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But I said "begins." If religion goes no farther than that, it
merely rakes the dead leaves off the soil and leaves it bare without
planting anything. Or, in plainer words, there are questions which
can be answered. Truth, for instance, is not an answer to the
ultimate questions until it has become familiar as the answer to
immediate questions. Some people think this level of truth is
beneath consideration when we are discussing important elements in
religion. Ordinary truth they think they can take for granted. What
they are interested in is ultimate truth, the truth of far-off
things that lift their eyes towards horizons. They are mistaken:
very badly mistaken .
Even to tell the truth for a single day--the truth, I mean, of
ordinary things: the things that pass through our minds, or are
spoken in conversation, casually, or uttered as the day progresses,
from encounter to encounter--even to tell this kind of truth for a
single day is beyond the capacity of any person in this church this
morning. To achieve such a thing would take not only heroic efforts
but also considerable practice. What distinguished, for example,
such a person as Socrates was the closeness of his approximation of
it. He thought truth--rigorously--until it became a habit. And he
spoke it, until less truthful people found it unendurable and made
him drink the hemlock. Jesus did the same thing, although at times
more mystically. He would not make a thing seem other than it was.
And with this much practice in the truth of day to day, such men as
Socrates and Jesus achieved their insights into deeper truth. They
knew there was truth in the world because there was truth in
themselves. They also knew that truth never compromises, never
accommodates itself to wish or preference. Truth is what is really
so: what is really so in day to day perceptions, and gradually it
becomes what is really so in the universe. If anyone will approach
truth in this way, learning to live with it, he will presently find
that he is not only living with it but living from it and by it, and
suddenly he is aware, as though the sun had blazed at midnight, that
truth is an ultimate radiance lighting the mind to God.
But mark me! It will not be easy. For very few people can even think
the truth when they find it disagreeable. This is so in the most
elementary way. How many people who act foolishly, or childishly, or
meanly, are willing to admit it? To set aside excuses and admit it?
Even to themselves? No, what they do is admit--eventually--enough of
the truth to make excuses plausible. They can't quite swallow
unadulterated lies, even of their own manufacture, so they mix in
enough of truth to make lies palatable. No diplomacy in the world is
practiced so adroitly, so suavely, so resourcefully, and at the same
time so unscrupulously, as the diplomacy we practice on ourselves.
Whoever would have religion make sense, therefore, and whose
expectation of religion is that it will bring him to the truth, must
know that truth will only shine in the sky for those who light her
lanterns on the ground.*
But then, it is not a matter of truth alone, but of everything else
expressed in thought or word or deed. How can we know whether
justice is an ultimate principle unless we speak justly and act
justly-- until we know what justice really is? To most people, most
of the time, it is little more than a word. When they ask such
questions as whether God is just, or whether justice is truly a law
of life, they are playing with words as a child learning algebra
might play with symbols. What the words--or the symbols--finally
refer to, they do not know. Nor can they know except by experience.
What would anyone know of music who had never heard the sound of it
but knew it only as written notation? A trained musician can, it is
true, tell something of the quality of a composition by reading the
score, but this is only because he has listened to music, because he
has made music, because he knows it as sound. If he knew nothing
more than he could tell by reading the score, he would be playing
with symbols, and would know them only as symbols. Which is exactly
the way many people play with words like justice--or even with a
word like God. They are dealing in symbols, not realities. And I say
again, to seek the answer to the great questions that such words
propound and to seek it with any hope of arriving at it, we must
first do some practicing. We must learn what justice is by just
words and deeds.
And so with all things else. So with love. What do people mean when
they ask whether God is love? What do they mean by love? What have
they known as love? That clutching, grasping possessiveness that
would absorb another to oneself? Or the vanity, perhaps, of being
loved?---Love means so many things: so very little, sometimes, and
at other times so much. In English, we have to make do with the one
word; there are other words, of course, but we use this one in place
of any of them. We "love" our parents, our spouses, our children,
our friends, our country, our way of life; and we "love"
Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, and Coca-Cola, baseball,
chewing gum, and sirloin steak, cooked rare. We "love" the new
styles in dresses, the latest detective story, Christmas
decorations, a fire in the hearth on a cold evening, the way a baby
blows bubbles, the color blue, flying in a DC6, baked grapefruit,
and God...Or at any rate, we hope that God "loves" us. But what do
we mean by love? What do we mean by it when we ask concerning the
love of God? Do we mean a sort of parental affection towards us,
indulgent, perhaps, and ready to pamper us? Something protective,
something that regards us as wonderful and precious, in spite of the
fact that most of the time we quite obviously are not? Do we mean
anything more than the projection of our own kinds of love--the easy
kind--into a giant celestial counterpart? If so, is it not quite
evidently nonsense? To the New Testament writers, it would not only
have been nonsense, it would have been blasphemy. In the language
they used, the koine Greek, they had a more precise vocabulary. But
even so, they ask the question, "How can a man love God whom he hath
not seen, if he love not his brother whom he hath seen?" In other
words, how can he reach the greatest love of all if he has not even
learned that love can be unselfish?
The kind of love the apostle, Paul, was concerned with: unselfish
and yet unforced, kind but not indulgent, compassionate but with no
hint of condescension, gentle but uncompromising, tender but
inflexible in aim and purpose...this kind of love is a kind the
modern age has almost forgotten. Love, we have been told, is for
self-realization, and we hoped it was true. But seldom, if ever,
were there more selves in the world that have failed of realization.
And so they are trying harder, and becoming less self-realized every
day. The cult has failed, and already the priests of the cult are
whining that they must not be blamed; and saying defiantly that the
cult must continue. It must continue, apparently, until everyone
pursues self-realization, and there is not a truly self-realized
person left in the world.
It is useless supposing that the emotional side of religion is
available to people who are enervated and debilitated by a cult like
this. To find love in the universe, you must first of all find
enough of it in yourself. If it were otherwise, not only religion,
but the universe, too, would not make sense. You cannot find a thing
that you would not recognize if you saw it. And you cannot find love
until you know what it is. If you could, the world would be built on
nonsense; and so would religion. Which, of course, is the very
delusion that blinds us to reality. For we want the world to be
built on nonsense; and although it would do us no good, and we know
it, we want the same thing of religion. But the fact is that not
only can religion make sense. It must. If it doesn't, it is
counterfeit. Whatever fails to make sense is not religion.
Or as Jesus once said, "Do men grow grapes of thorns or figs of
thistles?" And he marveled at them, the people of his generation,
because that was the very thing they were determined to do. As the
people of this generation are. Crying out that they seek religion.
Prayer: O God of our unbelief, make clearer to us the meaning of our
unbelieving. Amen.
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* At this point in the sermon, a topical reference was made to
circumstances leading to the loss of men of integrity in the service
of the government. The reference was covered by newspaper reports
the following day and is omitted here because the same matter is
more fully treated in Dr. Davies' recent sermon, "Mr. Forrestal Left
a Warning."
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