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Love Needs No Debating—It is Hello or Goodbye, Yet I am Between a Kiss and a Sigh!

January 8, 2020 2:43 am

Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land. So little minutes, humble though they be, make the mighty ages of eternity. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, one sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. The human mind is constituted on a plan that has no Universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it to see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider sweeps it has to use general ideas, as they are called, and in so doing to drop all concrete truths. Thus, in present case, if as wise beings wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and the dinner and the sparrow and the human’s end of live, we can do so only falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract proposition. We must say, all things in the World are fatally predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system of natural law. However, in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the concrete links are the only things of importance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The human mind is essentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by picking out what to attend to, and ignoring everything else—by narrowing its point of view. Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed, and it loses its way altogether. Humans always want their curiosity gratified for a particular purpose. If, in the case of the sparrow, the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile escape. And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fella, who never dined out in his life, may slip on it coming to the door, and fall and break his head too. It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our view. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out all the “infinitesimals” of the quantities one is considering. One treats them (under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist for the purpose of one’s calculations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Just so an astronomer, in dealing with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so the marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but not for the equally real motion of the Earth and solar system. Just so a business man’s punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes, while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each thousandth of a second. There are, in short, different cycles of operation in nature; different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next. The mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a man-of-war vegetates in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all these larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any chance of the mental concentration by which alone one may hope to learn something of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who in maneuvering the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely lose the battle by reason of the excessive “thoroughness” of his mind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected with one another only if we take the whole Universe into account. For all lesser points of view it is lawful—nay, more, it is for human wisdom necessary—to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one another. And this brings us nearer to our special topic. If we look at an animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of one’s kind by the possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be able to discriminate between the causes which originally produced the peculiarity in one and the causes that maintain it after it is produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that one was born with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant cycles. It was the triumphant originality of Dr. Darwin to see this, and to act accordingly. Separating the causes of production under the title of “tendencies to spontaneous variation,” and relegating them to a physiological cycle which one forthwith agreed to ignore altogether, one confined one’s attention to the causes of preservation, and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment. Significant learning occurs more readily in relation to situations perceived as problems. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Learning will be facilitated, it would seem, if the teacher is congruent. This involves the teacher’s being the person that one is, and being openly aware of the attitudes one holds. It means that one feels acceptant toward one’s own real feelings. Thus one becomes a real person in the relationship with the students. One can be enthusiastic about subjects one likes, and bored by topics one does not like. One can be angry, but one can also be sensitive or sympathetic. Because one accepts one’s feeling as one’s feelings, one has no need to impose them on one’s students, or to insist that they feel the same way. One is a person, not a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement, or a sterile pipe through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. As I think back over a number of teachers who have facilitated my own learning, it seems to me each one has this quality of being a real person. If your memory is the same, I wonder. If so, perhaps it is less important that a teacher cover the allotted amount of the curriculum, or use the most approved audio-visual devices, than that one be congruent, real, in one’s relation to one’s students. Another implication of the teacher is that significant learning may take place if the teacher can accept the student as one is, and can understand the feelings one possesses. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The teacher who can warmly accept, who can provide an unconditional positive regard, and who can empathize with the feelings of fear, anticipation, and discouragement which are involved in meeting new material, will have done a great deal toward setting the conditions for learning. It will perhaps disturb some that when the teacher holds such attitudes toward school work itself which are expressed, but feelings about parents, feelings of strong dislike for brother or sister, feelings of concern about self—the whole gamut of attitudes. Do such feelings have a right to exist openly in school setting? It is my thesis that they do. They are related to the person’s becoming, to one’s effective learning and effective functioning, and to deal understandingly and acceptantly with such feelings has a definite relationship to the learning of long division or the geography of Pakistan. This brings me to another implication which therapy holds for education. In therapy the resources for learning one’s self are possessed within. There is very little data which the therapist can supply which will be of help since the data to be dealt with exist within the person. In education this is not true. There are many resources of knowledge, of techniques, of theory, which constitute raw material for use. It seems to me that what I have said about therapy suggest that these materials, these resources, be made available to the students, not forced upon them. Here a wide range of ingenuity and sensitivity is asset. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

It is right and just that the ardent aspirations of a sincere candidate should eventually bring one a rewarding meeting in person with someone more advanced or in print with a qualified disciple. If one merits more, if one adds preparation to one’s aspirations, then a personal meeting with such a disciple may follow. However, it is wrong and unjust for one to be too demanding. One should expect further meetings only as one works upon oneself enough to be worthy of them, as well as only as the disciple has time to spare for them. And if one is so fortunate as to meet an adept, one should be satisfied with that single meeting. Such a meeting always brings certain tests with it and usually leads either to a powerful enhancement of the relation or to an abrupt cancellation of it altogether. This is because the tests arise from the power of opposition. The beginner who ventures out in quest of a teacher may have to stumble from charlatan to incompetent until one either finds the right one or abandons the effort as impossible. In most of the other affairs of life we find it necessary to use the services of specialists. Just so, here. We surrender our body to the surgeon. We must surrender our mind to the spiritual guide. Both, if incompetent or unscrupulous, may maim us for life. It is of the greatest importance therefore to exercise right judgement in the choice of one or the others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

You must be able to communicate clearly what it is exactly that you seek and why you seek a particular individual as an instructor. Seekers have diverse aims. Some want to get away from life. Others aspire after supreme bliss. Yet others want power or knowledge. So one must first be definite as to what, precisely, one seeks. If one falls into the wrong hands, or if one lets oneself be guided by an incompetent amateur instead of a wise and expert being, one’s way will be hindered and even the good one thing one does get will turn out to be evil. One should be determined to wait calmly for the assent of one’s whole being before one makes a decision which must necessarily and tremendously affect one’s whole future. Most people react so strongly to these teachers—either empathic rejection straightway of infatuated acceptance superficially. A clear perception which is unaccompanied by sitting in judgement or rushing into acquiescence, which justly notes what is, unidealized yet unbiased evaluation, is rare. All problems of love, power, and justice drive us to an ontological analysis. The confusions cannot be cleared up, nor can the problems be solved without an answer to the questions: In what way is each of these concepts rooted in being-itself? And the question of being-itself is the ontological questions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

It is, therefore, appropriate that, before dealing with the ontological roots of each of our concepts, we ask: What “root” in this sense mean? What is the “root-meaning” of a concept? How is the ontological question to be raised and how can it be answered? Ontology is the elaboration of the “logo” of the “on” in English of the “rational word” which grasps “being as such.” It is hard for the modern mind to understand the Latin esse-ipsum, being-itself, or the Greek, being-in-so-far-as-it-is-being. We all are nominalist by birth. And as nominalist we are inclined to dissolve our World into things. However, this inclination in an historical accident and not an essential necessity. The concern of the so-called realists of the Middle Ages was to maintain the validity of the universals as genuine expressions of being. It is however not realism to which I want you to turn from the naïve nominalism in which the modern World lives, but I want you to turn to something older than both nominalism and realism: to the philosophy which asks the question of being before the split into universal essences and particular contents. This philosophy is older than any other. It is the most powerful element in all great philosophies of the past, and it has come into its own in the important philosophical attempts of our period. It is the philosophy which asks the question: What does it mean that something is? What are the characteristics of everything that participates in being? And this is the question of ontology. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Because in our present thought the horror is “hidden,” “sin” as a condition of the human self is not available as a principle of explanation for those who are supposed to know why life goes as it does and to guide others. For example, why do around half of American marriages fail, or why do we have massive problems with substance addiction and with the moral failure of public leaders. Those who are supposed to know are lost in speculations about causes, while the real sources of our failure are possessed in choice and the facts at work in it. Choice is where sin dwells. Our social and psychological sciences stand helpless before the terrible things done by human beings, but the warpedness and wrongness of the human the human will is something we cannot admit into serious conversation. We are like farmers who diligently plant crops but cannot admit the existence of weeds and insects and can only think to pour on more fertilizer. Similarly, the only solution we know to human problems today is education. And indeed education might be a good thing. Who can deny that? It could help. However, what kind of education? And can we really think that if people only knew what is today generally understood to be the right thing to do, they would do it? Education as now understood—the actual social practice—cannot come to grips with the realities of the human self. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

It is not just a matter of “separation of church and state” and all that education has come to mean. Rather, education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible. “Now, the Eternal cries, bring your case forward. Now, Jacob’s King cries, state your proofs. Let us hear what happened in the past, that we may ponder it, or show me what is yet to be, that we may watch the outcome. Yes, let us hear what is to come, that we may be sure that you are gods; come, do something or other that we may marvel at the sight! Why, you are things of naught; you can do nothing at all! Here is one I have raised from the north; I have called him by name from the east. He shall trample down rulers as morter, like a potter treading clay. Now, we predicted this beforehand. Who foretold it, that we might hail it true? No one predicted it, no one announced it, not a word ever fell from your mouths. As for your idols, I see no one, not a prophet in their midst to answer my inquiries. They are all an empty nothing; all they do it utterly inane. Their metal images are all futile, all vain,” reports Isaiah 41.21-26, 28-29. A dramatic scene is described in the words of the prophet. Jahweh, as judge and party at the same time, calls for the gods of the nations to a Heavenly disputation to be witnessed by the people of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

They are to discuss which god has proved to be the true God. The true God must be He Who is the Lord of history. The final decision is that Jahweh is the God of history, and therefore the god who is really God. Jahweh is the God of history, because He has shown through His prophets that He understands the meaning of history, and that He knows the past and the future, the beginning and end, of all things. In showing that, He proves that He makes history, and that it is He Who has raised Cyrus, the destroyer of the power of the Jewish nation cannot answer. For they did not know of that act; they did not predict it; and they did not perform it. The disputation ends with the pronouncement that these gods are all vain, that their works are as nothing, and that their images are as mere wind and illusion. It is Jahweh alone Who is God, for He is the God of history. Seldom in history have beings been as disturbed about history as we are today. We desire urgently to catch at least a glimpse of the future, of wisdom and prophecy. It is not just a few thousand Jewish exiles, to whom our prophet speaks by the rivers of Babylon, but million exiles from all over the World, who try passionately to penetrate the darkness of their future. And with them, a great many other beings long for a strong, inspiring word concerning the future of humankind. However, those who have the power to shape the future fundamentally contradict each other. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Political leaders declare solemnly that it is almost impossible to carry the burden of their office at this time. Ministers at home and in the army can only describe in negative terms the object of their people’s death and sacrifice. Those who have to speak to the people of the enemy soon realize that they can say nothing of real promise on the political plane. Only the prophets of disaster-without-hope give evidence of complete certainty. However, they are not the prophets of God. We should not expect the darkness of our history to de dispersed soon, either by new conferences or by helplessness in regard to the future have depths that are more profound. We do not receive an answer concerning the future, because we ask questions of those who cannot know the future, the gods who are as vanity, the gods of the nations, who are as nothing besides the God of history. Every man tries to wrest an oracle from the god of one’s nation through the mouths of one’s priests, the might and wise. And every being succeeds. All beings throughout the World are flooded with oracles from the gods of their nations and the gods of other nations. All beings compare their oracles with others, and attempt to determine the most credible ones. However, the darkness simply increases. All beings speak of the future in terms of their own nations. Yet even the greatest nation is as nothing to the God of history. For no nation or alliance of nations can say that it is the meaning, the purpose of history, that it is the nation or alliance which holds the knowledge of the past and the power to shape the future. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The entire assembly of national gods must fall finally under the judgment of Jahweh, which condemns it as a thing of naught, as a thing incapable of doing anything at all. We receive so many oracles, but no prophecies, only because we refuse to turn to the source of prophecy, the God of history. Jahweh revealed Himself through Israel’s pain as the God Who is the first and the last, beginning and the end, of history. A complete national breakdown alone made the remnants of Israel ready to receive this revelation in its universal significance. However, whenever the Jewish nation used that revelation as an excuse for national pride, and transformed Jahewh into a merely national god, another breakdown followed. For Jahweh as a national god is always condemned by Jahweh the God of history. The mystery of Judaism today is possessed in that fact. Our prophet describes two very great figures: Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, the World-figure of his time, called by the prophet the shepherd and the anointed, the man of God’s counsel; and the servant of Jahweh who represents the saving power of the innocent suffering and death. The glorious founder of the Empire had to be the servant of the servant of Jahweh. He had to liberate the remnants of Israel, out of which the suffering servant arose. I feel that the only solution of this historical problem today is possessed in that prophetic concept. For there are two forces in our battered World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

One is the force of those who, like the suffering servant of God, exist, unseen, in all countries. We do not know where these servants live, or what they will make of the future. However, we know that they exist, and that their suffering is not vain. They are hidden tools of the God of history. They are the aged and the children, the young men and the young women, the persecuted and the imprisoned, and all those sacrificed for the sake of the future, for one small stone in the building of the Kingdom of God, the cornerstone of which is the perfect Servant of God. And the second force of the World is the force of those who, like Cyrus, rule Empires, and incorporate all the shame and greatness of Empires. They are the men of God’s counsel, because they carry through His purposes in the service of the suffering servants of Jahweh. However, they are not aware that they are instruments, as Cyrus was not aware that he was God’s man of counsel. They do not know what shall become of their deeds. And if we look to them in our attempts to grasp the future, we shall not know either; if we look to them, we shall always remain in darkness. However, if we turn to the true servants and to the true God whom they serve, the God of history, we shall know of the future. We can find the solution of riddle of history as a whole, and of our particular history, in the figure of Cyrus in the service of the servant of Jahweh. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Another striking metaphor expressing the completeness of God’s forgiveness occurs in Micah 7.19. There the prophet Micah said of God, “You will tread our sins underfoot and hurl our iniquities into the depths of the sea.” When I was a naval officer I had an experience where equipment was lost in the depths of the sea through a small boat accident. I know what it is to drag grappling hooks across the bottom of the sea al day in a vain effort to recover the equipment. That ship’s gear was lost forever. So it is with our sins. God has hurled them into the depths of the sea to be lost forever, never to be recovered, never to be held against us. Again, just as God said He put our sins behind His back, so here He says He will hurl them into the depths of the sea. They will not fall overboard; God will hurl them into the depths. He wants them to be lost forever, because He has fully dealt with them in His Son, Jesus Christ. Do you begin to get the picture? Are you realizing that God’s forgiveness is complete and irreversible? Have you started to understand that regardless of how bad you have been or how many times you have committed the same sin, even if Santa Claus did not bring you a present because of your bad behavior, God completely and forgives you because of Christ? Do you see that, because God has already dealt with your sins in Christ, you do not have to do penance or fulfill some probationary term before God can bless you again? #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

I once heard someone say he felt he could no longer claim God’s gracious promise of forgiveness in 1 John 1.9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and jut and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” He reasoned that he had sinned so many times he had used up all his “credit” with God. I believe many Christians think that way because we do not entirely comprehend the fullness of God’s forgiveness in Christ. However, if we insist on thinking in terms of “credit: before God, we must think only of Christ’s credit, for we have none on our own. And how much does God have? An infinite amount. That is why Paul could say, “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” reports Romans 5.20. Life is like the baseball season, where even the best team loses at least a third of its games, and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. The goal is not to win every game but to win more than you lose, and if you do that often enough, in the end you may find you have won it all. “And now, I would commend you to seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written, that the grace of God the Father, and also the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, which beareth record of them, may be and abide in you forever. Amen,” reports Ether 12.41. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

O Christ, the Son of God, Whom the savage multitude persecuted with blind fury, and while they inflicted suffering on Thee as Man, discerned not in Thee the essence of Godhead; grant that we, confessing Thee, true God and Man, to be One Christ, may be removed far away from eternal punishment. Jesus, our God, Who gavest Thy cheek to those who smote Thee, and wast for our sakes filled full with reproach; grant to us Thy servants that, being instructed by the example of Thy Passion we may be fitted alway to bear Thy sweet yoke, and learn to Thee Who are meek and lowly of heart. O God, Thou hast taught me that Christ has all fullness and so all plenitude of the Spirit, that all fullness I lack in myself is in him, for his people, not for himself alone, he having perfect knowledge, grace, righteousness, to male me see, to make me righteous, to give me fullness; that is my duty, out of a sense of emptiness, to go to Christ, possess, enjoy his fullness as mine, as if I had it in myself, because it is for me in him; that when I do this I am full of the Spirit, as a fish that has got from the shore to the sea and has all fullness of water to move in, for when faith fills me, then I am full; that this is the way to be filled with the Spirit, like Stephen, first faith, then fullness, for this way makes me most empty, and so most fit for the Spirit to fill. Thou has taught me that the finding of this treasure of all grace in the field of Christ begets strength, joy, glory, and renders all graces alive. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Help me to delight more in what I receive from Christ, more in that fullness which is in him, the fountain of all his glory. Let me not think to receive the Spirit from him as a thing apart from finding, drinking, being filled with him. To this end, O God, do thou establish me in Christ, settle me, give me a being there, assure me with certainty that all this is mine, for this only will fill my heart with joy and peace. O Christ, Son of God, Whom God the Father gave up for all, when He received Thee as a true Sacrifice for us; receive the desires of Thy people; save those whom Thou hast delivered; suffer not those to go into everlasting anguish, who Thou camest to redeem from perishing eternally; and grant that through Thee, Whom we believe to have been crucified for all, we may have remission of sins in this life, and everlasting joy in the life to come. Remember, O Jesus, the vinegar and gall, that bitter cup which Thou didst taste for the ungodly; and let the bitterness which was Thy portion be to us a cause of perpetual sweetness. It is easy to create an idealistic figure in imagination and declare that one will always act in such-and-such a way, but in actuality one’s actions are unpredictable and what they are can really be known only when they happen. May God be our guide and bless us in all our thoughts and deeds. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still, in Spite of Dungeon, Fire, Sword—O how Our Hearts Beat High with Joy!

January 7, 2020 1:57 am

We mortal cross the ocean of this World each in one’s average cabin of life. If you get simple beauty and nought else, you get the best thing God invents. I have found the experience of therapy to have meaningful and sometimes profound implications for education, for interpersonal communication, for family living, for the creative process. People in therapy are up against a situation which one perceives as a serious and meaningful problem. It may be that one finds oneself behaving in ways in which one cannot control, or one is overwhelmed by confusions and conflicts, or one’s marriage is going on the rocks, or one finds oneself unhappy at work. One is, in short, faced with a problem with which one has tried to cope, and found oneself unsuccessful. One is therefore eager to learn, even though at the same time one is frightened that what one discovers in oneself may be disturbing. Thus one of the conditions nearly always present in an uncertain and ambivalent desire to learn or change, growing out of a perceived difficulty in meeting life. When one comes to therapy, what are the conditions which this individual meet? If therapy is to occur, it seems necessary that the therapist be, in the relationship, a unified, or integrated, or congruent person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

What I mean is that within the relationship with the therapist, one must be exactly what one is—not a façade, or a role, or a pretense. I have used the term “congruence” to refer to this accurate matching of experience with awareness. It is when the therapist is fully and accurately aware of what one is experiencing at this moment in the relationship, that one is fully congruent. Unless this congruence is present to a considerable degree it is unlikely that significant learning can occur. Though this concept of congruence is actually a complex one, I believe all of us recognize it in an intuitive and commonsense way in individual with whom we deal. With one individual we recognize that one not only means exactly what one says, but that one’s deepest feelings also match what one is expressing. Thus whether one is angry or affectionate or ashamed or enthusiastic, we sense that one is the same at all levels—in what one is experiencing at an organismic level, in one’s awareness at the conscious level, and in one’s words and communications. We furthermore recognize that one is acceptant of one’s immediate feelings. We say of such a person that we know “exactly where one stands.” We tend to feel comfortable and secure in which a relationship. With another person we recognize that what one is saying is almost certainly a front or a façade. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

We wonder what one really feels, what one is really experiencing, behind this façade. We may also wonder if one knows what one really feels, recognizing that one may be quite unaware of the feelings one is actually experiencing. With such a person we tend to be cautious and wary. It is not the kind of relationship in which defenses can be dropped or in which significant learning and change can occur. Thus this second condition for therapy is that the therapist is characterized by a considerable degree of congruence in the relationship. One is freely, deeply, and acceptantly oneself, with one’s actual experience of one’s feelings and reactions matched by an accurate awareness of these feelings and reactions as they occur and as they change. A third condition in therapy is that the therapist will experience a warm caring for the client—a caring which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates “I care.” Not “I care for you if you behave thus and so.” This attitude is called “unconditional positive regard,” since it has no conditions of worth attached to it. I have often used this term “acceptance” to describe this aspect of the therapeutic climate. It involves as much feeling of acceptance for the client’s expression of negative, “bad,” painful, fearful, and abnormal feelings as for one’s expression of “good” beneficial, mature, confident and social feelings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Unconditional positive regard also involves an acceptance of and a caring for the client as a separate person, with permission for one to have one’s own feelings and experiences, and to find one’s own meanings in them. To the degree that the therapist can provide this safety-creating climate of unconditional positive regard, significant learning is likely to take place. An empathic understand is also important. The therapist is supposed to experience an accurate, empathic understanding of the client’s World as seen from the inside. To sense the client’s private World as if it were your own, but without ever losing the “as if” quality—this is empathy, and this seems essential to therapy. To sense the client’s anger, fear, or confusion as if it were your own, yet without your own anger, fear, or confusion getting bound up in it, is the condition we are endeavoring to describe. When the client’s World is this clear to the therapist, and one moves about in it freely, then one can both communicate one’s understanding of what is clearly known to the client and can also voice meanings in the client’s experience of which the client is scarcely aware. That such penetrating empathy is important for therapy. The therapist must be well able to understand the patient’s feelings, never in any doubt about what the patient means, and remarks fit in just right with the patient’s mod and content. And the therapist’s tone of voice must convey the complete ability to share the patient’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

A fifth condition for significant learning in therapy is that the client should experience or perceive something of the therapist’s congruence, acceptance, and empathy. It is not enough that these conditions exist in the therapist. They must, to some degree, have been successfully communicated to the client. When these five conditions exist, it has been our experience that a process of change inevitably occurs. The client’s rigid perceptions of oneself and of others loosen and become open to reality. The rigid ways in which one has construed the meaning of one’s experience are looked at, and one finds oneself questioning many of the facts of one’s life, discovering that they are only fact because one has regarded them so. One discovers feelings of which one has been unaware, and experiences them, often vividly, in the therapeutic relationship. Thus one learns to be more open to all of one’s experience—the evidence within oneself as well as the feelings one has regarded as more acceptable. One becomes a more fluid, changing, learning person. In this process it is not necessary for the therapist to “motivate” the client or to supply the energy which brings about the change. Nor, in some sense, is the motivation supplied by the client, at least in any conscious way. Let us say rather that the motivation for learning and change springs from the self-actualizing tendency of life itself, the tendency for the organism to flow into all the differentiated channels of potential development, insofar as these are experienced as enhancing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Therefore, therapy producing a type of significant learning which takes place when the five conditions are met: When the client perceives oneself as faced by a serious and meaningful problem; when the therapist is a congruent person in the relationship, able to be the person one is; when the therapist feels an unconditional positive regard for the client; when the therapist experiences an accurate empathic understanding of the client’s private World, and communicates this; when the client to some degree experiences the therapist’s congruence, acceptance, and empathy. To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it. Sometimes ordinarily quiet and rational persons may freeze with rage or become actually abusive if their aloofness and independence are threatened. Absolute panic may be induced at the thought of joining any movement or professional group where real participation and not merely payment of dues is required. If they do become involved they may thrash about blindly to extricate themselves. Hey can be more expert in finding methods to escape than a person whose life is attacked. Were the choice between love and independence, as a patent once put it, they would choose independence without hesitation. This brings up another point. Not only are they willing to defend their detachment by every available means, but they find no sacrifice too great in its behalf. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

External advantages and inner values will be equally renounced—consciously, by setting aside any desire that might interfere with independence, or unconsciously, by automatic prohibition. Anything so vigorously defended must have an overwhelming subjective value. We can hope to understand the functions of detachment and eventually to be helpful therapeutically only if we are aware of this. As we have seen, each of the basic attitudes towards others have its beneficial value. In moving toward people the person tries to create for oneself a friendly relation to one’s World. In moving against people one equips oneself for survival in a competitive society. In moving away from people one hopes to attain a certain integrity and serenity. As a matter of fact, all three attitudes are not only desirable but necessary to our development as human beings. It is only when they appear and operate in a neurotic framework that they become compulsive, rigid, indiscriminate, and mutually exclusive. This considerably detracts from their value, but does not destroy it. The gains to be derived from detachment are indeed considerable. It is significant that in all Eastern philosophies detachment is sought as a basis for high spiritual development. Of course we cannot compare such aspirations with those of neurotic detachment. There detachment is voluntarily chosen as the best approach to self-fulfillment and is adopted by persons who could, if they wanted, live a different kind of life; neurotic detachment, on the other hand, is not a mater of choice but of inner compulsion, the only possible way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Nonetheless, some of the same benefits may be derived from it—though the extent to which this will be so depends on the severity of the whole neurotic process. In spite of the ravaging force of a neurosis, the detached person may preserve a certain integrity. This would hardly be a factor in a society in which human relationships were generally friendly and honest. However, in a society in which there is much hypocrisy, crookedness, envy, cruelty and greed, the integrity of a none too strong person easily suffers; keeping at a distance helps to maintain it. Furthermore, since neurosis usually robs a person of one’s peace of mind, detachment may provide an avenue of serenity, its extent varying with the amount of sacrifice one is willing to make. Detachment allows one, in addition, some measure of original thinking and feeling, provided that within one’s magic circle emotional life has not been altogether deadened. Lastly, all of these factors, together with one’s contemplative relation to the World and the comparative absence of distraction, contribute toward the development and expression of creative abilities, if one has any. I do not mean that neurotic detachment is a precondition for creation, but that under neurotic stress detachment will provide the best change of expressing what creative ability there is. Substantial though these gains may be, they do not seem to be the main reason why detachment is so desperately defended. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Actually the defense is equally desperate if for one reason or another the gains are minimal or are heavily overshadowed by concomitant disturbances. This observation leads into further depths. If the detached person is thrown into close contact with others one may very readily go to pieces or, to use the popular term, have a nervous breakdown. I use the term advisedly here because it covers a wide range of disturbances—functional disorders, alcoholism, suicidal attempts, depression, incapacity for work, psychotic episodes. The patient oneself, and sometimes the psychiatrist too, tends to relate the disturbance to some upsetting event that occurred just prior to the “break down.” A sergeant’s unjust discrimination, a husband’s philandering and lying about it, a wife’s behaving neurotically, a homosexual episode, unpopularity in college, the need to make a living when life have previously been sheltered, and so on may be held to blame. True enough any such problem is relevant. The therapist should take it seriously and try to understand what in particular was set off in the patient by a specific difficulty. However, to do that is hardly sufficient, because the question remains why the patient has been so intensely affected, why one’s whole psychic equilibrium has been endangered by a difficulty which by and large cannot be considered greater than ordinary frustrations and upsets. In other words, even when the analyst understands how the patient reacted to a particular difficulty, one still needs to understand why there is such a distinct disproportion between the provocation and its effect. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

In answer we could point to the fact that the neurotic trends involved in detachment, like other neurotic trends, give the individual a feeling of security as long as they function, and that, conversely, anxiety is aroused when they fail to function. As long as the detached person can keep at a distance one feels comparatively safe; if for any reason the magic circle is penetrated, one’s security is threatened. This consideration brings us closer to an understanding of why the detached person becomes panicky if one can no longer safeguard one’s emotional distance from others—and we should add that the reason one’s panic is so great is that one has no technique for dealing with life. One can only keep aloof and avoid life, as it were. Here again it is the negative quality f detachment that gives the picture a special color, different from that of other neurotic trends. To be more specific, in a difficult situation the detached person can neither appease nor fight, neither co-operate nor dictate terms, neither love nor be ruthless. One is as defenseless as an animal that has only one means of coping with danger—that is, to escape and hide. Appropriating pictures and analogies that have appeared in associations or dreams: one is like the pygmies of Ceylon, invincible so long as they hide in the forests but easily beaten when they emerge. One is like a medieval town protected by one wall only—if that wall is taken, the town is defenseless against the enemy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Such a position fully justifies one’s anxiety toward life in general. It helps us to understand one’s remoteness as an over-all protection to which one must tenaciously cling and which one must defend at whatever cost. All neurotic trends are at bottom defensive moves, but the others also constitute an attempt to cope with life in a beneficial way. When detachment is the predominate trend it renders a person so helpless in any realistic dealing with life that in the course of time its defensive character becomes uppermost. If you want to understand something, try to change it. “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when people shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and case out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for behold, your reward is great in Heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets. But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all beings shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets,” reports Luke 6.20-26. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Readers and students of the New Testament often find that it is not the refined argument of Paul or the mystical wisdom of John, but the simple sayings of Jesus, as recorded by the first three evangelists, which are the most difficult to interpret. The words of Jesus seem so clear and straightforward and adequate that it is hard to imagine that anybody could miss the meaning. However, when we are asked to express the meaning in our own words, we discover one level of meaning after another. We realize that words of Jesus which we have known since our earliest childhood are incomprehensible to us. And if we try to penetrate them, we are drive from one depth to another; we are never able to exhaust them. Nothing seems simpler, and yet nothing is more perplexing, than, for instance, the Lord’s Prayer, the Parables, and the Beatitudes. We have heard the four Beatitudes and the four Woes as Luke reports them. Their meanings seems unmistakable. The poor, those who are hungry now, those who weep now, those who are isolated and insulted, are praised, congratulated, so to speak, because they can expect precisely the opposite of their present situation. And the rich, those who are full, those who laugh, those who are popular and respected, are pitied, because they must expect precisely that which is contrary. Two questions arise. What is promised and to whom is it promised? What is the kingdom which is to be owned by the less affluent, and who are the less affluent who shall own it? Ans who are the rich against whom the Woes shall be directed, and what shall happen to them? #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Matthew tried to answer these questions. He said that the poor are the poor in spirit, and that those who hunger, hunger after righteousness. He said that those who weep, mourn for the state of the World. And to them is promised the kingdom of Heaven, the vision of the Divine Spirit, the comfort and mercy of the realm of God. Is Matthew’s interpretation right? Or has Matthew, and have the official Christian Churches, following him, spiritualized the Beatitudes? Or, on the other has, has Luke, and have the many sectarian and revolutionary movements, following him, distorted the Beatitudes from a materialistic point of view? Both assertions have been made and both are wrong. If we want the true answer, we must look at those to whom Jesus spoke. He spoke to two kinds of people. One kind lived with their hearts turned toward the coming stage of the World. They were poorly adjusted to things as they were. They were suffering under the conditions of their lives. Many were disinherited, insecure, hungry, oppressed. There is no distinction made in the Beatitudes between spiritual and material wants, and there is no distinction made between spiritual and material fulfillment. Those whom Jesus spoke were in need of both. Neither the prophets nor Jesus spiritualized the message of the Kingdom. Nor did they understand it and interpret it to say that the Kingdom would come as the result of a merely material revolution. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Christianity pronounces the unity of body and soul. The Beatitudes praise those who will be fulfilled in their whole being. However, the other kind of people to whom Jesus spoke were those to whom He promised the Woes. They were unbroken in their relation to the present stage of the World. They lived with their hearts in things as they are. They were well-established in their lives; they enjoyed prestige, power and security. Jesus threatened them spiritually and materially. They were bound to this eon, and they were to vanish with this eon. They had no treasure beyond it. The situation of the people of Galilee to whom Jesus spoke is still our situation. The Woes are promised today to all of us who are well off, respected, and secure, not simply because we have such security and respect, but because it inevitably binds us, with an almost irresistible power, to this eon, to things as they are. And the Beatitudes are promised today to all of us who are without security and popularity, who are mourning in body and soul. And they are promised not simply because we lack so much, but because they very fact of our lacks and our sorrows may turn our heats away from things as they are, toward the coming eon. The Beatitudes do not glorify those who are poor in misery, individuals or classes, because they are less affluent. The Woes are not promised to those who are rich and secure, classes or individuals, because they are rich. If this were so, Jesus could not have promised to the less affluent the reversal of their situation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Jesus praises the less affluent in so far as they live in two Worlds, the present World and the World to come. And He threatens that rich in so far as they live in one World alone. (However, this does not mean that the rich are unrighteous. God loves all of his children.) This brings a tremendous tension into our lives. We live in two orders, one of which is a reversal of the other. The coming order is always coming, shaking this order, fighting with it, conquering it and conquered by it. The coming order is always at hand. However, one can never say: “It is here! It is there!” One can never grasp it. However, one can be grasped by it. And whenever one is grasped by it, one is rich, even if one be less affluent in this order. One’s wealth is one’s participation in the coming order, in its battles, its victories and defeats. One is blessed, one may rejoice and leap even when one is isolated and insulted, because one’s isolation belongs to this order, while one belongs to the other order! One is blessed, while they who cast out one’s name are to be pitied. By their dread and despair, and by their hatred of one, they prove that the Woes Jesus has directed against them have already become real. They lose the one and only order they have; they disintegrate in body and spirit. Perhaps we are right to consider the catastrophe of our present World as a fulfillment of the Words which Jesus directed against a rich, abundant, laughing, self-congratulating social order. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, if we believe this, we can also believe that those who have become poor and hungry and sorrowing and persecuted in this catastrophe are those in whom the other order is made manifest. They may betray it, but they are called first. Only through the paradox of the Beatitudes can we begin to understand our own life and the life of our World. “The Lord looks down from Heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are al alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one,” reports Psalm 14.2-3. Starting from ruin—we must see the soul and the person in its ruined condition, with its malformed and dysfunctional mind, feelings, body, and social relations, before we can understand that it must be delivered and reformed and how that can be done. One of the greatest obstacles to effective spiritual formation in Christ today is simple failure to understand and acknowledge the reality of the human situation as it affects Christians and non-Christians alike. We must start from where we really are. And where we recall that all people undergo a process of spiritual formation. Their spirit is formed, and with it their whole being. Spiritual formation is not just something for religious people. No one escapes. The most hardened unlawful person as well as the most devout of human beings have had a spiritual formation. They have become a certain kind of person. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

You have had a spiritual formation and I have had one, and it is still ongoing. It is like education: everyone gets one—a good one or a bad one. We reemphasize that those are fortune or blessed who are able to find or are given a path of life that forms their spirit and inner World in a way that is good. Remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to our as the life of a gnat. However, it is immortals whom we jokes with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortals horrors or everlasting splendors. Strangely, it is precisely the intrinsic greatness of the person that makes it in its ruined condition “a horror and a corruption such as you now meet only in a nightmare.” If we were insignificant, our ruin would not be horrifying. The hardest thing to accept in the Christian religion is the great value it places upon the individual soul. Still older Christian writers used to say that God has hidden the majesty of the human soul from us to prevent our being ruined by vanity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

This explains why even in its ruined condition a human being is regarded by God as something immensely worth saving. Sin does not make it worthless, but only lost. And in its lostness it is still capable of great strength, dignity, and heartbreaking beauty and goodness—enough so to hide from the unenlightened, or those who do not wish to understand, the horror it has become and is becoming. Gracious Lord, Almighty, Jesus Christ, let Thy sufferings assist us, and defend us from all pain and grief, all peril and misery, all uncleanness of heart, all sin, all scandal and infamy, from evil diseases of soul and body, from sudden and unforeseen death, and from all persecution of our foes visible and invisible. For we know that in what day or hour we call to mind Thy Passion, we shall be safe. Therefore relying on Thine infinite tenderness, we beseech Thee, O most loving Saviour, by Thy most benignant and sacred sufferings to protect us with gracious assistance, and in continual tenderness to preserve us from all evil. O God, the Son of God—so loving, yet hated—so forbearing, yet assaulted unto death—Who didst show Thyself so gentle and merciful to Thy persecutors; grant that through the wounds of Thy Passion our sins may be expiated, and as in Thy humiliation Thou didst suffer death for us, so now, being glorified, bestow on us everlasting brightness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

O Lover to the uttermost, may I read the meltings of thy heart to me in the manager of thy birth, in the garden of thy agony, in the cross of thy suffering, in the tomb of thy resurrection, in the Heaven of thy intercession. Bold in this thought I defy my adversary, tread down one’s temptations, resist one’s schemings, renounce the World, am valiant for truth. Deepen in me a sense of my holy relationship to thee, as spiritual bridegroom, as God’s fellow, as sinners’ friend. I think of thy glory and my vileness, thy majesty and my meanness, thy beauty and my deformity, thy purity and my filth, they righteousness and my iniquity, thy purity and my filth, thy righteousness any my iniquity. Thou hast loved me everlastingly, unchangeably may I love thee as I am loved; Thou hast loved me everlastingly, unchangeably, may I love thee as I am loved; Thou hast given thyself for me, may I give myself to thee; thou has died for me, may I live to thee, in every moment of my time, in every moment of my mind, in every pulse of my heart. May I never dally with the World and its allurements, but walk by thy side, listen to thy voice, be clothes with thy graces, and adorned with thy righteousness. “And it came to pass that the Lord said unto me: If they have not charity it mattereth not unto thee, thou hast been faithful; wherefore thy garments shall be made clean. And because thou hast seen thy weakness thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father,” reports Ether 12.37. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Let’s Start the New Year Right, Twelve O’clock Tonight when they Dim the Light Let’s begin!

January 6, 2020 3:18 am

Temper is what gets most people in trouble, and pride is what keeps them there. Do what you can with what you have, where you are. When you work with people, it is a lot like mining for gold. When you mine for gold, you must literally move tones of dirt to find a single ounce of gold. However, you do not look for the dirt—you look for the gold! Are humans apes or Angels? Now I am on the side of the Angels. It is reasonable to conclude from our study that changes associated with client-centered therapy is that the self-perception is altered in a direction which makes the self more highly valued. This change is not a transient one, but persists after therapy. This decrease in internal tension is a highly significant one. However, therapy will not bring about perfect adjustment, or complete absence of tensions, people are still human, not computers. It is also clear that the changes under discussion have not occurred simply as a result of the passage of time, nor as the result of a decision to seek help. They are definitely associated with therapy. The self-concept changes in therapy, not the ideal self. The latter tends to change but slightly, and its change is in the direction of becoming a less demanding, or more achievable self. We know that the self-picture emerging at the end of therapy is rated by clinicians (in a manner which excludes possible bias) as being better adjusted. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Spirituality in one’s aura, the self-actualized person is not always immediately recognizable although it is always indefinable. The effect one has upon those around one cannot be measured by its immediate result but only by its ultimate on. We know that this emerging self has a great degree of inner comfort, of self-understanding and self-acceptance, of self-responsibility. We know that this post-therapy self finds greater satisfaction and comfort in relationships with others. Thus bit by bit we have been able to add to our objective knowledge of the changes wrong by therapy in the client’s perceived self. The individua makes choices and establishes values differently; one meets frustration with less prolonged physiological tension, one changes in the way one perceives oneself and values oneself. However, this still leaves unanswered question of practical concern to the layman and to society, “Does the client’s everyday behavior change in such a way that the changes can be observed, and is the nature of these changes beneficial?” It seems that the inner changes taking place in therapy will cause the individual after therapy to behave in ways which are less defensive, more socialized, more acceptant of reality in oneself and in one’s social environment, and which give evidence of more socialized system of values. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

One will, in short, behave in ways which are regarded as more mature, and infantile ways of behaving will tend to decrease. The World can judge only by appearances and always judges worst; the World can never hope to understand the independence of a being like the self-actualized who will not hesitate to take on even the appearance of wrong whilst seeking to render service. Actually, one has to subscribe to an infinitely higher ethic than conventional society can understand. One will certainly be unpretentious and may even be unimpressive, but that will be only to the external eye. To those who can see with the mind, the heart, and the intuition, one will be a rare messenger of divinity. Of course, these changes are not only the result of therapy, but therapy combined with religion. Therapy and religion are a good combination towards healing because the individual is working on the mind, and the soul, which will manifest a deep wisdom of reality. We cannot dictate the external form in which one will express one’s attitude. The illuminate will do just that which is demanded of one by the particular circumstances of the case at that particular time and in that particular place. There is nothing arbitrary about one’s action. Some behave as if they know nothing, these hidden illuminati. Most of us are not in a position to judge either the inner being or outer behaviour of such a divinely illumined being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

People have these enlightened beings of the spirit among them and do not know it, often do not care to know it. One is indeed a life full of paradoxes. Outwardly one may be a millionaire, but inwardly one owns nothing, and begs at the door of God for salvation. It is a commonly held view—not only among laymen but also among many scientists—that human beings are machines that function in accordance with certain physiological requirements. They experience hunger and thirst; they have to sleep; they need physical experiences. He physiological or biological needs have to be met. If they are not, people will become neurotic or, if they do no eat, for example, they will die. If those needs are met, however, then everything is just fine. Now the only trouble with that view is that it is wrong. It can happen that all a person’s physiological and biological needs are met but one is still not satisfied, still is not at peace with oneself. Indeed, one may be psychically quite ill even though one seems to have everything one needs. What one lacks is an animating impulse that would make one active. Let me give you a few brief examples of what I mean. In recent years some interesting experiments have been conducted in which people have been deprived of all stimuli. They have been placed in complete isolation in a small space where the temperature and illumination remain constant. Their food is shoved in them through a hatchway. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

All their needs are met, but there are no stimuli. The conditions are comparable, say, to those a fetus experiences in the womb. After a few days’ exposure to this kind of experiment, people begin to develop serious pathological tendencies, often schizophrenic ones. Although their physiological needs are satisfied, this state of passivity is psychologically pathogenic and can lead to insanity. What is a normal situation for a fetus (although even a fetus is not as fully deprived of stimuli as the subjects in those experiments are) produces illness in an adult. In still other experiments, people have been prevented from dreaming. It is possible to do this because we know that very rapid eye movements accompany dreaming. If an experimenter wakes a subject when one sees rapid eye movements, one can keep that individual from dreaming. People subjected to this experiment, too, developed serious symptoms of illness. This suggests that dreaming is a psychic necessity. Even when we are asleep, we remain mentally and psychologically active. If we are kept from that activity, we become ill. The animal psychologist Harry Harlow found in his experiments with monkeys that primates could maintain their interest in a complicated experiment for ten hours at a time. They worked persistently at taking apart complex structure and stuck patiently at their task. No rewards were offered or punishments inflicted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Because Harlow did not make any use of the stimulus-response mechanism, it was clear that the animals persisted in their work out of sheer interest in it. Animals, too, especially the primates, can develop high levels of interest and are not motivated exclusively by the promise of food or the fear of punishment. Let me mention still another example. Human beings were producing art as long as 30,000 years. We are inclined to belittle that work today by saying it served purely magical ends. Think of the incredibly beautiful and graceful renderings is animals we find in cave paintings. The motivation for those paintings was presumably to ensure success in the hunt. That may well be, but does that explain their beauty? The needs of magic could have been met with far less artistic painting and decorative of caves and vases. The beauty that we can still perceive and enjoy today was an added extra. In other words, people have their interests that go beyond the practical, the functional, the object as took or utensil. They want t be active in a creative way; they want to give shape to things, to develop power latent in themselves. The German psychologist Karl Buehler has coined the very apt phrase “the delight of function” to suggest the joy that activity can being with it. People enjoy functioning not because they need this thing or that thing but because the act of making something, the utilization of their own capacities, itself is a pleasurable experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

The point that humans love to create things of value inherently by their nature is of course important because it has a bearing on education. A brilliant Italian teacher, Maria Montessori, realized that children can be trained with the old system of rewards and punishments, but they cannot be educated with it. Numerous studies designed to test that idea have confirmed that people do indeed learn better when what they do is itself inherently satisfying. I believe a human being is fully oneself only when one expresses oneself, when one makes use of the powers within one. If one cannot do that, if one’s life consists only of possessing and using rather than being, then one degenerates; one becomes a thing; one’s life become pointless. It becomes a form of suffering. Real joy comes with real activity, and real activity involves the utilization and cultivation of human powers. We should not forget that exerting our minds encourages the growth of brain cells. That is a fact supported by physiological evidence. Indeed, the growth of the brain can even be weighed and is analogous to the strengthening of muscles of which we make increased demands. If we never subject our muscles to more stress than they are accustomed to, they will remain at the stage of development they have attained, but they will never come near what they are potentially capable of. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Now I would like to introduce some social and economic considerations into discussion of affluence. We can distinguish a few major phases in human history. Perhaps we should begin by noting that the phase in which human evolution has taken places has been a very long one extending over a few hundred thousand years. There was no single step or moment that marked the completion of the development. It was a long process in which quantitative factors underwent a very gradual transformation into qualitative ones. The evolutionary process that produced the precursor of modern humans was more or less complete only 60,000 years ago; Homo sapiens, a creature who is just like us today, first appears about 40,000 years ago. Our beginnings, then go back a very short time. What is it that distinguished humans from animals? Well, human beings have a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of oneself; one knew that one existed and that one was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. One experienced oneself as an individual. Humans were aware that they thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere else in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

From the moment that humans were born as what we would call a full human being one lived for roughly 30,000 years in a situation of prevailing hardship, of perpetual shortage. One lived by hunting animals and by gathering foodstuffs that one could use but had not cultivated. Life in that period was marked by poverty and need. However, then came a great revolution that is sometimes called the Neolithic evolution. That revolution occurred about 10,000 years ago. Humans began to produce, to create material goods. One no longer lived only from what one happened to find r from the yield of the hunt but became a farmer or herdsman. One produced more than one needed at the moment, using one’s foresight, one’s intelligence, and one’s skills to make what one needed as an individual. The first farmers with their simple plows may strike us today as very primitive, but they were the first people to escape from total dependence on the whims of nature, to which all beings before had been subject, and to start using their brains, imaginations, and energies to influence the World and create more hospitable environments for themselves. They planned; they provided for the future; they created, for the first time, a relative affluence. They soon left primitive methods of agriculture and animal husbandry behind. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Human developed culture; they developed cities; and a second era followed quickly on the heels of the first: an era characterized by relative affluence. By “relative affluence” I mean a state in which the earlier poverty and need had been overcome but in which the new affluence was too confined to let everyone partake of it. The minority that controlled society and accumulated increasing power kept the best of everything for itself, leaving only the leftovers for the majority. The table was not set for everyone. Affluence was not available to all. Thus, though we may be oversimplifying for the sake of brevity, we can speak of the relative affluence (or relative poverty) that has been the rule since the beginning of the Neolithic revolution and that is still, to some measure, the rule today. Relative affluence is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, people were able to develop cultures. They had the material base they needed to build buildings, organize states, support philosophers, and so forth. However, on the other hand, the consequences of relative poverty was that a small group had to exploit a large one. Without the majority, that economy could not have flourished. The warring impulse is not, as many people like to claim, rooted in human instinct, in human’s natural drive to destroy. War had its beginnings in the Neolithic period from the moment when there were things worth taking away from someone else and when people had established their communal life in such a way that they could invent war s an institution and use it to attack others who has something they wanted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We usually have complicated reasons on hand to explain why we go to war. “We were threatened!” we say, and that is supposed to justify a way. And sometimes that is actually the case, but other times there are other motives which are usually pathetically transparent. So we have relative affluence, this accomplishment of the Neolithic period, to thank for culture on the one had and for war and the exploitation of human by human on the others. Ever since that period human beings have lived more or less in a zoo. Accordingly, the entire field of psychology, which is based on the observation of human beings, can be compared with that stage in ethology when all of our knowledge of animals was based on observations made in zoos and not in the wild. It has become particularly clear to psychologist that animals in zoos behave very differently from animals in the wild. Solly Zuckerman observed that the sacred baboons in the London Zoo in Regents Park were incredibly aggressive. He assumed at first that the trait lay in the nature of those particular primates. However, when other scientists observed those baboons in the wild, they found them not very aggressive at all. Imprisonment, boredom, the limitations on freedom—all of these things encouraged the development of an aggression that was absent in natural conditions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

When they are held captive humans and animals behave differently from the way they do when they are free. However, then the first industrial revolution brought about a great change in the human situation, a change that had its beginnings as far back as the Renaissance but has come to a head in our century: All of the sudden mechanical energy took the place of natural human energy, that is, energy supplied by animals and human beings. Now machines supplied the power that had formerly been supplied by living beings. And at the same time a new hope arose. If that energy could be harnessed, then everyone, not just a minority, could enjoy the fruits of affluence. On the heels of the first revolution followed another that has been called the second industrial revolution. In this revolution machines replace not only human energy but also human thought. I am referring here to the science of cybernetics and to the machines that have themselves assumed control of other machines an of the production process. Cybernetics has increased and continues to increase production possibilities to such a massive degree that we can realistically foresee a time—assuming that a war does not break out first or that humanity is not decimated by hunger or epidemics—when the new production methods will provide absolute affluence. At that point no one will be poor or in need anymore; everyone will know affluence. Human life will not be cluttered with the superfluous but will be marked by absolute abundance that frees people from the fear of hunger, the fear of violence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Our modern society has developed still another thing that never existed before. It produces not only goods but also needs. What do I mean by that? People have always had needs. They have wanted to live in attractive homes, and so forth. However, if you look around you today you will note that every increasing importance that advertising and packaging have acquired. It is rare for desires to arise within people any more; desires are awakened and cultivated from without. Even someone who is well off will feel poor when confronted with the plethora of goods the advertisers want one to want. There is no doubt whatsoever that industry will succeed in creating needs that it will then set about satisfying, indeed, will have to satisfy if it means to stay alive in the present system, for in that system the production of a profit is the test of viability. Our present economic system is based on maximum production and maximum consumption. The nineteenth-century economy was still based on the idea of maximizing savings. Our great grandparents considered it a nice to buy something you did not have the money to pay for. Today that has become a virtue. And, conversely, anyone who buys only what one truly needs borders on the politically suspect; one is a peculiar sort. People who do not own television sets stand out. They are obviously not quite normal. Where will this all lead us? #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

I can tell you. The unlimited increase of consumption produces a type of person who is devoted to an ideal, indeed, to what is almost a new religion, the religion of Trump Tower. If we ask ourselves how modern beings envision paradise, we are probably correct in saying that, unlike the Mohammedans, one does not expect to find oneself surrounded by beautiful women there (a decidedly make view of paradise anyway). One’s vision is of an immense department store where everything is available and where one will always have money enough to buy only everything one wants but also just a little bit more than one’s neighbour. That is part of the syndrome: One sense of self-worth is based on how much one has. And if one wants to be the best one has to have the most. The question of where to call a halt founders in the almost frenzied rounds of production and consumption, and even though most people in this economic system have much more than they can use, they still feel por because they cannot keep up with the pace of production or the mass of goods produced. This situation promotes passivity as well as envy and greed and, ultimately a sense of inner weakness, of powerlessness, of inferiority. A person’s sense of self comes to be based solely on what one has, not on what one is. Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty opportunity is possessed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Learn to pause or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you. Since we have two ears and one mouth, we should listen twice as much as we talk. Isaiah 38.17 gives another pictorial expression to describe the extent of God’s forgiveness of our sins. The prophet said of God, “You have put all my sins behind your back.” When something is behind your back, it is out of sight. We cannot see it anymore. God says He has done that with our sins. It is not that we have not sinned or, as Christians, do not continue with our sins. We know we sin daily—in fact, many times a day. Even as Christians our best efforts are still marred with imperfect performance and impure motives. However, God no longer “see” either our deliberate disobedience of our marred performances. Instead God “sees” the righteousness of Christ, which He has already imputed to us. Does this mean God ignores our sins like an overindulgent, permissive father who lets his children grow up undisciplined and ill-behaved? Not at all. In God’s relationship to us as our Heavenly Father, God does deal with our sins, but only in such a way as for our good. He does not deal with us as our sins deserves, which would be punishment, but at His grace provides, which is for our good. In God’s relationship to us as the moral Governor and Judge of humankind, God has put our sins behind his back. In God’s relationship to us as the Supreme Sovereign dealing with His rebellious subjects, He no longer “sees” our sins. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

And note that our sins do not just happen to be behind God’s back. The Scripture says God has put them there. How can God do this and still be a just and holy God? Again, the answer is that Jesus Christ paid the penalty we should have paid. As another hymn put it, “What can wash away my sing? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” However, that is not a key to keep sinning and expect forgiveness. Keep in mind repentance and damage that may be done to your soul. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who for our redemption willedest to be born and circumcised, and rejected by the Jews, betrayed with a kiss by Judas, seized, bound, and led in bonds to Annas, Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate, and before them to be mocked, smitten with palm and fist, with the scourge and the reed; to have Thy face covered and defiled with spitting; to be crowed with thorns, accused by false witnesses, condemned and as an innocent Lamb to be led to slaughter, bearing Thine own Cross; to be pierced though with nails, to have gall and vinegar given Thee to drink, on the Cross to die the most shameful of deaths, and to be wounded with a spear; do Thou by these Thy most sacred pains deliver us from all sins and penalties, and by Thy holy Cross bring us, miserable sinners, to tat place whither Thou didst being with Thyself the crucified robber on his late repentance; Who livest and reignest, please forgive us for all our sins, remove all obstructions, and bless us with abundant prosperity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

My Father, in a World of created changeable things, Christ and his word alone remain unshaken. O to forsake all creatures, to rest as a stone n him the foundation, to abide in him, be borne up by him! For all my mercies come through Christ, who has designed, purchased, promised, effected them. How sweet it is to be near him, the Lamb, filled with holy affections! When I sin against thee I cross thy will, love, life, and have no comforter, no creature, to go to. My sin is not so much this or that particular evil, but my continual separation, disunion, distance from thee, and having a loose spirit towards thee. But thou hast given me a present, Jesus thy Son, as mediator between thyself and my soul, as middle-man who pit holds both him below and him above, for only he can span the chasm breached by sin, and satisfy divine justice. May I always lay hold upon this mediator, as a realized object of faith, and alone worthy by his love to bridge the gulf. Let me know that he is dear to me by his word; I am one with him by the word on his part, and by faith on mine; If I oppose the word I oppose my Lord when he is most near; if I receive the word I receive my Lord wherein he is nigh. O thou who has the hearts of all beings in thine hand, form my heart according to the word, according to the image of thy Son, so shall Christ the Word, and his word, be my strength and comfort. “And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord that he would give unto the Gentiles grace, that they may have charity,” Ether 12.36. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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I Used to think Love was Something I Could Take or Leave Alone but Now I Could Not do without My Supply!

January 5, 2020 4:28 am

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end. We should be lenient in our judgment, because often the mistakes of others would have been ours had we had the opportunity to make them. What is food to one being is bitter poison to others. Every negative development in a person is to be understood as the result of damaging influences in early childhood. This has led sometimes to irrational self-accusation on the part of parents who feel guilty for every undesirable or pathological trait that appears in a child after birth, and to a tendency of people in analysis to put the blame for all their trouble on their parents, and to avoid confronting themselves with the problem of their own responsibility. Good intentions mean noting if they cover up the unconscious intentions; “honest” dishonesty demonstrates that it is not enough to have “meant” well consciously. Forces operate in beings of which one is not aware and rationalization protects one from awareness; unconscious forces are integrated in a system to which we call character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Character syndromes are rooted and nourished in the particular forms of relatedness of the individual to the outside World and oneself; furthermore, inasmuch as the social group shares a common character structure (“social character”) the socioeconomic conditions shared by all members of a group mold the social character. That is where the saying, “birds of a feather flock together” comes from. Love, tenderness, sadism, masochism, ambition, curiosity, anxiety, rivalry—these and many other drives are no longer each attributed to a special instinct, but to the influence of the environment (essentially the significant persons in early childhood) via the psyche. The description given thus far suggest that character determines, the character trait, whether loving or destroying, drives a person to behave in a certain way, and the person is acting according to one’s character feels satisfied. Indeed, the character traits tells us how a person would like to behave. However, we must add an important qualification: if one could. The conflict between what we would like to do and the demands of self-interest remains crucial. We cannot always behave as we are driven to by our passions, because we have to modify our behavior to some extent in order to remain alive. The average person tries to find a compromise between what one’s character would make one want to do and what one must do in order not to suffer more or less harmful consequences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The degree to which a person follows the dictates of self-preservation (ego interest) varies, of course. At one extreme the weight of the ego interest is zero; this holds true for the martyr and a certain type person who targets and terminates prominent people. At the other extreme is the opportunist for who self-interest includes everything that could make one more successful, popular, or comfortable. Between these two extremes all people can be arranged, characterized by a specific blend of self-interest and character-rooted passions. How much a person represses one’s passionate desires depends not only on factors within oneself but on the situations; if the situation changes, repressed desires become conscious and are acted out. This holds true, for instance, for the person with a sadistic-masochistic character. Everybody knows the type of person who is submissive to one’s boss and sadistically domineering to one’s wife and children. Another case in point is the change that occurs in character when the total social situation changes. The sadistic character who may have posed as a meek or even friendly individual may become a fiend in a terroristic society in which sadism is valued rather than deplored. Another may suppress sadistic behavior in all visible actions, while showing it in a subtle expression of the face or in seemingly harmless and marginal remarks. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Repression of character traits also occurs with regard to the most noble impulses. In spite of the fact that the teachings of Jesus are still part of our moral ideology, a being acting in accordance with them is generally considered a fool or a neurotic; hence many people still rationalize their generous impulses as being motivated by self-interests. These considerations show that the motivating power of character traits is influenced by self-interest in varying degrees. They imply that character constitutes the main motivation of human behavior, but restricted and modified by the demands of self-interest under varying conditions. Here is possessed the fundamental difference between behaviorism and psychoanalytic characterology. Conditioning works through its appeal to self-interest, such as the desire for food, security, praise, avoidance of pain. In animals, self-interest proves to be so strong that by repeated and optimally spaced reinforcements that interest for self-preservation proves to be stronger than other instincts like pleasures of the flesh or aggression. Humans of course also behave in accordance with one’s self-interest; but not always, and not necessarily so. One often acts according to one’s passions, one’s meanest and one’s noblest, and is often willing—and able—to risk one’s self-interest, one’s fortune, one’s freedom, and one’s life in the pursuit of love, truth, and integrity—or for hate, greed, sadism, and destructiveness. In this very difference is possessed the reason conditioning cannot be a sufficient explanation for human behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The discovery of unconscious processes and of the dynamic concept of character were radical because they went to the roots of human behavior; they were disquieting because nobody can hide any longer behind one’s good intentions; they were dangerous, because if everybody were to know what one could know about oneself and others, society would be shaken to its very foundations. Psychoanalysts is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations (transference), of character, and of conflicts between passionate strivings embodied in character traits and the demands for self-preservation. Thus far, feelings of inferiority have nothing to do with any factual inferiority, but have been discussed only as the effects of a tendency to recoil from competition. Do they then have nothing to do with existing shortcomings, with a realization of actual flaws? They are in fact the result of both actual and imagined inadequacies: feelings of inferiority are a combination of anxiety-motivated belittling tendencies and a realization of existing defects. As I have emphasized several times, we cannot ultimately fool ourselves, though we may be successful in shutting certain impulses out of awareness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

And therefore a neurotic person of the character we have been discussing will know, deep down, that one has anti-social tendencies which one must conceal, that one is far from genuine in one’s attitudes, that one’s pretenses are quite different from the undercurrents below the surface. One’s registering of all these discrepancies is an important cause for one’s feelings of inferiority, even though one never recognizes clearly the source of the discrepancies because they arise from repressed drives. Not recognizing their source, one gives to oneself reasons for feeling inferior which are rarely the real reasons, but only a renationalization. There is another reason why one feels that one’s inferiority feelings are the direct expression of an existing deficiency. On the basis of one’s ambition one has built up fantastic notions of one’s own value and importance. One cannot help measuring one’s realistic accomplishments against one’s notions of being a genius or a perfect human being, and in this comparison one’s real acts or one’s real possibilities appear inferior. The total result of all these recoiling tendencies is that the neurotic incurs real failures, or at most does not get on as well as one should, considering one’s opportunities and one’s gifts. Others who started with one get ahead of one, have better careers, greater success. This lagging behind does not concern only external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The older one becomes the more one feels the discrepancy between one’s potentialities and one’s achievements. One feels keenly that one’s gifts, whatever they may be, are going to waste, that one is blocked in the development of one’s personality, that one does not mature as time goes on. The problem of persons around the age of forty is that they become blocked in their development. However, one has not recognized the conditions leading up to such a situation, and therefore has not found any satisfactory solution. And one reacts to the realization of this discrepancy with a vague discontent, a discontent which is not masochistic but real and proportionate. A discrepancy between potentialities and achievement may be due, as I have already pointed out, to external circumstances. However, the discrepancy which develops in a neurotic person, and which is a never-failing character of neuroses, is due to one’s internal conflicts. One’s actual failures and the consequent increasing discrepancy between potentialities and achievements inevitably give even greater force to one’s existing inferiority feelings. Thus one not only believes oneself to be, but actually is inferior to what one might be. The impact of this development is all the greater since it puts the inferiority feelings on a realistic basis. Meanwhile the other discrepancy which I have mentioned—that between high-flown ambitions and the comparatively poor reality—becomes so unbearable that it demands a remedy. As such a remedy fantasy offer itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

More and more the neurotic substitutes grandiose ideas for attainable goals. The value they have for one is obvious: they cover up one’s unendurable feelings of nothingness; they allow one to feel important without entering into any competition and thus without incurring the risk of failure or success; they allow one to build up a fiction of grandeur far beyond attainable goal. It is this blind-alley value of grandiose fantasies that makes them dangerous, because the blind alley has a definite advantage for the neurotic when compared with the straightforward road. These neurotic ideas of grandeur should be distinguished from those of the normal person and those of the psychotic. Even the normal person will at times think oneself wonderful, attribute undue importance to what one is doing, or indulge in fantasies of what one might do. However, these fantasies and ideas remain decorative arabesques and one does not take them too seriously. They psychotic person with ideas of grandeur is at the other end of the line. One is convinced that one is a genius, the Emperor of Japan, Napoleon, Christ, and will reject all evidence of reality which tends to disprove one’s conviction; one will be wholly unable to comprehend any reminder that one is actually a less affluent doorman, or patient in an asylum or the object of disrespect and ridicule. If one become aware of the discrepancy at all one will decide in favor of one’s grandiose ideas, and will believe that the others do not know any better, or that they are deliberately treating one with disrespect in order to hurt one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, if therapy enables the individual to reorient one’s pattern of life and to reduce the tension and anxiety one feels regarding one’s personal problems, then the reactions of one’s automatic nervous system in, for example, a situation of stress, should also be altered. Essentially, if a change in life pattern and in internal tension occurred in therapy, this should show up in organismic changes in autonomic functioning, an area over which the individual has no conscious control. Individual who have experienced therapy develop a higher frustration threshold during their series of therapeutic contacts, and are able to recover their homeostatic balance more rapidly following frustration. After therapy, the individual is able to meet, with more tolerance and less disturbance, situations of emotional stress and frustration or stress was never considered in therapy; the more effective meeting of frustration is not a surface phenomenon but is evident in autonomic reactions which the individual cannot consciously control and of which one is completely unaware. Thus, it is predicted that if therapy enabled the individual to better handle stress at the psychological level, then this should be evident also in one’s autonomic functioning. Therefore, do not major in the minors. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Remember to breathe not weak, snatched gasps, but deep riveting drafts. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Another point in which the impossibility of the theory of addition of love and justice becomes visible is the relation of love and justice to the concrete situation. Justice is expressed in principles and laws none of which can ever reach the uniqueness of the concrete situation. Every decision which is based on the abstract formulation of justice alone is essentially and inescapably unjust. Justice can be reached only if both the demand of the universal law and the demand of the particular situation are accepted and made effective for the concrete situation. However, it is love which created participation in the concrete situation. It would be completely wrong to say that love must be added to justice if the uniqueness of the situation is to be reached. For this would mean that justice as such is impossible. Actually the situation shows that justice is just because of the love which is implicit in it. However, this can e understood fully only in the context of an ontological analysis of the root meanings of both love and justice. The weight of the problems and the dangerous character of the confusions is equally obvious when we finally confront power and justice. It is in this realm of problems that the relation of law and order to justice and of all of them to power is discussed and more often confused than illuminated. The first questions is: Who gives the law in which justice is supposed to be expressed? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To give a law is the basic manifestation of power. However, if a group which has power gives laws, how are they related to justice? Are they not simply the expression of the will to power of this group? The Marxist theory of the State asserts that the laws of the State are tools which give social control to a ruling group. The origin of its power may be military invasion or it may be socioeconomic stratification. In both cases justice is possible only if the State has withered away and has been replaced by an administration without political power. The justice of the ruling class is injustice and, if defended, ideology. The laws it gives preserve a social order, and as long as there is no alternative social order, the laws of the ruling classes are better than chaos. The more cynical representatives of this theory interpret justice exclusively as a function of power and in no way as its judge. They accept the Marxist analysis without the Marxist expectation, and reduce justice completely to a function of power. In reaction against this removal of justice as an ultimate principle a theory has been developed which tries to separate justice from power and completely and to establish it as a self-contained system of valid judgements. Justice is an absolute, without any relation to structures of power. The absolute law, derived from the principles of the natural or rational law, does not express wat is, but it demands what should be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Irrespective of power it commands and expects obedience because of its intrinsic validity. It does not express but it judges power. The contrast of these two theories about the relation of power to justice reveals the difficulty of the problem and the necessity of an ontological research into the rot meanings of power and justice. As announced before, I have led you into a jungle of problems and confusions, and, at every point, I have indicated the way out; namely, the ontological analysis of love, power, and justice. When the God we love chose to reveal Himself, He did so in creation itself and in more specific, special ways—most importantly, in the Scriptures and Jesus Christ. When we affirm that the Bible is a revelation from God, we do not simply assert that God as a person is known in and through it. We also mean that God has revealed understandable, objectively true propositions. The Lord’s Word is not only practically useful, it is also theoretically true (John 17.17). God has revealed truth to us and not just Himself. This truth is addressed to our minds and requires an intellectual grasp to understand and then apply. Because of the Bible’s nature, serious study is needed to grasp what it says. Of course, the Scripture contains easily grasped portions that are fairly straightforward. However, some of it is very difficult, intellectually speaking. In fact, Peter one said that some of Paul’s writings were intellectually challenging, hard to understand, and easily distorted (that is, uneducated in Christian theology) and unstable people (2 Peter 3.16). #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The more a person develops the mind and the understanding of hermeneutics (the science of interpreting the Scriptures), the more one will be able to understand the meaning and significance of the Scriptures. Unfortunately, many today apparently think that hard intellectual work is not needed to understand God’s propositional revelation to us. Instead, they believe that the Holy spirit will simply make know the meaning of a text if it is implored to do so. Tragically, this represents a misunderstanding of the Spirit’s role in understanding the Scriptures. In my view, the Spirit does not help the believer understand the meaning of Scripture. Rather, He speaks to the believer’s soul, convicting, comforting, opening up applications of His truths through His promptings. On the evening Christ gave Himself up for us, John 17 tells us, He prayed in succession for Himself, for His twelve disciples, and for all of us who would later believe. When He finished praying for His future bride, He went to the cross. Then came Hos death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement at the right hand of the Father, where He constantly makes intercession for us. Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession. Men, do you pray for your wives with something more than, “Bless good Meghan in all she does”? If not, you are sinning against her and against God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Most Christian men who claim to love their wives never offer more than a perfunctory nod to their wives’ needs before God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the material work of a Christian husband! The most basic command is, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave up himself for her.” Men, we are divinely called to die for our brides, to take on her sufferings as our own, and to make intercession for her. You are supposed to be her ride or die man. When it is said that the readiness of the seeker determines the appearance of the master, this applies to the first fundamental initiation of one’s spiritual life. It does not mean that a master will come into one’s own town and seek one out, but that one will come into one’s life. And this may be brought about in various ways—as by the seeker oneself being led, either by Worldly circumstances or by one’s own seeking, out of one’s own town to the town or country where the master is living. The location of one’s spiritual guide will in part be the accident of one’s own geographical situation, for one will obviously be limited in one’s selection to possibilities and reputations in one’s own country or nation or race. The sheer physical and financial difficulties of traveling throughout the World—not to mention the obstacles of personal circumstance, family obligations, and ignorance of where to search and whom to approach in foreign lands, combine to set this limitation upon one’s inquiry and hence upon one’s opportunity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

It is foolish to seek holiness geographically or holy beings in particular places. I have found that one being may live in a Himalayan abode and be a scoundrel and another being may live in a Bowery slum and be a saint. Wherever the live, people always carry their own thoughts and their own selves with them. The Soul, which is the object of our quest, is within us. The Master, who is to guide us upon our quest, will appear whenever we are ready for one and wherever we happen to live—or else we will be led to one. There are beings in the New World and the Old World, not less wise and noble than each other. If we have not met them, “the fault, Dear Brutus is…in ourselves,” primarily in our unworthiness, and secondarily in our incapacity to recognize what is beneath the surface. All speculation upon the motives and the methods of the illuminate will avail little. The light by which one works is denied to ordinary beings. We should not try to bind one down to qualities which fit only those who grope in the dark or move in twilight. We should trust where we cannot see and wait patiently for the day of revilement, when we will find all made clear and all riddle solved to our satisfaction. It is an old truism in the Old World that it takes an adept to understand an adept, but the New World will have to learn this truth by bitter experiences with pseudo-adepts. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

There are many signs of one’s spiritual status in the dignity and composure of one’s bearing, the deliberateness and truthfulness of one’s speech, and the impressiveness of one’s tension-free face. Helter Skelter is a phrase taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Charles Manson used it to characterize that state of confusion in which he kept his followers, and himself as well. In the state of helter-skelter nothing makes sense, and everything makes as much sense as anything else. Manson was able to use this ideology to brainwash his followers and make them believe they were not responsible for their actions and they were not doing anything wrong when the ended the life of an individual. He taught them they if harm came to a person by means of his follower’s hands, then it was meant to be, it was in divine order and they did no really harm the individual and the individual was still alive on a different plane of existence. Aldous Huxley, in one of his retrospective writings, commented on how, among the associates of his youth, the endless talk of meaninglessness—the meaninglessness of life and therefore of everything in it—was merely an excuse to permit them to do whatever they wanted. Their life was organized (or, more properly, disorganized) around their feelings and wayward thoughts, with their will in two. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, resolute action for the good requires that things make sense. You would not want someone caught up in helter-skelter to work on your lawn mower, do your gastrointestinal examination, nor work on your computer. Life makes sense only if you understand its basic components and how they interrelate to form the whole. Evil, on the other hand, thrives on confusion. God is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14.33). Frankly, our visible Christian World is not too far from helter-skelter with reference to its understanding of the makeup of the person and therefore of the spiritual life and spiritual formation. We need to access the fullness of biblical teachings on these matters. We suffer far too much from the influence of a surrounding culture that thrives on confusions. (And therefore its denial that human beings have a nature.) This may seem like a harsh thing to say about our “Christian World,” and I am sorry to day it; but the issues here are too important to mince words. Accordingly, much of what we do in Christian circles with very good intentions—hoping, we say, to see steady, significant growth in Christlikeness—simply makes no sense and lead nowhere so far as substantive spiritual formation is concerned. What a brutal thing to say! However, we need to recognize this, or show why it is not the case. I hope we have taken significant first steps toward a clarity that can serve as a foundation for the effectual practice of Christian spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. “As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgression from us,” reports Psalm 103.12. How far is the East from the West? If you start due north at any point on Earth, you would eventually cross over the North Pole and start going south, but that is not true when you go East or West. If you start West and continue in that direction you will always be going West. North and South meet at the North Pole, but East and West never meet. In a sense, they are an infinite distance apart. So when God says He removes our transgressions from us as far as the East is from the West, He is saying they have been removed an infinite distance from us. However, how can we get a handle on this rather abstract truth in such a way that it becomes meaningful in our lives? When God uses this metaphorical expression describing the extent of His forgiveness of our sin, He is saying His forgiveness is total, complete, and unconditional. God is saying He is not keeping score with regard to our sins. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities,” reports Psalm 103.10. Yes, God actually says that! I know it seems too good to be true. I confess I almost hesitate to write those words because they are so foreign to our innate concepts of reward and punishment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

However, those gracious words are right in the Bible, and they are God’s words. How can God possibly do this? How can He so completely disregard our transgressions as to say He removes them an infinite distance from us? The answer is by His grace through Jesus Christ. God laid our sins on Christ and He bore the penalty we should have borne. Because of Christ’s death in our place, God’s justice is now completely satisfied. God can now, without violating His justice or His moral law, forgive us freely, completely and absolutely. He can now extend His grace to us; He can show favor to those who, in themselves, deserve only wrath. O Loving Wisdom of the living God, O living everlasting Word and everlasting Power of God the eternal Father—for everlasting is Thy birth, Who art the everlasting Son of God the everlasting Father, and art God; without Whom is nothing, by Whom are all things; in Whom consisteth whatever is; Who art God above us, and Man for our sakes; for Thou hast willed for us to be what we are: grant us what Thou hast promised; give to us, although unworthy, what Thou hast offered to all alike; that is, that Thy Passion may be our deliverance, and Thy Death our life, and Thy cross our redemption, and Thy Wound our healing; that being crucified with Thee, we may by Thy gift be lifted up on high to Thy Father, with Whom in bliss Thou livest and reignest. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come unto their brethren through the Gentiles; therefore the Lord hath commanded me, yea, even Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

O Source of All Good, what shall I render to three for the gift of gifts, then own dear Son, begotten, not created, my redeemer, proxy, surety, substitute, his self-emptying incomprehensible, his infinity of love beyond the heart’s grasp. Herein is wonder of wonders: he came below to rise me above, was born like me that I might become like him. Herein is love; when I cannot rise to him he draws near on wings of grace, to raise me to himself. Herein is power; when Deity and humanity were infinitely apart he untied them in indissoluble unity, the uncreated and the created. Herein is wisdom; when I was undone, with no will to return to him, and no intellect to devise recovery, he came, God-incarnate, to save me to the uttermost as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me. O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind; let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, my eyes uplifted to reconcile Father; place me with ox, mule, camel, goat, to look with them upon my redeemer’s face, and in him account myself delivered from sin; let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace him with undying faith, exulting that he is mine and I am his. In him thou hast given me so much that Heaven can give no more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Oh, I Cannot Break Away I Must Have You Everyday as Regularly as Coffee or Tea!

January 4, 2020 5:40 am

When bad people combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Successful change requires: painstakingly laying a foundation; planning in incredible detail; tediously covering and recovering all the bases; continuously explaining and re-explaining; dealing with naysayers; playing politics; soothing egos; dispelling fears; cheerleading; troubleshooting; communicating; compromising; coaxing; cajoling; and ultimately, dragging a few stragglers kicking and screaming into the future. That is hard work. It is also leadership! And, the curious paradox is that when one accepts one’s self just as he or she is, then one has the ability to change. Many people are advocating members of society to get mental help, but no one is opening up with a testimony about their experience and what helped them. Drug therapy is not the only form of therapy. Sometimes all a person needs is someone to talk to and express what they are going through so they can feel like an accepted member of the population. Also, old theories about if you seem to have a problem with everyone, then you are likely the problem is an outdated hypothesis because tribalism and pack mentality has become a common expression for many groups in American culture. Therefore, some people are actually singled out and made to feel like misfits when nothing is actually wrong with them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

When the initial self-picture of someone has been in a therapeutic program is compared with those after therapy, it is found that after therapy the client sees himself or herself as changed in a number of ways. One feels one is more self-confident and self-reliant, understands oneself better, has more inner comfort, and more comfortable relationships with others. One feels less guilty, less resentful, less driven and insecure, and feels lees need for self-concealment. It is also an expectation that one will achieve greater congruence of self and ideal primary through alteration of their values, others through the alteration of self. Evidence supports this conclusion, and it appears that the concept of the self is what exhibits the greater change. Some change, however, does occur in the ideal self in the case of our client and the direction of this slight change is of interest. In other words, the self-deal has becomes less perfectly adjusted, or more attainable. It is to some degree a less punishing goal. We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. Most people are willing to adapt not because they see the light but because they feel the heat. It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Another finding in connection with therapy has to do with the “remembered self.” This remembered self turns out to be very different from the self-picture one gives at the time of entering therapy. Usually people need about eighteen months of therapy to see a significant change. In sorting of for the remembered self we have a crude objective measure of the reduction in defensiveness which occurs. One is usually able to give a considerably truer picture of the maladjusted and disturbed person that one was when he or she entered therapy, a picture which is confirmed by other evidence. In client-centered therapy our theory is that in the psychological safety of the therapeutic relationship the client is able to permit in one’s awareness feelings and experiences which ordinarily would be repressed, or denied to awareness. These previously denied experiences now become incorporated into the self. For example, a client who has repressed all feelings of hostility may come, during therapy, to experience one’s hostility freely. One’s concept of oneself then becomes reorganized to include this realization that one has, at times, hostile feelings towards others. One’s self-picture becomes to that degree a more accurate map or representation of the totality of one’s experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The most significant change in a person’s life is a change of attitude. Right attitudes produce right actions. All change in involves problems, and all successful change involves solving those problems. If you do not tackle problems, you might have less conflict, but you do not get anywhere in terms of change. That is why risk-taking is important. Those who are successful at implementing change do not have fewer problems. The difference is they have a problem-solving attitude and a problem solving mechanism. During and after therapy there will be an increasing congruence between the self as perceived by the client and the client as perceived by a diagnostician. The assumption is that a skilled person making a psychological diagnosis of the client is more aware of the totality of the client’s experience patterns, both conscious and unconscious, than is the client. Hence if the client assimilates into one’s own conscious self-picture many of the feelings and experiences which previously one has repressed, then one’s picture of oneself should become more similar to the picture which the diagnostician has of one. Thus we may say that the objective evidence indicates that the client has become, in one’s self-perception and in one’s total personality picture, substantially the person one wished to become when one entered therapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The individuals who will succeed and flourish will also be masters of change: adept at reorienting their own and other’s activities in untried directions to bring about higher levels of achievement. They will be able to acquire and use power to produce innovation. You may have habits that weaken you. The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. Advice is like the snow. The softer it falls, the deeper it sinks into the mind. Among the many ways of thus recoiling from competition, perhaps the most important is that by which the neurotic creates in one’s imagination such a distance from one’s real or alleged competitor that any competition appears absurd, and is thereby eliminated in consciousness. This distance may be achieved either by setting the other person on a pedestal high out of reach, or by putting oneself so far below all others that any competitive thoughts or attempts seems impossible and ridiculous. The latter process is called “belittling.” Belittling oneself may be a conscious strategy, practiced merely for reasons of expediency. If the disciple of a great painter has done a good picture but has reason to fear the begrudging attitude of one’s master, one may belittle one’s work in order to allay the master’s envy. Always imitate the behavior of winners when you lose. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The neurotic person, however, has only the vague notion of a tendency to undervalue oneself. If one has done a good job one will seriously believe that others would have done better, or that one’s success was an accident and that one probably could not do so well again. Or, having done well, one may pick out some flaw, such as having worked too slowly, and use this to devaluate one’s entire accomplishment. A scientist may feel ignorant about questions concerning one’s own field, so that one’s friends have to remind one that one’s self has written about them. When asked a question which is unwise or unanswerable one will be inclined to react with a feeling of one’s own folly; when reading a book with which one dimly disagrees one will be inclined, instead of thinking it through critically, to infer that one is not intelligent enough to understand it. One may perhaps cherish the belief that one has managed to preserve a critical and objective attitude toward oneself. However, not only will such a person take one’s inferiority feelings at their face value; one will insist on their validity. In spite of one’s complaints about them and the sufferings they cause one, one is far from accepting any evidence to disprove them. If regarded as a highly competent worker one will maintain that one is being overvalued or that one has succeeded in bluffing others. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

For instance, there was a girl I mentioned heretofore, who developed an inordinate ambition at school after the humiliating experience with her brother, was always the first in her class and was regarded by everyone as a brilliant student, but was still convinced in her own mind that she was stupid. Although a glance into a mirror or the attention paid by men might be enough to convince a woman that she is attractive, she may still cling with an iron conviction to the belief that she is unattractive. A person may be convinced until he is forty that he is too young to assert his opinion or take a lead, and after forty he may switch to a feeling that he is too old. A well-known scholar was continually amazed at the reverence shown him, and in his own feelings insisted on being an insignificant mediocrity. Compliments are discarded as empty flattery or as prompted by ulterior motives, and may even result in anger. Observations of this kind, which can be made almost without limit, show that inferiority feelings, perhaps the most common evil of our times, have an important function, and for that reason are maintained and defended. Their value consists in the fact that by lowering one’s self in one’s own mind and thereby putting one’s self below other people and checking one’s ambition, the anxiety connected with competitiveness is allayed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

For one young lady, this strange sense of cruelty and ugliness always imminent, ready to seize hold upon her, who was the exception, formed one of the deepest influences of her life. Wherever she was, a school, among friends, in the street, in the train, she instinctively abated herself, made herself smaller, feigned to be less than she was for fear that her undiscovered self should be seen, pounced upon, attacked by brutish resentment of the commonplace, the average Self. Incidentally is should not be overlooked that inferiority feelings may factually weaken one’s position for the reason that self-belittling leads to an impairment of self-confidence. A certain amount of self-confidence is a prerequisite for any achievement, whether it be in varying a standard recipe for salad-dressing, selling merchandise, defending an opinion, or making a good impression on a potential relative. A person with strong tendencies to belittle oneself may have dreams in which one’s competitors excel, or in which one is at a disadvantage. Since there is no doubt that one subconsciously wishes for a triumph over competitors such dreams might look like a contradiction of Dr. Freud’s contention that dreams represent wish fulfillments. Dr. Freud’s view must not, however, be taken too narrowly. If direct wish-fulfillment involves too much anxiety, the allaying of that anxiety will be more important than a direct fulfillment of the wish. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Thus when a person who is afraid of one’s ambition has dreams in which one id defeated, one’s dreams are the expression not of a wish to fail but of a preference for failure as the lesser evil. A patient of mine was scheduled to give a lecture during a period of her treatment when she was desperately fighting to defeat me. She has a dream that I was giving a successful lecture and that she was sitting in the audience humbly admiring me. Again, an ambition teacher dreamed that one’s pupil was the teacher and that he failed to know his assignment. The degree to which self-belittling serves as a check on ambitions is shown also by the fact that the capacities that are belittled are usually the ones in which the individual desires most ardently to excel. If one’s ambition is of an intellectual character, intelligence is its instrument and hence is belittled. This connection is so usual that one may guess from the focus of the self-belittling tendency where the greatest ambitions are possessed. The ambiguities in the meaning of love, power, and justice have confusing consequences and produce new problems as soon as the relation of the three concepts to each other is considered. Love and power are often contrasted in such a way that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Powerless love and loveless power are contrasted. This, of course, is unavoidable if love is understood from its emotional side and power from its compulsory side. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

However, such an understanding is error and confusion. It was this misinterpretation which induced the philosopher of the “will-to-power” to reject radically the Christian idea of love. And it is the same misinterpretation which induces Christian theologians to reject the philosophy of the “will-to-power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. In both cases an ontology of love is missing and in the second case power is identified with social compulsion. In the same period the theological school which has been created by Albrecht Ritschl dominated the field of Protestant theology. The anti-metaphysical bias of this school caused it to contrast the love of God with His power in such a way that the power actually disappeared and God became identified with love in its ethical meaning. The consequence was an ethical theism which neglected almost completely the divine mystery and majesty. God as the power of being was discarded as a pagan invasion. The trinitarian symbolism was dissolved. The kingdom of God was reduced to the ideal of an ethical community. Nature was excluded because power excluded. And power was excluded because the question of being was excluded. For if the question of being is asked and concepts like love and power are seen in the light of the ontological question, the unity of their root meanings can become visible. Yet most important are the problems in social ethics which result from the confrontation of love and power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

One could say that constructive social ethics are impossible as long as power is looked at with distrust and love is reduced to its emotional or ethical quality. Such a division leads to a rejection of or indifference to the political realm on the side of religion. And it leads to the separation of the political from the religious and the ethical and to the politics of mere compulsion on the political side. Constructive social ethics presuppose that one is aware of the element of love in structure of power and of the element of power without which love becomes chaotic surrender. It is the ontological analysis of love and power which must produce this awareness. The problems and confusions which characterize the discussion of love in its relation to power, characterize equally the discussion of love in its relation to justice. One does not usually contrast love with justice in the way in which one contrast love with power. However, it is commonly accepted that love adds something to justice that justice cannot do by itself. Justice, one says, demands that an inherited fortune is distributed in equal parts amongst those who have the same legal claim. However, love may induce one of the heirs to surrender one’s right to one of the other heirs. In this case one acts in a way which is not demanded by justice, but may be demanded by love. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Love transcends justice. This seems rather evident, but it is not! If justice is not limited to proportional distribution, the act of resignation might have been an act of non-proportional justice, or it might have been an act of injustice against oneself, as in the first act of Shakespeare’s King Lear, when Lear surrenders all his powers to his daughters. The relation of love to justice cannot be understood in terms of an addition to justice which does not change its character. Only an ontology of justice can describe the true relation of the root concepts. Another example supports this view. A man may say to another: “I know your criminal deed and, according to the demand of justice, I should bring you to trial, but because of my Christian love I let you go.” Through this leniency, which is wrongly identified with love, a person may be driven towards a thoroughly criminal career. This means that one has received neither justice nor love, but injustice, covered by sentimentality. One might have been saved by having been brought to trial after his first fall. In this case the act of being just would have been the act of love. In classical theology the tension between love and justice is symbolized in the doctrine of atonement as developed by Anselm of Canterbury. According to Anselm, God Himself must find a way to escape the consequences of His retributive justice which conflicts with His merciful love. He is subject to the law of justice which is given by Himself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

And this law would cause the eternal death of all beings in spite of His desire to save humans according to His love. The solution is the undeserved, substitutional death of the God-man, Jesus Christ. In spite of its theological weakness this remained the predominant doctrine in Western Christianity because of its psychological power. It implies the ontological insight, which it explicitly contradicts, that ultimately love must satisfy justice in order to be real love, and that justice must be elevated into unity with love in order to avoid the injustice of eternal destruction. However, this is not manifest in the legal form in which the doctrine is developed. O God, Who for us hast willed Thy Son to endure the gibbest of the Cross, that Thou mightiest drive away from us the power of the enemy; grant to us Thy servants to attain the grace of resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Our Lord, thy righteous will be done, for I know that thou workest unto the children of men accord to their faith,” reports Ether 12.29. O my God, thou fairest, greatest, first of all object, my heart admires, adores, loves thee, for my little vessel is as full as it can be, and I would pour out all that fullness before thee in ceaseless flow. When I think upon and converse with thee ten thousand delightful thoughts spring up, ten thousand sources of pleasure are unsealed, ten thousand refreshing joys spread over my heart, crowding into every moment of happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

I bless thee for the soul thou has created, for adorning it, sanctifying it, though it is fixed in barren soil; for the body thou hast given me, for preserving its strength and vigour, for providing senses to enjoy delights, for the ease and freedom of my limbs, for hands, eyes, ears that do thy bidding; for they royal bounty providing my daily support, for a full table and overflowing cup, for appetite, taste, sweetness, for social joys of relatives and friends, for ability to serve others, for a heart that feels sorrows and necessities, for a mind to care for my fellow-humans, for opportunities of spreading happiness around, for loved ones in the joys of Heaven, for my own expectations of seeing thee clearly. I love thee above the powers of language to express, for what thou art to thy beings. Increase my love, O my God, through time and eternity. O God, Who for our redemption hast received the Blood of Jesus Christ, destroy the works of the devil, and break through all the snares of sin; that those who have been created by a new birth may not be defiled by the old contagion. Lord Jesus Christ, Who didst stretch out Thine hands on the Corss, and redeem us by Thy Blood, forgive me a sinner, for none of my thoughts are hid from Thee. Pardon I ask, pardon I hope for, pardon I trust to have. Thou Who art pitiful and merciful, spare and forgive me. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

Cresleigh Homes

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One of these Mornings, it Won’t be Very Long, You’ll Look for Me…I’ll be Gone!

January 3, 2020 3:29 am

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. If humans do find the solution for World peace, it will be the most revolutionary reversal of their record we have ever known. We must have the power to change ourselves, then things will change around us. Unreasonable and absurd ways of life are truly an offense to God. Christians desire to be like God and live a deep and fruitful Christian life. Our Lord is a God of reason as well as revelation. God is perfect in knowledge and, in fact, knows everything both actual and possible. The Son of God became incarnate as the Logos (Greek: “the word”), which some take to represent and emphasize this reasoned, omniscient aspect of God’s character, that is, the divine reason or wisdom that is made manifest and understandable in the God-man Jesus Christ. God exhibits wise intelligence in choosing the best goals and the best means of accomplishing them. So wise is He that Scripture calls Him “the only wise God,” reports Romans 16.27. He is the God of truth who cannot lie, and who is completely reliable. His very word is true and His church—not the university—is the pillar and support of the truth. God invites His people to come and reason together with Him by bringing a legally reasoned case against His actions to which He will respond. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

What a contrast the God of the Bible is with the god of Islam, who is so transcendent that his ways are inscrutable (beyond understanding)! How different God is from the irrational, fickle, finite deities of the Greek pantheon or other polytheistic religions! These mythological “gods” exhibit the folly of human emotions and the danger of ignoring revelation. The God of the Bible requires teachers who diligently study His Word and handle it accurately. He demands of His evangelists that they give rational justification to questioners who ask them why they believe as they do. On one occasion His chief apostle, Paul, emphasized that his gospel preaching was by way of words of truth and rationality when Festus charged that his great learning was driving him mad. No anti-intellectualism here! By contrast, the monistic religions of the East promote gurus who offer koans, paradoxes like the sound of one hand clapping, upon which to meditate in order to free the devotee from dependence on reason and enable one to escape the laws of logic. The Buddhist is to leave one’s mind behind, but the Christian God requires transformation by way of its renewal. Is it any wonder that we Christians started the first universities and have planted schools and colleges everywhere our missionaries have gone? #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Is it any wonder that science began in Christian Europe because of the belief that the same rational God who made the human mind also created the World so the mind would be suited to discern the World’s rational structure placed there by God? God is certainly not a cultural elitist, and He does not love intellectuals more than anyone else. However, it needs to be said in the same breath that ignorance is not a Christian virtue if those virtues mirror the perfection of God’s own character. The opening charge in Ephesians 5 is a clear call to radical, sacrificial love: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” reports Ephesians 5.25. This call to martial love was a bare-knuckled swing at the domestic commitment (or lack of same) of people of the day—just as it is today. Taken seriously, the unveiled form of these words, “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” is staggering! And honestly received, the punch it delivers flattens many Christian men…because they fall so short! The reason the punch hurts is because it is an obstructed call to love with a willingness to sacrifice, even unto death. Martial love is like death—it wants all of is. If you do not understand this, you do not know what marital love it. This does not mean marriage wants to kill us, but the love of a marriage wants to take over every aspect of our live and being, with no return. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The realization of what this call means may at first be frightening, but it is also beautiful, because a being who embraces such a love will experience the grace of death to self. Marriage is a call to die, and a man who does not die for his wife does not come close to the love to which he is called. Christian marriage vows are the inception of a lifelong practice of death, of giving over not only all you have, but all you are. Is this a grim gallows call? Not at all! It is no more grim than dying to self and following Christ. In fact, those who lovingly die for their wives are those who know the most joy, have the most fulfilling marriages, and experience the most love. Christ’s call to Christian husbands is not a call to be doormats, but to die. As we shall see, this can mean a death to our rights, our time, our perceived pleasures—all liberating deaths. This is a truly male thing, a masculine thing—for it takes a strong man to die. When Christ “gave himself up” for us, He not only died, He suffered. And His suffering was not only the cross, but it was and is suffering which comes from identification with His bride, the Church. This is why Saul, who was fanatically persecuting the Church, suddenly heard Jesus cry, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Christ suffers with His bride, and husbands ought to suffer with and for theirs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Men, when you properly hitch your life to another, you are in for a wild ride with huge ups and downs. Just as when you really love God you will undergo difficulties foreign to an unloving heart, so it is in marriage. You will share her experienced injustices, cruelties, and disappointments. You will experience her upsets, insecurities, and despairs. However, of course, you will also know an index of joys beyond the range of the unloving. You will ride through some dark valleys, but you will also soar among the stars! The question then is, how does spiritual power work, how is it related to physical and psychological power, and how is it related to the compulsory element of power? For hundreds of years people have discussed the meaning of the concept of justice. Since earliest times justice has been symbolized in myth and poetry, in sculpture and architecture. Nevertheless, its meaning is not unambiguous. On the contrary, its legal meaning seems to be contradicted by its ethical one, and both the legal and the ethical meaning seem to be in conflict with its religious meaning. Legal justice, moral righteousness, and religious justification seems to struggle with each other. Aristotle speaks of justices as a proportion, both in distribution and retribution. This raises several problems. First, one must ask whether the terms “distributive” and “retributive justice” constitute a valid distinction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Distributive justice gives goods to everybody according to one’s just claim; and one’s just claim is determined by one’s social status, which is partly dependent on the status one has received by historical destiny in Universe and society, and partly by one’s own merits in actualizing one’s status and its potentialities. Retributive justice takes place if one diminished one’s status and its just claims by not fulfilling its potentialities or by acting against the social or cosmic order in which one’s status is rooted. Retributive justice then appears as punishment and produces the problem of the meaning of punishment and its relation to justice. Is punishment a purpose in itself, determined by retributive justice, or is it the negative implication of distributive justice, or is it the negative implication of distributive justice and determined by it? Only an ontological consideration of justice can lead toward an answer. The same is true f the meaning of justice as proportion. The term “proportional justice” implies degrees of justified claims. It presupposes a hierarchy of standing and claims. It presupposes a hierarchy of standing and claims for a just distribution. On the other hand, the word “justice” implies an element of equality. How is the hierarchical element in proportional justice related to the equalitarian element in it? If we consider the fact that the status of a being in Universe and society is subject to continuous change, the question becomes even more difficult. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The dynamic character of life seems to exclude the concept of a just claim; it seems to undercut even the idea of proportional justice. Is there a type of justice which transcends and restricts the kind of justice described by Aristotle? Can perhaps the proportional element be taken into dynamic-creative type of justice? This again demands assumptions about the relation of the static to the dynamic character of being; it demands ontological assumptions. None of the concepts of love, power, and justice can be defined, described and understood in their carried meanings without an ontological analysis of their root meanings. None of the confusion and ambiguities in the use of those three concepts can be removed, none of the problems intrinsic in them can be solved without an answer to the question: How are love, power, and justice rooted in the nature of being as such? In view of all we have said about the detached person’s human relationships it will be clear that any close and lasting relation would be bound to jeopardize one’s detachment and hence would be likely to be disastrous—unless the partner should be equally detached and so of one’s own accord respect the need for distance, or unless one is able and willing for other reasons to adapt oneself to such needs. A Solveig who in loving devotion patiently awaits Peer Gynt’s return is the ideal partner. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Solveig expects nothing from Peer. Expectations on her part would frighten him as much as would loss of control over his own feelings. Mostly he is unaware of how little he himself gives, and he believes he has bestowed his unexpressed and unlived feelings, so precious to himself, upon the partners. Provided emotional distance is sufficiently guaranteed, Peer may be able to preserve a considerable measure of enduring loyalty. He may be capable of having intense short-lived relationships, relationships in which he appears and vanishes. They are brittle, and any number of factors may hasten his withdrawal. Relationships that involve pleasures of the flesh may mean inordinately much to one as a bridge to others. If they are transitory and do not interfere with one’s life, one will enjoy them. They should be confined, as it were, to the compartment set aside for such affairs. On the other hand, one may have cultivated indifference to so great a degree that it permits of no trespassing. Then wholly imaginary relationships may be substituted for real ones. All the peculiarities we have described appear in the analytical process. Naturally, the detached person resents analysis because indeed it is the greatest possible intrusion upon one’s private life. However, one is also interested in observing oneself and may be fascinated by the greater vista it opens upon the intricate process going on within one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

One may be intrigued by the artistic quality of dreams or by the aptness of one’s inadvertent associations. One’s joy in finding confirmation for assumptions resembles the scientist’s One is appreciative of the analyst’s attention and of one’s pointing to something here and there, but abominates being urged or “forced” in a direction one has not foreseen. One will often mention the danger of suggestion in analysis—although factually there is less danger of this in one’s case than for any other type, because one is fully armed against “influence.” Far from defending one’s position in a rational way by testing out the analyst’s suggestion, one tends, as is one’s wont, to reject blindly, though indirectly and politely, all that does not fit in with one’s own ideas about oneself and life in general. One finds it particularly obnoxious that the analyst should expect one to change in any way. Of course one wants to get rid of whatever is disturbing one; but it must not involve a change in one’s personality. One is almost as unfailingly willing to observe as one is unconsciously determined to remain as one is. One’s defiance of all influence is only one of the explanations for one’s attitude, and not the deepest one; we shall become acquainted with other later on. Naturally one puts a great distance between one’s self and the analyst. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the World. For a long time the analyst will be only a voice. In dreams the analytical situation may appears as a long-distance call between two reporters on different continents. At first glance a dream like this would seem to express the remoteness one feels toward the analyst and the analytical process—merely an accurate presentation of an attitude that exists consciously. However, since dreams are a search for a solution rather than a mere description of existing feelings, the deeper meaning of such a dream is a wish to keep one’s relationship to the analyst and to the whole analytical process away from one—not to let the analysis touch one in any way. Maturity is the ability to live in peace with that which we cannot change. Managing change in complex organizations is like steering a sailboat in turbulent water and stormy winds. If you are on a course to some destination and the wind is blowing at gale force dead broadside; you have to make a number of critical choices. If you head into the wind, you will lose speed and direction although your probably can ride out the storm. If you let the wind carry you too far, it might blow the boat over; and if your let it go a little less far than that, it may well drive you off course. If you decide to hold rigidly to your course at all costs, you may find that the winds rip the sails and even break off the mast. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The true sailor, knowing these choices, works with the wind. He or she will bring the boat up close between gusts, “fall off” a little on the next gust, and come back up to the course in such a way that the boat stays on the compass heading towards its destination through many short-term decisions, which go with or against the prevailing winds in an appropriate combinations. We live in a time of paradox, contradiction, opportunity, and above all, change. To the fearful, change is threatening because they worry that things may get worse. To the hopeful, change is encouraging because they feel things may get better. To those who have confidence in themselves, change is a stimulus because they believe one person can make a difference and influence what goes on around them. These people are the doers and the motivators. Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. It is nice to not have to wait on the clock to change to change our own actions, as humans, we have free will and the ability to constantly be improving and leaving behind ideas, thoughts, actions, situations and people who no longer support the person one is becoming. Now it is a remarkable phenomenon in our culture that people do not fully acknowledge or—perhaps we should say—are not fully conscious of what a grave affliction boredom is. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Take someone in solitary confinement or, to use a less drastic example, take someone who simply does not know what to do with oneself for whatever reason. Unless such a person has the resources within oneself to engage in some vital activity, to produce something, or to call one’s intellectual powers into play, then one will perceive one’s boredom as a burden, an encumbrance, a paralysis that one will not be able to explain by oneself. Boredom is one of the worst forms of torture. It is a very modern phenomenon, and it is spreading rapidly. A person who is that the mercy of one’s boredom and unable to defend oneself against it will feel severely depressed. You may feel moved to ask here why most people do not notice how grave a malady boredom is and how much suffering it causes us. I think the answer is quite simple. We produce today so many things that people can take to help them cope with their boredom. We can temporarily sweep our boredom under the rug by taking a tranquilizer or drinking or going to one cocktail party after another or fighting with our spouses or turning to the media for amusement or devoting ourselves to pleasures of the flesh. Much of what we do is an attempt to keep ourselves from fully acknowledging our boredom. However, do not forget that uneasy feeling that often overcomes you when you have watched a stupid move or repressed your boredom some other way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Remember the hangover that hits you when you realize that what you did for diversion actually bored you do death and that you have not made use of your time but have killed it. Another remarkable thing about our culture is that we will go to any lengths to save time, but once we have saved it, we kill it because we cannot think of anything better to do with it. There exists in the World today a gigantic reservoir of good will toward us, the American people. The Constitution does not provide for the first- and second-class citizens. It is important that we notice who presented Christ as this sacrifice of atonement. God presented Him. The whole plan of redemption was God’s plan and was undertaken at God’s initiative. Why did He do this? There is only one answer: because of His grace. The atonement was God’s extending favor to people who deserved not favor but wrath. The atonement was God’s bridging the awful “Grand Canyon” of sin to reach people who were in rebellion against Him. And He did this at infinite cost to Himself by sending Jesus to die in our place. “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this World and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

“Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. However, because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved,” reports Ephesians 2.1-5. Again we see the contrast drawn so sharply between our ruin and God’s remedy. In verses 1-3, Paul described us as dead in our sins, under the sway of Stan, captivated by the World, prisoners of our own sinful lusts, and objects of God’s holy wrath. Could any picture be more morbid, any background more contrasting? However, against this dark background Paul once again presented the flawless diamond of God’s grace. However, God intervened! We were dead in our transgressions, but God intervened. We were in bondage to sin, but God intervened. We were objects of wrath, but God intervened. God who is rich in mercy intervened. Because of His great love for us, God intervened and made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in our transgressions and sins. All this summed up in one succinct statement: “It is by grace you have been saved.” Our condition was hopeless, but God intervened in grace. “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. However, when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous thing we had done, but because of his mercy,” reports Titus 3.3-5. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Again Paul draws a gracious contrast between our ruin and God’s remedy. The contrast could not be more bold and complete. Our foolishness, disobedience, and enslavement to all kinds of sinful passions is met by God’s kindness, mercy, and love. The utterly unrighteous are declared righteous (justified) by His grace. God’s grace really is amazing. God’s grace, then, does not supplement our good works. Instead, His grace overcomes our bad works, which are our sins. God did this by placing our sins on Christ and by letting fall on Him the wrath we so richly deserve. Because Jesus completely paid the awful penalty of our sins, God could extend His grace to us through complete and total forgiveness of our sins. As is so often the case, there is an interesting and instructive parallel to the spiritual life of the individual in the historical events of the Old Testament. The descendants of Abraham became a distinct people in the furnace of Egyptian slavery. Though God was, as always, at work in the larger scene, the Israelites lived, so far as they knew, under total domination of a god-system focused in the Pharaoh. That is, in Egyptian slavery they were “dead” to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He meant nothing to them, had noting to do with them—so far as they knew or cared. At the proper time, he approached them through and outcast (Moses [Acts 7.37-40]), as he approached us through an outcast (Jesus [Acts 7.52; Hebrews 13.12-14]). #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

By an act of intervention into their deadness (Deuteronomy 11.1-7) he brought them (and later us) to a new life of interactive (covenant) relationship to him. This interactive, covenant relationship is eternal life (John 17.3). It is what it means to have been “born from above”—which Nicodemus, as a teacher in Israel, was supposed to have understood, but could not because he had only “the mind of the flesh” and so could think only in terms of “the natural” (see John 3.10). However, this eternal kind of life is not a passive life. Passivity was for the Israelites, and it is for us one of the greatest dangers and difficulties of our spiritual existence. The land promised to them was one of incredible goodness—“flowing with milk and honey,” as it is repeatedly described. However, it still had to be conquered by careful, persistent, and intelligent human action, over a long period of time. In the beginning of the conquest of the Promised Land, the walls of Jericho fell down, to make clear God’s presence and power. Welcome to the kingdom! However, that never happened again. The Israelites had to take the remaining cities through hand-to-hand warfare, though always still with divine assistance. What was then true of the Promised Land of the Israelites was then and is now true of individual human beings who come to God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

The Israelites were saved or delivered by grace just as surely as we are. However, in both cases “grace: means we are to be, and are enabled to be, active to a degree we have never been before. Paul’s picture of grace is, “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.8. We therefore live in “hot pursuit” of Jesus Christ. “My soul followeth hard after thee,” the psalmist called out (68.8). And Paul’s panting cry was, “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death,” in order to participate in the life of his resurrection reports Philippians 3.10-11. What are we to say of anyone who thinks they have something more important to do than that? The work of spiritual formation in Christlikeness is the work of claiming the land of milk and honey in which we are individually and collectively, to dwell with God. The old hymn rings out: “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wistful eye To Canaan’s fair and happy land, where my possessions lie.” However, the real Jordan, the spiritual “Jordan,” is not physical death, as has usually been supposed. We need not and must not wait until we die to live in the land of milk and honey; and if we will only move to that land now, the passage in physical death will be but one more day in the endless life we have long since begun. That is exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “If anyone keeps my words one shall ever see or taste death,” reports John 8.51. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Even when a teacher is found one may be a master of one pat only and unable to guide aspirants properly along those with which they have individual affinity and for which they have the requisite mental or emotional or volitional capacity. Another false idea is that the masters seek out disciples, make the advances towards them, whether “astrally” or physically. On the contrary, aspirants must take the first step themselves, must request acceptance. The illuminate does not have to engage in a lengthy conversation to find out whether another being is also illumined. “And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ same, who could no be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and they were glad,” reports Ether 12.18-19. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we who amid so many adversities have fainted through our own infirmity, may be relieved by the intervention of the Passion of Thine only-begotten Son; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we who are incessantly afflicted by our own transgressions, may be delivered by the Passion of Thine only-begotten Son; Who with Thee one may achieve personal influence and develop idea patterns. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

O God, praise waiteth for thee, and to render it is my noblest exercise; this is thy due from all thy creatures, for all thy works display thy attributes and fulfill thy designs; the sea, dry land, Winter cold, and Summer heat, morning light, evening shade are full of thee, and thou givest me them richly to enjoy. Thou art King of kings and Lord of lords; at thy pleasure empires rise and fall; all thy works praise thee and thy saints bless thee; let me be numbered with thy holy ones, resemble them in character and condition, sit with the at Jesus’s feet. May my religion be always firmly rooted in thy word, my understanding divinely informed, my affection holy and Heavenly, my motives simple and pure, and my heart never wrong with thee. Deliver me from the natural darkness of my own mind, from the corruption of my heart, from the temptations to which I am exposed, from the daily snares that attend me. I am in constant danger while I am in this life; let thy watchful eye ever be upon me for my defence, save me from the power of my Worldly and spiritual enemies and from all painful evils to which I have exposed myself. Until the day of life dawn above let there be unrestrained fellowship with Jesus; until fruition comes, may I enjoy the earnest of my inheritance and the firstfruits of the Spirit; until I finish my course with joy may I pursue it with diligence, in every part display the resources of the Christian, and adorn the doctrine of thee my God in all things. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Life is the Rose’s Hope While Yet Unblown the Reader of an Ever-Changing Tale!

January 2, 2020 3:10 am

You are rich beyond your wildest dreams! Treasures it, measure it, in units of love. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. Learning to lead is, on one level, learning to manage change. A leader imposes (in the most beneficial sense of the word) one’s philosophy on the organization, creating or re-creating its culture. The organization then acts on that philosophy, carries out the mission, and the culture takes on a life of its own, becomes more cause than effect. However, unless the leader continues to evolve, to adapt and adjust to external changes, the organization will sooner or later fall. You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere. Think of accelerated change as an object hurtling toward you at tremendous speed. If you first spot it a mile away, its speed and the distance between you and it blur its nature; all you can see is an indistinct shape. As the object continues rushing toward you, you begin to discern a rough oblong shape, but you cannot determine much else about it. Is it a threatening enemy missile or a friendly vehicle you might ride toward the future? Quickly, it bears down on you. As you peer at it closely, you suddenly see handles on its side. An opportunity, not a danger! If you have focused well enough and soon enough, you can seize it, letting it whisky you forward well ahead of those who failed to focus on it in time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Many people do not understand the concept of faith because they are still learning to believe. However, electricity had the possibility of being discovered in 400 A.D., but was not discovered until 1752. So that gives you an idea of how powerful can become as you develop it. Perhaps we will eventually have the power to manifest our blessings by believing they are possible. New ideas do not detach themselves gradually from the traditional concepts of energy by deeper reflection on them, but belongs to those intuitively apprehended ideas which, arising in other realms of a spiritual nature, as it were take possession of the mind and compel it to reshape the traditional conceptions in their own likeness. The question now arises: Whence this new idea that thrusts itself upon consciousness with such elemental force? And whence did it derive the power that could so seize upon consciousness that it completely eclipsed the multitudinous impressions of a first voyage to the tropics? These questions are not so easy to answer. However, if we apply our theory here, the explanation can only be this: the idea of energy and its conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious. Such a conclusion naturally obliges us to prove that a primordial image of this kind really did exist in the mental history of humankind and was operative through the ages. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

As a matter of fact, this proof can be produced without much difficulty: the most primitive religions in the most widely separated parts of the Earth are founded upon this image. These are the so-called dynamistic religions whose sole and determining thought is that there exists a universal magical power about which everything revolves. Many people misunderstand this idea of animism. In reality primitives do not mean, by their power-concept, souls or spirits at all, but something which the American investigator Lovejoy has appropriately termed “primitive energetics.” This concept is equivalent to the idea of soul, spirit, God, health, bodily strength, fertility, magic, influence, power, prestige, medicine, as well as certain states of feeling which are characterized by the release of affects. Among certain Polynesians mulungu—this same primitive power-concept—means spirit, soul, daemonism, magic, prestige; and when anything astonishing happens, the people cry out “Mulugu!” This power-concept is also the earliest form of a concept of God among primitives, and is an image which has undergone countless variations in the course of history. In the Old Testament the magic power glows in the burning bush and in the countenance of Moses; in the Gospels it descends with the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues from Heaven. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

In Heraclitus magic power appears as World energy, as “ever-living fire”; among the Persians it is the fiery glow of “Haoma,” divine grace; among the Stoics it is the original heart, the power of fate. Again, in medieval legend it appears as the aura or halo, and it flares up like a flame from the roof of the hut in which the saint lies in ecstasy. In their visions the saints behold the Sun of this power, the plentitude of its light. According to the old view, the soul itself is this power; in the idea of the soul’s immortality the there is implicit its conversation, and in the Buddhist and primitive notion of metempsychosis—transmigration of souls—is implicit its unlited changeability together with its constant preservation. So this idea has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every being. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear. These conditions were evidently fulfilled in the case of Benjamin Franklin. The greatest and best thoughts of beings shape themselves upon these primordial images as upon a blueprint. I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images comes from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent movement of the Sun every day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

We certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the other hand, is the myth of the Sun-hero in all its countless modifications. It is this myth, and not the physical process, that forms the Sun archetype. The same can be said of the phases of the Moon. He archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas. Hence it seems as though what is impressed upon the unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-idea aroused by the physical process. Therefore we may take it that archetypes are recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions. Naturally this assumption pushes the problem only further back without solving it. There is nothing to prevent us from assuming that certain archetypes exist even in animals, that they are grounded in the peculiarities of the living organism itself and are therefore direct expressions of life whose nature cannot be further explained. Not only are the archetypes, apparently, impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences, but, at the same time, they behave empirically like agents that tend towards the repetition of these same experiences. For when an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or fascinating effect, or impels to action. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in this World must first come to pass in the heart of America. Deep learning brings about personality change. In psychotherapy, the concept of a “cure” is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behavior, not with a disease. During and after therapy the client increases in attitudes of self-acceptance, and this is correlated with an increase in acceptance of others. We did not ask unanswerable questions as to what instruments would measure success or cure. We asked specific questions related to each hypothesis. What instrument can be used to measure the individual’s concept of self? What instrument will give a satisfactory measure of maturity of behavior? How can we measure the degree of an individual’s acceptance of others? While question such as these are difficult, operational answers are discoverable. Thus our decision in regard to criteria gave us much help in solving the whole problem of instrumentation of the research. Profound research indicates that changes occur in the perceived self of the client during and after therapy; there are constructive changes in the client’s personality characteristics and personality characteristics of the well-functioning person; there is change in the direction defined as personal integrations and adjustment; there are also changes in the maturity of the client’s behavior as observed by friends. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

No one learns to make right decision without being free to make wrong one. In each instance, the change we have observed in someone during and after therapy is significantly greater than that found in people who try to deal with their problems without seeking help. Findings indicate some people are misguided and become somewhat confused and ambiguous when they do not have the proper guidance. For instance, a boy found out he was adopted, ditched his father before entering the ballpark to see a baseball game, sold his ticket and went to meet with some man at the park at night. The boy thought was his biological father because in an email he had claimed to be. In the process, unbeknownst to him, he was about to be kidnapped, when the FBI intercepted and rescued the minor. The boy had no idea he was being preyed on. Prior to the incident, the teacher did notice a change in his personality, and held him after class prior to the incident, but the boy would not confess that anything was wrong. He had also been hanging out with unsavory youth and trying to impress them. Had the boy been in therapy, he would have been able to express his concerns and received proper guidance. Luckily the boy was returned home safely and the bad man was caught in the process, but he could have lost his life and a lot of taxpayer money was used to find him. The bright side, however, is the man will not be able to prey on other young kids. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing World. We must learn to listen. Sometimes change means doing things different. In regard to client-sponsored psychotherapy, at least, there is now objective evidence of beneficial changes in personality and behavior in directions which are usually regarded as constructive and these changes are attributed to the therapy. It is the adoption of multiple specific research criteria and the use of a rigorously controlled research design which makes it possible to make such a statement. If you are like I am, your heart may be saddened by what we have discussed. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we must ask how we can become the kind of people who bring honor to Christ, to help turn the culture toward Him, and to be lights in the midst of darkness for our families, friends, churches, and communities. There is no simple answer to this question, but one thing is crystal clear. We must rededicate ourselves to being deeply spiritual people who it can truly be said that “Christ is formed in you.” And, given the times in which we live, we must obey Jesus’ admonition to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. Surrounded by a fragmented culture, how do we become deeply spiritual people who are wise and savvy, yet innocent and pure? How do we raise children, develop good marriages, serve as role models at work, and make an attractive impact on our communities? #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

More than ever before, we need what the Old Testament calls wisdom. The spiritually mature person is a wise person. And a wise person has the savvy and skill necessary to lead an exemplary life and to address the issues of the say in a responsible, attractive way that brings honor to God. Wisdom is the fruit of a life of study and a developed mind. Wisdom is the application of knowledge gained from studying both God’s written Word and His revealed truth in creation. If we are going to be wise, spiritual people prepared to meet the crises of our age, we must be a studying, learning community that values the life of the mind. Clearly, to become spiritually formed in Christ, a person of wisdom, requires that we follow Christ’s teaching in this critical area—and it was Christ who taught us to love the Lord our God with all our minds. The information of most relevance in the study of stigma has certain properties. It is information about an individual. It is about one more or less abiding characteristics, as opposed to the moods, feelings, or intents that one might have at a particular moment. The information, as well as the sign through which it is conveyed, is reflexive and embodied; that is, it is conveyed by the very person it is about, and conveyed though bodily expression. Information possessing all of these properties I here call “social.” Some signs that convey social information may be frequently and steadily available, and routinely sought and received; these signs may be called “symbols.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

The social information conveyed by any particular symbol may merely confirm what other signs tell us about the individual, filling out our image of one in a redundant and unproblematic way. Some lapel buttons attesting to social club membership, are examples, as are male wedding rings, or the color of the sole of some women’s high heel shoes, in some contexts. However, the social information conveyed by a symbol can establish a special claim to prestige, honor, or desirable class position—a claim that might not otherwise be presented or, if otherwise presented, then not automatically granted. Such a sign is popularly called a “status symbol” might be more accurate, the former term being more suitably employed when a well-organized social position of some kind is the referent. Prestige symbols can be contrasted to stigma symbols, namely, signs which are especially effective in drawing attention to a debasing identity discrepancy, breaking up what would otherwise be a coherent overall picture, with a consequent reduction in our valuation of the individual. The shaved head of female collaborators in World War II is an example, as is an habitual solecism through which someone affecting middle class manner and dress repeatedly employs a word incorrectly or repeatedly mispronounces it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

In addition to prestige symbols and stigma symbols, one further possibility is to be found, namely, a sign that tends—in fact or hope—to break up an otherwise coherent picture but in this cause in a beneficial direction desired by the actor, not so much establishing a new claim as throwing severe doubt on the validity of the virtual one. I shall refer here to disidentifiers. On example is the “good English” of an educated inner-city adult visiting the South; another is the bandana or loud boisterous conversations conducted outside the homes affected by some urban lower-class people. A study of illiterates provides another illustration: Therefore, when goal orientation is pronounced or imperative and there exists a high probability that definition as illiterate is a bar to the achievement of the goal, the illiterate is likely to “pass” as literate. The popularity in the group studied of windowpane lenses with heavy horn frames (“bop glasses”) may be viewed as an attempt to emulate the stereotype of the businessman-teacher-young intellectual and especially the high state jazz musician. A New York specialist in the arts of vagrancy provides still another illustration: After seven-thirty in the evening, in order to read a book in Grand Central or Penn Station, a person either has to wear horn-rimmed glasses or look exceptionally prosperous. Anyone else is apt to come under surveillance. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

On the other hand, newspaper readers never seem to attract attention and even the seediest vagrant can sit in Grand Central all night without being bothered if he or she continues to read a paper. Note that in this discussion of prestige symbols, stigma symbols, and disidentifiers, sighs have been considered which routinely convey social information. These symbols must be distinguished from fugitive signs that have not been institutionalized as information carriers. When such signs make claims to prestige, one can all them points; when they discredit tacit claims, one can call them slips. Some signs carrying social information, being present, first of all, for other reasons, have only an overlay of informational function. There are stigma symbols that provide examples: the wrist markings which disclose that an individual has attempted suicide pock marks of drug addicts; the handcuffed wrists of convicts in transit; or black eyes when worn in public by people, as writer on women of the evening suggests: “Outside [the prison were she now is] I had been in the soup with it. Well, you know how it is: the law sees a chick with a shiner, figures she is up to something. Bull figures maybe in the life. Next thing trails her around. Then maybe bang! Busted.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Other signs are designed by a person solely for the purpose of conveying social information, as in the case of insignia of military rank. It should be added that the significance of the underlay of a sign can become reduced over time, becoming, at the extreme, merely vestigial, even while the informational function of the activity remains constant or increases in importance. Further, a sign that appears to be present for non-informational reasons may sometimes be manufactured with malice aforethought solely because of its informing function, as when dueling scares were carefully planned and inflicted. Signs conveying social information vary according to whether or not they are congenital, and, if not, whether, once employed, they become a permanent part of the person. (Skin color is congenital; a brand mark or maiming is permanent but not congenital; a person’s head-shave is neither congenital nor permanent.) More important, impermanent signs solely employed to convey social information may or may not be employed to convey social information may or may not be employed against the will of the informant; when they are, they tend to be stigma symbols. Later it will be necessary to consider stigma symbols that are voluntarily employed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

It is possible for signs which mean one thing to one group to mean something else to another group, the same category being designated but differently characterized. For example, the shoulder patches that prison officials require escape-prone prisoners to wear can come to mean one thing to guards, in general negative, while being a mark of pride for the wearer relative to one’s fellow prisoners. The uniform of an officer may be a matter of pride to some, to be worn on every possible occasion; for other officers, weekends may represent a time when they can exercise their choice and wear mufti, passing as civilians. Similarly, while the obligation to wear the school cap in town may be seen as a privilege by some boys, as will the obligation to wear a uniform on leave by other ranks, still there will be wearers who feel that the social information conveyed thereby is a means of ensuring control and discipline over them when they are off duty and off the premises. So, too, during the eighteen hundreds in California, the absence of a pigtail (queue) on a Chinese man signified for Occidentals a degree of acculturation, but to fellow-Chinese a question would be raised as to respectability—specifically, whether or not the individual has served a term in prison where cutting off of the queue was obligatory; loss of queue was for a time, then, very strongly resisted. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Signs carry social information vary of course as to reliability. Distended capillaries on the cheek and nose, sometimes called “venous stigmata” with more aptness than meant, can be and are taken as indicating alcoholic excess. However, teetotalers can exhibit the same symbol for other physiological reasons, thereby giving rise to suspicions about themselves which are not justified, but with which they must deal nonetheless. A final point about social information must be raised; it has to do with the informing character of the “with” relationship in our society. To be “with” someone is to arrive at a social occasion in one’s company, walk with one down a street, be a member of one’s party in a restaurant, and so forth. The issue is that in certain circumstances the social identity of those an individual is with can be used as a source of information concerning one’s own social identity, the assumption being that one is what the others are. Being with some people alone, like with Paris Hilton, is a prestige symbol. In the extreme, perhaps, is the situation in criminal circles: a person wanted for arrest can legally contaminate anyone he or she is seen with, subjecting them to arrest on suspicion. (A person for whom there is a warrant is therefore said “to have smallpox” and his or her criminal disease is said to be “catching.”) In any case, an analysis of how people manage the information they convey about themselves will have to consider how they deal with the contingencies of being seen “with” particular others. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

By the late nineteenth century, etiquette books no longer had to give advice to people about suppressing bodily functions and being proper. In the early nineteenth century, diners still had to be reminded not to blow their noses on the tablecloth, not to spit food back into the serving dishes, not to pick their teeth with their knives, and not to urinate in front of ladies. As time passed, people learned enough to control themselves in public. The self-contained, modern, discreet person was invented in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the loss of control inherent in modern, anonymous city life. The noteworthy element is not how quaint the Victorians were or how different, but how much more like us they are than any other people before them. To really appreciate the revolution in eating in the late nineteenth century, it would help to see a Victorian dining room with its pantry fully stocked and its food on the table. The nineteenth century saw the introduction and spread of brand-named foods, prepackaging, logos, and graphic labels. Before the Victorian era, food was either raised or grown at home or bought in bulk. The local general store or grocer had large sacks of sugar, beans, and flours; barrels of molasses and pickles; as well as spices such as pepper, cloves, and allspice. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

The grocer measured and weighed his waves into the customer’s containers and kept a tab, billing his or her accounts once a month. Milk, eggs, and fowl were purchased from a country farmer who brought them to market or, more likely, from a city dairyman who kept cows and chickens in town. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the quality of foods often got a lot worse. Railroads and urbanization supported the growth of the food business. Flour was milled closer to the source or closer to inexpensive transportation rather than closer to the consumer. It was commonly extended by unscrupulous companies with a measure of chalk dust or plaster. Tea was often stretched with iron filings, a profitable ingredient for a product sold by weight. Milk was often skimmed of valuable cream and sold as whole. Even when it was not, city cows often lived in multistory brick barns, were fed on rotten silage, and infected with tuberculosis. These consumptive Camilles of the cow Worldly hardly gave thick, white milk that Americans were used to. New York City’s milk was most often described as watery and bluish. By the late nineteenth century, there were strong reactions to the declining quality of food. You can change anything you want, but you cannot change everything you want. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

During the 1870s, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was hired to manage the Western Health Reform Institute which he renamed the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He believed in crispy foods to clean the teeth, uncooked fruit as God made it, and bran to encourage evacuation. “Bran does not irritate, it titillates,” reports Dr. Kellogg. His first commercial product was called Granola, but there was another product already on the market called Granula so he changed the name to Granose and sold 100,000 pounds in the first year. One of his patients was Charles Post. After nine months Post still has his ulcers, but he had learned the joy of food marketing. In 1895 in invented Postum, a coffee substitute, and, soon thereafter, a dry cereal called Elijah’s Manna. As grocers objected to the blasphemy, he renamed it Grape Nuts. Soon after he followed with Post-Toasties. Dr. Kellogg prescribed a diet high in grains and low in the ubiquitous salt pork on which most Americans subsisted. He was so successful that he packaged his corn flakes and advertised them heavily, urging brand-name loyalty as an assurance of purity. Post marketed his Grape Nuts and Post-Toasties in the same way—with a distinctive logo, testimonials from doctors and patients, and factory packaging. The National Biscuit Company put up billboards across America assuring consumers that “You Need a Biscuit” (Uneeda Biscuit) was packaged in a moisture-proof wrapping to ensure a pure, untainted, crisp product. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

At the same time, the Reverend Sylvester Graham was an evangelist for whole-wheat flour and developed a sweetened whole-wheat cracker (the Graham cracker) that was supposed to keep the consumer not only healthy, but also moral. Graham was both a Presbyterian minister and an agent of the Pennsylvania Temperance Society and marketed his new cracker to boarding schools as a suppressant of masturbation in boys. This was certainly creative advertising that even a modern advertising executive would admire. The greatest contributor among these health-food pioneers Gail Borden. City people were being poisoned by tainted milk every day. Borden discovered that by evaporating much of the water from milk and canning the result, the milk did not have to be refrigerated. The cows could live a healthy country life while the consumers could stay far away in the city, hence Borden’s famous slogan for Carnation milk: “from contented cows.” The condition upon which God hath given liberty to humans is eternal vigilance. God made the country, and people made the town. Be always sure you are right—then go ahead. Absence of occupation is not rest, a mind quite vacant is a mind distressed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Almighty and everlasting God, Who restores us by the blessed Passion of Thy Christ, preserve in us the works of Thy mercy; that by the celebration of this Mystery our lives may be continually devout; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, purify Thy family, and cleanse it from all contagion of wickedness; that the vessels which have been redeemed by their Lord’s Passion may never again be stained by the unclean spirit, but may be possessed by everlasting salvation; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Remember Thy compassions, O Lord, and sanctify with eternal protection Thy servants, for whom Christ Thy Son by His Blood appointed unto us the Paschal mystery; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who by the Passion of Thy Christ our Lord hast dissolved that hereditary death of the ancient sin, to which the whole race of Adam’s posterity had succeeded; grant that havng been made conformable unto Him, as we by necessity of nature have borne the image of the Earthly, so by the sanctification of grace we may bear the image of the Heavenly, even of Christ our Lord; Who with Thee we shall prosper and overcome all oppression. “And it came to pass that Orihah did walk humbly before the Lord, and did remember how great things the Lord had done for his father, and also taught his people how great things the Lord had done for their fathers,” reports Ether 6.30. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Lord of all being, there is one thing that deserves my greatest care, that calls forth my ardent desires, that is, that I may answer the great end for which I am made—to glorify thee who hast given me being, and to do all the good I can for my fellow beings; verily, life is not worth having if it be not improved for this noble purpose. Yet, Lord, how little is this the thought of humankind! Most beings seem to live for themselves, without much or any regard for thy glory, or for the good of others; they earnestly desire and eagerly pursue the riches, honours, pleasures of this life, as if they suppose that wealth, greatness, merriment, could make their immortal souls happy; but, alas, what false delusive dreams are these! And how miserable ere long will those be that sleep in them, for all our happiness consists in loving thee, and being holy as thou art holy. O may I never fall into the tempers and vanities, the sensuality and folly of the present World! It is a place of inexpressible sorrow, a vast empty nothingness; time is a moment, a vapour, and all its enjoyments are empty bubbles, fleeting blasts of wind, from which nothing satisfactory can be derived; give me grace always to keep in covenant with thee, and to reject as delusions a great name here or hereafter, together with all sinful pleasures or profits. Help me to know continually that there can be no true happiness, no fulfilling of thy purpose for me, apart from a life lived in and for the Son of thy Love. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Residence three is nearly 2,800 square feet, and comes in three different exterior architectural styles. One of my favorite is this Mid-Century Modern house by Cresleigh Homes reminds me of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It is crisp and commanding, yet looks welcoming, like it is made for down-home hospitality. The star attractions is of course the balcony and angular roofline. Inside, though, the design is truly a hard worker with plenty of room to maneuver: the kitchen is anchored by the large great room, and expansive dining room, and there is a huge first floor master suite. Additionally on the first floor is a powder room and a decent sized foyer, and a mud room just off of the three car garage.

There is also a master bedroom on the second floor, a laundry room, two seondary bedroom, and the third bedroom opens up to the balcony. Do not miss the other extras throughout this home! Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District. You will find yourself in love with one of Cresleigh’s amazing designs. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/

Sometimes an Angel Has to Fall to Know One Was in Heaven—Are You Living?

January 1, 2020 12:46 am

Make sustained rapid improvement a way of life. Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. If it is in the right direction, there is nothing wrong in change. To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often. Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing this impossible. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; God plants his foot steps in the sea, and rides upon the storm. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance. Some people think that it seems God does not exist because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. And the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. They say, if God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the World. Therefore, God does not exist is their thought. However, it is said in the person of God: “I am Who am,” reports Exodus 3.14. We know God exists. It is certain, and evident to our senses that in the World some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is noting else than the reduction of something in a state of actuality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

However, nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thu that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cld. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, exempli gratia that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. However, this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the World of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient case of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible, Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinite, because in all efficient cases following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient cases, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. However, if there be no first cause it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name Go. The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. However, it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been noting in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence—which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. However, every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go out to infinite in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in other their necessity. This all beings speak of as God. The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something in which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. The fifth way is taken from the governance of the World. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil. This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it to produce good. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle. The human situation is one of finiteness—all flesh is grass and the grass withereth. It is one of sin—we receive double for all our sins. It is one of vanity and pride—we are brought to nothing and fall utterly. However, in spite of one’s realistic knowledge of human nature and density, darkness and light follow each other; after the depth of sin and punishment, the prophet announces forgives and liberation. However, the wave falls, and the prophet asks himself how he could have made such an announcement, when all the goodness of mortal beings is as the flower of the field, which faces because the breath of God blows upon it. However, he does not remain in the depths of his melancholy: over against human mortality the word of God shall stand forever. There is something eternal to which we can cling: Be not afraid, the Lord God shall come with strong hand. So the wave rises, and then again it falls: the nations are as a drop of water and a piece of dust; all nations are as nothing before God, they are counted as less than nothing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Again the wave rises: God stands above the circle of the Earth, above all created things, above the highest and the lowest! And when once more the wave falls and the servant of God complains that he does not receive justice from God, the answer is that God acts beyond human expectation. He gives power to the faint and to one that hath no might God is increaseth strength. God acts paradoxically; He acts beyond human understanding. How shall we interpret these words? Is there a way to unite the heights and depths contrasted in this essay? Shall we understand the words of consolation and hope as vain promises, never fulfilled in the past and never to be fulfilled in any future? Shall we understand then as an escape from the realization of Human’s real situation, through mysticism and poetic elevation? If so, what about the probing realism of the prophet’s analysis of the human situation? One saw history as it is, but at the same time one looked beyond history to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being. One knew two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. Because one knew these two orders, one could speak as one did, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Let us look at these orders, these different natures, and their interrelation. In speaking of them we speak of ourselves, because we belong to both of them in every moment of our life and history. The human order, the order of history, is primarily the order of growing and dying. “Surely the people is grass.” Human’s experience of melancholy, awakened by fading and perishing nature, is symbolic of one’s transitoriness. Generations after generations grow up, struggle, suffer, enjoy and disappear. Should we take all this seriously? Should we take it more seriously than the growing and fading of the grass? He prophet, when one was asked to speak one’s nation, raised the question: Why speak to them? They are grass. We could continue: Why write and work and struggle for them? They are grass. What matter, when after a few years all those for whom we wrote and spoke and struggled will have vanished? They were grass, the grass withered, the flowers faded. That is the order of history. However, the other appears at the horizon: the word of God shall stand forever. Second, the order of history is an order of sin and punishment. The exile, following the destruction of Jerusalem, was, as all the prophets said, the punishment of the people for their sins. We do not like words such as “sin” and “punishment.” They seem to us old-fashioned, barbaric, and invalid in the light of modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

However, whenever I have met exiles of high moral standards and insights, I have discovered that they feel responsible for what has happened within their own countries. And very often I have met citizens who democratic countries, citizens of this country, who have expressed a feeling of guilt for the situation of the World today. They were right, and the exiles were right: they are responsible, as are you and I. Whether or not we call it sin, whether or not we call it punishment, we are beaten by the consequences of our own failures. That is the order of history. However, at the horizon the other order appears, saying that our struggles are not in vain, that our iniquity is pardoned. There is a third element in the order of history, uniting finiteness and sin: the tragic law which controls the historical process, the law which ordains that human greatness utterly fall. There is human greatness in history. There are great and conquering nations and empires; there are even nations and empires which manifest a certain righteousness. There are princes and even good princes; there are judges and even just judges. There are states and constitutions and even states and constitutions which provide a certain amount of freedom; there are social orders and even some which provide a certain amount of equality. There are creative spirits and even some which have the power of knowledge and understanding. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

However, just in being great and powerful and righteous they touch the divine sphere, and they become arrogant, and they are brought to nothing. They are without roots; they wither; the divine storm blows over them, and they vanish. That is the subject of Greek tragedy. That is the message f the prophet to the nations of the World. They are all subject to the law of tragic self-destruction—the bad and the good, individuals and nations, the weak and the heroic. And again the other order, the order beyond history and tragedy, appears at the horizon: He gives power to the faint and their strength is renewed, so that they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The order beyond the order of history is the divine order. And it is paradoxical: humans are like grass, but the word of God spoken to them shall stand forever. Humans stand under the law of sin and punishment, but the divine order breaks through it and bring forgiveness. Humans faint, falling from the height of their moral goodness and youthful power, and just when they have fallen and are weakest, they run without weariness and rise up with wigs as eagles. God acts beyond all human assumptions and valuations. He acts surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically. The negative character of the historical order is the beneficial character of the divine order. The weak and despairing, the sinful and tragic in the historical order are the strong and victorious in the divine order. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The prophet speaks of the paradoxical destiny of the servant, the elected nation. Described as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, it is despised and rejected in the human order. Who does not think, hearing these words, of the exiles not only of Israel but of all nations of the World? However, the divine order appears. The exiled nation, or (as the Christians later, historically wrong, spiritually right, interpreted it) the Man on the Cross, represents another order, an order in which the weakest is the strongest, the most humiliated, the most victorious. The historical, human order is overcome by the suffering servant, the crucified Saviour. If we doubt this paradox, if we despair about our human situation, if our exile is without hope or meaning for us, the prophet should fill us with shame for the arrogance of our rationalism and the narrowness of our moralism, of history. He asks, “Who has directed the Spirit of God? With whom took He counsel and who instructed Him and taught Him the path of Justice?” We always wish to teach God the path of justice. We tell Him that He must punish the bad and reward the good, especially in relation to ourselves. However, He accepts no counsel concerning the course of history, as He took no counsel concerning the structure of the World, with all its natural destruction, cruelty, and transitoriness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The divine order cannot be judged according to the measures of the historical order, the measures of human comfort and morality, democracy and civilization. That was the answer Job received from God when he struggled with Him about the unintelligible injustice of his historical fate. God did not justify Himself in moral categories; He triumphantly pointed to the unexplorable greatness of nature which cannot be measured according to the measure of human righteousness. However, if the divine order and the historical order have nothing to do with each other, how can the divine order concern us at all? How can eternity and forgiveness and divine help concern us if we are in the other order, the historical order, standing under the law of finiteness and weakness and punishment? How can the divine order comfort us in our misery? How can we listen to the words of the prophets which tell us of the end of our warfare? There are three answers to this question. First, the divine order is not the historical order; and we should not confuse these two orders. No life is able to overcomes finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The illusions of our period have been that modern civilization can conquer them, and that we can achieve security in our own existence. Progress seemed to have conquered tragedy; the divine order seemed to be embodied in the progressive, historical order. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

However, for nearly three decades our generation has received blow after blow, destroying that illusion, and driving to despair and cynicism those who wanted to transform, and thought they could transform the historical order into a divine order. Let us learn from the catastrophe of our tie at least the fact that no life and no period are able to overcome finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The second answer is that there is another order to which we, as human beings, belong, an order which makes beings always dissatisfied with what is given to one. Humans transcend everything in the historical order, all the heights and depts of one’s own existence. One passes, as no other being is able to pass, beyond the limits of one’s given World. One participates in something infinite, in an order which is not transitory, not self-destructive, not tragic, but eternal, holy, and blessed. Therefore, when one listen to the prophetic word, when one hears of the everlasting God and of the greatness of His power and the mystery of His acts, a response is awakened in the depth of one’s soul; the infinite within one is touched. Every being knows, in some depth of one’s soul, that is true. Our despair itself, our inability to escae ourselves in life and in death, witnesses to our infinity. The third answer is that the two orders, the historical and the eternal, although they can never become the same, are within each other. The historical order is not separated from the eternal order. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

What is new in the prophets and in Christianity, beyond all paganism, old and new, is that the eternal order reveals itself in the historical order. The suffering servant of God and the enemies because of whom one suffers, the Man on the Cross and those who fainted under the Cross, the exiled and persecuted in all periods of history, have all transformed history. The strong in history fall; the strength of each of taken from us. However, those who seem weak in history finally shape history, because they are bound to the eternal order. We are not a lost generation because we are a suffering, destroyed generation. Each of us belongs to the eternal order, and the prophet speaks to all of us: Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people! I have learned that there are not different types but qualifications of love, since the different qualities are presented, by efficiency or deficiency, in every act of love. This insight, however, does not make the distinction of the qualities of love less important. If, as I shall suggest, one has to distinguish the libido, the philia, the eros, the agape qualities of love we must ask: how are they related to each other? What is meant if one speaks of love without qualification? Which quality of love is adequate to the Great Commandment? Which to its emotional quality? #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Whenever the word love is used one also speaks of self-love. How is self-love related to the qualities of love, to its ontological and to its ethical character? First of all one must ask whether self-love is a meaningful concept at all. Considering that love presupposes a separation of the loving subject, and the loved object, is there such a separation in the structure of the self-consciousness? I am very doubtful about using the term self-love, and if it is used, abut using the term self-love, and if it is used, about using in it any except a metaphorical sense. Besides this terminological question, one must ask how the different qualities of love are related to what is metaphorically called self-love, and how it is related to the ethical and to the ontological nature of love. This survey of the problems and confusion, connected with the use of the term love is equaled by a survey of the confusions and problems connected with the public discussion of the concept of power. I may tell an anecdote which has more symbolic than analytical meaning. I have been warned not to announce a lecture on “Love, Power, and Justice” in the Untied States, because power would be understood as the product of the electrical power companies, and justice as the fight against the policy of the Federal Government to provide for affordable electrical power by the regulation of rivers according to the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Power in the sense presupposed by this story is electrical power. In the same way the term power can be applied to all physical causes, although theoretical physics has got rid of this anthropomorphic symbol and has replaced it by mathematical equations. However, present-day physics speaks of power-fields in order to describe the basic structures of the material World. This is at least an indication of the significance the term power has even in the most abstract analysis of physical occurrences. Physicists are usually conscious of the fact that they use an anthropomorphic metaphor when they use the term power. Power is a sociological category and from there it is transferred to nature (just as is law). However, the term metaphor does not solve the problem. We must ask, how is it possible that both physics and social science use the same word, power? There must be a point of identity between the structure of the social and the structure of the physical World. And this identity must be manifest in the common use of the term power. There is, however, only one way of discovering the root meaning of power, namely to ask about its ontological foundation. And this, of course, is one of the purposes of these lectures. Within the social realm the meaning of power is burdened by another ambiguity, the relation of power and force. This duality is almost exclusively restricted to the human sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

For only in humans, that is in the being whose nature is finite freedom, the distinction of power and force is meaningful. One speaks of power politics, and one often does so with moral indignations. However, this is the consequence of mere confusion. Politics and power politics are one and the same thing. There are no politics without power, neither in a democracy nor in a dictatorship. Politics and power politics point to the same reality. It does not matter which term you are using. Unfortunately, however, the term power politics is used for a special type of politics, namely that in which power is separated from justice and love, and is identified with compulsion. This confusion is possible because there is indeed a compulsory element in the actuality of power. However, this is only one element, and if power is reduced to it and loses the form of justice and the substance of love, it destroys itself and the politics based on it. Only penetration into the ontological roots of power can overcome the ambiguities in the relation of power and compulsion. If power is distinguished from compulsion the question arises whether there is a power which is neither physical nor psychological, but spiritual. Compulsion uses both physical and psychological means in order to exercise power, must conspicuously in the terror methods of dictatorships. No compulsion at all is presupposed in spiritual power. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Nevertheless, one assumes that spiritual power is the greatest, that it is the ultimate power. One does so whenever one says that God is Spirit. It is meet and right that we should give thanks to Thee, O Lord God, through Jesus Christ Thy Son, Who, being God Eternal, was pleased to becomes Man for our salvation. O the one, peerless, manifold Mystery of our Saviour! For He, being one and the same, God mist high, and perfect Man, both supreme High priest and most scared Sacred Sacrifice, according to His Divine power created all things, according to His human condition delivered humans; by virtue of His Sacrifice He atoned for the polluted, in right of His Priesthood He reconciled the alienated. O the peerless Mystery of redemption! Wherein those ancient wounds were healed by the Lord’s new medicine, and the judgment passed before on the first human rescinded by the privileges of our Saviour. The one in self-indulgence extended one’s hands to the tree, the other patiently fitted His to the Cross; therefore deservedly did the punishment borne by innocence become the discharge of the debtor, for with good right are debts remitted to debtors when discharged on their behalf by Him Who owed nothing. “And it came to pass that they began to spread upon the face of the land, and to multiply and to till the Earth; and they did wax strong in the land,” reports Ether 6.18. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Creator and Redeemer God, Author of all existence, source of all blessedness, I adore thee for making me capable of knowing thee, for giving me reason and conscience, for leading me to desire thee; I praise thee for the revelation of thyself in the gospel, for thy heart as a dwelling place of pity, for thy thoughts of peace towards me, for thy patience and thy graciousness, for the vastness of thy mercy. Thou hast moved my conscience to know how the guilty can be pardoned, the unholy sanctified, the poor enriched. May I be always amongst those who not only hear but know thee, who walk with and rejoice in thee, who take thee at they word and find life there. Keep me always longing for a present salvation in Holy Spirit comforts and rejoicings, for spiritual graces and blessings, for help to value my duties as well as my privileges. May I cherish simplicity and Godly sincerity of character. Help me to be in reality before thee as in appearance I am before humans, to be religious before I profess religion, to leave the World before I enter the church, to set my affections on things above, to shun forbidden follies and vanities, to be a dispenser as well as a partaker of grace, to be prepared to bear evil as well as to do good. O God, make me worthy of this calling, that the name Jesus may be glorified in me and I in him. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Dining rooms are perhaps the best evidence of the revolution that took place in society in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution not only made all the furniture, dishes, and silver plate possible, but also created a new class of people to use them. Early in the nineteenth century, the existence of a dining room at all was the mark of gentry. The landed gentry of the South and the merchant shippers of the North might boast a separate room just for eating, but they represented only a very small part of the population. By the 1860s, a separate dining room was considered de rigueur (prescribed or required by fashion, etiquette, or custom) for even a cottage.

When the guest filed into a Victorian dinner in the late nineteenth century, they found small menus on the table describing what cuisine they would be served. Staff set and removed plate for every course, and no one used fingers to touch the food. There were special forks and ladles and knives for every conceivable food: oyster ladles and forks; tomato servers; fish knives and forks; cake knives and servers forks; different spoons for clear sup, for cream soup, for dessert, for fruit, for breakfast coffee, for dinner coffee, and for tea. The volume and variety of silver-plated flatware and hollowware would baffle any modern dinner. What is so amazing about Victorian table manners is how successful they were. We may no longer use all the cutlery, but we have internalized their whole system of suppressing bodily functions and being proper. Cresleigh homes residence 4 osfer a formal dining room. Have your cake and eat it with whipped cream!

Style is displayed in exquisite proportions in residence 4, of Cresleigh homes, at Brighton Station. This 3,501 square foot home has a superb floor plan, which has a cache of thoughtful amenities. The chef inspired kitchen has a huge island, and opens up to the large great room, with an optional fireplace. Notice the abundance of storage in the butler’s pantry, and walk-in pantry. There is also a cozy home management office on the first floor, along with a formal dining room, coat closet, and a master suite with its own bathroom. The first floor also boast of a powder room for guest, a mud room and a 3-car tandem garage, which easily holds a family fleet, or a portion of it that can be converted into an optional workshop.

An elegant stairway leads to the master suite on the second floor, which offers both conviences and quiet seclusion. Included are many special features: a coffee bar, bathroom with deep soaker tub, multiple vanities, and walk-in closet. There are two more bedrooms, complimented by a charming loft, which could be converted into a 5^th bedroom with only a little rearranging, and there is another full bathroom that comes standard. This come contains 3.5 bathrooms and up to five bedrooms. There is also outdoor livability with a large covered porch with an optional outdoor fireplace, and extended patio. How will you customize your home?

Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District. These chic residences (1-4) reflect Cresleigh Ranch’s exuberant spirit, varied architectural traditions, and incomparable landscape. Happy Exploring! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/

You are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine, You Make Me Happy When Skies are Gray!

December 31, 2019 5:13 am

The climate of change that defines turn-of-the-century life is with us to stay. And while change of this magnitude demands greater adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning, it also promises huge opportunity for those who know where and how to look for it. Vision is the capacity to create and communicate a view of a desired state of affairs that induces commitment among those working in the organization. The origin, process, and conclusion of science is something which exists only in the subjective experience of persons and so also is its utilization. Science will never depersonalize, or manipulate, or control individuals. It is only person who can and will do that. That is surely a most obvious and trite observation, yet a deep realization of it has had much meaning for me. It means that the use which will be made of scientific findings in the field of personality is and will be a matter of subjective personal choice—the same type of choice as a person makes in therapy. To the extent that one has defensively closed off areas of one’s experience from awareness, the person is more likely to make choices which are socially destructive. To the extent that one is open to all phases of one’s experience we may be sure that this person will be more likely to use the findings and methods of science (or any other tool or capacity) in a manner which is personally and socially constructive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

There is, in actuality then, no threatening entity of “Science” which can in any way affect out destiny. There are only people. While many of them are indeed threatening and dangerous in their defensiveness, and modern scientific knowledge multiplies the social threat and danger, this is not the whole picture. There are two other significant facets. There are many persons who are relatively open to their experience and hence likely to be socially constructive. Both the subjective experience of psychotherapy and the scientific findings regarding it indicate that individuals are motivated to change, and may be helped to change, in the direction of greater openness to experience, and hence in the direction of the behavior which is enhancing of self and society, rather than destructive. Science can never threaten us. Only persons can do that. And while individuals can be vastly destructive with the tools placed in their hands by scientific knowledge, this is only one side of the picture. We already have subjective and objective knowledge of the basic principles by which individuals may achieve the more constructive social behavior which is natural to their organismic process of becoming. What this line of thought has achieved for me is a fresh integration in which the conflict between the “experientialist” and the “scientist” tends to disappear. This particular integration may not be acceptable to others, but it does have meaning to me. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Science, as well as therapy, as well as other aspects of living, is rooted in and based upon the immediate, subjective experience of a person. It springs from the inner, total, organismic experiencing which is only partially and imperfectly communicable. It is one phase of subjective living. It is because I find value and reward in human relationships that I enter into a relationship known as therapeutic, where feelings and cognition merge into one unitary experience which is lived rather than examined, in which awareness is non-reflective, and where I am participant rather than observer. However, because I am curious about the exquisite orderliness which appears to exist in the Universe and in this relationship I can abstract myself from the experience and look upon it as an observer, making myself and/or others the object of that observation. As observer I used all of the hunches which grow out of the living experience. To avoid deceiving myself as observer, to gain a more accurate picture of the order which exists, I make use of all the canons of science. Science is not an impersonal something, but simply a person living subjectively another phase of oneself. A deeper understanding of therapy (or of any other problem) may come from living it, or from observing it in accordance with the rules of science, or from the communication within the self between the two types of experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

As to the subjective experience of choice, it is not only primary in therapy, but it is also primary in the use of scientific method by a person. What I will do with the knowledge gained through scientific method—whether I will use it to understand, enhance, enrich, or use it to control, manipulate and destroy—is a matter of subjective choice dependent upon the values which have personal meaning for me. If, out of fright and defensiveness, I block out from my awareness large areas of experience—if I can see only those facts which support my present beliefs, and am blind to all others—if I can see only the objective aspect of life, and cannot perceive the subjective—if in any way I cut off my perception from the full range of its actual sensitivity—then I am likely to be socially destructive, whether I use as tool the knowledge and instruments of science, or the power and emotional strength of subjective relationship. And on the other hand if I am open to my experience, and can permit all of the sensing of my awareness, than I am likely to use myself, my subjective experience, and my scientific knowledge, in ways which are realistically constructive. This then is the degree of integration I have currently been able to achieve between two approaches first experienced as conflicting. It does not completely resolve all the issues posed, but it seems to point toward a resolution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

It rewriters the problem or reperceives the issue, by putting the subjective, existential person, with the values which one holds, at the foundation and the root of the therapeutic relationship and of the scientific relationship. For science too, at its inception, is an “I-Thou” relationship with person or persons. And only as subjective person can I enter into either of these relationships. The fear of success results from fear of the begrudging envy of others and this of the loss of their affection. Sometimes it is a conscious fear. A gifted writer among my patients renounced writing altogether because her mother began to write and proved to be successful. When after a long period she took it up again, hesitantly and apprehensively, she was afraid not of writing poorly but of writing too well. This woman was for a long time incapable of doing anything at all, the main reason being her excessive fear that others would begrudge her everything; instead she put all her energy into the task of making people like her. The fear may appear also as a mere vague apprehension that one would lose friends if one were to have any success. In this fear, however, as in so many others, the neurotic person is more often away not of one’s fear but only of the resulting inhibitions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

When such a person plays tennis, for example, one my feel when one is close to victory that something holds one back and makes it impossible for one to win. Or one may forget to keep an appointment of decisive importance of one’s future. If one has something pertinent to contribute to a discussion or conversation one may speak in so low a voice, or in such condensed expression, that one will fail to make any impression. Or one will let others have the acclaim for work one has accomplished. One may observe that with some persons one can talk intelligently, while with others one is stupid; that with some one can play an instrument in a masterly fashion while with others one plays like a beginner. Although one feels bewildered by such an uneven state of affairs one is unable to change it. It is only when one has gained insight into one’s tendency to recoil that one will discover that when talking to a person less intelligent than oneself one compulsively has to act still less intelligent; or that when playing with a poor musician one has to play still worse, drive by a fear that by excelling one would hurt and humiliate the other. Finally, if one does have a success one is not only unable to enjoy it, but does not even fell it as one’s own experience. Or one will diminish it by attributing it to some fortuitous circumstances or to some insignificant stimulation or help from outside. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

After a success, however, one is likely to feel depressed, partly because of this fear, but also because of an unrecognized disappointment brought about by the fact that the actual success always remains far being one’s secret excessive expectations. Thus the conflict situation of the neurotic person derives from a frantic and compulsive wish to be the first in the race, and at the same time an equally great compulsion to check oneself as soon as one gets well started or makes any progress. If one has done something successfully, one is bound to do it poorly the next time. A good lesson is followed by a bad lesson, an improvement during treatment by a relapse, a good impression on people by a bad one. This sequence keeps recurring and gives one the feeling that one is waging a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds. One is like Penelope, who unraveled every night what she had woven during the day. Thus inhibitions may set in at each step of the way: the neurotic may repress one’s ambitious wishes so completely that one does not even attempt a piece of work; one may try to do something but be unable to concentrate or carry it through; one may do excellent work but shrink from any evidence of success; and finally one may reach outstanding success and be unable to appreciate it or even feel it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

If you come to comfort the disturbed, you will surely disturb the comfortable. “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through the righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord,” reports Romans 5.20-21. A study of the grace of God is a study in contrast, a contrast between the desperate plight of humankind and the abundant and gracious remedy God has provided for us through Christ Jesus. This contrast is beautifully described in the words f an old hymn: Guilty, vile and helpless we, spotless Lamb of God was He; full atonement! Can it be? Hallelujah, what a Savior! We already know that all of us are indeed guilty, vile, and helpless. We recognized that all of us are equally in need of the grace of God. When an engaged couple goes into a jewelry store to shop for that special diamond, the jeweler will often se a dark velvet-covered pad on one’s counter, then carefully lay each diamond on the pad. The contrast of the dark velvet provides the background that enhances the sparkle and beauty of each diamond. Our sinful condition hardly qualifies as a velvet pad, but against the dark background of guilt and moral pollution, God’s grace in salvation sparkles like a beautiful, clear, and flawless diamond. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The apostle Paul used a contrasting background when he described God’s gracious remedy for our ruin in a series of Scriptures I like to call God’s wonderful contractions. Having painted the dark background of our ruin, Paul proceeds to set before us the clear, sparkling diamond of God’s remedy. Notice how be begins: But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. We are all found to be in a state of ruin, but now God has provided a remedy: a righteousness is said to be apart from law, that is, apart from any consideration of how well or not so well we have obeyed the law of God. Under God’s grace, the extent or quality of our law-keeping is not an issue. Instead, those who have faith in Jesus Christ are justified freely by his grace. To be justified means more than to be declared not guilty. It actually means to be declared righteous before God. It means God has imputed or charged the guilt of our sins to His Son, Jesus Christ, and has imputed or credited Christ’s righteousness to us. Not, however, that we are justified by His grace. It is because of God’s grace we are declared righteous before Him. We are all guilty before God—condemned, vile, and helpless. We had no claim on God; the disposition of our case was wholly up to Him. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

God could with total justice have pronounced us all guilty, for that is what we were, and consigned us all to eternal damnation. That is what He dd to the Angels who sinned (see 2 Peter 2.4), and God could have with perfect justice done the same to us. God owed us nothing; we owed Him everything. However, because of God’s grace, God did not cosign us all to hell; instead, He provided a remedy for us through Jesus Christ. “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood,” reports Romans 3.25. What is a sacrifice of atonement? When God turns aside his wrath, taking away sin. The meaning of Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, then, is that Jesus by His death turned aside the wrath of God from us by takin it upon Himself. As He hung on the cross, He bore our sins in His body and endured the full force of God’s wrath in our place. “He himself bore of sins in His body,” and suffered, “the righteous for unrighteous” reports 1 Peter 2.24, 3.18. By His death Jesus completely satisfied the justice of God, which required eternal death as the penalty for sin. It is not so much that we are afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it is that place in between that we fear. A vision without a plan is only a dream. The outer wall of the soul is perhaps like a permeable membrane in a biological organism, which is designed to allow passage of some but not all foreign objects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

When the wall of the soul is broken, individuals are at the mercy of forces they cannot handle. The soul can be sustained intact and can function as it is supposed to only in keeping of God. “Behold, all souls are Mine,” reports Ezekiel 18.4. Our actions always arise out of the interplay of the universal factors in human life: spirit, mind, body, social context, and soul. Action never comes from the movement of the will alone. Often—perhaps usually—what we do is not an outcome of deliberate choice and a mere act of will, but is more of a relenting to pressure on the will from one or more of the dimensions of the self. The understanding of this is necessary for the understanding and practice of spiritual formation, which is bound to fail if it focuses upon the will alone. The inadequacy of good intentions alone to ensure proper action is marked by Jesus’ words: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” If the six dimensions, infinite environment, soul, social, body, mind, and spirit, are properly aligned with God and what is good—and therefore with each other—that mere relenting will be good, and our actions will simply be the good fruit of the good tree. If they are not so aligned, they will be the inevitable bad fruit of the bad tree. If they are not so aligned, they will be the inevitable bad fruit of the bad tree. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

We must clearly understand that there is a rigorous consistency in the human self and its actions. This is one of those things we are most inclined to deceive ourselves about. If I do evil, I am the kind of person who does evil; if I do good, I am the kind of person who does good. Actions are not impositions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities is supervises and interacts with. Today one of the most common rationalizations of sin or folly is, “Oh, I just blew it.” While there is some point to such a remark, it is not the one those who use it hope for. It does not exonerate them. While it may be true that there are other circumstances in which I would not have done the foolish or sinful thing I did, and while what I did may not represent me fully, “blowing it” does not represent me fully. I am the kind of person who “blows it.” “Blowing it” shows who I am as a person. I am, through and through, in my deepest self, the kind of person who “blows it”—hardly a lovely and promising thing to be. Whatever my action is comes out of my whole person. The will or spirit, tiny power that it is, is very largely at the mercy of the forces playing upon it from the larger self and beyond. The God-intended function of the will is to reach out to God in trust. By standing in the correct relation to God through our will we can receive grace that will properly reorder the soul along with the other five components of the self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

In the life away from God, the order of dominance is: body, soul, mind (thought/feeling), spirit, and God. This is the order in idolatry of all kinds, including that of those who worship “The Good Life,” as it is often called. There are two Gods. There is the God that people generally believe in—A God who has to serve them (sometimes in very refined ways, say by merely giving them peace of mind). This God does not exist. However, the God whom people forget—the God whom we all have to serve—exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive. In the life under God, by contrast, the order of dominance is: God, spirit, mind (thought/feeling), soul, body. Here the body serves the soul; the soul, the mind, the spirit; and the spirit, God. Conversely, the life from above flows from God throughout the whole person, including the body and its social context. For those who are according to [that is, who live life in terms of] the flesh [the natural human powers only] set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

When the proper ordering of the human system under God is complete—which no doubt will never fully occur in this life because of the social dimension of the self and our finitude and the total spiritual environment surrounding us—then we have people who love God with all their heart, and with all their soul, and with all their strength, and with all their mind; and their neighbor as themselves. When we are like this, our whole life is an eternal one. Everything we do counts for eternity and is preserved there. The spirit must first come alive to and through God, of course. Otherwise we remain dead to him in trespasses and sins. However, once the spirit comes alive in God, the lengthy process of subduing all aspects of the self under God can begin. This is the process of spiritual formation viewed in its entirety. Spiritual transformation only happens as each essential dimension of the human being is transformed to Christlikeness under the direction of a regenerate will interacting with constant overtures of grace from God. Such transformation is not the result of mere human effort and cannot be accomplished by putting pressure on the will (heart, spirit) alone. In spite of all the misuses to which the word love is subjected, in literature and daily life, it has not lost its emotional power. It elicits a feeling of warmth, of passion, of happiness, of fulfilment, whenever it is used. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The word love brings to mind past or present or anticipated occasion of loving or being loved. Its root meaning, therefore, sees to be an emotional state which like all emotions cannot be defined, but which must be described in its qualities and expressions and is not a matter of intention or demand but of happening or gift. If this were so, love could be kept within the sphere of affections, and it could be discussed as one affection among others. In considering the significance of love, when we consider the nature of the divine substance and about the many ways in which humans participate in it, we must reflect on human’s intellectual love towards God as the love with which God love himself. In other words, love is elevated out of emotional into the ontological realm. And it is well-known that from Empedocles and Plato to Augustine and Pico, to Hegel and Schelling, to Existentialism and depth psychology, love has played a central ontological role. There is another interpretation of love which is neither emotional nor ontological but ethical. In one of the determining documents of Judaism, Christianity and all the New World, the word love is combined with the imperative “thou shalt.” The Great Commandment demands of everyone the total love of God and the love of one’s neighbour according to the measures of human’s natural self-affirmation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

If love is emotion, how can it be demanded? Emotions cannot be demanded. We cannot demand them of ourselves. If we try, something artificial is produced which shows the traits of what had to be suppressed in its production. Repentance, intentionally produced, hides self-complacency in perversion. Love, intentionally produced, show indifference or hostility in perversion. This means: love as an emotion cannot be commanded. Either love is something other than emotion or the Great Commandment is meaningless. There must be something at the basis of love as emotion which justifies both its ethical and its ontological interpretation. And it may well be that the ethical nature of love is dependent on its ontological nature, and that the ontological nature of love gets its qualifications by its ethical character. However, if all this is valid—and we shall try to show that it is valid—the question arises as to how these interpretations of love are related to the fact that love appears in the shape of the most passionate of emotions. Beautiful Christlike love does not just happen! It comes from the inner resolve of a person who has determined to live under the authority of God’s directive regarding how a Godly being must love one’s spouse—as it is spelled out in Ephesians 5. Thy are directives every Christian being out to be familiar with, must understand, and, I think, even commit to memory. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

To examine the Godly being’s responsibility, we must fix in our minds the grand truth at the end of Ephesians 5, verse 31, where Paul quotes Genesis 2.24: when a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, “the two will become one flesh.” He then adds in verse 32, “There is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.” There is an astounding unity in marriage! The assertion that men and women become “one flesh” indicates something of the psycho-spiritual depth of marriage—an exchange of soul. Marriage ideally produces two people who are as much the same person as two people can be! Christians in marriage have the same Lord, the same family, the same children, the same future, and the same ultimate destiny—an astounding unity. An amazing bounding took place the moment I saw my new born children and held them in my arms. They are from my flesh. I am close to my children, interwoven with them. Yet, I am no one flesh with them. I am one flesh only with my wife. This, in my opinion, is why mature couples possessing extraordinarily different appearances yet often look so much alike—they are “one flesh.” There has been an exchange of soul—a mutual appropriation of each other’s lives. This is, indeed, a mystery—which partially illustrates the even deeper marital union of Christ and Church. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

We must keep the mysterious nature of our union constantly before us if we are to understand the disciplines of marital love as they unfold—the discipline of sacrificial love, of sanctifying love, of self love. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, and because of the multitude of his tender mercies over them. And it came to pass that they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. May forgiveness, O Lord, we beseech Thee, proceed from the Most High. May it succour us in our misery; may in cleanse us from our offenses; may it be granted to penitents; may it plead for mourners; may it bring back those who wander from the faith; may it raise up those who are fallen into sins; may it reconcile us to the Father; may it confirm us with the grace of Christ; may it conform us to the Holy Spirit. Thou incomprehensible but prayer-hearing God, know, but beyond knowledge, revealed, but unrevealed, my wants and welfare draw me to thee, for thou hast never said, “Seek ye me in vain.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

To thee, great God, I come in my difficulties, necessities, distresses; possess me with thyself, with a spirit of grace and supplication, with a prayerful attitude of mind, with access into warmth of fellowship, so that in the ordinary concerns of life my thoughts and desires may rise to thee, and in habitual devotion I may find a resource that will soothe my sorrows, sanctify my successes, and qualify me in all ways for dealing with my fellow beings. I bless thee that thou hast made me capable of knowing thee, the author of all being, of resembling thee, the perfection of all excellency, of enjoying thee, the source of all happiness. O God, attend me in every part of my arduous and trying pilgrimage; I need the same counsel, defence, comfort I found at my beginning. Let my religion be more obvious to my conscience, more perceptible to those around. While Jesus is representing me in Heaven, may I reflect Him on Earth, while He pleads my cause, may I show forth His praise. Continue the gentleness of thy goodness towards me, and whether I wake or sleep, let thy presence go with me, thy blessing attend me. Thou has led me on and I have found thy promises true, I have been sorrowful, but thou hast been my help, fearful, but thou hast delivered me, despairing, but thou hast lifted me up. Thy vows are ever upon me, and I praise thee, O God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. The symmetry and grace of this residence 3 Farmhouse is captured in this design. The two private patios and backyard provides plenty of room for outdoor activities. Inside, the kitchen with center island work counter opens to the dining room, and great room. There is also a flex space and an optional doubled sided fireplace, which opens up to what can be a fourth bedroom, a den, office, library, or sewing room. The heavenly master suite officers a walk-in closet and abundant linen storage. A corner deep soaking bath tub and glass-enclosed shower highlight the bathroom.

Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District. The master suite in #MillsStation Residence 3 is heavenly! Get a full spa experience—right in your own home. 🧖‍♀️🧖‍♂️ Watch the full walkthrough on our IGTV. How would you customize your #CresleighRanch home? https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/

Please Plant this Heart of Mine Underneath the Lonesome Pine on the Hill When it is Twilight on the Trail!

December 29, 2019 4:51 am

Almost one hundred years ago, in October and November of 1929, the stock market crashed and the World entered the Great Depression. The Roaring Twenties came to an end. Wealthy people everywhere lost their fortunes. Multimillionaires jumped out of windows. My grandparents told me they even cut back on eating meat. So, why does Paul in the Bible attack conformism? Why does he not call the Christian the perfectly adjusted being? Why does he not describe the Christian way as the way to a complete acceptance of the moral and religious standards of society? His thought is far from this, and according to the certain criteria of adjustment, certainly he could not have been called a good educator. However, he knew why he rejected conformism. He knew that all conformism is a state of being conformed to this eon. So let us try to understand the meaning of this strange assertion. This eon means the state of things in which we are living, which is, according to Paul, a state of corruption. Being conformed to it, therefore, means to participate in its corruptedness. Where there is conformism there is acceptance of corruption, subject to the present questionable state of things. In our English Bibles, the Greek word for eon is translated “World.” This is somehow misleading. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

When we speak of World we think of the Universe. However, the Universe, including our Earth and everything in it, is the product of incessant divine creativity here and now. It is good in its created form, and it is the place to which the kingdom of God shall come, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. It is one of those most dangerous misunderstandings of the Christian message to deny this World and its created glory, and to direct our eyes to a Superworld, unrelated to the original creation. The Bible speak of a new Heaven and a New Earth in contrast to the Old Heaven and the Old Earth. And now we understand what Paul means when he speaks of conformity to this eon: he means the untransformed Old Earth and the untransformed Old Heaven. He means the corrupted state of the Universe, and especially of our Universe—the Universe of beings—when he warns us not to become conformed to it. The attitude towards this eon, toward ourselves, and towards our World that the apostle demands is threefold: judgment, resistance, and transformation. However, one may ask—must I judge, must I resist, must I transform everything I encounter? Ought we not to adjust to that which is borne out of the wisdom of the ages, bestowed upon us by the generations before us through their experience and insights? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Could one not say—be conformed to what has been proved to be good and noble and in conformity with the spirit of love? We must ask this question with great seriousness and self-criticism. However, we must not forget that we are living in this eon, under the control of its forms and ways, where the uncorrupted is mixed with corruption, and the acceptable with the unacceptable, and good with evil. This is what makes conformity so dangerous. If the corruption of this eon were obvious, very few would be tempted to be conformed to it. Not many people, in reality or in literature, make a pact with the devil. However, there are many who are lured by elements of goodness, indeed of real goodness, into a pact with this eon, into the state of being conformed to it. And certainly, there are strong arguments for accepting conformity. We all are conformed to the family into which we are born whether we want to be or not. Shall we try to be non-conformists in our family because conformism would mean adjustment to this eon, to the corrupted state of things? Would that not bring much suffering to the other members of the family, and deprive us of the many blessings that an intimate and ordered family life can provide? How can the commandment to honor father and mother be combined with the warning of the apostle not to be conformed to this eon? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Jesus says—“I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. One who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and one who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” reports Matthew 10.35-37. There are the most radical statements of non-conformity. And even Paul’s radicalism sounds conservative in comparison with them. It is astonishing that a faith based on words like these has been used throughout its history as a most successful instrument of conformity inside and outside family relations. How did this happen? Why is it the predominant attitude within Western culture even today, in spite of all the forces of disintegration? It is because it is infinitely difficult to find the point where the state of being conformed contradicts love as it is manifest in the Christ. It would be easy to notice the point where separation becomes unavoidable, if our family, as often was the case in early Christianity, tried to make us reject the Christ and what he stands for. However, this is not so today. Instead of it, the question of conforming or not conforming arises in innumerable small moments of our daily life. And in each moment, our answer is a risk, burdened with struggles within our own conscience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

We do not know with certainty whether our non-conformity is based on a wrong conformity to ourselves or whether it is our awareness of corruption that drives us to non-conformity. And we do not know with certainty whether our non-resistance is based on a wrong surrender or whether it is an element of love and wisdom that keeps us conformed to the family group. We do not know these things with certainty, and we can act only at the risk of being wrong. However, act we must. Most people try to avoid the risk by being conformed to the state of things into which they have been thrown by destiny. However, those who have transformed our World risked wrong decisions. And the greater beings they were, the more conscious were they of the risk. They did not cease to doubt in spite of the depth and the passion of their faith. For when they refused to be conformed to themselves, but were renewed in their own being and could thus renew other things. And precisely for this reason they never became self-assured—they took upon themselves the risk of not being conformed and the anxiety and doubt and glory of this risk. Paul demands this of every Christian. Every Christian must be strong enough to risk non-conformity, even in the radical sense that Jesus describes with respect to one’s family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The situation in the family is an example, and more than an example. For all conformity is rooted in it. And resistance to conformity is first of all resistance to the family. However, there are other larger groups in which we breathe the air of conformity day and night, and where the resistance is sometimes easier, yet often more difficult, than in the family. I am thinking of educational, social, political, and religious groups. Let us look at each of them in the light of the apostolic word. It seems that an educational group is least exposed to conformity. Those who are learning are usually more inclined to resist than to accept their teachers and what they are taught by them. And the teachers are chosen on the basis of the independence of their judgments and the freedom of their scholarly questioning. This seems to make the institutions of higher learning the representative places of non-conformity. I do not think that this is so, however. One needs to ask the students two questions: Do not you often build, out of your resistance to what you are taught, a new conformity of rebellion? And do you resist the group or gang to which you belong as strongly as you resist your teachers, or are you conquered by gang conformity and all the elements of this eon, and the corruption implied in such conformity? How would you answer? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

As we read some of the passages from the prophets, we might easily imagine that we were reading the reports of eye-witnesses from Warsaw or Hiroshima, Tokyo (2011) Sri Lanka, Berlin, San Francisco (1906), Oakland (1989) on New York (11 September 2001). Isaiah says: “Behold, the Lord maketh the Earth empty and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down and scattereth its inhabitants…Towns fall to pieces; each being bolts one’s door; gladness has gone from the Earth and pleasure is no more. The cities are left desolate; their gates are battered down; and few are left. For Earth has been polluted by the dwellers on its face…breaking the Eternal Covenant. Therefore, a curse is crushing the Earth, and the guilty people must atone.” Every one of these words describes the experience of the peoples of Europe and Asia. The most primitive and most essential foundations of life have been shaken. The destruction is such that we, who have not experienced it, cannot even imagine it. We have not experienced it; we cannot believe that we could be caught in such a destruction and see busses dancing, bridges collapsing, oceans swallowing up 200,000 people and entire cities. And yet, I see American soldiers walking through the ruins of these cities, thinking their own country, and seeing with visionary clarity the doom of its towns and cities. I know that this has happened, and still is happening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

There are soldiers who have become prophets, and their message is not very different from the message of the ancient Hebrew prophets. It is the message of the shaking of the foundations, and not those of their enemies, but rather those of their own country. For the prophetic spirit has not disappeared from the Earth. Decades before the World wars, people judged the European civilization and prophesied its end in speech and print. There are among us people like these. They are like the refined instruments which register the shaking of the Earth on far-removed sections of its surface. These people register the shaking of their civilization, its self-destructive trends, and its disintegration and fall, decades before the final catastrophe occurs. They have an invisible and almost infallible sensorium in their souls; and they have an irresistible urge to pronounce what they have registered, perhaps against their own wills. For no true prophet has ever prophesied voluntarily. It has been forced upon the by a Divine Voice to which they have not been able to close one’s ears. No being with a prophetic spirit likes to foresee and foreasy the doom of one’s own period. It exposes them to a terrible anxiety within oneself, to serve and often deadly attacks from others, and to the change of pessimism and defeatism on the part of the majority of the people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

People desire to hear good tidings; and the masses listen to those who bring them. All the prophets of the Old and New Testaments, and others during the history of the Church had the same experiences. They all were contradicted by the false prophets, who announced salvation when there was no salvation. “The prophets prophesy falsely, and my people love to have it so,” cries Jeremiah in despair. They called him a defeatist and accused him of being an enemy of his country. However, is it a sign of patriotism or of confidence in one’s people, its institutions and its way of life, to be silent when the foundations are shaking? Is the expression of optimism, whether or not it is justified, so much more valuable than the expression of truth, even if the truth is deep and dark? Most human beings, of course, are not able to stand the message of the shaking of the foundations. They reject and attack the prophetic minds, not because they really disagree with them, but because they sense the truth of their words and cannot receive it. They repress it in themselves; and they transform it into mockery or fury against those who know and dare to say that which they know. In which of these two groups do you consider yourselves to be? Among those who respond to the prophetic spirit, or among those who close their ears and hearts against it? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

I have always felt that there might be few who are able to register the shaking of the foundations of the Earth as such, but God Who laid the foundations and would shake them; and that they did not speak of the doom of the nation as such, but of God Who brings doom for the sake of His eternal justice and salvation. As the 102^nd Psalm says: “Thy years are foundations of the Earth, and the Heavens are the work of thy hands. They vanish, but thou shalt endure; they wear out like a robe, thou changest them like garments. However, thou art the same and thy years shall have no end.” When the Earth grows old and wears out, when nations and cultures die, the Eternal changes the garments of God’s infinite being. God is the foundation on which all foundations are laid; and this foundation cannot be shaken. There is something immovable, unchangeable, unshakeable, eternal, which becomes manifest in our passing and in the crumbling of our World. On the boundaries of the finite the infinite becomes visible; in the light of the Eternal the transitoriness of the temporal appears. The Greeks called themselves “the mortals” because they experienced that which is immortal. This is why the prophets were able to face the shaking of the foundations. It is the only way to look at the shaking without recoiling from it. Or is it possible to be conscious of the approaching doom, and yet to regard it with indifference and cynicism? Is it humanly possible to face the end cynically? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

There are certainly some among us who are cynical toward most of that which beings create and praise. There are some among us who are cynical about the present situation of the World and the leaders of the World. We may be cynical, of course, about the true motives behind all human action; we may be cynical about ourselves, our inner growth and our outer achievements. We ay be cynical about religion and about our Churches, their doctrines, their symbols and their representatives. There is scarcely one thing about which we may not be cynical. However, we cannot be cynical about the shaking of the foundations of everything! I have never encountered anyone who seriously was cynical about that. I have seen much cynicism, particularly among the younger people in Europe before the war. However, I know from abundant witness that this cynicism vanished when the foundations of the World began to shake at the beginning of the European catastrophe. We can be cynical about the end only so long as we do not have to see it, only so long as we feel safety in the place in which our cynicism can be exercised. However, if the foundations of this place and all places begin to crumble, cynicism itself crumbles with them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

And only two alternatives remain—despair, which is the certainty of eternal destruction, or faith, which is the certainty of eternal salvation. “The World itself shall crumble, but my salvation knows no end,” says the Lord. This is the alternative for which the prophets stood. This is what we should call religion, or more precisely, the religious ground for all religion. How could the prophets speak as they did? How could they paint these most terrible pictures of doom and destruction without cynicism or despair? It was because, beyond the sphere of destruction, they saw the sphere of salvation; because, in the doom of the temporal, they saw the manifestation of the Eternal. It was because they saw the manifestation of the Eternal. It was because they were certain that they belonged within the two spheres, the changeable and the unchangeable, bot bound within it alone, can face the end. All others compelled to escape, to turn away. How much of our lives consist in nothing but attempts to look away from the end! We often succeed in forgetting the end. However, ultimately we fail; for we always carry the end with us in our bodies and our souls. And often whole nations and cultures succeed in forgetting the end. However, ultimately they fail too, for in their lives and growth they always carry the end with them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Often the whole Earth succeeds in making its creatures forget its end, but sometimes these creatures feel that their Earth is beginning to grow old, and that its foundations are beginning to shake. For the Earth always carries its ends within it. We happen to live in a time when very few of us, very few nations, very few sections of the Earth, will succeed in forgetting the end. For in these days the foundations of the Earth do shake. May we not turn our eyes away; may we not close our ears and our mouths! However, may we rather see, through the crumbling of a World, the rock of eternity and the salvation which as no end! Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of Heaven we have below. “And in the mouth of three witnesses shall these things be established; and the testimony of three, and this work, in the which shall be shown forth the power of God and also his word, of which the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost bear record—and all this shall stand as a testimony against the World at the last day. And if it so be that they repent and come unto the Father in the name of Jesus, they shall be received into the kingdom of God. And now, if I have no authority for these things, judge ye’ for ye shall know that I have authority when ye shall see me, and we shall stand before God at the last day. Amen,” reports Ether 5.4-6. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Receive my confession, O my only Hope of Salvation, Jesus Christ, my Lord and God. For in the mortal World I am lost, and altogether in thought, word, and deed, and in all evils, I am overwhelmed. Thou Who justifiest the ungodly and quickenest the dead, Lord my God, justify me and revive me. Save me, O Lord, King of eternal glory, Who canst save. Grant me to will and to do, and to accomplish, what is pleasing to Thee, and profitable to myself; give me assistance in distress, consolation in persecution, and strength in all temptation; vouchsafe me pardon for past evils, amendment of present evils, and be pleased to send me protection against evils to come. Thine it is to give the sinner a stricken heart and a fountain of tears. It is mine, if Thou shalt vouchsafe it, to weep for my sins; it is Thine to efface them speedily, as a cloud. I beseech Thee, O Lord, to forget my sins, and to remember Thy mercies. O Christ, spare me, pity me, not according to Thy word, that I may live, and not be disappointed of my hope. Give me a fountain of tears, O Fountain of life. My hope of salvation is in no works of mine; but my soul hangs simply on the boundlessness of Thy love, and confides in the multitude of Thy mercy. Hear our Prayer, O Lord, and listen to our groanings, for we acknowledge our iniquities, and lay open our sins before Thee. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Against Thee, O God, have we sinned; to Thee we make our confession, and implore forgiveness. Turn Thy face again, O Lord, upon Thy servants whom Thou hast redeemed with Thine own Blood. Spare us, we pray Thee, and vouchsafe pardon to our sins, and be pleased to extend to us Thy loving-kindness and Thy mercy. Thou eternal God, thine is surpassing greatness, unspeakable goodness, super-abundant grace; I can as soon count the sands of ocean’s ‘lip’ as number thy favours towards me; I know but a part, but that part exceeds all praise. I thank thee for personal mercies, a measure of health, preservation of body, comforts of house and home, sufficiency of food and clothing, continuance of mental powers, my family, their mutual help and support, the delights of domestic harmony and peace, the seats now filled that might have been vacant, my country, church Bible, faith. However, O, how I mourn my sin, ingratitude, vileness, the days that to my guilt, the scenes that witness my offending tongue; all things in Heaven, Earth, around, within, without, condemn me—the Sun which sees my misdeeds, the darkness which is light to thee, the cruel accuser who justly charges me, the good Angels who have been provoked to leave me, thy countenance which scans my secret sins, thy righteous law, thy holy word, my sin-soiled conscience, my private and public life, my neighbours, myself—all write dark things against me. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

I deny them not, frame no excuse, but confess, Father, I have sinned; yet still I live, and fly repenting to thy outstretched arms; thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near, thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near, thou wilt not condemn me, for he died in my stead, thou wilt not mark my mountains of sin, for he levelled all, and his beauty covers my deformities. O my God, I bid farewell to sin by clinging to his cross, hiding in his wounds, and sheltering in his side. O Good Jesus, Who didst enable Lazarus at the sound of Thy voice to rise from the tomb, grant us to hear Thy voice in our souls, and to rise through grace from the depth of our own sin. Cleanse, O Lord, our consciences by the sincere confession of the Catholic Faith, and by continual contrition of heart; that we may always be heard by Thee in Heaven, when we call to Thee for pardon of sins on Earth! Let us live then and be glad, while young life is before us. “Though I speak with the tongues of humans and of Angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” reports St. Mark 3.25. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard! I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. Our country is the World; our country people are all humankind. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

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Cresleigh Meadowsis coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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Rancho Cordova, CA |

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Sometimes an Angel Has to Fall to Know One Was in Heaven—Are You Living?

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

You are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine, You Make Me Happy When Skies are Gray!

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

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