Sunday: Does the Cosmic Process Affirm Our Affirmative?
WEEK 28
SUNDAY
DOES THE COSMIC PROCESS AFFIRM OUR AFFIRMATIVE?
Revelation 21:1-4
Before we leave this mastery of the negative by a mighty positive, we must look at another phase. It is not enough that the individual affirm the positive; we must feel that the whole cosmic process affirms our positive. We cannot have a positive in us as persons while the whole historical process affirms a vast negative. We must feel that the sum total of reality is affirming the positive with us. Then and then only do we belong to the affirmative.
But in no other viewpoint except the Christian is there an affirmation of meaning to history and a belief in progress here and now. Only in Christianity did a new kind of hope emerge. In all other systems was a kind of paralysis; nothing new was emerging. We find in Ecclesiastes, which expresses some pre-Christian and sub-Christian themes: “Whatever has happened— / that’s what will happen again; / whatever has occurred— / that’s what will occur again. / There’s nothing new under the sun” (1:9). This vicious circle was found in all ancient faiths.
Scottish theologian John Baillie calls attention to the fact that the circle as the symbol of life arose simultaneously in Greece, India, and China. Life was a circle that turned round on itself in meaningless existence; it got you nowhere. The only thing to do was to escape from this circle into the spiritual and the eternal. There was no escape forward; the only escape was backward or inward or upward. Salvation was escape—escape from the weary round of existence. The devotees’ interest was not in the future, for there is no future, but in the changeless eternal world. The Stoics called this the “flight from the world of sense to pure being.” Salvation in Hinduism is to get out of this world of karma and transmigration into realization of oneness with the non-personal Brahma. The world process is maya (illusion). History was not worth recording, for it had no meaning and no goal; only the spirit counted. Hence all India’s literature is philosophy, related to spirit and its emancipation from a material world. Salvation is escape.
O Lord, teach us what you have in mind for us and our world. Help us to catch your mind with joy and offer ourselves as agents of your purpose. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am on the Way, the Way not to escape but to something Big and Significant.