|
By Rev A. Powell Davis
December 8, 1946
There were times during the
recent war when it seemed as though nothing that could ever happen
could be quite as bad as what was happening at that particular time.
This was so during the fall of France and immediately afterwards,
when the news came, shock upon shock, of uninterrupted German
victories: perhaps some diabolical force had been let loose in the
world before which humanity stood helpless. It was the same when
Pearl Harbor was struck, and for months afterwards while we tasted
the bitterness of defeat. Surely, we said, this is the harshest
moment that has ever come upon us, and if we survive it nothing that
can ever happen to us will be quite as bad.
But today we know that things are happening which are more
dismaying, more disquieting, more deeply discouraging than anything
we had to contend with during the war. Never was there such an
opportunity to make a universal peace, and never has the need for
peace been so imperious. One war more, and it is a question whether
mankind itself will still survive upon this planet. Yet peace seems
very far away. One week we are hopeful of it, the next despairing;
incredible as it seems, we are preparing for another war at least as
energetically as we are for its prevention, and apparently no other
course is open to us. That we want peace, no one can doubt; and we
are groping desperately for whatever leads towards it. But we have
to admit that not only are we having to contend with the opposed
policies of other nations; we are also having to contend with
frustrating dissensions and grievous inadequacies within our own
country.
Nor is war the only danger: it is just the culminating one.
Everything seems to have gone wrong all at once. It is not that
goodwill has suddenly disappeared, or that wise counsels are nowhere
to be found, or that human nature is capable of nothing but evil;
the truth is that there is a great deal of goodwill, but
nonetheless, it seems to be inadequate; wise counsels were never
more plentiful but somehow they are not sufficiently embodied in our
actions; as for the good in human nature, it is not enough to meet
the circumstances. We need to become so much better than we are, if
we are to be equal to the claims upon us, that we wonder whether so
much advance is possible in a single generation.
Moreover, things that even a little while ago seemed fairly simple
have overnight become extremely complicated. It is not as clear as
it used to be what is involved in doing right. no matter how much a
man may wish to maintain his earlier idealisms, he has to work them
out problem by problem, by very painful stages. He has to do the
right as he sees it, as much of it as he can, and carry anguish of
its incompleteness in his heart. A good intention is not sufficient
to provide a good outcome. No, he who would do right must first
discover how much of right is possible; and then, in fear and
trembling try to do it. For we have come to a time when almost
nothing is above contention. We are in an uncharted world, lost and
bewildered and full of trouble, and in the trackless jungle of its
vast confusion we are struggling hour by hour to find our way.
As I said at the beginning, it is in many ways a time of deeper
distress than any during the war. All we had to do then, strenuous
and agonizing though it may have been, was to defeat an enemy. But
now we have to move from one age into another, forsake a world to
which we were accustomed for one that is strange and unexplored and
new. Every step that we take is attended by danger; all assurance
has departed; we feel like wanderers in a wilderness, disinherited,
unbefriended and alone.
Is it surprising that the enemies of goodness sometimes mock us?
That we ourselves find irrepressible the question as to whether
anything beyond ourselves has any care for what befalls us? As in
the past, so now with greater emphasis than ever, we hear the
ancient question that the psalmist asked: Where is thy God?
If we ask who this man was who wrote these words we find that his
name is unrecorded. But we have reason to believe that he wrote as
an exile in a wintry, Palestinian wilderness: an exile and a
fugitive whose whole world had dissolved, so far as he himself was
concerned, before his eyes. He had fought for the right, but God had
not sustained him. He had lost everything, and worst of all he was
losing his faith--his faith that God prospered the righteous, that
the universe was always on the side of justice, that truth was
mighty and would prevail.
It was not a new experience, even in the day of the psalmist. Such
times have come, again and again, both to individuals and to
nations. Very few human lives are not visited by anguished days and
broken-hearted nights. Few indeed escape some cup of bitterness. Nor
has it ever been true that the world has known a long-continued time
of tranquil progress; such periods have always been broken, after an
interval, if not in one way, then in another. Our lives are short
and so it seems to us that the world into which we were born is the
permanent world. We read about other kinds of worlds, hear about
them, and after a fashion imagine them. But we do not actually feel
the reality of them. It was just something that went before;
something that prepared the way for the happier world in which or
own lives commenced. And this happier world seems to us the real
world; we feel that it ought to be permanent, that it must be
permanent, that fundamentally nothing should really disturb it. But
this is only because our lives are short. If we knew other ages as
intimately as we know our own, we would not be so easily deceived.
But of course, we are deceived. In case you have forgotten how
dependable the world of human progress used to seem, perhaps I
should remind you that Andrew Carnegie, when he left his generous
endowment to the Church Peace Union to be used for making permanent
peace in the world, was greatly worried about what should be done
with the income of the fund after its purpose was achieved. He
thought the purpose of peace-making would be accomplished within a
very few years and that the trustees might wish for guidance as to
what should then be done with the money. Do not write him down as an
eccentric; he was no more optimistic than most of his
contemporaries. He was sure that goodness was on its way to
permanent victory and that one of its most immediate triumphs would
be a warless world.
Now it was out of that kind of expectation that most people of this
generation got their religion. And their trouble is that they think
that apart from such an expectation, all religion is discredited.
The psalmist thought the same--until his deepening experience taught
him better. He had been given to understand that God was the
guarantor of successful ventures for the righteous; that virtue was
sure to lead to happiness, or at the very least to peace of mind.
This hopeful sentiment is expressed over and over again by other
psalmists. In happy times, it was natural to believe it. What it was
necessary to discover was that religion--the deeper religion from
which all lesser faiths have taken sustenance: taken it without even
knowing it--has always developed in times of tribulation. It is true
that the joy of life can give confidence and gratitude and fullness
of heart. But it cannot develop faith--not joy alone. Only pain and
heartache, desolation and loneliness can do that. If you took out of
the Bible all the religion that had come out of anguish and loss,
there would be nothing left but legend and sentiment--that and a
little poetry and some rather unimportant history. It would have
become merely light reading.
But on the contrary--to speak first of the Old Testament--its books
are united by this development of an ever-deepening faith. In a
symbolical sense, the key to it is in the story of the patriarch
Jacob, the fabled ancestor of the entire Hebrew people, from whom,
of course, the Old Testament came.
Jacob began his religious experience with a God with whom he made a
bargain. A God concerning whom he dreamed a dream while resting in
his flight from justice--the justice that pursued him because,
besides being a man who wanted to know God, he was a man with some
rather shady personal ambitions. And so, with this God of his dream,
he made a bargain.. "Give me," he said to his God, "give me good
fortune, prosperity, happiness, and I will give you ten percent of
everything I get. Moreover, I will worship no other god but you." It
didn't seem an odd bargain to Jacob. He didn't notice at all that
God was to be just a utility--a kind of slave in an Aladdin's lamp,
bonded to do a self-centered man's ambitious bidding.
But in the years that followed, Jacob learned a great deal.
Prosperity came but so did disillusionment. So did heartbreak and
loneliness. And nearer the end of the story we find Jacob seeking
God a second time. Once more, justice is in pursuit; once again
Jacob is a runaway. But this time, there is no bargaining. As the
story tells it, Jacob went out and wrestled through a long nighttime
of doubt and grief and fear; wrestled with God. And when the morning
came, he was no longer Jacob but Israel: one who had prevailed with
God. He came back from the experience, weary, wounded and humbled.
But he had found his religion at last. He had prevailed by
surrendering--surrendering his life, not on his terms but on life's
terms, on God's terms--to God. Henceforth, he was God's to command,
no matter what the doubt and fear of it, no matter how dimply lit
the path before him. And it is this that all the greater prophets of
the Old Testament worked out more fully--yet never so fully that the
people altogether understood it. They always wanted to make bargains
with God. They always wanted their religion to come easily. They
always resisted the growing pains of the soul.
And if we turn to the New Testament we have to remember that
Christianity began, after all, not only with a life, beautifully
lived, but with a certain man nailed to a cross. A man who cried
that his God had forsaken him, yet somehow knew that he was not
forsaken. As I have often said, I have no use, myself, for the
conventional Protestant cross, that shiny brass thing with no man on
it. In that respect at any rate, the Catholics did better: they left
the man on the cross. I could never accept a Catholic creed but I
have known for years that the crucifix, a cross with a man on it,
was at the real heart of Christianity and an ultimate authentic
symbol. What it is trying to say to the world is that faith is not
to be had cheaply; that if we will not reckon with the tragic we
shall never know the deeper essence of religion; and I think it is
also saying that not even God can take mankind off its cross until a
world is made that does not crucify the true, the just and the
loving; a world that does not stone its prophets and resist the
living God whose spirit burns in what they say.
|
