Week 27 Sunday
Week 27 Sunday
The Halfway House
Ephesians 4:16; Colossians 1:17 (Weymouth); 2:10; 8:14
We have now completed half our journey in our quest for victorious living. One note running through these pages, which will continue in the pages to come, is this: if there is to be victorious living, there must be no paralyzing divisions, there must be unity. This is psychologically and spiritually sound.
But we have only begun to see how wide this demand for unity will be. It must take in everything. We saw that there must be no clashing division between the conscious and the subconscious mind. Freud says that the process of mental harmony is brought about by “making the unconscious conscious.” In other words, there should be no hidden strife between the conscious and the subconscious minds. We also saw that there must be no clashing division in the conscious mind itself. When we try to give ourselves to mutually competing ends, we find defeat. There are some things that are not “compossible”—they cannot exist side by side without causing spiritual paralysis. If we are going to have victory, we must decide between them. Again, there must be nothing between us and God. Every barrier must go down between God’s will and ours.
And now we see the necessity of a further unity, the unity between the individual and the social. If we allow a division to grow up between these two through lack of emphasis on either side, there will be spiritual defeat. The social without the personal is a body without a soul, and the personal without the social is a soul without a body; one is a corpse and the other a ghost. But together they make a living person. This division between the individual and the social has been the root cause of the major defeats of religion in modern life. The hope of the world is in the healing of this breach.
In order to get victory are you prepared to heal that breach as far as you are concerned?
O Christ, you are leading us to unity. Help us to hold back at no point, but to go on to complete unity. Amen.
Week 27 Monday
The Unity of the Ideal and the Real
Matthew 7:15-27; 23:2-3
We said yesterday that we were beginning to see how wide the demand for unity will be. This demand will confront us at the place of the ideal and the real, of theory and practice.
While in Russia, an intelligent woman said to me, “I suppose you are an idealist?” I replied that I was. She waved her hand and said, “Au revoir, I’m a realist.” I smiled then and rather pitied her for her contempt of idealism, but since then my smile has worn off, and there has come a sense of concern that she might be right.
Will it prejudice a truth in our eyes if it comes by way of Karl Marx? Well, we shall have to get over those prejudices if we are going to discover reality and through it victory. Marx propounded the idea of the unity of theory and practice. This means that you have only one theory and that is what you put into operation, at least in its beginnings. The only thing you really believe in is the thing you believe in sufficiently to put into operation, at least in its beginnings. This unity of theory and practice searches us to the depths and should prove a cleansing cathartic to Christendom.
John Macmurray says that the next great step forward for Christianity is to get rid of its idealism.* As an earnest Christian, he means it. Just what does he mean by it? His contention is that we have built up idealism as mental compensation for low practice. The very fact that we hold these high ideals gives us comfort that we are persons who could be so lofty, at least, in ideal. This compensates for the real and excuses us, or lets us down easy. This mental world becomes a world of fantasy, while something else holds us in fact, because it holds at the place of action.
Is Macmurray right? Must idealism go and realism take its place? Or can they be unified?
O Christ, we come needing guidance at this place. Help us to be willing to let go even our ideals if they interfere with reality. For we must be real. Amen.
* Creative Society (New York: Association Press, 1936).
Week 27 Tuesday
Losing Our Ideals to Find Them Again
1 Corinthians 6:20; 2 Corinthians 3:13; Philippians 3:4-7
Yesterday we said that one of the first steps toward unity of life is to break down divorces between idealism and realism. One or the other must go, or they must come together. Macmurray says that idealism must go:
But the first step of all, on which everything else turns, is the total rejection of idealism. . . . For idealism is profoundly irreligious, because it is the perversion of religion into unreality. . . . The idealism of pseudo-Christianity consists in the divorce between hunger and love, through which love becomes an ideal, and hunger is left to control and determine action. Love becomes a sentiment or a feeling or the exaltation that accompanies the contemplation of an idea.*
If we lose idealism, does it mean that we should have no ideals? On the contrary, I think if we should lose idealism as something built up above and apart from life, if we should sow it into the soil of the real, our ideals would spring up again and flower into renewed beauty. We should lose them and find them again. Now we haven’t them, for they stand apart from life; then we would have them, for they would be deeply rooted in life itself. Now they are castles in the air to be realized in some future age or future world; then they would become houses here and now for us to live in.
In suggesting this we find ourselves very, very close to Christ in our thought and spirit. For he had no idealism apart from realism. He says, “The words I have spoken to you I don’t speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me does his works” (John 14:10 CEB). Here “words” and “works” are used synonymously: Jesus’ words were God’s works. They were one.
They must become one in your life and mine. But how?
O Christ, you are searching us with your realism. You are calling us to overhaul and throw overboard useless thinking that we do not intend to put into operation. Help us not to ask for compromises. Help us to be true. Amen.
* Creative Society, 149, 151–52.
Week 27 Wednesday
The Application of This Principle
Luke 4:16-24; 2 Corinthians 4:2
Yesterday we ended by asking the question of how we could make our idealism and our realism one. Here we shall have to walk softly and ask for light and a transparent honesty.
First of all, we should take an inventory of ideals that we think are now being used in our lives as mental compensation; things that are held to comfort us mentally but not to guide us morally. We shall probably come across things like this: A little girl of three not wanting to go to bed, was hiding from her mother. She said to someone sitting near, “If my mother asks where I am, tell her I am not here, but don’t tell a lie.” That last phrase was idealism used as mental compensation for what she was doing. We will find many such things in our lives.
At the close of a question period, someone overheard a member of the audience saying, “It is our business to ask questions, and it is his business to answer them, but none of us expect to do anything about it.” This was searching. It showed that he believed that religion was idealism and not realism. We must end this hiatus.
As we go over our lives in the quietness before God and come across such things, we must renounce this idealism in the name of Christianity. It will hurt us to the very core to renounce our idealism, for it will mean that we will appear in our own eyes less good than we had led ourselves to believe. But at the very least, there will be this gain—there will be mental honesty. And that is the beginning of a fresh approach. So,
Down with every barrier,
Off with every mask,
Out with every sin, and,
Away with every sterile ideal.*
O Christ of the kindly searching eye, we open our lives to your gaze, and we open our wills to your full obedience. Help us to be completely honest and completely responsive. Then we can go forward. Amen.
* Source unknown.
Week 27 Thursday
The Application of This Principle to the Social Order
James 1:22-27; 1 John 3:16-19
When we come to apply this principle of the unity of theory and practice to the social order, we shall find ourselves in difficulties, for here the realization of our ideals does not depend entirely on us. Other people are involved and social change must await their cooperation. What, then, can we as individuals do?
We can ask ourselves two questions. First, in what direction is my face turned? This first question includes others: Is my attitude straight in regard to doing away with a competitive order in favor of a cooperative one? Am I really inwardly set against ghastly inequalities between man and man? Am I inwardly committed to wiping out distinctions based on class and color? Have I inwardly renounced war? Am I inwardly free from the dominance of narrow nationalism? Am I inwardly set against all exploitation of human by human? Do I want to see all people free? Do I really want community?
The second question—What steps am I taking toward making real these inner attitudes in outer life?—includes these issues: As far as it depends on me and on the circumstances I control, am I, here and now, taking steps to end the things that are wrong? Am I going as far as I can in realizing the things that are right? I may not be at the goal, but am I on the way, with the consent of my whole being? Now?
This “now” is important. For without it, even the intention to do it sometime or other becomes a mental compensation and an opiate. “Of course we’ve got to do away with these injustices and inequalities; but then I don’t suppose, at least I hope not, that it will be in my time,’’ said a large landowner to me in India. There is no reality that hasn’t a “now” in it. Am I prepared to put a “now” in all these intentions?
O you who are the Alpha—the Christ of the beginnings—help me to begin here and now to take the right attitudes and to take the first steps. I am used to living in two worlds; it will not be easy to begin in one. But help me to do it. Amen.
Week 27 Friday
The Unity of the Secular and the Sacred
Luke 16:9-12; Acts 6:1-3; 1 Corinthians 10:31
One of the most disastrous divorces that ever took place in Christendom was the divorce between the sacred and the secular. In early Christianity they were one. When the disciples wanted people to look after the food arrangements, they said they must get people “of good repute, full of the Spirit and wisdom” (Acts 6:3) to look after this matter. Wisdom and the Holy Spirit were to be carried into the so-called secular and were to make it sacramental. All life was to be saved.
Now we have divided life into the sacred and secular: sacred callings and secular callings, sacred days and secular days, sacred buildings and secular buildings, sacred books and secular books. We thought thus to preserve both. In doing so we have impoverished both. The secular has become materialized, and the sacred etherealized, with the emphasis on the “ether.’’ It has been the very devil’s strategy thus to divide and rule. And he does rule where they are divided. We can never live victoriously as long as we try to live a compartmentalized life. They must be brought together. They need each other.
Wrote an earnest missionary: “When you write, show us how to live victoriously in such dull commonplaces as the keeping of books, attending to uninteresting details such as a missionary has to do. Can we not make the whole thing vicarious by the thought that, if I do these things, someone else will be spared the drudgery of them?” Very beautiful. And yet was there not still the lurking thought that the material was less and other than the spiritual, and that one goes into it as one takes up a cross? Instead, should it not be looked on as a part of one’s spiritual life—that the spiritual life cannot be manifest except in and through the material? The word must become flesh or die as a word.
O Christ, in whom everything became one and in whom the commonplace was no longer the commonplace, but glowing with meaning and purpose, help us to make them one this day. Amen.
Week 27 Saturday
The Sacred and the Secular Looked at Again
Exodus 31:1-6; Romans 12:1; 1 Corinthians 6:19-20
We cannot leave this cleavage between the sacred and the secular without pausing another day, for if we still keep them divided, then we are defeated indeed, and defeated where it counts most.
We often quote with approval the man who said that he made shoes to pay expenses while he served God. But should he not have thought of serving God through the making of the shoes? Was not that material thing itself to become the manifestation of the spiritual? Is not the thing that attracts us to Brother Lawrence (the seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother) the fact that he practiced the presence of God in and through the washing of his pans and the scrubbing of his floors? Zechariah 14:21 says that “every pot in Jerusalem shall be sacred to the Lord of hosts.” And was not this the thing that Brother Lawrence fulfilled?
The business owner must be able to handle ledgers with the same sense of sacredness and mission as the minister handles the sacred Book in the pulpit. Of course that would mean the scrapping of many a business, for you cannot handle crookedness with sacredness. But it would be far better to scrap the business than to scrap one’s soul. But legitimate business can be made a sacrament. “The extension of the incarnation” should mean just this: Here today I stand in this business, in this workshop, in this schoolroom, to become the embodiment of the spirit of Christ in this situation. I shall work out his mind and spirit in my relationship with things and persons. As Peter offered his boat to Jesus to teach the multitudes from, so I offer to him my boat, my business, my life from which he may teach in this situation the meaning of the kingdom. I am an extension of the incarnation.
O Christ, we thank you that you can make life glow with meaning when we take you into the whole of it. Help me this day to do that very thing. I shall need power. But I know I can bank on you. Amen.