4. THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD - page 3

The Prayer consists of a preliminary statement of recognition and orientation: "Our Father, Which art in heaven"; then, of three threefold statements, making in all ten sections — 10, the perfect number of the Creative, for it is not only a culmination or seed (as symbolized by number 9), but it is that plus a new beginning at a higher level, a new creative impulse.

The words of this Prayer are so well known that it seems unnecessary to repeat them; and yet for centuries Christian men, women and children have said them myriads of times, either by rote and without real intent or with the literal minds and the merely devotional feeling of "creatures", not of potential "sons" — even though the Prayer was to "our Father"! Words, words, and no creative spirit within the utterance of these words, dulled by meaningless repetition! Men, Christians in name only, have failed to understand that if Jesus prayed with us all to God as "our Father" it was because he wanted to oppose the idea of an essential gap between men and God, and to affirm man's essential oneness in substance, quality and power with the Father. The leaders and teachers of Christianity have failed to see that Heaven is not a distant place away from here and now, but an order of being, a quality of activity, and the space of God's Will through all conceivable dimensions of length, breath and depth. They have been afraid or unwilling to realize that the Name, the Kingdom, the Will, had to be established not in a social-collective, religious-political sense, but primarily in a psychological sense, that is, in us as individuals.

"Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."


The "Name" is the certification of direct ancestry and thus of consubstantiality from seed to seed; one bears the name of one's father. The "Kingdom" is the inheritance, the patrimony. The "Will" is the sum-total of all the self-defining abilities and traits of character. These three factors are to be established in us if we are calling God with sufficient faith and intensity of realization. "Our Father". If He is our Father, His Name, His Kingdom, His Will are potentially in us, men born of the earth. All that is needed in order to see this threefold potential become an actuality here and now, where we are acting, is that the Father consecrates us as His sons by entrusting us with the power of the Fatherhood.

This trust is the only true "Initiation"; it is the transfer of the power of the Fatherhood by the Father upon the son who has "come of age". All that men require in order to become wielders of the power and agents of God is, in truth and reality, to come of age as essential beings. This does not mean that men will become "creators" in the all-inclusive and absolute sense in which God is Creator. But the power of the Fatherhood that emanates in any world-cycle from the one Father-Creator can operate in and through man as man comes of age; that is, as man becomes fully individualized and, being transfigured by the light and love of divine Sonship, experiences himself as a son of God and a carrier of this power of the Fatherhood.

Man must first come of age as a spiritual being; this is the one condition. And this coming of age implies a gradual development of those powers and faculties which belong to the "creative order", Heaven. They are the Christ-powers, in contradistinction to the faculties and abilities of the "earth order" which ordinary men today prize so enormously, yet which bind man to the earth, to materiality and mortality, to the blind compulsions of life or the negative light of the ego. And the essential one among these Christ-powers is Christ-love (agape) active compassion, or true charity (from charis, meaning divine Grace.)

Yet for man, at this relatively early stage of human evolution, to come spiritually of age is a very arduous task, filled with danger. The main danger is what psychologists today call "infantilism"; that is, the inability to free oneself from a state of emotional and mental, even of physical-social, dependence upon the parents. It is the danger of seeking to replace, at a purely personal level, a negative "father-image" in one's early life experience by an unsteady devotion to some transcendental "heavenly Father", who is then only a shadowy figure, the bearer of an unresolved "father-complex", as modern psychologists would say. The child must learn to operate on his own; he must thus "leave behind" the father, mother and all binding family attachments; also he should examine critically all traditional ideas, preconceptions and prejudices which his mind absorbed during childhood and adolescence. But he should always beware lest in leaving behind the realities of the "earth" he does not merely escape into the illusions of a "pseudo-heaven" — a heaven which, because it is not creative, is not the heaven of which Jesus spoke in dynamic terms.

In other words man must emerge from the binding matrix of the past, live as a mature individual in the present, and aim consciously toward the future — toward his future as a son of God. This process of emergence is what has often been called the "Path". It is the "Way, the Truth and the Life" which Jesus demonstrated as a divine Performer of the ritual process of metamorphosis of earthly man into Christ-man. As man walks upon this Path he actually becomes a "disciple of Christ". If man reaches his goal, he experiences the Transfiguration; he is a son of God. The light and love of the Fatherhood are completely focused within and through his individual being.

"Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses as we
forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil."

The second part of the great Prayer Jesus taught to his disciples refers to the three essential needs of man on this arduous Path. First, man must be sustained in his quest toward the future. Secondly, man must experience and act out compassionate love. Thirdly, man must find the strength to free himself from the pull of the past.

However, the term translated as "daily bread" in Jesus' Prayer actually means "bread for the morrow"; it refers to that power of sustainment which does not merely feed the everyday life, but is directed toward the creation of ever new tomorrows. It is creative futureward substance, not mere earth-chemicals for the body.

The forgiving of our trespasses as we forgive others signifies that on the path of discipleship to Christ, the great principle is mutuality. The Golden Rule is an expression of this principle; and here, in the Prayer, we see the Love which is compassion and "forgiveness" presented as an ever greater expression of mutuality linking the divine and the human. Man must love and forgive; then God's love and forgiveness vivify him in spirit. And in this mutual activity the disciple communes with Christ, and the substance of God's gift (the "bread for tomorrow") is leavened by the Spirit.

The overcoming of temptation and deliverance from evil point to the constant need there is for the individual to struggle against the down-pull of the past — or in modern scientific terminology the entropy of the material universe whose energy constantly "runs down". The accuracy of the translation has been questioned by many people who object to the idea that God could "lead" us into temptation; yet there may be a deep significance in this phrase "lead us not . . .", as we see that Jesus, after the Baptism, was also "led by the spirit into the wilderness".

The basic idea is no doubt that no one can be entrusted with the power of the Fatherhood until his organism of body, soul and mind has proven able to withstand the "fire" of the creative spirit. Every engine must likewise be tested for its ability to deliver power without being shattered by the energy released. Moreover, every person approaching his spiritual goal arouses, by this very fact, the accumulated power (the total inertia) of his past; he sees himself as what he has been, as a dark, negative ego; he meets his "Shadow" as concretized evil; and the tendency to recoil in horror, remorse and utter despondency from this confrontation is indeed, in some cases, overpowering. A divine intervention is thus needed to draw man away from the past by revealing to his inner eyes what he can be, what he must become, because he is essentially that — God's son.

This, then, gives significance to the little word "for" in the Prayer — "for thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory forever. Amen." God's intervention delivers the disciple from evil "for" in this act of intervention God appears to him as his Father. It is this very "vision of God" which is the Deliverer — provided the disciple and would-be son of God does not shrink in awe from the vision of the Father, Who holds in His hands the power of the disciple's very Self, his status as a "son". All great mystics have spoken guardedly of this "vision of God", in one form or another; every son must meet his Father face to face to receive the power of the Fatherhood.

First the disciple experiences the ineffable light-substance, the "cosmic consciousness", the oneness of all in the four-dimensional space of the "creative order", the Kingdom of Heaven. Then, he senses, pulsating through it all, the Power of God, the Fatherhood, in incessant activity. Lastly he envisions God's Glory — the very Selfhood of the Father. And he receives the "word of power", the AMEN, which is his own spiritual NAME, the key that unlocks for him the knowledge of how to use the power of the Fatherhood, and also the work to be done, which is the purpose of his illumined and "Christed" Soul.

The power must be used. It must be used consciously and purposefully by man, as a son and an agent of the Creator-Father. All the tragedies and the crises of human evolution have but one single purpose: to make individuals able to use this creative power on the basis of divine love and in the wisdom of the Creator.

Without individuals who have mastered such a use of the power of the Fatherhood, God the Creator would not see His "Plan of Creation" fulfilled; for it is only within and through the organisms of the many sons of God, during long eras of time, that this fulfillment of God's Plan can be reached. The Christ-men are the mystic vessels in which the mysterious trans-substantiation of matter into divine energy can be performed. Their sublime Company carries on the divine creative-regenerative Great Work after the turning point of the great cycle of God's creative activity has been reached. They are God-the-Many; He, the Creator "in the Beginning", is God-the-One. They are the Brotherhood of the Sons; He is the Father.

Through all there is, was and ever will be, the one power of the Fatherhood pulsates. It is one power, and it is many energies. Its names are legion; its properties are countless. It is spirit, yet it is also formative mind; and it is life. It is vast and diffuse through endless cosmic spaces; yet it is focused within the Soul of the transfigured individual. Where it is thus focused, there sons of God arise. With love and in wisdom they wield the power of the Fatherhood.

This is the goal. No man is so low that some day he may not reach it, be it after eons of suffering and travail of soul. No man is so high that he may not falter on the way, even in sight of the very goal. The Path is dangerous; many fall by the wayside as "casualties" of the process. Yet the goal can be reached. To this Jesus, the man, testified — and others after him. His promise is with us. And the Holy Spirit is with us, if we let it fill our confused and distracted egos.

It is possible. To know that this is possible; to know that this is possible through Christ, the Archetype of divine Sonship; to know that the Way, the Truth and the Life which prove that it is possible are still with us, even though they be obstructed by dogmas and covered by monstrous avalanches of human pride and greed — such "knowing" can make Christianity real and dynamic; a transforming force in a world desperately in need of creative vision and of the actual experience of spirit; a powerful affirmation of divine purpose where there is today only the negation of spirit or the frantic negation of the negation.

In this affirmation, which is strength and which is peace, modern man can meet all challenges. In this affirmation, man stands with the Father; and through His power and in His love "all things are possible".