PASSED AND UNPASSED TESTS
We are informed by the author on page one of this latest biography of Jane Austen, the great nineteenth century British novelist, that she was “pretty”, “attractive”, “both in appearance and personality.” We are also informed in the preface that Austen had “a life of disappointment and frustration.” We are also told why this was so. -Ron Price with thanks to Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Obstinate Heart: Jane Austen A Biography, Michael O’Mara Books Ltd., 1997, Preface and p.1.
Price, too, had a life of disappointment and frustration which he has described in the several genres of his autobiographical work Pioneering Over Three Epochs and which any reader can read about in their periodic and not infrequent occurances over his life. But there is little question that in overview he also enjoyed “a fundamentally assured and happy way of life.”1 Of course, it was a life not without anxieties, disappointments, trials, tests and periods of deep grief and depression. But in retrospect, in viewing the totality of his days he clearly indicated on many occasions that he had had a happy and confident life experience. In achieving this there had been many keen spiritual tests, only some of which he had passed. -Ron Price with thanks to the 1Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, p.18.
Sometimes one sits in the cool of the garden
at peace with the world and oneself.
A jet may pass slowly, silently, through the
distant blue sky. One feels at ease with its
smallness, its small angular place on the horizon.
Then there are the heart-rendering shocks
of depression, of anxiety, of unfullfilled desires,
of a broken marriage, of anticipations in fear and
tension. Such a vast collection of moments and
hours, days and years, of deep grief, pleasure and
joy, of tests passed and unpassed, in these transition
years of a life left behind and now its traces, traces,
its days gone swiftly by swift as the twinkling of an eye,
with celestial blessings1 to come, in an ocean of light2.
Ron Price
3 June 1999
1 Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message BE156.
2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, USA, 1970, p.23.