling the Britons, and the Huns who sacked Rome would still be ruling that beautiful city. The Persian troops would still be masters of Egypt and Alexander’s troops would still be the masters of Persians. The Crusades would be proselytizing Muslims in the Middle East by force and guarding the Southern American Boarder. However, brute force is a success only in the beginning and a failure always in the end. It is true that some wars seem to have achieved a creative result, but how much more painlessly, bloodlessly, could not the same result have been achieved by nonviolent methods. It might have required a longer time, more patience, but the cruelty and horror and loss of war would have been avoided. We may watch the democratic nations trying to prevent open conflict with the totalitarian ones, but all they are succeeding in doing is merely to put off the inevitable clash from one year to another, as violence erupts on their own streets in protest to democratic nations becoming totalitarian and totalitarian nations complaining about their conflict disorder spreading to other lands like a pandemic. This conflict cannot be hidden by the American fake news and puppet leaders because it is a bathe of good and evil and there must be conflict. The evil ever seeks to destroy the good, and the good must defend itself ever. It could not happen otherwise. #Randolphharris 25 of 27
Dear Lord in Heaven, please forgive your children for the times they have missed opportunities to show compassion to someone You brought into their lives. Please help your human family to be sensitive to Your voice speaking within them, directing them how they can best help someone else. Thou hast endowed us with a knowledge of Thy Torah and hast taught us to perform the statues of Thy will. Thou hast mase distinction, O Lord our God, between the sacred and the secular, between the Godly and the morbid, between American and the heathens, between the seventh day of rest and the six days of work. O our Father, our King, please grant that the days which are approaching may begin for us in peace. May we be withheld from all sin, cleansed for all iniquity, and may we cleave in reverence to Thee. O Lord, how lovely it is to be your guest. Breeze full of scents; mountains reaching to the skies; waters like a boundless mirror, reflecting the sun’s golden rays and the scudding clouds all nature murmurs mysteriously, breathing depths of tenderness. Birds and beasts of the forest bear the imprint of your love. Blessed are you, mother Earth, in your floating loveliness, which wakens our yearning for happiness that will last forever in the land where, amid beauty that grows not old, rings out the cry: Alleluia! What sort of praises can I give you? I have never heard the song of the cherubim, a joy reserved for the spirits above but I know the praises that nature sings to you. In winter, I have beheld how silently in the moonlight the whole Earth offers you prayer, clad in its white mantle of snow, sparkling like diamonds. I have seen how the rising sun rejoices in you, how the song of the birds is a chorus of praise to you. I have heard the mysterious mutterings of the forests about you, and the winds singing your praise as they stir the waters. I have understood how the choirs of the stars proclaim your glory as they move for ever in the depths of infinite space. #RandolphHarris 26 of 27
As if an enchanted paradise, dear Lord in Heaven, you have brought me into life. We have seen the sky like a chalice of deepest blue, where in the height the birds are singing. We have listened to the soothing murmur of the forests and the melodious music of the streams. We have tasted fruit of fine flavour and sweet-scented honey. We can live very well on your Earth. It is a pleasure to be your guest. Glory to you for the feast-day of life. Glory to you for the perfume of lilies and roses. Glory to you for each different taste of berry and fruit. Glory to you for the sparkling silver of early morning dew. Glory to you for the joy of dawn’s awakening. Glory to you for the new life each day brings. Glory to you O God, for age to age. O grant us knowledge, understanding and secernment. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who bestowest knowledge upon humans. Please bring us back, O our Father, to Thy Torah; please draw us near, O our King, to Thy service, and restore us unto Thy presence in wholehearted repentance. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who desirest repentance. Please forgive us, O our Father, for we have sinned; please pardon us O our King, for we have transgressed. Verily Thou art merciful and forgiving. Blessed art Thou, O gracious Lord, who are abundant in forgiveness. Please behold our affliction and plead our cause. Please hasten to redeem us for the sake of Thy name, for Thou art a mighty Redeemer. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer of America. Please heal us, O Lord, and we shall be healed; please save us and we shall be saved, for to Thee we offer praise. Grant complete healing for all our ailments for Thou, O God, art our King, our faithful and merciful Healer. Praised art Thou, O Lord, who healest the sick among Thy people America. Blessed this year unto us, O Lord our God, and bless its yield that it may be for our welfare. Please send Thy blessing upon the Earth. Send dew and rain for a blessing upon the earth. #RandolphHarris 27 of 27
Cresleigh Homes
Ready for the holidays? We are so excited to welcome guests into our home this year…the Brighton Station Residence 2 has a spacious, open floorplan that’s perfect for entertaining!
So glad we’re settled in our #CresleighRanch home this year!
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Between Christ and Satan in the Demon World of Today
It is difficult to say exactly at what point fear begins, when the causes of that fear are not plainly before the eyes. Impression gather on the surface of the mind, film by film, as ice gathers upon the surface of still water, but so often so lightly that they claim no definite recognition from the conscious Then a point is reached where the accumulated impressions become a definite emotion, and the mind realized that something has happened. When a medium is called upon to relay a message which supposedly comes the realm of the dead, one usually goes into a trance. This is a “condition in which a spiritualist medium allegedly loses consciousness and passes under the control of some external force, as for the supposed transmission of communications from the dead.” In a state of unconsciousness, the necromancer may obtain communication in the for of automatic writing, but it usually comes through verbal speech. Sometimes the phenomenon called “materialization” occurs. This is defined as the ability on the part of some mediums “to create from unknown materials outside of their own body, some visible, tangible, more or less highly organized new formations supplied with their own illumination (such as efflorescent substance) for which formations in many cases, the human body in part or in whole forms a pattern, and these materializations appear and disappear suddenly. Many reputable writers report that the materializations actually have been photographed and carefully studied. They are sometimes called phantasms, and seem to speak while the medium appears to be unconscious. When a materialization does not occur, the unconscious sounds exactly like that of the deceased person one has been attempting to reach. Many people have gone to a séance believing the whole idea to be fraudulent, but have become firmly convinced that they truly heard a loved one who had died. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Automatic writing is another baffling spiritisitic marvel. The mediums may, while in a trance, inscribe a paper with the exact handwriting of the deceased. At other times a pencil may write without being touched by the human hand or any apparent mechanical device. Then again, in some instances a phantasm does the transcribing. Of course, before we accept reports of this nature, we must recognize the possibilities of deliberate deceit, overwrought imagination, or inaccurate observation. If, on the other hand, one simply dismisses the testimony of intelligent, honest, God-fearing humans as having no value, one is not being fair. A further word of caution is in order. Christians may be tempted to conclude that these strange and unexplainable phenomena are proof of God’s existence. This is not correct because many of them may have a naturalistic explanation. Writings produced mysteriously in seances have been carefully examined by graphologist, and have even become the objects over which court battles have been fought. Spiritists usually attempt their alleged contact with the spirit World through a medium who enters what appears to be a trance, and receives some kind of communication in either verbal or written form. Undoubtedly some people who claim to have this ability are impostors, but hundreds of educated humans who have been closely involved in this activity or have conducted intensive investigation are convinced that extraordinary, perhaps supernatural, spiritual power is involved. However, those who believe the Holy Bible are certain that all necromancy is sinful and dangerous. As we look at the most considerable Evidence touching Florence Newton’s witchcraft upon Mary Longdon, for which she was committed to Youghall Prision, 24th March 1661, it is interesting to find that the following she bewitched one David Jones to death by kissing his hand through the Grate of the Prison, for which she was indicted at Cork Assizes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Elenor Jones, Relict of the said David Jones, being sworn and examined in open Court what she knew concerning any practice of Witchcraft by the said Florence Newton upon the said David Jones her Husband, gave in Evidence, that April last the said David, having been out all night, came home early in the morning, and said to her, Where dost thou think I have been all Night? To which she answered she knew not; whereupon he replied, I and Frank Beseley have been standing Centinel over the Witch all night. To which the said Elenor said, Why, what hurt is that? Hurt? Quoth he. Marry I doubt it is never a jot the better for me; for she hath kiss’d my Hand, and I have a great pain in that arm, and I verily believe she hath bewitch’d me, if ever she bewitch’d any Man. To which she answered, The Lord forbid! That all that Night, and continually from that time, he was restless and ill, complaining exceedingly of a great pain in his rm for seven days together, and at the seven days’ end he complained that the pain was come from his Arm to his Heart, and then kept his bed Night and Day, grievously afflicted, and crying out against Florence Newton, and about fourteen days after he died. Francis Beseley being sworn and examined, saith, That about the time aforementioned meeting with the said David Jones, and discoursing with him of the several reports then stirring concerning the said Florence Newton, that she had several Familiars resorting to her in sundry shapes, the said David Jones told him he had a great mind to watch her one Night to see whether he could observe any Cats or other Creatures resort to her through the Grate, as ‘twas suspected they did, and desired that said Francis to go with him, which he did. And that when they came thither David Jones came to Florence, and told her that he heard she could not say the Lord’s Prayer; to which she answered, She could. He then desir’d her to day it, but she excused herself by the decay of Memory through old Age. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Then David Jones began to teach her, but she could not or would not say it, though often taught it. Upon which the said Jones and Beseley being withdrawn a little from her, and discoursing of her not being able to learn this Prayer, she called out to David Jones, and said, David, David, come hither, I can say the Lord’s Prayer now. Upon which David went towards her, and the said Deponent would have pluckt him back and persuaded him not to have gone to her, but he would not be persuaded, but went to the Greate to her, and she began to say the Lord’s Prayer, but could not say Forgive us our trespasses, so that David again taught her, which she seem’d to take very thankfully, and told him she had a great mind to have kiss’d him, but that the Grate hindered her, but desired she might kiss his Hand; whereupon he gave her his Hand through the Grate, and she kiss’s it; and towards break of Day they went away and parted, and soon after the Deponent heard that David Jones was il. Whereupon he went to visit him, [and was told by hum that the Hag] had him by the Hand, and was pulling off his Arm. And he said, Do you not see the old hang How she pulls me? Well, I lay my Death on her, she has bewitched me. Fourteen days languish he died. This concludes the account of Florence Newton’s trial, as given by Glanvill. It seems that the witch was indicted upon two separate charges, with bewitching the servant-girl, Mary Longdon, and with causing the death of David Jones. The case must have created considerable commotion in Youghal, and was considered so important that the Attorney-General went down to prosecute, but unfortunately there is no record of the verdict. If found guilty (and we can have little doubt but that she was), she would have been sentenced to death in pursuance of the Elizabethan Statute, section I. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Many of the actors in the affair were persons of local prominence, and can be identified. The “Mr. Greatrix” was Valentine Greatrakes, the famous healer or “stroker.” He was born in 1629, and died in 1683. He joined the Parliamentary Army, and when it was disbanded in 1656, became a country magistrate. At the Restoration he was deprived of his offices, and then gave himself up to a life of contemplation. In 1662 the idea seized him that he had the power of healing the king’s-evil. He kept the matter quiet for some time, but at last communicated it to his wife, who jokingly bade him try his power on a body in the neighbourhood. Accordingly he laid his hands on the affected parts with prayer, and within a month the body was healed. Gradually his fame spread, until patients came to him from various parts of England as well as Ireland. In 1665 he received an invitation from Lord Conway to come to Ragely to cure his wife of perpetual headaches. He stayed at Ragley about three weeks, and while there he entertained his hosts with the story of Florence Newton and her doings; although he did not succeed in curing Lady Conway, yet many persons in the neighbourhood benefited by his treatment. The form of words he always used was: “God Almighty heal thee for His mercy’s sake”; and if the patient professed to receive any benefit he bade them give God the praise. He took no fees, and rejected causes which were manifestly incurable. In modern times the cured have been reasonably attributed to animal magnetism. He was buried beside his father at Affane, Co. Waterford. Some of his contemporaries had a very poor opinion of him; Increase Mather, writing in 1684, alludes contemptuously to “the late miracle-monger or Mirabilian stroaker in Ireland, Valentine Greatrix,” who he accused of attempting to cure an ague by the use of that “hobgoblin word, Abrodacara.”John Pyne the employer of the bewitched servant-girl, served as Bailiff of Youghal along with Edward Perry in 1664, the latter becoming Mayor in 1674; both struck tradesmen’ tokens of the usual type. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Richard Myres was Bailiff of Youghal in 1642, and Mayor in 1647 and 1660. The Rev. James Wood was appointed “minister of the gospel” at Youghal, by Commonwealth Government, at a salary of L120 per annum;in 1654 his stipend was raised to L140, and in the following year he got a further increase of L40. He was sworn in a freeman at large in 1656, and appears to have been presented by the Grand Jury in 1683 as a religious vagrant. Furthermore, it seems possible to recover the name of the Judge who tried the case at the Cork Assizes. Glanvill says that he took the Relation from “a copy of an Authentick Record, as I conceive, every half-sheet having W. Aston writ in the Margin, and then again W. Aston at the end of all, who in all likelihood must be some publick Notary or Record-Keeper.” This man, who is also mentioned in the narrative, is to be identified with Judge Sir William Aston, who after the establishment of the Commonwealth came to Ireland, and was there practising as a barrister at the time of the Restoration, having previously served in the royalist army. On 3rd November 1660 he was appointed senior puisne Judge of the Chief Place, and died in 1671. The story accordingly is based on the note taken by the Judge before whom the case was brought, and is therefore of considerable value, in that it affords us a picture, drawn by an eye-witness in full possession of all the facts, of a witch-trial in Ireland in the middle of the seventeenth century. In discussing the religious beliefs of people who seek to converse with the dead, we can distinguish between those who claim to be “Christian” and those who make no pretense of accepting historic Christianity. The distinction between these groups is sometimes made by using the term “spiritualist” to denote the ones who profess to believe the Bible, and designating the others as “spiritists.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Believe it or not, after Mrs. Sarah Winchester lost her six-week-old daughter and husband, the distracted widow turned to spiritualism because she felt that she was haunted by spirits of the damned. Her husband, William Wirt Winchester was a man, a man of God. Celibacy had become Mrs. Winchester’s personal goal. It liberated her and fueled the spiritualist that sustained her in hopes of the eternal life she craved. Mrs. Winchester was always resplendent in luxurious clothes and bejeweled with bracelets, anklets, rings, and ropes of gold necklaces inlaid with pearls and precious stones. The fragrance of her perfume and cosmetics was pleasant. Mrs. Winchester’s beauty mesmerized everyone she came into contact with. God had inspired her to attend Center Church Praise House in New Haven, Connecticut. Mrs. Winchester felt at home in this church. She enjoyed the gospel. The sermon was so eloquent and moving that the floor was wet with the congregation’s tears. The Tiffany stained glass windows, which told the story of the Puritan settlers and how as they gathered under an oak tree, and Jesus led them to build the new Kingdom of God. Also, the Waterford crystal chandelier was a favourite her hers, the warm glow it provided made her feel the presence of God. There was also sumptuous music from the massive pipe organ that filled the air, while members sat in the beautiful ornate wooden pews praising the Lord. The exterior of the church was exquisite. It looked like a Roman palace. It was a traditional gorgeous red brick and white wood, adored with Corinthian pillars, and an amazing tower that reached to the Heavens as its focal point. However, this is when strange things started to happen. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Mrs. Winchester noticed that the main floor of the church was raised up a few feet higher than the rest of the green. She was curious as to why. She went to the floor below, not without trepidation, and lite a candle, and discovered that underneath was a crypt. The church was built on top of an ancient cemetery with grave stones from the late 17th century to the early 19th century. The gravestones were left in their original position to be protected by the church’s foundation where a crypt, an enclosed chamber, around the burial ground was created. There were 137 grave stone that belonged to New Haven’s founders and earliest citizens. During her tour, Mrs. Winchester felt an intense spiritual energy, the colonial burial ground had been untouched. Mrs. Winchester always e practical views about spooks, but she had a vision of huntsmen—one of whom was untidily cutting the throat of a fallow deer upon the very grave of Reverend James Pierpont’s grave. She felt an awful and soul-freezing situation of horror and went back upstairs. Nothing much happened at the church dinner that night. However other worshippers, moved by Mrs. Winchester’s evident emotion, marveled in whispers about her. They said she must have been haunted by spirits and that is why she stumbled upon the secret crypt and the someone heard her conversing with the devil. A furious gust rattled the windows of the church, and she thought what a pity the congregation’s Christmas would be spent in such a climate. Days later, the Evil One appeared to Mrs. Winchester, pounding at her front door and shouting recriminations at Mrs. Winchester for stealing away his prize. She said a prayer, and the Evil One disappeared. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Over the next week, Satan often reappeared, offering her jewels and riches to return to his service and moaning that she had jilted him. In response, she inventoried all her belongings and donated them to the church, her mentor, and a spiritual guide. Worldly possession would not longer matter. Mrs. Winchester intended to wed her newly widowed person to Jesus Christ as His bride, and nothing could deter her. However, the Devil would not stop using his infinitely subtle tactics and trickeries in manipulating her. After seeing that man’s dreadful face in the crypt of the church, it positively haunted her. That white skin, with the black hair brushed low over the forehead, was a thing he could never forget, and the dismembered body that lay near the deer. Foretelling her future, one seer warned Mrs. Winchester of all the countless thousands of departed souls slain by her husband’s rifles; she must protect herself and atone for such mass murder. She was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long was it was under construction she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. Mrs. Winchester moved to California, to the Santa Clara Valley, bought an unfished farmhouse. She hired an army of carpenters and work began; architect and foreman quit the first day. Jesse Evans had willfully speared the rumour among villagers that the Winchester mansion was haunted. No one would venture near the house except in broad daylight. The haunted Winchester mansion was part of the gospel of the countryside. One of the foremen who stayed on was William Cantelo. He occupied a separate Victorian house on the estate of the Winchester mansion with a few other men employed by Mrs. Winchester. The house was put in thorough repair and expansion, though not a stick of the old furniture and tapestry were removed. Floors and ceilings were relaid: the roof was made watertight again, and the dust of half a century was scoured out. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The ground floor and first floors set a heavy timber door, strongly barred with iron, in the passages between the earlier farmhouse and the expansion of the mansion, so there had been a great deal of work done. However, workmen refused to remain after sundown. Even after the electric light had been put into the four story mansion, which was now adored with a nine-story tower, nothing would induce them to remain, though, electric light was death on ghosts. The legend of the Winchester’s ghosts had gone far and wide, and the men would take no risks. They went home in batches of five and six, and if anyone happened to be out of sight of one’s companion, even during the daylight hours, there was an inordinate amount of talking between one another. On the whole, though nothing of any sort or kind had been conjured up by their heated imaginations during their years of work upon the Winchester, the belief in ghosts was rather strengthened because men’s confessed nervousness, and local tradition declared itself in favour of the ghost of a man. The mansion was very large, some estimated that it must have been 50,000 square feet prior to the 1906 earthquake. Every inch of the walls, including the doors, were covered with tapestry, and remarkably fine Italian furniture. They key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and the other 2,000 doors of this Eighth Wonder of the World filled two buckets. It once contained 500 rooms. There are five different heating systems, three elevators, thirteen bathrooms. One rambling room has four fireplaces and five hot-air registers. There is a spiral stairway that has 42 steps, each two inches high. Other stairways melt into blank walls. A second story door opens into the great outdoors and a 20-foot step. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
There is a linen closet that has the area of a three-room apartment; a nearby cupboard is less than one-inch deep. A skylight is placed in the middle of a room, in the floor! Another floor is apparently a series of trap-doors. Exterior faucets project unexpectedly from under the second-story windows. The visitors must stoop through one door to enter, the next gives clearance for an eight-foot giant. Many stairway posts are upside down. And legions of ghost are said to lurk around every square foot of the mansion. All the furniture was well made, and of dark expensive rare wood. Even the looking-glass on the dressing-table in Mrs. Winchester’s bedroom is an old pyramidal Venetian glass set in heavy repousse frame of tarnished silver. Yet nothing could well have been less creepy than the glitter of silver and glass, and the subdued lights and cackle of conversation around the empty dinner table in the Venetian dinner room. Mrs. Winchester hoped by introducing such beauty into her estate would introduce a new and cheerful spirit, not only to her mansion, but would also break the curse and send the ignorant superstitions of the past into oblivion. Henry, the butler, after dinner one night, retired to pantry were the $30,000.00 gold dinner service and fine china and crystal were kept to make sure nothing went missing (that is where the name “Butler’s pantry” comes from. The butler would sleep in a large pantry to guard the contents.) He would read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and other fine authors until he felt ready to go off. Henry fumbled for the peart at the end of the cord that hung down inside the bed, and switched on the flight on the bedside lamp. Then sudden dazzled him for the moment. He felt under his pillow for his book with half-shut eyes. Then, growing used to the light, he happened to look down to the foot of his bed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
His heart stopped dead, and throat shut automatically. In one instinctive movement, he crouched back up against the head-boards of the bed, staring at the horror. The movement set his heart going again, and the sweat dripped from every pore. He was not a particularly religious man, but he had always believed that God would never allow any supernatural appearance to present itself to man in such a guise and in such circumstances that harm, either bodily or mental, could result to him. However, in a moment, his life and reasoned rocked unsteadily on their seats. Leaning over the foot of his bed, looking at him, was a figure swathed in a rotten and tattered veiling. This shroud passed over the head, but left both eyes and the right side of the face bare. It then followed the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the bed-end. The face was not entirely that of a skull, though the eyes and the flesh of the face were totally gone. There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand. One wisp of hair crossed the forehead. It was perfectly still. He looked at it, and it looked at him, and his brains turned dry and hot in his head. He had still got the pear of the electric lamp in his hand, and he played idly with it; only he dared not turn the light out again. Henry shut his eyes, only to open them in a hideous terror the same second. The thing had not moved. His heart was thumping like it was about to jump out of his chest, and the sweat cooled him as it evaporated. Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel creaked in the wall. He reason failed him. For twenty minutes, or twenty second, he was able to think of nothing else but this awful figure, till there came, hurtling though the empty channels of his sense, the remembrance of the foremen and architect quitting on their first day. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
At last, Henry moved. How he managed to do it, he had no idea, but with one spring toward the foot of the bed he got within arm’s-length and struck out one fearful blow with his fist at the thing. It crumbled under it, and his hand was cut to the bone. With a sickening revulsion after his terror, Henry dropped half-fainting across the end of the bed. After he came to, there was utter quiet, but Henry seemed to hear something. He could not be sure, but at last there was no doubt. There was a quiet sound as one moving along the passage. Little regular steps came towards him over the hard teak flooring. He was speechless. He turned the light out, and fell forward with his own head pressed into the pillow of the bed. He then sank to his knees and put his face in the bed. Only he heard footsteps. Footsteps came to the door, and there they stopped. There was a rustling of moving stuff, and evil spirit was in the room. Mrs. Winchester had been awakened by the noise and he could hear her through the annunciator praying. Henry was cursing his own cowardice. Then steps moved out again on the oak boards of the passage, and he heard the sounds dying away. In a flash of remorse Henry went to the door and looked out At the moment later the passage was empty He stood with his forehead against the jamb of the door almost physically sick. “You can turn on the light,” he said, and there was no answer. By morning light that filtered past the curtains, he could see his way. There was nothing wrong in the room from end to end, except smears of his own blood on the end of the bed, the china hutch, and on the carpet. When he got upstairs to check on Mrs. Winchester, Henry heard sleet volleying against the window panes. And he thought to himself, “I must pack.” Mrs. Winchester was fine, she was brushing he lovely long locks and pretending nothing happened. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
And he did hear someone coming softly up their stairs. Henry stood still a moment on the landing to listen. It could not be Mrs. Winchester’s step, he thought; I am looking right at her. However, then the steps ceased suddenly and he heard no more. They were at least two flights down, and Henry came to the conclusion they were too heavy to be those of Angus the maid. No doubt they belonged to a foreman who had mistaken the floor. He went into his bedroom and packaged his bags as best as he could. Once or twice, however, he caught himself wondering who it could have been wandering down below, the floor was empty and unfurnished. From time to time, moreover, Henry was almost certain he heard a soft tread of someone padding about over the bare boards—cautiously, stealthily, as silently as possible—and, further, that the sounds bad been lately coming distinctly near. For the first time in his life he began to feel a little creepy. In the sitting-room, he was not pleased to hear again that stealthy tread upon the stairs, and to realize that it was much closer than before, as well as unmistakably real. And this time he got up and went out to see who it could be creeping about on the upper staircase at so late an hour. However, the sound ceased; there was no one visible on their stairs. And by this time, everyone was in bed and asleep—everyone except himself and the owner of this soft and stealthy tread. “My absurd imagination, I suppose,” Henry thought. “It must have been the wind after all, although—it seemed so very real and close, he thought.” Henry went back to his packing. It was by this time getting on toward midnight. With something of a start, Henry suddenly recognized the he felt nervous—oddly nervous; also, that for some time past the causes of this feeling had been gathering slowly in his mind, but that he had only just reached the point where he was forced to acknowledge them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It was a singular and curious malaise that had come over him, and he hardly knew what to make of it. Henry felt as though he were doing something that was strongly objected to by another person, another person, moreover, who had some right to object. It was a most disturbing and disagrreable feeling, not unlike the persistent promptings of conscience: almost, in fact, as if he were doing something he knew to be wrong. Yet, though he searched vigorously and honestly in his mind, he could nowhere lay his finger upon the secret of this growing uneasiness, and it perplexed him. More, it distressed and frightened him. “Pure nerves, I suppose,” he said aloud with a forced laugh. He was standing by the door of the bedroom during this brief soliloquy, and as he passed quickly towards the sitting-room to fetch them from the cupboard he saw out of the corner of his eye the indistinct outline of a figure standing on the stairs, a few feet from the top. It was someone in a stooping position, and with one hand on the banisters, and the face peering upwards toward the landing. And at that same moment he heard a shuffling footsteps. The person who had been creeping about below all this time had at last come up to his own floor. Who in the World could it be? And what in the name of Heaven did he want? Henry caught his breath sharply and stood stock still. Then, after a few seconds’ hesitation, he found his courage, and turned to investigate. The stairs, he saw to his utter amazement, were empty; there was no one. He felt a series of cold shivers run over him, and something about the muscles of his legs gave a little and grew weak. And so now, Henry saw nothing but the dreadful face of John Bender Jr. of the “The Bloody Benders.” Lowering at him from ever corner of his mental field vision; the white skin, the evil eyes, and the fringe of black hair low over the forehead. Henry utter a scream and, and drew back his hands as if they had been burn. No one ever heard from him again. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
When the Bender family fled town, their inn was investigated, and a secret room was found covered in blood. Upon further investigation, nine bodies were found on their property. Among one of them was Henry Clitz, Mrs. Winchester’s butler. It is believed the entire family performed the killings. Although John Jr. died during the escape, none of the other Benders were ever found. It was an awkward and disagreeable predicament, Henry found himself in. In his effort to find the brass button on the wall in the butler’s pantry, he nearly scraped the nails from his fingers, but even then, in those frenzied moments of alarm—so swift and alert were the impressions of a mind, keyed-up by a vivid emotion—he had time to realize the he dreaded the return of the light, and that it might have been better for him to stay hidden in the merciful screen of darkness. It was but the impulse of a moment, however, and before he had time to act upon it he had yielded automatically to the original desire, and the room was flooded with light. So many people praised the light, but often overlook the security and shelter that the darkness provides. Through the 38 years of residence, Mrs. Winchester’s employees remained fiercely and faithfully loyal, defending every eccentricity. Perhaps Henry’s betrayal attracted a force in the Winchester mansion that desired to consume his soul, and make him an eternal resident. Mrs. Winchester was deeply concerned with the welfare of her employees and their families. They were well paid and often additionally rewarded with gifts, even homes, real estate, transportation machines, and even lifetime pension. In truth, volumes could be written extolling her many virtues and justifying construction of the most beautiful and bizarre of all abodes. Still, the Question remains—Why? Why? The enigma of the Mystery House that tragedy and a rifle built is perhaps unanswerable. The present generation must weigh and draw its own conclusions about the Valley’s most interesting, most controversial, most unappreciated and surely our most mysterious First Lady! #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
On today’s episode of 13 Days of Christmas we look back at other events that took place during the same year that Sarah spent her first Christmas on her San Jose Estate.
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International Institute 