Chapter XIII
A NEW BEGINNING
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“I will pull down my barns,
and build greater.”
--Luke 12:18
[146] The
idea which Jesus had in mind when he used
this parable was that of illustrating the
folly of adding riches to riches for the
mere sake of having riches, without any
consideration of their ethical value.
Jesus knew that the pursuit of wealth for
its own sake, without any regard for what
it will enable its possessor to do to
ameliorate human suffering, could end
only in that form of idolatry which we
term as mere “money
worship.”
Every day
some man somewhere is thinking about
retiring from business, but the great
majority of these are dissuaded either by
their friends or by their own counter
impulses. A man starts out to acquire a
certain amount which he is sure will be
enough to enable him to do all he has set
his heart on doing, but when he arrives
at that amount there is a conflict in his
soul, providing he remembers his good
resolution of years ago, which many so
easily forget.
[147] He
finds himself arguing with himself, and
it is as if one self said to the other,
“It is ridiculous for you to think
of retiring now. You have only just got
your stride; from now on it will be all
easy money.” And he listens as he
should, and it is all easy money, for
wealth is like a snowball, which seems to
increase of its own momentum. It exceeds
his fondest expectations, but he neither
retires nor uses even the interest on his
investments, so great is it. You ask him
what he is doing with it all, and he
tells you he is putting it back into his
business. When you inquire why, he looks
at you as if you were foolish to ask such
a question. He is wondering if it is
possible that you do not realize that
putting money back into the business is
the surest way to make money work for you
while you rest.
Then, if you
are as courageous as you are inquisitive,
you ask him if he is doing anything to
make it easier for the hospitals which
depend on charity to give good service to
those who are unfortunate enough to have
to become inmates. He is quite likely to
tell you that he has serious intentions
of building a hospital that will be more
to his liking than those to which he now
refuses his support. If he does not do it
before he dies, he will surely do it
after he dies, but, as Henry Ward Beecher
once said of such a person, “He is
dead already.”
The man in
the parable found himself, as so many men
are finding themselves today, with more
wealth than he could use. Such a man paid
[148] $85,000 for a fur coat for his wife
a few years ago. I hope it will keep her
warm, but it will not if she remembers
that over in Europe the mothers of
new-born babies only last year had to
wrap those babies in paper, because they
had neither cotton, wool, silk, nor linen
for the purpose. I suppose if those
mothers should complain, some little
preacher for the foolish rich--for there
are rich who are not foolish--might call
to their attention the fact that Jesus
was born in a stable, and I have no doubt
some would derive comfort from the
reflection. But just the same it would
still be hard on the European baby.
We may argue
that the person who pays such a vast
amount of money for a fur coat is putting
the money into circulation; but on this
principle one might contend that a man
who lives extravagantly and riotously is
putting his money into circulation. Of
course it is all a question of
relativity, but there is one comparison
that such a person could make in a very
practical way which would show that
between some things there is no
similarity. For instance there is no
comparison between the state of mind
induced by the comfort from wearing an
$85,000 sable coat, and that induced as a
result of going without it and wearing
something cheaper while 80,000 children
are being fed for three days.
It is all a
state of consciousness, but there are
some people who could sleep better if
they knew that they had just provided
40,000 blankets at $2.00 a pair for baby
cribs. It is this dissatisfaction [149]
with good coats of a reasonable price, in
order to put on others of a price that,
from any point of view save that of
vulgar display is out of all reasonable
requirement, that makes the parable of
Jesus so applicable today. There is no
harm in keeping money in circulation, and
indeed that is what it is for, but no one
but a fool will contend that any woman
with a grain of commonsense will not get
more happiness out of keeping 40,000
babies warm than she will get out of
being herself overdressed.
When the man
in a parable had concluded to “eat,
drink, and be merry,” he was called
a fool and told that that night his soul
would be required of him. How short-lived
are the joys we refuse to share with
others! Now, just as every cloud has its
silver lining, so every parable has a
positive as well as a negative side.
There is a sense in which a man may say,
“I will pull down my barns, and
build greater,” and still be in
harmony with the Law, for there are
barns, and barns.
Here is a
man whose barn is a job by which he is
held captive, so that he can neither
improve himself where he is, nor spare
the time to look for something better.
Growing demands press upon his slender
resources until he either shrivels up in
his barn or he says within his soul,
“I will pull down my barn, and
build a greater one.” If a
man’s barn is a job in a place
where there is no possibility for further
expansion and improvement, [150] he may
stay with it until old age makes him even
less serviceable; or he may make a
resolution on the New Year’s Day of
his ambition to pull down his barn by
refusing to believe that it is the only
job to be had. This does not necessarily
mean that he shall throw out the dirty
water before he gets the clean, but it
does mean that he shall not hypnotize
himself into the belief that it is this
job, or none.
A man may be
in one barn, or job, physically while he
is in another mentally, and, while he is
so, he is mentally tearing one barn down
while he is building another in prospect,
so that he will step from one into the
other without disturbing anyone. When
this is not possible it is better to quit
and take one’s chances than to have
the walls of the barn close in on one to
a point of suffocation.
On the first
day of the first month it was a custom of
the Jews to celebrate the setting up of
the tabernacle. This was to call to their
remembrance the day when their
forefathers quit their jobs under Pharaoh
and started out for the new country of
larger promises. Under the guidance of
Moses they had pulled down their old
barns long before they had built new
ones, on the principle that if they did
not immediately get new ones they would
at least never go back to positions
outgrown. It was a case of burning their
bridges behind them.
In the
“days of ‘49” men gave
up good positions to go out to
California, not altogether in a [151]
spirit of adventure, but because the
walls of their respective barns were
restricting their movements. They had
nothing in sight but a prospect; but a
prospect without a job is sometimes
preferable to a job without a prospect.
Today there are greater barns in
California than were ever dreamed of in
Maine or New Hampshire. But this could
not have been so if pioneering New
Englanders had not been willing to pull
down their barns, or, to use their own
expression, “pull up
stakes.”
A
man’s barn may not be a job which
he is afraid to give up; it may be a
building of limitations which he has
erected for himself by persistent
negative thinking. There is a story told
of an Italian nobleman who, in order to
punish a woman who had been unfaithful to
him, caused her to be placed in a little
niche just large enough for her to stand
in. Then he ordered masons to lay a row
of bricks around her until one row rose
on top of another. By degrees a wall rose
until she was left standing in her living
tomb. It is a horrible story, but it
serves to illustrate how men build their
own barns around themselves by accepting
limitations as if they were imposed upon
them by God, and therefore incurable.
It does not
matter that the walls of one man’s
barn are built of gold bricks, or
accumulated riches, or whether another
man’s are built of the mud of
accumulated fears, each must decide to do
what the man in the parable resolved to
do. [152] He must say to his soul, with
all the strength of his character,
“I will pull down my barn, and
build greater.” Here is one whose
barn is neither a job which he is afraid
to lose, nor one whose walls he has built
by his own accumulated fears. This
person’s walls have been built by
others, but he accepts them as the
boundaries of his own restricted
opportunities. This barn is what to
others might seem a luxurious home. There
is no lack of anything, save the right to
expand. A young man or a young woman,
more frequently a young woman, is made to
feel that if he or she leaves the
parental roof for the establishment of a
new home it will hasten the end of a
mother who is considering her own
happiness more than that of her grown
child, though she would never admit it
even to herself. The mother is all too
frequently of hardy stock, so that such
sons and daughters live in these
particular barns until they are not fit
to live in any other.
There is a
certain kind of love which builds the
walls of this particular barn, but it is
a barn nevertheless, and all too
frequently a cage in which some dear soul
is imprisoned by its unwilling consent,
if there is such a state of mind. Have we
not seen men and women who have spent the
best part of their lives in a barn which
they have called home when all that was
fine in them cried for a home of their
own, in which they could be their real
selves? This accounts for the willingness
of young people to leave luxurious homes
for much less pretentious ones. [153]
When a young woman marries and leaves a
beautiful home to go into a small
apartment with the man of her choice she
is pulling down her barn in order to
build a greater, for she is about to
develop into something bigger than she
could ever become in what she calls her
[parents] home. In a material way she is
giving up something better than she is
getting, but in a spiritual way she is
getting something bigger than she is
giving up. It does not mean that she is
to despise the home of her parents simply
because she is now the mistress of a home
of her own. She merely pulls one down, in
which she is more or less of a dependent,
in order to build another up in which she
shall be the ruling spirit.
It is in
some such way as this that the man who
has built around himself a wall of wealth
must learn to tear it down, not in order
to throw this wealth away but in order to
do more good with it. It is well that he
built the old barn, but now he needs more
room. A man has not expanded to his
fullest capacity when he has become
merely fabulously rich. This is only the
beginning of his normal development for,
with all his acquisitiveness, he requires
those riches of the intellect by means of
which to appreciate art, music and
literature. And in addition to these he
acquires those riches of soul by means of
which to appreciate the needs of
suffering humanity.
When the
rich man senses those personal needs he
resolves to become of service. Theodore
Roosevelt might have been content with
his particular [154] barn of social and
financial security, but he saw the need
of men in his station of life taking an
active interest in politics. Hitherto
politics was largely the profitable
pursuit of the unclean, but when Mr.
Roosevelt saw that this was leading to
national immorality he said, if not in
word, in deed, “I will pull down my
barns (or respectable seclusion) and
build greater.” He might have
continued to live in his barn of personal
comfort and been content to cast his vote
like every other citizen, but that was
not his way. He pulled down the barn of
his private life and became a public
character such as has not been seen in
many a day.
Consider the
case of young Father Damien of Belgium
whose life might have been spent in the
quiet of a monastery, but he early
recognized that this would have been
merely an easy method of saving his own
soul. He had read of those eastern lepers
who were taken to the Island of Molokai
from their homes as soon as the dread
disease manifested itself. On that island
they were left with no one to care for
them but lepers like themselves, since no
one dared to run the risk of contracting
the horrible malady. When Father Damien
volunteered to go to Molokai he was
informed that it would be the place of
his burial, since no one was ever
permitted to leave after once setting
foot on its soil. It was indeed the place
of his burial for, after many years spent
in ministering to the physical as well as
the spiritual welfare [155] he finally
died of the disease, which he contracted
through such ministry. It was his way of
tearing down his barn and building a
greater one.
History
teems with glorious deeds of similar
character but time is not long enough for
us to recount even a tithe of them. It is
enough for us to know that there is a
positive side to his parable of the
Master. At the close of this year and the
opening of another year it may be that we
have discovered that our particular barn
is not large enough, and as the New Year
approaches we may be making those inner
resolutions which are the necessary
forerunners of better things to follow.
It may be that some of us are not so
dissatisfied with our barns as are
others, for not all men are victims of
discontent. There are those who feel that
they are doing the best they can with the
means at hand. But are they?
A
man’s barn is never big enough
until there is not room enough for
another good act. When a man’s barn
is big enough to satisfy him he has
stopped growing. There is always room for
expansion. In one sense it is scientific
not to admit our limitations; in another
it is wise to recognize that our
possibilities are much greater than our
performances. When a man realizes that
his mental barn is cluttered with a lot
of junk in the form of negative and
unproductive thoughts he ought to clean
it up. If on the other hand it is full of
a sound philosophy which [156] he is
making very little use of, then he needs
to pull it down and build a greater one
where there will be room for the
application of all he knows.
Sometimes a
man’s barn is a habit which he has
built around himself, and which stands in
the way of his progress. When this is the
case he must not conclude that his habit
is too strong ever to be broken. Let him
fall back upon the sustaining Infinite in
his own soul, and say to himself,
“I will pull down this barn, this
debilitating habit, and build a greater
habit, a habit of temperance and
sobriety. I will use all my mental energy
in the direction of proving my God-given
superiority over everything that robs me
of self-respect. I will build a barn, a
habit of thought, that will stand against
every wind of temptation, that will be a
place into which I can retreat when the
storm of passion threatens to overwhelm
me. It will be a temple of pure thoughts
at the very center of my thinking being,
erected thought by thought, and day by
day; the walls will be like the walls of
a fortress, impervious to any assault
that may be made upon them. The barn that
I shall build, in place of the one that I
shall pull down, will be the habitual
dependence upon Spirit instead of matter,
for through Spirit and my reliance upon
it, I shall be more than
conqueror.”
If the barn
that we have builded is the habit of
regarding ourselves as invalids and
therefore [157] unable to do the one
thing our hearts desire to do, in this
also must we be resolute. If we have
built for ourselves a barn, the walls of
which are fear and doubt, depression and
discouragement, we must again say within
our souls, “I will pull down my
barn and build a greater. I will build
those ‘more stately mansions’
of the soul, out of that Rock that is
higher than I, that spiritual Truth which
quiets the mind and heals the body at the
same time.
“With
the passing of the old year there will be
a passing also of all my old false
beliefs, for the New Year of spiritual
awakening has brought with it the
revelation of Christ in me, the perfect
expression of a perfect God. I shall not
look back and darken a beautiful present
by regrets for what might seem to be an
aimless past. I shall regard it as a
traveler on an ocean liner regards the
refuse which is thrown overboard--I shall
say to my soul ‘You have seen the
last of the old barn, for the new barn,
the New Year with all its glorious
possibilities, is to be
constructed.’
“I
shall press forward to the completion of
that spiritual building in consciousness,
that building ‘not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens,’ that
structure in which is nothing ‘that
maketh or worketh a lie,’ that
Creation of Pure Thought, wherein is no
sin and sickness, no pain and no poverty,
that building which is not less real,
because it is not of matter, but of Mind.
Having [158] pulled down the barn of my
old misconceptions, I shall build a
greater structure on that solid
foundation of my understood relation to
that Eternality which, to know aright, is
Life Eternal.”
Chapter
14
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
