new church life: september/october 2017
been cultivated without any special awareness that this is the person to be
helped. We need time to get this. But as time goes by, over many years, we can
appreciate more and more how every natural experience prepares us in some
way for greater understanding, greater enlightenment and greater fulfillment.
An illustration of this from a book, The Rational Optimist, is how just
about every prediction of doom and gloom for this planet over the last several
hundred years – from the overpopulation crisis to the food and energy resource
threat and global warming – has been met, unexpectedly, by new scientific
discoveries that have extended the viability of life as we know it despite the
exponential growth of the population. One can quibble over the details but
the fact is that we produce so much more food and energy than we need right
now that the glut has actually forced prices down, and the only reason for
deprivation anywhere in these matters is political.
In other technical fields the refinements of applied science, including
miniaturization and the ability to do more with less are illustrated by the hand-
held devices just about everyone carries these days, each one of which has
more computing power than the original Eniac machine that filled a whole
room just 70 years ago.
In a recent interview on PBS an immigrant professor at the Stanford
School of Medicine explained how he has developed a functional microscope
made primarily of folded paper. It will sell for less than one dollar, enabling
people even in the poorest and most remote areas of the planet to analyze and
treat horrible diseases right there in the field.
What’s the point? Well, obviously the planet itself is not producing new
elements, but people are discovering new ways to employ them, and with the
increase of the population there is a corresponding increase in the number of
creative minds applying themselves to our problems.
It is exactly the same in spiritual things: the more people there are using
the resources of this world to apply the principles of love and wisdom, the
better prepared we will be for eternal life. Just so, the more time we have to
practice these things the more confirmed and effective we will be – which is
why human longevity continues to be extended in this world, and why heaven
itself is never full or complete but always expanding.
Each person who contributes in any way to the welfare of the human race
benefits from the feeling of usefulness and purpose that enriches his or her
spirit, and anyone who actually gets help in some tangible, appreciable way can
enjoy the blessings of spiritual life in the thought and affection embodied in
it. So, both givers and receivers build up reservoirs of experience in this world
that fix and establish their trajectories forever.
But let’s consider some of the hard cases that sometimes make all of us
wonder about the value of this worldly life. As we know, there are people
382