ETERNAL FATHER STRONG TO SAVE

.

.

.

.

.

.

From Wikipedia

.

The original hymn was written in 1860 by William Whiting,

 an Anglican churchman from Winchester, Great Britain.

 Whiting grew up near the ocean on the coasts of England,

and at the age of thirty-five had felt his life spared by God

 when a violent storm nearly claimed the ship he was travelling

 on, instilling a belief in God's command over the rage and calm

 of the sea.

 As headmaster of the Winchester College Choristers' School

 some years later, he was approached by a student about to

 travel to the United States, who confided in Whiting an

 overwhelming fear of the oean voyage. Whiting shared his

 experiences of the ocean, saying he wrote the hymn to

 "anchor his faith". 

In writing it, Whiting is generally thought to have been

 inspired by Psalm 107, which describes the power and fury

 of the seas in great detail:

Some went out on the sea in ships;

 they were merchants on the mighty waters.

They saw the works of the Lord,

 his wonderful deeds in the deep.

For he spoke and stirred up a tempest

 that lifted high the waves.

They mounted up to the heavens and

 went down to the depths;

 in their peril their courage melted away.

Psalm 107: 23-26

.

.

Within a year the text appeared in the influential first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern (HA&M) in 1861 and its circulation became widespread throughout England.

 The text was substantially revised by the compilers of that

 edition. In response Whiting continued to revise his own text,

 releasing another version in 1869 and third in 1874, the last

 one incorporating most of the suggested changes by HA&M.

Meanwhile, John B. Dykes, an Anglican clergyman, composed

 the tune "Melita" to accompany the HA&M version of 1861.

 Dykes was a well-known composer of nearly three hundred

 hymn tunes, many of which are still in use today.

 "Melita" is an archaic term for Malta, an ancient seafaring

 nation which has been a colony of the British Empire. It was

 the site of a shipwreck, mentioned in Acts of the Apostles

 (chapters 27-28), involving the Apostle Paul.

The original words of the 1861 version are:

.

Eternal Father, strong to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

O Christ! Whose voice the waters heard

And hushed their raging at Thy word,

Who walkedst on the foaming deep,

And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood

Upon the chaos dark and rude,

And bid its angry tumult cease,

And give, for wild confusion, peace;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

O Trinity of love and power!

Our brethren shield in danger's hour;

From rock and tempest, fire and foe,

Protect them wheresoe'er they go;

Thus evermore shall rise to Thee

Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

.

.

.

.

Here's the song by the U.S.Navy Band & Chorus,

a very moving, very powerful version.  Video background

is simply satellite footage over the "blue planet."

.

.

.

.

.

.

THE INNER WORLD

.

.
.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.
Happiness and joy take origin in the inner life.

You cannot experience real joy all by yourself. A solitary life is fatal to happiness. Even families and nations will enjoy life more if they share it with others.

You cannot completely control the external world — environment.

It is the creativity of the inner world that is most subject to your direction because there your personality is so largely liberated from the fetters of the laws of antecedent causation. There is associated with personality a limited sovereignty of will.

Since this inner life of man is truly creative,

there rests upon each person the responsibility of choosing as to whether this creativity shall be spontaneous and wholly haphazard or controlled, directed, and constructive. How can a creative imagination produce worthy children when the stage whereon it functions is already preoccupied by prejudice, hate, fears, resentments, revenge, and bigotries?

Ideas may take origin in the stimuli of the outer world,

but ideals are born only in the creative realms of the inner world. Today the nations of the world are directed by men who have a superabundance of ideas, but they are poverty-stricken in ideals. That is the explanation of poverty, divorce, war, and racial hatreds.

This is the problem: If freewill man is endowed

with the powers of creativity in the inner man, then must we recognize that freewill creativity embraces the potential of freewill destructivity. And when creativity is turned to destructivity, you are face to face with the devastation of evil and sin — oppression, war, and destruction. Evil is a partiality of creativity which tends toward disintegration and eventual destruction. All conflict is evil in that it inhibits the creative function of the inner life — it is a species of civil war in the personality.

Inner creativity contributes to ennoblement of character through personality integration and selfhood unification. It is forever true: The past is unchangeable; only the future can be changed by the ministry of the present creativity of the inner self.

.

From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part III, 111, 4

.

FAROUT FIRE FACTS

.

.

.

 .

.

FIRE IN RELATION TO CIVILIZATION

.

Primitive society with its four divisions — industrial, regulative, religious, and military — rose through the instrumentality of fire, animals, slaves, and property.

Fire building, by a single bound, forever separated man from animal;
 it is the basic human invention, or discovery. Fire enabled man
 to stay on the ground at night as all animals are afraid of it.
 Fire encouraged eventide social intercourse; it not only
 protected against cold and wild beasts but was also employed
 as security against ghosts. It was at first used more for light
 than heat; many backward tribes refuse to sleep
 unless a flame burns all night.

.

.
Fire was a great civilizer, providing man with his

 first means of being altruistic without loss by enabling 

him to give live coals to a neighbor without depriving himself.

 The household fire, which was attended by the mother

 or eldest daughter, was the first educator, requiring 

watchfulness and dependability. The early home was not a

 building but the family gathered about the fire, 

the family hearth. When a son founded a new home, 

he carried a firebrand from the family hearth.

Though Andon, the discoverer of fire, avoided treating it as an object of worship, many of his descendants regarded the flame as a fetish or as a spirit. They failed to reap the sanitary benefits of fire because they would not burn refuse. Primitive man feared fire and always sought to keep it in good humor, hence the sprinkling of incense. Under no circumstances would the ancients spit in a fire, nor would they ever pass between anyone and a burning fire. Even the iron pyrites and flints used in striking fire were held sacred by early mankind. 

.

.

It was a sin to extinguish a flame; if a hut caught fire,

 it was allowed to burn. The fires of the temples and shrines

 were sacred and were never permitted to go out except that

 it was the custom to kindle new flames annually or after some

 calamity. Women were selected as priests because they

 were custodians of the home fires.

.

.

.
The early myths about how fire came down from the gods
 grew out of the observations of fire caused by lightning.
 These ideas of supernatural origin led directly to fire worship,
 and fire worship led to the custom of “passing through fire,”
 a practice carried on up to the times of Moses.
 And there still persists the idea of passing through fire
 after death. The fire myth was a great bond in early times
 and still persists in the symbolism of the Parsees. 
 . 

 .
Fire led to cooking, and “raw eaters” became a term of derision.
 And cooking lessened the expenditure of vital energy necessary 
for the digestion of food and so left early man some strength for
 social culture, while animal husbandry, by reducing the effort
 necessary to secure food, provided time for social activities.

It should be remembered that fire opened
 the doors to metalwork
 and led to the subsequent discovery of
 steam power and the 
 present-day uses of electricity.

.
From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part III, 69, 6

.
A brief description of THE URANTIA BOOK is available
 on The Urantia Foundation's website - see it here:
http://www.urantia.org/en/urantia-book
.

.

.

THOUGHTS ON PRAYER - 1

.

Children, when first learning to make use

of language, are prone to think out loud,

to express their thoughts in words,

even if no one is present to hear them.

With the dawn of creative imagination

they evince a tendency to converse

with imaginary companions. In this way

a budding ego seeks to hold communion

with a fictitious alter ego.

By this technique the child early learns

to convert his monologue conversations

into pseudo dialogues in which this

alter ego makes replies to his verbal

thinking and wish expression.

Very much of an adult's thinking

is mentally carried on in

conversational form.

.

.

The early and primitive form of prayer was

much like the semimagical recitations of the

present-day Toda tribe [of India], prayers

that were not addressed to anyone in

particular. But such techniques of praying

tend to evolve into the dialogue type of

communication by the emergence of the

idea of an alter ego. In time the alter-ego

concept is exalted to a superior status of

divine dignity, and prayer as an agency of

religion has appeared. Through many

phases and during long ages this

primitive type of praying is destined

to evolve before attaining the level

of intelligent and truly ethical prayer.

.

.

.
The simple prayer of faith evidences
a mighty evolution in human experience
whereby the ancient conversations
with the fictitious symbol of the
alter ego in primitive religion have
become exalted to the level of
communion with the spirit of the
Infinite and to that of a bona fide
consciousness of the reality of
the eternal God and Paradise Father
of all intelligent creation.
*

The Urantia Book

Part III, 91, 3