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THIRTY-NINTH
DAY
THE
MINISTRY OF SUFFERING
Spirit loq. We are grieved that you do not
practice all that we have taught you, that you show to us selfish in
self-seeking, that your actions are not in harmony with your faith. Why is this?
Can you not see that there is lack of strength in such a life, in such manifest
inconsistency? It is not reading, nor teaching which you need, it is practice!
Ques. How do I fail?
Ans. You fail ever in love; in dealing with all around you, you
fail in love. Your days are planned solely in reference to yourself, and to what
you vainly imagine is the advancement of self. You admire self-sacrifice in
others: but you carefully avoid it in yourself. You cannot teach the world
before you have learnt yourself. Neither would it be of any advantage to the
world to learn truths which have not been intimately bound up with action, which
have not resulted in action in the life of the Teacher.
Your days should be
spent in doing good, in making every hour of your life of real service to
others, first, to the small circle in which you live, secondly to a larger
circle outside your home.
Never
consider gold;
never consider even that it has claims on your time, except claims to be of
service in the lives of others, who need what it can give.
(p. 76)
You ask to know of poverty, of suffering, and why it is that in the lives of
many, both seem necessary evils; you ask whether they are truly evil in their
effects on those who endure them. There is a deep reason why those who are born
in surroundings of poverty and suffering should be so born, and that reason lies
in the antecedents of their previous development. You ask “Is the suffering and
deprivation of the body needful to the development of the soul?” And you say to
yourself “If this is so, then shall I be relieved from the unpleasant duty of
ministering to the lives of these poor creatures whose surroundings are so
distasteful to me.” Now, suffering of all kinds borne in a spirit of rebellion,
of soreness and unwillingness, of non-comprehension of its holy import to the
life of the soul, can be of small value to anyone. Whereas sympathy, in drawing
out the aspirations of the soul, in lifting it to higher and purer spheres, not
only gives new life to the soul, but actually redeems and counteracts the
suffering of the body, and throws a light on this very suffering, which may make
it of inestimable value to the sufferer. Thus do we answer your question of
double meaning.
What is suffering?
Pause and consider it in its elements. Is it not the non-adaptation of the body
to its surroundings? You suffer when you exert yourself for others, when you place your body in
unpleasant surroundings; but you only suffer because your soul is not strong
enough to assert its power, its supremacy over the body, and to adapt the body
to its surroundings.
Animals and men suffer
from the inefficiency, the non-development of the soul; unless, as in the
case of Christ Jesus, whose suffering was voluntary undertaken for a special
purpose. But
even here he was “made perfect through suffering.”
The last vestige of self-will in the place of God’s will disappeared on the
Cross of Christ Jesus; and the struggle between the higher and the lower
principle in
(p. 77)
Jesus, is vividly described in the
picture you have of his agony in the
The suffering which is
voluntary is never of the hopeless and despairing nature of the suffering
against which the whole being rebels. It is actually impossible for one whose soul is alive to the advantage there is
in suffering, to resent it entirely or to feel it so painfully.
Beyond this there are
of course many sufferings, among which are the direct results of sins against
the body, as of sins against the soul. Such are the sufferings induced by
intemperance, by vice, and by many forms of disease produced by unwholesome
surroundings.
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