October 15:   Mother’s Ascension Day Celebration for Families

The following are stories about Mother’s childhood that may be used as part of a children’s story or Sunday school.  They are taken from published Pearls of Wisdom and her book, In My Own Words. 

You may wish to introduce the stories by introductory comments:

 

   

       

 God has placed a mission, a divine plan in our hearts.  As children, our souls learn many lessons to prepare us for this mission.

 

Ø     These  stories from Mother’s childhood show us how God was teaching her to exercise love and learn wonderful virtues so that her GREAT ME or Christ Self would grow.

 

Ø     This happens in your life too!

 

Ø     What are some of the virtues of God?  [eg: honesty, working hard/perseverance, courage, love, kindness, constancy, humility, gratitude, patience, care for elementals, et]

 

Ø     Let’s read a few stories and, as you listen, think about the virtues God was teaching Mother.     [After each story, a few virtues are listed as a starting point in your discussions.]

 

 

Omri-Tas, January 8, 2006 “I Will Keep the Vow,” vo.l 49, no. 2 

“It’s funny, I had completely forgotten about this episode of selling violets when I was very little—going into the woods and picking for hours and hours bunches of violets and taking them with a playmate and going door to door offering these violets for sale, and the playmate’s mother being the wise one who held us in prayer for our mission—a very lovely, Christian woman who inspired that prayer. I remember how the dog and the cat who went with us also had to kneel in prayer—put their little paws together and off they went.  

It’s wonderful to know how little children can be so much a part of the innocence of a cosmos. Isn’t that quality of innocence in Omri-Tas so beautiful when it is the mature crystal, still so innocent? Innocence, I think, is the ability to appreciate and enjoy the very simple truths of life and to take a childlike enjoyment and happiness out of these very precious pearls that he has brought to us and then to realize they’re not so simple. But they are really the wisdom of the ages.”  

 What are some virtues?   Hard work, innocence, courage, devotion, determination, care for elementals 

 

Excerpts from In My Own Words, Elizabeth Clare Prophet

 Chapter 4:  Early Memories  (you may want to divide this excerpt into sections)     

“Among the early memories of my childhood are scenes in my play yard with my playmates. My surroundings were truly idyllic. My father fixed up the old tool shed as a playhouse. On the east wall he put in a beautiful stained-glass window from an old mansion that had been torn down in Rumson. The morning sun shone through the aquas, blues and purples of a clipper ship sailing on the high seas. What it conveyed to me, what I sensed (though unarticulated by my child awareness) was the depth and power of the ocean of God’s being and the movement of the ship of identity across the sea of life.  

Many years later, when I was twenty-two and under training by Mark L. Prophet, my late husband, he wrote down a poem for me that recalled this thoughtform of my childhood:  

Onward, courage!  

Then blame not the Bard  

When the wind and the gale  

Sweep o’er the moor  

And bow down the sail,  

For the ship shall move on  

And the Port be obtained  

If the courage be high  

And the will be maintained!  

 

“Just across the garden path from my playhouse door was a white picket fence enclosing my very own play yard. Here Daddy built me a rope swing with a heavy wooden seat suspended from sturdy metal poles that formed an arch. Because the ropes were long, my friends and I could swing high. And swing we did, by the hour. There was a sandbox; a large, round, low table about a foot high for making mud pies and other concoctions; and a large box with two lids. This box alternated as the icebox for mud pies and a home for the rabbits who escaped from the Morris boys’ pen next door from time to time.  

Under the back window in our large, sunny kitchen, my father built me a red chest with my name on top stamped in gold and outlined in black. In that chest I kept mostly toys, blocks and some dolls and handmade doll clothes.  

Father and Mother decided that there should be a map of the world over my toy chest. And so one day, at my two-year-old eye level, they put up a colorful map with the names of all the countries and capital cities in bold type. I couldn’t read, so I would look at the countries, point to them and ask my mother, who would be cooking or washing dishes, “What is this country? What is that country?” No matter how many times I would ask her, she would tell me again.  

Soon I had memorized all of the countries in the world. But more than that, I was developing a world awareness as I played with my blocks on the black-and-white checkered kitchen linoleum. As my mother would tell me about these countries and impart to me her knowledge of the world, I would put my finger on a country and get a sense of what it was like there, and what the people and children were like.  

One Easter, a friend of my parents gave me an Easter basket with a hen and a dozen chicks. My father went to work and built an elaborate chicken house and chicken pen. Mother and I took care of the chickens for many years, collecting their eggs each morning and feeding them grain, water and leftovers. When we let the chickens out to wander in the fresh grass, they would often stray from the backyard to the front and then go next door or across the street onto the neighbors’ lawns and gardens. I ran after them and shooed them back to their pen. We named the mother hen Lucy Locket and we called another one Chicken Little.  

I was often making mud pies, swinging on my swing or rolling down the hill of green grass from the back door to the chicken coop. Or I’d be riding my trike or scooter up and down South Street with my best friend, Jane Petherbridge. Sometimes I was picking little weeds that choked the flowers in the rock garden or plucking the dead leaves and flowers off of the geraniums in their pots. Otherwise, I was sure to be found on the front porch with my dolls, my doll carriage, my doll beds and high chairs, and a toy stove and kitchen sink. Jane would bring over her dolls and doll carriage and we would play house by the hour.  

Wisteria vines entwined themselves about the front porch roof and balustrades and had done so for decades. In the summertime, they provided shade on the sunny side of the house. Clusters of pale purple flowers tumbled from the branches. For me the scent of wisteria is a sweet scent of childhood and early “motherhood.”  

I took care of Trudy, my littlest doll, with her handmade dresses, nighties, and pink angora hat and coat. There was Pamela, whom I could bathe, and Gwendolyn in her knitted skirt, sweater and hat. She had beautiful golden blond hair and, like the others, eyes that opened and shut. Then there was Emily, the largest doll of all. I have no idea where she came from, but the top of her head and her hair were missing. All were loved and cared for as my very own babies. Mother and my Swiss aunts kept me supplied with the sweetest doll clothes. As Jane and I grew older, we got new dolls that could drink and wet their diapers. We could wash and set their hair and give them baths.  

I had several dollhouses when I was a child. The last and the largest was built by my father, and my collection of dolls and doll furniture for it was considerable. Jane and I spent many a winter’s afternoon and evening enacting all kinds of stories and plays with the families who lived in our dollhouses.  

By the time I was eight years old, I was taking care of real babies around the neighborhood. It was my greatest happiness to be allowed to wheel the neighborhood babies up and down the street, feed them their lunch or supper, or care for them at the beach. By and by I was in demand as a babysitter and continued this occupation through high school as a means of earning money for clothes and college. ”

 

Virtues:   care for elementals, kindness, sensitivity to beauty, responsibility for babies, innocence and love, awareness of the world

 

Chapter 5:  Neighbors   

“I remember how Stephen Morris taught me to ride my first two-wheel bike up and down South Street. It seemed I would never get the hang of it, and patient “Saint Stephen” would run up and down the street with me night after night. One day I made up my mind that this was the day I was going to ride my bike. I prayed to God to help me and asked him to be my partner and ride with me. Then I thought, “If God is going to be my partner, why don’t I just ask him to ride my bike through me.” So I did. I said, “God, please ride my bike with me and through me, and I’ll ride it too.” And when I made up my mind to do it, with God, I got on my bike and rode. I was riding when Stephen came home and saw me. He was so happy and I was too.  

I remembered the Bible verse, “With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.”⁵ After that I determined to prove this law every day of my life. I tested it again and again and found that if I did my part, God would do his. But if I didn’t take the necessary, practical human footsteps, this law would not work for me. I had to meet God at least halfway, and then some. I had to do all that was humanly possible. I had to stretch the limits of my ability. My reach had to exceed my grasp. Then, and only then, would God enter and supply the power and the grace for each new challenge and achievement.  

The key word, I found, was with—”With God all things are possible.” This meant that working with him and being on his team, I could accomplish his will, which I would make my own. But the sealing of my understanding was Jesus’ statement “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”⁶ This was true partnership. This is what I wanted my life to be—a partnership with God. And I went after it.  

 

 Virtues:  dependence on God “with God all things are possible”; determination, discipline

 

 Chapter 12:  Earning My Way

“In the summer I would go into the forest to pick violets and bring them home. I would arrange them nicely, put them in tinfoil and then go door to door selling them. Sometimes I would do this with Norma Jean Ivins, and her mother (the Seventh-Day Adventist) would kneel with us and lead us in prayer for our mission. The dog and cat who went with us also had to kneel in prayer, putting their little paws together. We would say a prayer to Jesus to bless our wares and let us find those who needed what we had to offer.  

I remember the great leaping of the flame in my heart when I would come with my violets and ring the doorbell. People would be so gracious, and they would receive me and talk to me about my violets. They would give me a quarter for a bunch. I remember the experience of the Holy Spirit in that interchange. It was a ritual of interaction with angels and elementals, and a distribution of joy.  

There were also people who would greet me at the door and say, “What are you doing knocking on my door and bothering me?” or “Who are you, you little kid, coming up to my house with your violets?” I would walk away with my head hanging, and then I would go and pray and ask God to help me so that people would receive me. It was good training for my mission.”  

 

“All summer long and through the fall I saved my pennies and quarters and fifty-cent pieces. I would go downtown to the five-and-ten and I would look for something pretty. I would buy a little vase or perhaps curlers or hairpins for my mother, or socks or handkerchiefs for my father. I would hide these gifts in the closet until I had enough to fill my mother’s stocking and my father’s stocking and enough presents to put under the tree. It took me six months to do this.”  

 

Virtues:  givingness, generosity, devotion, being frugal and a good steward, dependence on God

 

 Chapter 10:  A Past Life

“When I was about four, suspended in that carefree realm of timeless, spaceless dimension that the child yet lives in, I was alone one day playing in my sandbox. The clouds were tracing forms of formlessness on the skyey canvas, shaping and reshaping themselves in fairy-tale motifs. The rays of the sun on the morning dew made the lawn and lilacs, the hyacinth, jonquils and forsythia sparkle like a crystal paradise in some far-off land.  

I was secure in the definitions of the little white picket fence, caressed by the breezes and the soft flapping of the leaves on the giant silver maple as they showed their silvery undersides. My dolls were all lined up on the little painted wicker chair from Mexico. They were receiving a lesson on how to make mud pies for Daddy.  

Then, gradually, gently, the scene began to change. At a certain point it was as though someone had turned the dial on a radio and I was locked into another frequency.  

I was who I was, calmly centered in my heart. My soul was free, as free as the child I was. Yet I was not in Red Bank, New Jersey, nor in the time frame of the present. I was idly playing on the sands of the River Nile, basking in the sunshine, comforted by the warmth of the sun and a mother’s love. Playing there was altogether natural to me because I was secure in my native universe, secure in the God who was everywhere, the God whose flame burned within my heart.  

As I sat there playing in the sand, I knew I was in Egypt. I knew I was on the Nile River. Then, as easily as my soul had glided into that scene, it glided back, and I was once again in my sandbox in Red Bank, New Jersey. The dial had been turned back to the previous station. Not even dazed, I jumped up and ran to find my mother. She was cooking at the kitchen stove. “Mother! Mother! What happened to me?” Then I told her step by step the story of what I had just experienced.  

She sat me on a chair and sat down opposite me. With kindness and a certain respectful regard that my mother always had for me no matter what my age, she said calmly, “You have remembered a past life.” And then, in words I could understand, she explained, “We have all lived before. We are sent here with a purpose and a plan. But it takes many lifetimes to finish the work we must do. Our body is a coat we wear. And when it wears out, we get another.”  

“Do we get a new mommy and daddy too?” I asked.  

“Yes, we get a new daddy and we come back in another mommy’s tummy. The soul is born once but it gets a new coat when it needs one. And when we come back again, the storybook of our life continues with the next chapter.”  

My mother then explained why she believed we had all lived before and would live again. “People are born different from each other,” she said. “One child is born rich, another poor. One is good at many things, another is good at none. Good luck, bad luck. One is a genius, another can hardly learn to read and write.”  

“Why?” I asked.  

“Because when we do good in one life, that good returns to us in a future life. When we are naughty and do bad things, that returns to us also. If you harm someone in one lifetime, you may be harmed in the next. This is how God’s justice works, Betty Clare. Unless you understand that you have lived before, you will never understand why certain things happen in your life, both the good and the bad. If you practice the piano and study your lessons and you get good at it, you can bring it back in your next life. After several lifetimes of studying the piano, you could be born a child virtuoso like Mozart.”  

Still in the state of just having experienced a past modality, parallel to my present one, my child mind could easily grasp the reality that lay just beneath the surface of conscious awareness. My past life was a reality, and I knew what my mother was talking about. The concepts of reincarnation and karma were dimly familiar, embedded in the memory of my soul. I just had to be reminded because I was wearing a new body and I couldn’t recall what I had known in other times and spheres.  

I went back to my sandbox, content that life would unfold itself to me, that life would teach me whatever I needed to know in order to finish what I had begun as a little child playing on the Nile River. But the boundaries of my existence had been permanently altered. I now had a fixed coordinate somewhere in the distant past. I had relived a record of a past life. And that record, I felt certain, was one key to my destiny. I would never forget the experience.  

Yes, I did think in these terms as a child. For after all, we are mature and ancient ones, even when we are children, inhabiting a child’s mind and body. And the part of us that is timeless understands beyond the present. Such flashbacks may not be uncommon among children. But because there is not a wise parent or teacher to interpret the déjà vu, the child will often lose those early soul experiences beneath the shifting sands of the subconscious mind. Without religious training and a sense of the Self beyond the self, the soul may become the slave of the concrete, rational mind that screens out intuition and extrasensory perceptions that come from beyond the mental belt.” 

 

Virtues:  spirituality, soul awareness, listening to God, trust

  

 

Ideas for concluding comments:

 

Ø     Your Christ Self or GREAT ME has many virtues.  Today, in honor of Mother and all of her virtues, each of you choose one virtue we talked about today and see a picture of it  [take a moment and reflect.]         Do you all have one?

 Ø     Tuck this virtue in your heart and help it grow every day.    You can ask Mother to help you expand this virtue by teaching you lessons.   You and Mother are walking together.

 

In your Sunday school today, you will be able to decorate a beautiful heart picture frame with Mother’s picture in it.  You might want to write your virtue on a little piece of paper and put it with your focus of Mother.  This can be a reminder that Mother is always with you as you learn to be your GREAT ME every day!