What Is The Religious Spirit?

I am surrounded each morning by many friends.  Most of these friends I have never met, but I feel that I have met them through the books they have written.  Through the years, the writers of the Psalms in the Old Testament have shared my predicaments with me.   It is always good to know that one has company.  They seemed to know, and to feel, way back in their time, the very feelings  I, and all of us, have experienced on the trail of life.  Here are just a few examples:  “…I am weak; my very bones are shaken; my soul quivers in dismay.”  “…How long must I suffer anguish in my soul, grief in my heart, day and night?”  “…My strength drains away like water and all my bones are loose.  My heart has turned to wax and melts within me.”  “…I am lonely and oppressed.  Relieve the sorrows of my heart and bring me out of my distress.”  Have you ever been there with the Psalmists?  

These writers also use violent and unpleasant words, words of vengeance and anger, words of hatred and arrogance against their enemies.  Do we not do the same?  The Psalmists reach into the wellspring of the human heart and give expression to all that they discover there.  They also reach out to the Beyond and express in the language of their day what they experience—“Thou, Lord, dost make my lamp burn bright, and my God will lighten my darkness.”

"They cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he rescued them from their distress."

The writers of the Psalms describe, in their own unique way, the essential character of the religious spirit.  Alfred North Whitehead, another friend of the written word, expresses this religious spirit of the Psalmists far better than I can.

“Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.”

How grateful I am for these friends of mine!

Influences

It stirs me deeply when I look back and realize that so many people gave me something or were something to me without knowing it.  Some of these people I never met.  Some I merely heard or read things about.    Still others were very close and known intimately.  So many of them had a decisive influence on me.  They came into my life and became “powers” within me.  Much of who I am and what I’ve attempted to do and to live is rooted in the rich soil and the sway of these “Star Persons.”  

My Grandad never knew....

I’ve come to believe that we all live, spiritually, by what other people have given us in the significant moments of our life.  These significant times are unannounced; they often come quietly and unexpectedly.  Sometimes we do not even perceive them until we look back upon the trail of life.  Many of the qualities that may be credited to us, we owe to people in whom we first saw or experienced those qualities being exercised.

If these “Star Persons” who have meant so much to us could stand before us now, and we could tell them how much they influenced us, I think they would be amazed to learn what they passed over from their life into ours.  

[My high school Latin teacher, Mr. Sim, was stunned when his “smart-aleck” student of years ago wrote of how much his patience influenced my life.  His response at 85 years of age:  “I didn’t know.  You made my day!”]

I realize in these quiet moments of a new day the great number of individuals to whom I am indebted.  In the eyes of the world few of these significant others in my life were eminent (though some were), most of them were inconspicuous, but not so for me.  They were “stars,” each one, for they lighted my candle enabling me to see through the darkness. 

The Road Not Taken

John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”  What if?  We all ask the question from time to time.  With Robert Frost, we pause occasionally to remember the roads that opened before us over the course of the years and wonder what might have been had we trod the ones not taken.  The choice of roads make all the difference.  I am grateful for the roads I chose, but I also know those others I did not choose to take would have made “all the difference” too.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,  And sorry I could not travel both  And be one traveler, long I stood  And looked down one as far as I could  To where it bent in the undergrowth;	Then took the other, as just as fair,  And having perhaps the better claim  Because it was grassy and wanted wear,  Though as for that the passing there  Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay  In leaves no step had trodden black.  Oh, I kept the first for another day!  Yet knowing how way leads on to way  I doubted if I should ever come back.	I shall be telling this with a sigh  Somewhere ages and ages hence:  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,  I took the one less traveled by,  And that has made all the difference.

Two roads lay open to the Christian Church in its infancy:  The way of Rome and the way of Greece.  What if the Christian Church had chosen to take the way of Greece? 

Jesus said, “Seek and ye shall find,” and “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”  The Greeks found this easy to understand, but it was very hard for a Roman.  The Romans were organizers, and an organization is not a place where people are encouraged to seek or to be free.

“Like a mighty army moves the Church of God.”  That is a Roman, not a Greek idea.  Greeks could not tolerate unquestioning obedience or for doing and saying and thinking what everyone else does.  Greeks wanted to think for themselves.  Romans distrusted anyone who was different.  They wanted their people to be unthinking people—a people who would do what they were told.

Romans thought human nature tolerable only under strong control.  Humanity was evil.  This was far from the Greek way which saw in every person a spark of the divine.  The Greeks said with Jesus,  “The truth shall make you free,” but neither Jesus nor the Greeks said, “This is the truth.”  Both talked about God, but they did not attempt to define God.  The Romans, on the other hand, made authoritative declarations about the things unseen and demanded that it be received without question.

Ah! it is true, the road we choose makes all the difference.

Menander Speaks to Our Time

Jesus of Nazareth said, “Out of the heart of  man proceed evil thoughts.  These are what defile a man.”  The people of Palestine in the first century A.D. considered Jesus’ saying as new.  Some now say his words were God’s.  The people of Jesus’ time did not know, as most of us do not know, that something very similar was said four hundred years earlier in Athens by Menander.  He said, “All that defiles a man comes from within.”  Jesus said, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s (sister’s) eye, with never a thought for the great plank in your own?”  Menander wrote four hundred years earlier, “When you would say some evil of your neighbor, first think of all the evil in yourself.”  When Paul, the apostle, wrote, “Evil communications corrupt good manners,” he was, though he probably did not know it, directly quoting Menander.   

Bridges and Walls--Bridges connect, walls separate.

Menander was a comedian of sorts, a playwright, in ancient Greece.  He was able to speak the truth of life (of human nature) in a way only a few have done since.   He was, perhaps, the Athenian Shakespeare.  Unlike Shakespeare, however, Menander has mostly been forgotten and ignored.  To forget and ignore history and the persons who played a part in it is a tragic thing—and when we do it, as we are doing now in our society—we suffer severe consequences.  History, if unknown or unacknowledged, repeats itself!

Athens, the first democracy, was fading away in Menander’s time.  The people had lost the inner flame of free thought, of openness, of the genius that had spawned that democratic experiment.  In Menander’s time, they were a selfish people, concerned only for their own security, affluence and comfort.  The Athenians became small and absorbed in small personal matters.  There was no anger at what was taking place around them, no fire of conviction, no speaking out for truth.  Only that which touched them personally mattered and the wall they built around themselves  eventually destroyed the greatness that once was theirs.

Menander tried, but failed. The fire was gone. No longer could the Athenians grasp, just as we seem to be failing to grasp Menander’s truths:

“If a man can change a god to that which he desires, 

Then he himself is greater than the god.”

“No man is alien to me.  In us all 

There is one nature.” 

The Thrill of a Naturalist's Quest

From the time I was just a little guy I apparently had the heart of a naturalist.  My mother told stories of how as a youngster I would sit quietly for hours and watch ants do their work.  During the early summers of my youth there were turtles, frogs, or some other form of wildlife in the old wash tub on the back porch.  Once I found a cocoon that held my interest.  I put the mysterious cocoon in a Mason jar, punched nail holes in the lid, and placed it in the house in an out of the way place.  A while later, thousands of tiny Praying Mantis, small enough to escape through the holes in the lid,  invaded our home.  In spite of such episodes (and there were many), my parents did not discourage the naturalist tendency within me.  Indeed, my father, our neighbors and friends encouraged it.  My father even brought home a little black snake for me to observe once.  Neighbors brought baby groundhogs, squirrels, birds, and turtles for my summer menageries. 

When I was in the sixth or seventh grade I found a book, “The Thrills of a Naturalist’s Quest,” by Raymond L. Ditmars in the school library.  Written in 1934, the book described the author’s experience as a naturalist.  Reading the book flamed my interest and over the next several years I became an avid herpetologist (dealing with reptiles and amphibians).  I spent several summers as a counselor in the Nature Department at a Boy Scout Camp primarily catching snakes of all kinds.

Other interests took over as I entered high school, but the thrill of the naturalist’s quest never left me completely.  That thrill was re-awakened recently as I walked through the rainforest of Costa Rica where the Fer-De-Lance snake makes its home.  I remembered Ditmars describing his experience with this very aggressive reptile.  I looked for one all along the pathways we trod through the  jungle.  Unfortunately, I did not spy one.  However, we did see the poisonous brown viper.  What a thrill!  The guide became quite uncomfortable as I tried to get in close to the snake for a photo.   He did not know that within me still, there was “The Thrill of a Naturalist’s Quest.”

More Fortunate Than Aristotle

My thoughts wander this morning to my Teacher, Encourager, and Friend, D. Elton Trueblood.  Our relationship began when he was 70 and I was 27 years of age.  It ended twenty-four years later with his death at the age of 94.  I am more fortunate that Aristotle!  Aristotle had Plato as his teacher for only twenty years!

While I knew about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle before meeting Elton, he made these ancient philosophers and teachers come alive for me.  Elton took me on as his student and as he often said, became my “unofficial” Bishop.  He taught me many things and introduced me to some of the greatest minds and the greatest books the world has ever known.  How grateful I am!

Plato (c. 428-348 B.C) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle.  Plato founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Western world.  Centuries before John wrote in his gospel, “The true light that lightens every man that cometh into the world,” Plato was already teaching it.  Plato believed there was in every person a spark of good, of the divine, which could be kindled into a flame.  To make the spark blaze up in the souls of men was the object of Plato’s work, which he called the service of God.  “One must turn the eye,” Plato said, “from the perishing world to what is real and eternal…turn the eye of the soul to the light.”

As Socrates fanned the spark in Plato so Plato did in Aristotle.  The flame in Aristotle, however, gave forth a different light.  Aristotle was a scientist.  Through Plato Aristotle came to believe in God, but Plato never attempted to prove God’s reality.  Aristotle had to do so.  Plato contemplated God.  Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate God.  Plato never defined God, but Aristotle tried.  Both Plato and Aristotle were ardent seekers of truth, but they sought and found it by different paths.  (Aristotle later became Alexander the Great’s teacher).

I am so grateful to Elton, for through him, I became friends with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

Visions and Dreams

The ancient prophet recorded God as saying:  “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov 29:18, KJV).  And later, in the New Testament, God is recorded as saying:  “This will happen in the last days….your young men (and women) shall see visions and your old men (and women) shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:17-18).

Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica

The seeing of visions and the dreaming of dreams sounds so otherworldly, so redundant in our world today.  Yet, we will perish without visionaries and dreamers who have the capacity to see new possibilities, new combinations of what is and what can be, and to see now, in imagination, that which is not yet but which ought to be.

What’s the use of dreaming or envisioning something new and different?  Most of us see what is—the status quo—the way it really is, we say.  But is it?  Is it what really is?  This morning I ask myself, “What is the real future?”  Does what is happening now in the present contain within it the possibility of a new world totally different from the one we now know?  I think so.  But it will take dreamers and visionaries to make it happen.

I believe that the vision I see (“a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky”)—so different from what is—is real.  I see that which ought to be but is not yet.  And because it ought to be, I believe, by faith, that it will be.