Special

por Rogerio Coelho

Of the extemporaneity of the teachings 
(Part 2 and final)

 

I still have many things to say to you, but presently you cannot bear them


“(...) You will hear with your ears and you will understand nothing; you shall see with your eyes and you shall see nothing”. 
-               Jesus. (Mt., 13:13)


The moral that the Spirits teach is that of Christ, for the simple reason that there is no better one. But then, what good is their teaching, if they only repeat what we already know? The same could be said of the morality of Christ, which already Socrates and Plato taught almost five hundred years before Him and in very similar terms. The same could also be said of all moralists, who do nothing more than repeat the same thing in all tones and in all forms. Well! Spirits come - quite simply - to increase the number of moralists, except that, everywhere they are heard, they are heard both in the hut and in the palace, both by the ignorant and by the learned.

What the teaching of the Spirits adds to the morality of Christ is the knowledge of the principles governing the relations between the "dead" and the "living", principles that complete the vague notions of the soul, its past and its future , giving by sanction to the Christian doctrine the own laws of the Nature. With the help of the new lights that Spiritism and Spirits spread, man recognizes himself in solidarity with all beings and understands this solidarity; charity and fraternity becomes a social necessity; he does by conviction what he did only out of duty, and does it better".

Here is a question: "How useful are these manifestations or revelations, since the Spirits do not know more than we do, or do not tell us everything they know?"1

Spirits refrain from giving us what we can get by work. On the other hand, there are things which they are not allowed to reveal, because our present stage does not give us the capacity to understand them. Aside from this, the conditions of the new existence in which they find themselves increase the circle of perceptions: they see what they did not see on Earth; freed from the barriers of matter, exempt from the care of corporeal life, they appreciate things from a higher point of view; the perspicacity they enjoy covers a wider horizon; they understand their mistakes, rectify their ideas and get rid of human losses. Herein lies the superiority of the Spirits in relation to corporeal humanity, and hence the possibility of their advice - according to the degree of advance they have attained, more judicious and disinterested than that of incarnates. The environment in which they are found enables them to initiate us into the things we do not know about the Future Life that we cannot learn in the environment we are in. Until now, man has only hypothesized about his future; such is the reason why his beliefs in this respect have broken down into such numerous and divergent systems, from nothing to the fantastic conceptions of hell and paradise. Today, they are the eyewitnesses, the very actors in the afterlife who tell us what they have become and only they could do.

(...) It enabled God to lift the veil that concealed the invisible world from the visible world. There is nothing extra-human about the manifestations: it is spiritual humanity that comes to talk to the corporeal humanity and, among other things, to say: "we exist, therefore nothingness does not exist: this is what we are and what you will be; and as you walk in the darkness, we have seen you clear the way and draw the script for you: you walk by chance, we have pointed you to the goal. The earthly life was everything to you, because you saw nothing else. We came to tell you, showing the spiritual life: the earthly life is nothing. Our vision stopped in the tomb, we uncovered to you a splendid horizon. You did not know why you suffer on Earth; now in suffering you can see God’s justice. The good produced no apparent fruit for the future. Henceforth it will have a purpose and will be a necessity; brotherhood, which was only a beautiful theory, now rests on a law of Nature. At the end of your life, you would say an eternal goodbye to those that are dear to you: now you will say: "See you soon!"

Not only, however, will the future life concern the fruits that man must reap from it. He will taste them on Earth by the transformation these new beliefs will necessarily have in his character, in his tastes, in his tendencies, and therefore in his social habits and relationships. Putting an end to the realm of selfishness, pride and unbelief, they prepare the good, which is the Kingdom of God, proclaimed by Christ".

Moses opened the way; Jesus continued the work; Spiritism will conclude it

"(...) Much will be asked of him to whom much has been given, and greater ones will be accounted to him to whom more things have been entrusted" - Jesus. (Luke 12:48).

According to Kardec1, "if Christ could not fully develop His teaching, it was because men lacked knowledge that they could acquire only in time and without which they would not understand; there are many things that would seem absurd in the state of knowledge then. To complete His teachings must be understood in the sense of explaining and developing, not in assembling new truths, because everything in it is in the state of germ, lacking only the key to understand the sense of the words".

Continuing the Master of Lyon1, "Spiritism, starting from the very words of Christ, as it came from Moses, is a direct consequence of His doctrine." The vague idea of ​​the future life adds the revelation of the existence of the invisible world that surrounds us and peoples the space, and thus it needs the belief, gives it a body, a consistency, a reality. It defines the bonds that unite the soul to the body and raises the veil that hides the mysteries of birth and death for men. In Spiritism, man knows where he comes from, where he is going, why he is on this Earth, why he suffers temporarily and sees the justice of God everywhere. He knows that the soul progresses incessantly, through a series of successive existences, until it reaches the degree of perfection that brings him near to God. He knows that all souls, having the same point of origin, are created equal, with equal aptitude to progress, by virtue of their free-will; that they are all of the same essence and that there is no difference between them, except in the progress made; that they have all the same fate and will reach the same goal, more or less quickly, by work and goodwill".

Revelations are therefore taught gradually over the millennia when their opportunity becomes urgent, necessary..."

Kardec concludes1: "The first revelation had its personification in Moses, the second in the Christ, and the third has no individual in it. The first two were individual, the third collective, there is an essential character of great importance. It is collective in the sense of not being made or given as a privilege to any person, no one, therefore, can inculcate himself as its exclusive prophet; it was spread simultaneously over the Earth to millions of people of all ages and conditions, the lowest to the highest of the scale.

"The teaching of the Spirits, reproducing the maxims of the Christ in different forms, developing and commenting them, to make them available to all is not circumscribed, all, literate or illiterate, believers and unbelievers, Christians or not, can receive it, since Spirits communicate everywhere. Neither of those who receive it, directly or through others, can plead ignorance, cannot be excused neither by lack of education nor by obscurity of the allegorical sense.

(...) To the Spiritists, therefore, much will be asked, because much they have received too; but also to those who have profited, much will be given".1

(...) The Commandments of God, given through Moses, contain the germ of the broader Christian morality. The comments of the Bible, however, restrained their meaning, because, practiced in all their purity, they would not have understood it then. But even so, God's Ten Commandments ceased to be one as a brilliant frontispiece, a beacon destined to clear the road that mankind had to go through.

The morality which Moses taught was appropriate to the state of advancement in which the peoples – he proposed to regenerate – and these peoples, semi-wild regarding the perfection of the Soul did not understand that one could worship God otherwise than by means of burning offerings, nor that an enemy should be forgiven. Remarkable from the point of view of matter and even of the arts and sciences, their intelligence, was long overdue in morality and had not been converted under the rule of an entirely spiritual religion. They needed a semi-material representation, which represented the Hebrew religion. The holocausts spoke to their senses, as the idea of ​​God spoke to the Spirit.

(...) The time has come for ideas to be developed, so that the progress that is in God's plan can be accomplished. They have to follow the same route as the ideas of freedom, their forerunners. However, it is not believed that this development takes place without struggle. No; those ideas need, in order to reach maturity, of shakes and discussions, in order to attract the attention of the masses. Once this is achieved, the beauty and sanctity of morals will touch the Spirits, who will then embrace a Science that gives them the key to the future life and unlocks the doors of eternal happiness".

Moses - Jesus – Spiritism1

"The Supreme Spirits proceed in their revelations with extreme wisdom. They do not attack the great questions of the Doctrine only gradually, as the intellect is apt to understand the truth of a higher order, and when circumstances prove conducive to the issuance of a new idea That is why, at the beginning, they did not say everything, and they did not say anything to-day, never yielding to the impatience of the most anxious, who want the fruits before they are ripe.Therefore, it would be superfluous to wish to advance to the time that Providence signed for every thing, because then the truly serious Spirits would deny their contest".

Joanna de Ângelis1 claims to be all of us "(...) Sick Spirits in difficult treatment, because the condition of unhappiness that is our favorite tonic pleases us. However, Jesus is the Divine Physician and His Doctrine is the effective medicine that we can use with immediate results.

If, however, in the tumult in which we suffer, we have lost our ears to hear Him or the taste for the bread of His teachings, let us seek a solitary rock, far from the tribulations, in the center of an island, and let us be receptive. Such a rock and such an island is prayer and meditation within the reach of all. There the Celestial Aesculapius will tell us again, with the same previous assurance: "Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you will obtain it and it will be granted you what you ask for".

The incomparable Master of Lyon says that "man has reached a point where the light emerges from itself under the bushel, he is mature enough to face it, so much the worse for those who dare not open their eyes. To consider things in a broad and elevated way, no longer from the petty and narrow point of view of the interests of sects and castes".


Translation:
Eleni Frangatos - eleni.moreira@uol.com.br

 
 

     
     

O Consolador
 Revista Semanal de Divulgação Espírita