*
I am coming to recognize that the primary Christian reality is kinship, relatedness of persons, the union of family.
This is not so much a metaphorical way of explaining other things, as the bottom line - that by which everything else is explained.
It is, I think, the key.
**
Edited from Letter from a Father by William Arkle - this is God speaking:
http://www.billarkle.co.uk/prose/letterfromafather2.html
One of the most important
ways I have chosen for you to learn what is vital for your understanding
is to find yourself a part of a family situation on earth, for here you
are able to go though the experience in one single lifetime, and with
unbroken continuity, the experience of being a child, a mature individual
and a parent.
In this situation, if you will only learn to pay close attention
to it, are all the mysteries of the universe that matter to you.
If you
take the trouble to stand apart and observe closely all the relationships
that exist in your family situations, you will be able to observe as completely
as you will how the problems of life arise, why they arise and how they
are solved.
The family situation is a very special gift to you and one
day you will be surprised that you took it so for granted.
*
I have not yet explained
to you that you are not my only children, and that I have not brought
you all up in the same way. I explained that I have gradually brought
the physical universe into being by planning it and organising it at more
ethereal levels of manifestation where the stuff of manifestation is more
responsive and mobile. These levels are called by you more heavenly levels
of being, for in them everything is more in harmony and more expressive
of the intense beauty which to me is so valuable.
As these ethereal
forms of manifestation were brought into existence, so did I cause other
of my children [,the angels ,] to be born into them. They grew up and matured in these
conditions where their attention was filled with the direct and indirect
presence of your mother and myself.
We wished them to become familiar
with us in this way because we were going to need them as helpers while
our plan of creation grew outwards from us to more remote and unconditioned
levels where our personality also became less dominant, and where other
personalities, your own, would in future time be able to grow up in a
slower and more difficult environment but a more independent one.
*
You understand that,
at this very point in my description, you are face-to-face with one of
the great secrets of my work, which, until now, has been kept hidden from
you for the children of heaven have never had that independence that you
have had.
They have been through happier times, but they have had greater
need of me and my strength, for they were not weaned at the beginning
on the strength and independence which you have been weaned on...
Slowly
you will come to understand that the standing alone and apart in my universe,
without being able to detect me directly, is a gift to your development
which my other children have not had.
*
This gift is a painful gift for
much of the time, but the depth of the understanding it produces is far
greater than the understanding produced in the happy states of heaven
where the qualities of my being are dominant. For joy and delight fill
the days of these heavenly children, but such lessons are one-sided and
do not teach them the intrinsic values of such delights because they are
not valued against the experience of their opposites.
You, on the other
hand, value all these opposites from the very beginning and in so doing
gain an insight which is beyond my ability to explain to you at this stage,
but I can say that your more detached and objective judgements will one
day put you in a position where the added depth of your understanding
will show you the merit of my endeavour...
*
Try to become clear
in your own understanding how you feel towards your own children of earth.
When you feel clearly the real depth of the attitudes you should properly
find within yourselves towards them, then nearly all of the questions
you have about my attitudes towards you will be answered.
For, if you
have not yet learned to love your own children properly, then you are
not yet ready to learn how I feel towards you.
If you are not aware that
your responsibilities towards your loved ones are an exact analogy of
my responsibilities towards you then you have not begun to understand
why I have put you on earth.
**
