That is wrong. The man who hurt me was angry. Did you see the bad things he did to me? It does not matter what the think. I love you. I am loyal to you. They cannot part us. It is impossible. However, you cannot be angry. You cannot be violent. If you are angry and violent, I cannot love you. I do want you to protect me. Protect the house. Protect all those I love. Never once in my brawl with the stranger had I felt this kind of fear. You want me to be afraid? I cannot love you and be afraid of you. If I am afraid, I will come to hate you. Did you see how I hated the stranger? Make a choice. Shocking as this may sound, the murder of an individual is a relatively human action—not because the effect of an individual murder is quantitatively smaller than that of a mass murder or a total extermination (for the deaths cannot really be added; the very plural form of the noun “death” is absurd, for each individual murderer still can react to one’s crime in a human way. It is possible to mourn one victim of murder, not a million victims. One can repent one murder, not a million murdered. In other words, imaginative, and moral capacity are congruent or at least commensurable with one’s capacity for action. And this congruence, this condition in which the being is more or less equal to oneself, is no doubt the basic prerequisite of that which is called humanity. It is the congruence that is absent today. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Consequently, modern unmorality does not primarily consist in being’s failure to conform to a specific more-than-human image of beings; perhaps not even in one’s failure to meet the requirements of a just society; but rather in one’s half-guilty and half-innocent failure to conform to oneself, that is to say, in the fact that one’s capacity for action has outgrown one’s emotional, imaginative, and moral capacities. We have good reason to think that our fear is by far too small: it should paralyze us or keep us in a continual state of alarm. It does not because we are physically unequal to the danger confronting us, because we are incapable of producing a fear commensurate with it, let alone of constantly maintaining it in the midst of our still seemingly normal everyday life. Just like our reason, our psyche is limited in the Kantian sense: our emotions have only a limited capacity and elasticity. We have scruples about murdering one being; and no scruples at all about bombing a city out of existence. A city full of dead people remains a mere word to us. All this should be investigated by a Critique of Pure Feeling, not for the purpose of reaching a moral verdict, but in order to determine the boundaries of our emotional capacity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

What disturbs us today is not the fact that we are not omnipotent and omniscient, but the reverse, namely, the fact that our imaginative and emotional capacities are too small as measured against our knowledge and power, that imaginatively and emotionally we are so to speak smaller than ourselves. Each of us moderns is an inverted Lestat: whereas Lestat had infinite anticipations and boundless feelings, and suffered because his knowledge and feelings were unequal to these feelings, we know more and produce greater things than we can imagine or feel. As a rule, then, we are incapable of producing fear; only occasionally does it happen that we attempt to produce it, or that we are overwhelmed and stunned by a tidal wave of anguish. However, what stuns or panics us at such moments is the realization not of the danger threatening us, but of the futility of our attempts to produce an adequate response to it. Having experiences this failure we usually relax and return shamefaced, irritated, or perhaps even relieved, to the human dimensions of our psychic life commensurable with our everyday surroundings. Such a return, however pleasant it may be subjectively, is of course sheer suicide from the objective point of view. For there is nothing and there can be nothing that increases the danger more than our failure to realize it intellectually and emotionally, and our resigned acceptance of this failure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

In fact, the helplessness with which contemporary humankind reacts—or rather fails to react—to the existence of the superbomb bespeaks a lack of freedom the like of which has never before existed in history—and surely history cannot be said to have been poor in varieties of unfreedom. We have indeed reached the freezing point of human freedom. The Stoic, robbed of the autonomy of action, was certainly unfree; but how free the Stoic still was, since one could think and feel as one pleased! Later there was the even more impoverished type of being, who could think only wat others had thought of one, who indeed could not feel anything expect what one was supposed to feel; but how free even this type of being was, since one still could speak, think, and feel what one was supposed to speak, think, and feel! Truly unfree, divested of all dignity, definitively the most deprived of beings are those confronted with situations and things which they cannot cope by definition, to which they are unequal linguistically, intellectually, and emotionally—ourselves. If all is not to be lost we must first and foremost develop our moral imagination: this is the crucial task facing us. We must strive to increase the capacity and elasticity of our intellectual and emotional faculties, to match the incalculable increase of our productive and destructive power. Only where these two aspects of being’s nature are properly balanced can there be responsibility, and moral action and counter-action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Whether we can achieve such a balance, is an open question. Our emotional capacity may turn out to be limited a priori; perhaps it cannot be extended at will and ad infinitum. If this were so, and if we were to resign ourselves to such a state of affairs, we would have to give up all hope. However, the moralist cannot do so in any case; even if one believed in the theoretical impossibility of transcending those limits, one would still have to demand that they be transcended in practice. Academic discussions are pointless here: the question can be decided only by an actual attempt, or, more accurately, by repeated attempts, for instance, spiritual exercises. It is immaterial whether such exercises aim at a merely quantitative extension of our ordinary imagination and emotional performance, or at a sensational, “impossible” transcending of our proportio humana, whose boundaries are supposedly fixed one and for all. The philosophical significance of such exercises can be worried about later. What matters at present is only that an attempt at violent self-transformation be made, and that it be successful. For we cannot continue as we are. In our emotional responses we remain at the rudimentary stage of small artisans: we are barely able to repent an individual murder; where as in our capacity for killing, for producing corpses, we have already entered the proud stage of industrial mass production. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Indeed, the performances of our heart—our inhibitions, fears, worries, regrets—are in inverse ratio to the dimensions of our deeds, for instance, the former grow smaller as the latter increase. This gulf between our emotional capacity and our destructive powers, aside from representing a physical threat to our lives, makes us the most divided, the most disproportionate, the most inhuman beings that ever existed. As against this modern cleavage, all older spiritual conflicts, for instance, the conflict between mind and body or duty and inclination, were relatively harmless. However, violently the struggle may have raged within us, it remained human; the contending principles were attuned to each other, they were in actual contact, neither of them lost sight of the other, and each of them was essentially human. At least on the battlefield of the contending principles beings preserved their existence unchallenged: beings were still there. Not so today. Even this minimum of being’s identity with oneself is gone. For the horror of being’s present condition consists precisely in this, that the conflicting forces within one are no longer inter-related: they are so far removed from each other, each has become so completely independent, that they no longer even come to grips. They can no longer confront each other in battle, the conflict can no longer be fought out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

In short, beings as producers, and beings as a being capable of emotions, have lost sight of each other. Reality now seems attributable only to each of the specialized fragments designated by an “as.” What made us shudder ten years ago—the fact that one and the same being could be guard in an extermination camp and good father or mother and husband or wife, that as the former one could be so radically different from oneself as the latter, and that the two parts one played or the two fragments one was did not in the least stand in each other’s way because they no longer knew each other—this horrifying example of guilelessness in horror has not remained an isolated phenomenon. Each of us, like this schizophrenic in the trust sense of the term, is split into two separate beings; each of us is like a worm artificially or spontaneously divided into two halves, which are unconcerned with each other and move in different directions. True, the split has not been entirely consummated; despite everything the two halves of our being are still connected by the thinnest of threads, and the producer half, by far the stronger, drags the emotional half behind it. The unity is not organic, it is that of two different beings meaninglessly grown together. However, the existence of this minimal connection is no comfort. On the contrary, the fact that we are split in two, and that there is no internal principle integrating these halves, defines the misery and disgrace of our condition. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Violence is a uniting of the self in actions. Violence is creating the self. It is an organizing of one’s powers to prove one’s power, to establish the worth of the self. It is a risking all, a committing all, an asserting all. However, it united the different elements in the self, omitting rationality. This is why I have said above that the uniting of the self is done on a level that bypasses reason. Whatever its motive or its consequences may be within the violent person, its result is generally destructive to the others in the situation. The physical element which bulks so large in violence is a symbol of the totality of one’s involvement. When violence erupts I can no longer sit idly on the sidelines. Movement seizes my body, which I am called upon to risk as an expression of my total commitment. No desire or time to think is left once the violence breaks out; we are in a nonrational World. This can be subrational, as it generally is in the riots in the transient communities; or it can be superrational, as it assumedly was with Joan of Arc. Reason no longer has even a pretense of command. In the movie If, the conventional dullness of life at a British boys’ boarding school is portrayed with stark realism. The burden of routine, the loneliness, the artificial moralistic rules soon developed int sadism and homosexuality. In the face of the severe beatings they receive, the boys begin to form a bond of camaraderie. Then the leading boys discover a cache of machine guns and ammunition under the cathedral. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The movie ends with a surrealistic scene in which the boys take their guns to a position on top of the church and mow down guests, dressed in all their British pomp, who have come to commencement exercises. The movie is a presentation of the steps of violence from separation to loneliness to camaraderie to sadism to violence. The availability of guns has a curious and macabre relation to violence. This form of technology not only vastly increases the range and effectiveness of violence but also has a strong effect—generally dulling—on the conscious of those who use them. One day when I was on a farm in a fairly remote section of New Hampshire, I noticed under an apple tree a stray dog which seemed to be diseased. Having been alone for some time, during which time one’s imagination often comes up with weird ideas, I decided the dog had rabies. Although I could not get to it in the tangle of branches, our own dog, to which our whole family was deeply attached, could and did. She went sniffing around the “rabid” one, and, being a show, she would not come back to me no matter how much I called. I went in the house and got the Luger pistol that my son used on the farm for target practice, inserted a clip in it, and came out to shoot the rabid dog. Now the point of this story is that my having in my hand a pistol with which to shoot some living thing changed me into an entirely differ person psychologically. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

I could deal out death to anyone since I was possessed by this instrument of death; I had become an irrational man of hostility. The gun had me rather than my having it: I had become its instrument. Seized with dislike for this person I had become, I took the gun back to the house and put it away; and the incident was resolved in a quite different way. We understand only vaguely the effect that technology can have on the conscious of a person, but it is clear that the possession of guns can radically change personality. Glenn Gray remarks that, as an officer in the army, he did not feel dressed when he went out without his pistil strapped to his belt; not being in the army, I felt myself to be a misdirected robot, without conscious control over my actions, when I had my finger on the trigger with the intent to kill. An extreme form of such an effect on personality can be seen in the career of Charles Fairweather, the teenager who went on a rampage in Nebraska and murdered eleven people before he was caught. “I love guns,” he had said as a boy. “They give me a feeling of power like nothing else.” His story follows along common lines: as a queer-looking child with bowlegs and thick glasses he was mocked regularly when he first went to school. He developed early in life the symbolic interpretation of the World as a place of mockery, and his cry for recognition became that much the stronger for never having any answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Charles Fairweather then discovered that he could get recognition by letting loose his temper and flailing away at the school bullies in fights, which he managed to win by the sheer vehemence of his violence. His father described him as “always one of the quiet ones,” illustrative again that the docile appearing person may be precisely the violent-prone one. Despite his poor eyesight, he became a remarkable marksman with a gun. Upon getting out of high school Charles managed to find a girl friend and a job as assistant on a garbage truck. When the scant recognition that these afforded him was wiped away—he lost his job and his girl friend’s mother threw him out—he got three guns and shot his girl friend’s mother and stepfather, living for several says in their house with their bodies wrapped up in paper and stowed in the chicken yard. Forcing the girl to go with him, he then went on the path of violence made familiar by Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. The important element in this bloody store is his early symbolic interpretation that the World is a place of derision. His ultimate violence achieved a double response: it answered his cry for recognition and it also mocked the World in revenge. (Again, we see the macabre logic in such outburst of violence.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

From his complete lack of feeling when he was later questioned about the persons he had murdered, we cannot conclude that Charles was always so unfeeling, so typically schizoid. It is obvious that the person on a binge of violence must become unfeeling and detached, like a soldier mowing down the enemy with a machine gun, or else he could never do what he feels he has to do. We are haunted above all by his childhood obligato: “I love guns. They give me a feeling of power.” The symbol of the gun as a phallus and its relation to pleasures of the flesh is well known. Both are long and slim, both eject a substance that can radically change the person into whom it is directed. Hence the gun has become, especially with simple people, a symbol par excellence of masculine power. The line delivered by Mae West on greeting her boy friend remains the classic expression of this: “Is that gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” However, the cultural aspects of guns is also convincing, as Stanley Kunitz remarks. We hunted with guns to eat; we hunted with guns to live in our pioneer period, from which we in America are removed only by a little over a century and a half. In all these ways the gun was valuable, a laudable symbol of power; and handling it well was also laudable. Many a person feels when he or she possesses a gun that one has a power that was unfairly taken away from one. And what a power it is! #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

With a gun, people who have had their power taken away feel they can now make this big explosion and hurl that projectile to kill things much larger than themselves. Consciousness is surrendered willingly. In the film Patton, the general’s running out and emptying his pistol into the air at German airplanes bombing his Algerian base is childish gesture, an anachronistic hang-over from a boy playing with guns; but it is nevertheless a convincing expression of violence. In a World where peace is such a universal quest, we sometimes wonder why violence walks our streets, accounts of murder and senseless killings fill the columns of our newspapers, and family quarrels and disputes mar the sanctity of the home and smother the tranquility of so many lives. Perhaps we stray from the path which leads to peace and find it necessary to pause, to ponder, and to reflect on the teachings of the Prince of Peace and determine to incorporate them in our thoughts and actions and to live a higher law, walk a more elevated road, and be a better disciple of Christ. The ravages of hunger in Somalia, the brutality of hate in Bosnia, and the ethnic struggles especially in the United States of America and across the globe remind us that the peace we seek will not come without effort and determination. Anger, hatred, and contention are foes not easily subdued. These enemies inevitably leave in their destructive wake tears of sorrow, the pain of conflict, and the shattered hopes of what could have been. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Their sphere of influence is not restricted to the battlefields of war but can be observed altogether too frequently in the home, around the hearth, and within the heart. So soon do many forget and so late do they remember the counsel of the Lord: “There shall be no disputations among you, for verily, verily I say unto you, he hath the spirit of content is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another. Behold, this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of beings with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.” We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our World know the blessing of peace. World peace, though a lofty goal, is but an outgrowth of the personal peace each individual seeks. I speak not of the peace promoted by beings, but peace as promised by God. I speak of peace in our homes, peace in our hearts, even peace in our lives. Peace after the way of beings is perishable. Peace after the manner of God will prevail. We are reminded that anger does not solve anything. It builds nothing, but it can destroy everything. The consequences of conflict are so devastating that we years for guidance—even a way to insure our success as we seek the path to peace. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

When we now hear the word “Spirit,” we are somehow prepared for it: the power in us, but not of us, qualifying us for the service of a new state of things is what Spirit means. This may sound strange to many both inside and outside the churches for whom they term Holy Spirit is the strangest of the strange terms that appear among Christian symbols. Rarely a subject of preaching, it is also neglected in religious teachings. Its festival, Pentecost, has almost disappeared in the popular consciousness of this country. Some groups that claim spiritual experiences of a particular character are considered unhealthy, and often rightly so. Liturgically, the use of the term “Holy Ghost” produces an impression of great remoteness from our way of speaking and thinking. However, spiritual experience is a reality for everyone, as actual as the experience of being loved or the breathing of air. Therefore, we should not shy away from the word “Spirit.” We should become fully aware of the Spiritual Presence, around us and in us, even though we realize how limited our experience of “god present to our spirit” may be. For this is what Divine Spirit means: God present to our spirit. Spirit is not a mysterious substance; it is not a part of God. It is God Himself; but not God as the creative Ground of all things and not God directing history and manifesting Himself in its central event, but God as present in communities and personalities, grasping them, inspiring them, and transforming them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

For Spirit its first all power, the power that drives the human spirit above itself towards what it cannot attain by itself, the love that is greater than all other gifts, the truth in which the depth of being opens itself to us, the holy that is the manifestation of the presence of the ultimate. You may say again—“I do not know this power. I have never had such an experience. I am not religious or, at least, not Christian and certainly not a bearer of the Spirit. What I hear from you sounds like ecstasy; and I want to stay sober. It sounds like mystery, and I try to illuminate what is dark. It sounds like self-sacrifice and I want to fulfill my human possibilities.” To this I answer—Certainly, the Spiritual power can thrust some people into an ecstasy that most of us have never experienced. It can drive some toward a kind of self-sacrifice of which most of us are not capable. It can inspire some to insights into the depth of being that remain unapproachable to most of us. However, this does not justify our denial that the Spirit is also working in us. Without doubt, wherever it works, there is an element, possibly very small, of self-surrender, and an element, however weak, of ecstasy, and an element, perhaps fleeting, of awareness of the mystery of existence. Yet these small effects of the Spiritual power are enough to prove its presence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, there are other conscious and noticeable manifestations of the Spiritual Presence. Let me enumerate some of them, while you ask yourselves whether and to what degree they are of your own experience. The Spirit can work in you with a soft but insistent voice, telling you that your life is empty and meaningless, but that there are changes of a new life waiting before the door of your inner self to fill its void and to conquer its dullness. The Spirit can work in you, awakening the desire to strive towards the sublime against the profanity of the average day. The Spirit can give you the courage that says “yes” to life in spite of the destructiveness you have experiences around you and within you. The Spirit can reveal to you that you have hurt somebody deeply, but it also can give you the right word that reunites one with you. The Spirit can make you love, with the divine love, someone you profoundly dislike or in whom you have no interest. The Spirit can conquer your sloth towards what you know is the aim of your life, and it can transform your moods of aggression and depression into stability and serenity. The Spirit can liberate you from hidden enmity against those whom you love and from open vengefulness against those why whom you feel violated. The Spirit can give you the strength to throw off false anxieties and to take upon yourself the anxiety which belongs to life itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The Spirit can awaken you to sudden insight into the way you must take your World, and it can open your eyes to a view of it that makes everything new. The Spirit can give you joy in the midst of ordinary routine as well as in the depth of sorrow. The Spirit can create warmth in the coldness you feel within you and round you, and it can give you wisdom and strength where your human love towards a loved one has failed. Just when you felt totally rejected, and  when you rejected yourself totally, the Spirit can throw you into a hell of despair about yourself and then give you the certainty that life has accepted you. The Spirit can give you the power of prayer, that nobody has except through the Spiritual Presence. For every prayer—with or without words—that reaches its aim, namely the reunion with the divine Ground of our being, is a work of the Spirit speaking in us and through us. Prayer is the Spiritual longing of a finite being to return to its origin. These are works of the Spirit, signs of the Spiritual Presence with us and in us. In view of these manifestations, who can asset that one is without Spirit? Who can say that one is in no way a bearer of the Spirit? One may be in a small way. However, is there anybody among us who could say more than that about oneself? One can compare the Spiritual Presence with the air we breathe, surrounding us, nearest to us, and working life within us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

This comparison has a deep justification: in most languages, the word “spirit” means breath or wind. Sometimes the wind becomes storm, grand and devastating. Mostly it is moving air, always present, not always noticed. “Many will say to me in that day: Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name have cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then I profess unto them: I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity,” reports 3 Nephi 14.22-23. Jesus opened up the Mysteries to the mass of the Western continent and gave to the many what had hitherto been given only to the chosen few. The presence of God, the journey from anticipation to realization is a long one. One this Quest the curiosity to know what lies ahead can never be satisfied with perfect correctness because it must necessarily differ with different individuals. Changes of circumstances which bring uncertainty of the future will not frighten one. They will interest one. One will seek to discover if they point the way to an incoming of new forces of experience necessary for one’s further development. “I try to put it in the past, hold on to myself and don’t look back. I don’t wanna dream about all the things that never were. Maybe I can live without when I’m out from under. I don’t wanna feel the pain, what good will it do me now, I’ll get it all figure out when I’m out from under,” (Out from Under By Britney Spears). #RandolphHarris 19 of 19