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But there is something further. The spiritual reality is alive.
Whatever the mystery of aliveness may be, it is no more mysterious
when we think of it as a whole than when we think of it in an
individual living being. Truth lives in minds that are formed by
it--or broken by betrayal of it. Beauty lives in hearts that respond
to it. Justice is alive in generation after generation. The
spiritual is a living reality
And so we come to this: if the spiritual is real, and if we think of
it as a total reality that includes all the spiritual qualities
derived from it, just as the universe is a total reality, derived
from whatever force it is that has produced it; and if we also see
that this total spiritual reality is alive, what name shall we give
it?
I confess that it seems to me most natural that we should call it
God. Whatever there may be of God that is more than this--and I am
not supposing for a moment that this of which we have experience is
all of God that there is--this is God as we can know God.
This is the God without whom--or which--the scientist would never
have within his mind the power to search for truth, or the
compulsion to be loyal to it. It is the God--the living spiritual
reality--without whom the poet would never learn to write a single
verse or hear the music of the words he utters. It is the God from
whom even the atheist cannot escape. But it is also the God of all
of us--of everyone whatever.
I do not say that everyone recognizes this God. No, but we lived in
the universe, too, for a long time before we called it that. Men
breathed the air about them for millions of years before they knew
that it was air. Yet, they knew their need of it. It was once indeed
a great mystery. So great a mystery that in later ages men
remembered it when they wanted to express the further mystery of
God. The Greek word for spirit is the same word as the one for
breath: pneuma. It means air, and also spirit: that which is
breathed. And when we are told in the New Testament that God is
spirit (pneuma) although the writer has an elaborate theology in
mind, his basic intention is that we shall understand it in just the
sense the word indicates. God is what the soul 'breathes' as the
body breathes air. And this remains the case whether we acknowledge
it or not.
There is nothing remarkable in our not having been aware of what
sustains our life. Think of the thousands of years that people lived
in Western Europe without ever knowing that the temperate climate
they enjoyed was due to the Gulf Stream flowing from a distant
ocean. Or think how long it is before an infant knows that what
comes to him as experience of care and nurture is his mother.
Moreover, are we to suppose that the human mind already knows all
there is to know about the spiritual--that there is no further
comprehension to be reached in the future? Are we to think even in
the present that because some men do not consciously experience God,
they have no experience of God at all? It seems to me that if we
will take the right starting-point, the same sort of starting-point
that science takes for exploring the physical universe, the
starting-point we have been trying to take this morning, we are
bound to come to a recognition that God is as real as the air we
breathe-and that, at least to this extent, he is known to us in
experience.
Do you remember those striking words of Maeterlinck's? "We wander in
God like helpless sleep-walkers." How true it is--how pitifully
true! Like sleep-walkers! Spiritually blind with our eyes wide open!
Drifting and wandering! When we might move with purpose and aim. And
helpless! When we might have the strength of the fully-grown soul.
But our wandering is in God. That at least we cannot lose. We
wander--but in God.
I wonder what would happen to us--and to the world--if we should
awake? Perhaps God would become as real to us as he was to Jeremiah
or Jesus. As real and as unmistakable. And this, no doubt, is what
we fear. For what might not the result be--in the claims upon us? In
our way of life? If we altogether knew--and consciously -- the God
that we only know with incomplete awareness?
But perhaps we should ask in closing a further question: Is this the
God that religion has tried to identify? Not always. Religion, too,
has often lost its way. But it is the God religion at its best has
tried to identify. It is told in the Old Testament, for instance,
that Moses once asked God his name. The story is legendary but it
conveys a profound insight. For the answer of God to Moses is, "I am
that I am"; or "I am that which is." (In Hebrew this probably
translates an Egyptian liturgical expression: one with immense
possibilities for exposition.) The meaning is "I am Reality, the
Alive-ness of reality, the Breath of the Life of the World." And in
the New Testament, as we have already seen, God is identified as
spirit--which once again means Aliveness, Breath, the life that is
'breathed' by the Soul.
It is a pity that the simplicity and purity of these definitions is
ever departed from. It is a pity that creeds that say more than this
are ever written. For in reality they do not say more, they say
less. Beyond this, there is room only for symbolism and poetry--the
poetry that can tell our hearts what prose can never convey--
bringing us the glow of a truth that is living, the fire of moral
passion, the sweet wonder of all loveliness--all that is splendid
and high with hope, all that is struggling and watered with tears,
all that man at his best can become, all that man at his worst
repents, all that is found and lost and sought and found again, as
we travel the paths of human pilgrimage.
All this, yes, and all that begins with this and then goes out
beyond the far horizons: this it is that is full of the power and
the glory, the joy and the beauty, the strength and the wonder of
God.
Prayer: O Thou whom we fear we know not, and yet without whom we
could know nought else, teach us how truly we know thee when the
true, the good, and the beautiful are knocking on the doors of our
hearts. Amen.
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