“We are nearer to you than you are to each other, Dad, and we can prove
it, if you will let go of yourselves and take hold of us. We want to
come to you. We do come to you. We try and try to tell you that there
is nothing to grieve about, nothing to dread. Only love, and hope, and
growth, and beauty of completer union. But we can’t do it alone. We
must have a free heart, a free mind, a free hope to come into. Give us
that, and we will show you that we are more truly your own—not your own
flesh and blood, but your own purpose and force, which was one in the
beginning, and will inevitably be one in the end. We want to make it one
now. Don’t you, Dad? Won’t you try to let the bars down and take us in?
We’ll come, and we’ll all be happier than you’ve ever been in all your
life yet, because the Eternal Purpose is Unity, and we can begin it right
here and now, if you there will join us and be part with us, as we with
you, of the glorious and happy and (O) irresistible movement toward the
great end—which, after all, is not an end, but an eternal and infinite
growth toward bigger things.
“It is a big gospel we are giving you, sir; a man’s gospel; a gospel of
hope and beauty and construction. And I am asking you to let me come
in again to your every-day life, to let the dread and misgiving and
unhappiness go, to think of us here—all of us who are yours—as still
yours, still with you, still loving and working and hoping with you and
for you; and if you can do that, I promise you we shall all be happier
than any of us have ever been before.
“You see, sir, we are all of the forces of Progress. We are all for
Light, and Building, and Justice, and Truth, and when one of us holds
back we are all held back. This is the first time it has been possible
to tell you all this. This is the first time we have been able to reach
you freely, in a way you could not mistake. But the people who have
preached the gospel of happiness as a curative force have not been
entirely wrong. They have not been wholly right. But the forces here
cannot possibly affect a tense and resisting mind as they can a relaxed
and receptive one. And the forces here are potent and eager and ready.
You know that must be true, because I am one of them, and the only change
in me—absolutely the only one, Dad—is that I have left the limitations
of the flesh behind and grown in perception and knowledge. I am the same
Boy,[8] plus the better things, and minus the limitations.
“Grandmother is the same, too—plus. She is sweeter, finer, broader,
more loving, than when you knew her. Just as she was, but expanded,
irradiated, deepened. That’s all that death means, so you see it isn’t
death at all, nor separation, nor anything but beauty, and greater love,
and wider opportunity, and higher ideals to live to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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