His youngest son, Cary Stratton, read this at his father’s memorial. Gil and his family used to attend Encino Community Church to hear the Religious Science minister Dr. Fletcher Harding back in the 1970s. This reading was written by that pastor of that church.
“My father was a “do-er” and this reading reminds me of him.”
Cary Stratton
Why Are We Here?
This is an excerpt from a lecture by Dr. Fletcher A. Harding of the Encino Community Church – January 1968
Why are we here? We have no choice. We are here because of the celestial, the cosmic, and the essential necessity of life to express itself as us. If we ask ourselves the same question in terms of what we should be doing, we should be seeing how successful we can be about the Father’s business.
What does this involve? It involves studying the nature of the “head office” by finding out who we are and what we are as a branch office. We explore our minds, our talents, our abilities, our intellectual possibilities, so that we have a sense of identity in relationship to God.
How do we use these things in such a way as to continue to reflect the divine origin? We use them affirmatively. You see, I think the only basic immortality there is – is to have a talent and a mind and to USE them. Part of our inescapable responsibility of life is to learn to speak affirmatively, to think affirmatively in terms of growth and increase, and to behave lovingly because THAT is part of the affirmative nature of the “head office” AND, to understand that everybody else is also a branch office, occupied with the same endeavors, the same spiritual challenges, and the same ultimate and spiritual possibilities.
We know that life has been flowing for 25 million years and there is no reason to assume it won’t go on indefinitely. As one of the branch offices of the mainstream of life… We are what God is.
God is simply ‘god-in-action’ in man and, as man.
We are not something that God manufactured; we are the extension of his manufacturing process.
We’re not something He made.
We are something He does.