The Clan And The Valley

WED., AUG. 24, 1983, 7:36 PM
SPRINGFIELD, MED. LIBRARY

You have wanted a Teaching relating to this pleasure reading you have done this summer, and I see no reason why I should not offer you one. You even can assume that I initiated the idea, for you are pretty conservative about “deciding on a topic ahead of time”. Yes, o son, I certainly could have negated your request, if I had not wanted to comment… or if I had something more vital this evening.

You enjoyed this fictional journey into another time and environment. It kept your interest and you identified with the characters and felt emotions, as they did. It is a good story with intellectual and emotional challenges. But does it have a spiritual dimension?

There was obviously much feeling for spirit, though its focus was not Me, as you know Me. It was at a time and in a place not described in the Bible. Relationship with Me had to have different frames of reference. However, there were rituals, and I like these. There were traditions, and I like these. The people were doing the best they could for the setting.

The Clan gave spiritual significance to certain animals, linking individual humans to particular animals. Yet there was one mighty spirit, one mighty force that was sovereign and who was not subject to deposition by any other animal spirits. Yes… there was I, in primitive form.

I was tied to the tangible, true, but this need I finally “perfected” in coming to the earth as Jesus… God in tangible form. The likeness is more important than the difference.

There was Creb, a man of spirit, with power in the Clan because of his spiritual being. Even though he was of the less developed people (those just above the animals, or so it was judged) his power came both from election and from development. He was an utterly unlikely individual to become a holy man, but he was so elected (say I, as persons are to this very day), and then he developed on, partly because of that election.

Ayla was a spirit of an “other” sort. He knew it, and she came to know it also, even though her understanding of it was generally child-like and naïve. She had the strong desire to be Clan, but also the sense that she should go beyond “acceptable” behavior. Hers was a “free” spirit, certainly, but this quality was mixed with that of election. She should not have survived several threats, but she did. The story says directly that this was due to her personal resourcefulness. But the more important question is… why did this develop? The answer is indirectly told. She was a person whose spirit directed her to survival. She had emotions of sadness and of doubt, but when the real challenge came her spirit carried her through.

Strong spirit (and hers was that of the strongest force short of Me… a translation) allows and empowers a person to accomplish what seems impossible to others. No one else in the story had relationships with the animals as Ayla did. Was not the instinct of such primitive animals to shun the physical being of one so different? Powerful spirit overcomes such barriers… then and now.