Your Lodge should be your place of inspiration, the place where you
learn how you are to serve, the place where you find the bread of
life. But the bread of life is meant to feed the hungry, and not to
surfeit those already filled, to feed the hungry crowds around you
starving for knowledge, that life may be made intelligible and thus
tolerable to them; and it is yours to feed the flock of the Great
Shepherd, and to help those who, without this Wisdom, are helpless.
And all need it; not the poor alone, nor the rich alone, but every
child of man. For the one thing that presses upon all alike, the
bitterness of life, is the sense of wrong, the want of intelligibility
in life, and therefore a feeling of the lack of justice upon earth;
that is the sting which pierces every heart; whether the heart belong
to the rich or the poor, it matters not. When you understand life,
life becomes bearable; and never till you understand it will it cease
to be a burden grievous to be borne; but when you understand it,
everything changes. When you realise its meaning, its value, you can
put up with the difficulties. And our work with regard to those around
us is to bring that knowledge, and by that knowledge to lift them to a
place of peace. That is the work which demands to be done, and which
your Lodges have the duty of doing. For there ought not to be one
scheme for human helping, in any place where a Lodge of the
Theosophical Society is established, where in that Lodge workers may
not be found ready and eager to give labor to the helping of their
brothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling about
Universal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, in
discussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meant
soft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. It
means work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who require
service at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for the
world, that is the true meaning of Brotherhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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