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To Those Brothers and Sisters in Christ Who Find Acceptance of the Word Holy:
Miracles, miracles, miracles! Men are always hearing about miracles; and when they witness them they seldom realize the ingredients that are in them, the application of cosmic law, and how devotion and holy prayer fashion in man the required faith by which the Reality of God at last takes shape in mortal form.
"Oh, shed Thy Light on me!" This simple statement - invocative to God because man believes He is, invocative to the Spirit because man believes the Spirit hears, invocative of results because man believes that results are forthcoming by His Law - should be uttered from the depths of the soul and breathed as holy prayer, daily, hourly, and whenever His grace is required.
The grace and Light of God have not changed their nature through the long centuries of mankind's submersion in a material consciousness. Religions may change through the misappropriation of the Law by those who should correspond to Holy Fires but often do not; but no man need give to the Christ as an excuse for his spiritual neglect the fact that he has been misled by his teachers.
Each man, if he will, can still find the pathway of communion with his God. Each man, if he will, can imbue himself with that devotion which will attract the attention of the highest peers from inner levels of Light and draw to him the mantle of humility. Thus he can focalize a greater measure of the devotion of his Real Self, until he is no longer imbued with the idolatrous image of himself as the ruler over his divine Presence.
Many there are in the world today who are content if they can pursue the pathway of whimsy, if they can do what they want to do, if they can be what they want to be. But once they reach their goal, how frequently they are bored with the results, for somehow even the most spiritually unenlightened know when they are not fulfilling their reason for being.
In the eleventh hour men build cathedrals of human accomplishment when they should be building cathedrals of divine accomplishment. The stones of their labors are as difficult to handle today as were the stones of the temples built by artisans and priests of God in days of old; but the results are entirely different. Because their labors are centered in the human self, they have builded upon the sand of which our Lord spoke; and one day they shall see that their labors were in vain.1
The floods have come as they have been predicted - floods of permissiveness, of inexcusable hatred, of the accentuation of human misery, and of an almost fanatical dedication to the mania of the ego. Yet our Lord stands the same today as he did two thousand years ago. He can pass through the walls, disappear from their midst, walk upon the water and say, "Be not afraid, it is I." But the nations of the world have forgotten the depth of his blazing Reality, which has not diminished through the centuries; and those who have seen his glory know that it has taken on even greater lustre.2
I make a plea, then, not only to the Franciscan Brothers but also to all who would take upon themselves the yoke of responsibility of our Lord - wearing the rough garment of obedience, the hairshirt of fervor - to be dauntless in their faith. Let other men shed the skin of their bad example in the world order! The brothers and sisters of our Lord must go onward mindful of Him, realizing that the best fruit of good example to the errant ones is fervent devotion to the unwavering principle of His Love.
The world will always plague the devotee, and the carnal mind will always attempt to beleaguer him with doubt and argumentations on the fruitlessness of his search. But he is not afraid of that. He is not moved, because he knows that as the antipode of Reality, there exist those voices of the night that speak simultaneously with the voices of the day.
Therefore, man must first of all determine with whom he speaks and what force he allows to speak through him. When he speaks on behalf of faith and love, he must understand that God speaks; and when he speaks on behalf of human folly and human vileness, he must recognize that darkness speaks. The voices of the night will attempt to lead him into paths of unrighteousness that always end in unhappiness, and through him they will attempt to lead others down the path of spiritual neglect.3
As the cosmic law is ever vital and alive, so the Tree of Life is vibrant with the fruit of new meaning, changing day by day through the hidden miracle of changelessness. Here the fruit of newness of Life is found never shedding the stamping of the Divine Image with the giving away of itself; for when one measure of delight is taken, another replaces it so that the fruit of the vine is always found to be the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The cup of cold water given in the name of Christ is the elixir of hope to a world maddened by blackness and despair. As in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, until man has seen them for himself, he may be unable to realize his own injustices; and when he does, it is often too late. The motivation of the soul to higher expansions of faith and service is a noble undertaking. Blessed, then, are the men and women who do not fear to make public their service to the needs of our Lord. Let them not be afraid to renounce the things of the world; instead let them be afraid to renounce Him.4
Out of the depths of our Brotherhood, out of the fountainhead of cosmic experience, arise new steps of opportunity, new dimensions of spiritual attainment, the measure of which is beyond the ken of man's present knowledge. How many activities of The Great White Brotherhood are hidden from the view of the merely curious! Men think of themselves as being involved in the decades, when their existence spans centuries and millennia; yet they decry the failure of their memory to span the centuries when they cannot even remember what happened yesterday!
O Chalice of Holy Wisdom,
Mind and spirit of man,
Wear thy garments as you can
And do the things God hopes for you
With sacred memory of the few,
Groping through the darker strands
Until you find at last the plans
God has made for thee -
Truly made for thee,
Creative still to be,
Transcendent yet to see.
Freedom and love are bold;
Hope far greater than gold
Gilds the Holy Plan
Revealed to seeker. Vanguard Teacher
Of freedom in the soul,
Mold and make man Whole!
There is no night so dark
To drive God out of it,
No day so bright that embodied man
Can flout the darkness
That attempts to steal his peace.
By vigilance and by the drawing forth of cosmic strength, the renewal of hope to the ages is born and rises as a symbolic metaphor - sunlike, dawning in consciousness, embellishing all with a greater measure of themselves. Man lays in the creche of his own rude making the vital, immortal image of the Son of God. Cradled within himself are the leaps of life and the childlike wonder of beholding Good.
Lord,
Make me an instrument of Thy peace.
Where there is hatred let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light; and
Where there is sadness, joy.
grant that I may not so much
Seek to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.