The content’s game and the spirit movement

On the initiative of Monteiro Lobato, who translated it, many decades ago it came to us the poignant story of Pollyanna, the girl who tried to remain always happy from the moment that her humble father, devoted preacher of the Gospel, who said there were 800 verses found in the Bible that recommend joy, contentment, good cheer. These texts present not only in the New Testament but also in the Old Testament.

After the discovery, he told his daughter that if God had - through various emissaries - the job of recommending us for eight hundred times the joy, it is because he wanted us to be always cheerful. In addition, He invented, as a result, the "content’s game", which is to find at all, in all things that happen to us, an excuse to stay cheerful and happy.

Pollyanna's story came to our mind in the face of a letter we had received from a reader of this magazine, who said he was very sad for the course that the spiritual movement in Brazil has taken, in which it seems that sometimes we give more importance to the letter than the spirit, as modern reincarnated Pharisees.

"Love yourselves," it is the first lesson!

The sentence above is well known to all of us - leaders, speakers, writers, mediums, journalists, supervisors of groups or mere Houses Spiritist participants.

"Instruct yourselves," it is the second.

The lesson now remembered figure at the end of a text that also deserves to be remembered:

“I am too overcome with compassion for the afflicted, for your great weakness, to stop extending my helping hand to the deviants unfortunate who, seeing the sky fall in the abyss of error. Believe, love, meditate on the things there are revealed, do not mix the weeds with the good seed, utopias with the truths. Spiritists! Love yourselves, this is the first lesson, instruct yourselves, this is the second. It can be found all the truths in Christianity; It is from human the errors that it took root. Behold, from beyond the grave, we thought nothing, voices you cry: Brothers! Nothing perishes. Jesus-Christ is the winner of evil, be the winners of wickedness." (The Spirit of Truth, Paris, 1860, chapter VI, Section 5, of The Gospel According to Spiritism).

Of course, there have been events in the Spiritism movement that really sadden us, but none of them can be an excuse to ignore the need for the feeling of love, true love, love without blemish, selfless love, is the main ingredient of all what we performed in the Spiritism movement.

Acting like this, it will be possible - for sure - to take the example of the young Pollyanna and seek to highlight the achievements and activities that we participate the positive side, the noble side, the good things that bring us joy and contentment prescribed by 800 times in Scripture, restoring in this way, in the spiritism movement the joy that you have missed.