Speaker 1: Abiding joy, who carry music in their heart through dusky
lane and wrangling mart plying their daily toil with busier
feet because their secret souls a holier repeat. Serene will
be our days in bright and happy will our nature
be when love is an unerring light and joy its
own security, wordsworth abiding joy. Is there such a thing?
Where is it? Who possesses it? Yes, there is such
a thing. It is where there is no sin. It
is possessed by the pure hearted. As darkness is a
passing shadow, and light is substance that remains. So sorrow
is fleeting, but joy abides forever. No true thing can
pass away and become lost. No false thing can remain
and be preserved. Sorrow is false, it cannot live. Joy
is true and it cannot die. Joy may become hidden
for a time, but it can always be recovered. Sorrow
may remain for a period, but it can be transcended
and dispersed. Do not think your sorrow will remain. It
will pass away like a cloud. Do not believe that
the torments of sin are ever your portion. They will
vanish like a hideous nightmare. Awake, arise, be holy and joyful.
You are the creator of your own shadows. You desire,
and then you grieve, renounce, and then you all rejoice.
You are not the impotent slave of sorrow. The never
ending gladness await your home coming. You are not the
helpless prisoner of the darkness and dreams of sin. Even now,
the beautiful light of holiness shines upon your sleeping lids,
ready to greet your awakening vision. In the heavy, troubled
sleep of sin and self, the abiding joy is lost
and forgotten. Its undying music is no more heard, and
the fragrance of its fadeless flowers no longer cheers the
heart of the wayfarer. But when sin and self are abandoned,
when the clinging to things for personal pleasure is put away,
then the shadows of grief disappear, and the heart is
restored to its imperishable joy. Joy comes and fills the
self emptied heart. It abides with the peaceful, Its rain
is with the pure. Joy flees from the selfish, It
deserts the quarrelsome. It is hidden from the impure. Joy
is as an angel, so beautiful and delicate in chaste,
that she can only dwell with holiness. She cannot remain
with selfishness, She is wedded to love. Every man is
truly happy in so far as he is unselfish, he
is miserable in so far as he is selfish. All
truly good men, and by good men I mean those
who have fought victoria the battle against self, are men
of joy. How great is the jubulation of the saint.
No true teacher promises sorrow as the ultimate of life.
He promises joy. He points to sorrow, but only as
a process which sin has rendered necessary. Where self ends,
grief passes away. Joy is the companion of righteousness in
the divine life. Tender compassion fills the place where weeping
sorrow sat. During the process of becoming unselfish, there are
periods of deep sorrow. Purification is necessarily severe. All becoming
is painful. Abiding joy is its completion, realized only in
the perfection of being. And this is a state where
all is loveliness and power and love with all sublimest
qualities of mind, where all enjoyed dominion over themselves, acts, feelings, thoughts, conditions.
Consider how a flower evolves and becomes. At first, there
is a little germ groping its way in the dark soil,
towards the upper light. Then the plant appears, and leaf
is added unto leaf, and finally the perfected flower appears,
in the sweet perfume and chaste beauty of which all
effort ceases. So with human life, at first the blind
groping for the light in the dark soil of selfishness
and ignorance. Then the coming into the light, and the
gradual overcoming of selfishness with its accompanying pain and sorrow,
and finally the perfect flower of a pure, unselfish life,
giving forth without effort the perfume of holiness and the
beauty of joy. The good, the pure are superatively happy.
However man may argumentatively deny or qualify this, humanity instinctively
knows it to be true. Do not men everywhere picture
their angels as the most joyful of beings? There are
joyful angels and bodies of flesh. We meet them and
pass on. And how many of those who come in
contact with them are sufficiently pure to see the vision
within the form, to see the incorruptible angel in its
common instrument of clay, They needs must grow. Who cannot
see the blade before the ear must be the outward
symbols disappear from him whose inward sight is clear. Yes,
the pure are joyful. We look almost in vain for
any expressions of sorrow. In the words of Jesus, the
man of sorrows is only completed in the man of joy.
Aye Buddha, who wept with all my brother's tears, whose
heart was broken by a whole world's woe. Laugh and
am glad, for there is liberty in sin, and in
the struggle against sin there is unrest and affliction. But
in the perfection of truth, in the path of righteousness,
there is abiding joy. Enter the path. There spring the
healing streams, quenching all thirst. There bloom the immortal flowers,
carpeting all the way with joy, their throng, swiftest and
sweetest hours. Tribuation lasts only so long as there remains
some chaff of self which needs to be removed. The
tribuation or threshing machine ceases to work. When all the
grain is separated from the chaff, and when the last
impurities are blown away from the soul, Tribulation has completed
its work, and there is no more need for it
than abiding joy is realized. All the saints and prophets
and saviors of the race have proclaimed with rejoicing the
Gospel or the good News. All men know what good
news is an impending calamity avoided, a disease cured, friends
arrived or returned in safety, difficulties overcome, success in some
enterprise assured. But what is the good news of the
saintly ones. This that there is peace for the troubled,
healing for the afflicted, gladness for the grief stricken, victory
for the sinful, a home coming for the wanderer, and
joy for the sorrowing and broken hearted. Not that these
beautiful realities shall be in some future world, but they
are here and now, that they are known and realized
and enjoyed. And therefore proclaim that all may accept them
who break the galling bonds of self and rise into
the glorious liberty of unselfish love. Seek the highest good,
and you will find it as you practice it and
realize it. You will taste the deepest, sweetest joy as
you succeed in forgetting your own selfish desires, and your
thoughtfulness for others, in your care for others, in your
service for others. Just so far and no further will
you find and realize the abiding joy in life. Inside
the gateway of unselfishness lies the asylum of abiding joy.
And whosoever will may enter in, whosoever doubts, let him
come and see. And knowing this, that selfishness leads to misery,
unselfishness to joy. Not merely for oneself alone, For if
this were all, how unworthy could be our endeavors, But
for the whole world. And because all with whom we
live in come in contact, will be the happier and
truer for our unselfishness, because humanity is one, and the
joy of one is the joy of all. Knowing this,
let us scatter flowers and not thorns in the common
ways of life. Yes, even in the high way of
our enemies, let us scatter the blossoms of unselfish love.
So shall the pressure in their footprints fill the air
with the perfume of holiness, and gladden the world with
the aroma of joy.