What’s the Big Idea?

June 26, 1956
Bridgeport

What’s the Big Idea?

We have been requested to make some observance today of Civic Sunday. Feeling that the Barnum Festival, coming next week-end is a community celebration, the Bridgeport Pastors’ Association suggested that the churches might very well make some fitting recognition of the spirit that prompts such a gigantic spectacle. The Barnum festival is a good idea. It is a good idea whenever separated groups in a community do something together. Something good is happening when beauty, talent, humor, pageant and parade create diversion for the adults and bring excitement and laughter to little children. It’s a good idea too – but it’s not the big idea.

The memorial service we will observe next Sunday, honoring the memory of Phineas T. Barnum is a good idea. He was not perfect. Who is? But he had as many fine qualities as the average person and was a better churchman than many of his day. Just as much as his generosity, his fearless pronouncements of his Universalist beliefs deserve our praise and commemoration. A Barnum Memorial Service is a good thing – but it’s not the big idea.

The nation-wide publicity, the ballyhoo, the trade and interest which accrues Bridgeport businessmen, these preliminaries and consequences of the Barnum festival are good for Bridgeport. The sense of community becomes badly fragmented in city life today. The consequences of urban progress in housing, transportation and specialization of occupation are not entirely beneficial. We love the intimacy of the close-ly knit village, the small but crowded church. We have broken away from the provincialism and isolation of the tribe, clan and family. That break-through was good because it was necessary in the changing world. But in so doing, the person-to-person relationship, the sense of community, threatens to become a part of the forgotten past. So the gathering of clans, the lodges of parading Shriners and Knights, the procession of veterans, baton-twirlers, the floats of business and industry come to recapture and preserve something of the sense of community that was never better illustrated [than] the old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration in the small towns of America. It’s a good idea – but it’s not the big idea.

“... They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks ... nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall ... them afraid ... For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever. (Micah 4) That’s the big idea! That’s the daring, optimistic dream of community that men have the power to vibrate within us and tumble the walls of the Jericho of self-centeredness. We must put an end to war, hunger, disease and agonizing poverty because every person on our globe is part of one human family, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh – we must build the universal community, because that’s the Big Idea. That’s the basic oneness of all great religions, not the prize package of Judaism or Christianity.

Here in America the white invaders have been so dominated by their share of mankind’s history, they have never known or overlooked the fact that some of the human beings from whom they took the land had the big idea too. The great Iroquois tribes who made up a Confederation of Indian Nations prior to the time of the European Invasion, dreamed of the Big Idea around their council fires. Their religious savior Deganawida (OUR WILDERNESS SAVIOR, by Thomas R. Henry), born of a virgin mother, or so the Iroquois were taught by their religious teachers, beheld a great vision. This vision was . preached and communicated by Hiawatha, the Indian Savior’s .... Hiawatha was not the character of Longfellow’s poem. The real Hiawatha was a person whose career and personal qualities are startlingly parallel to the life of St. Paul. Deganawida dreamed of a gigantic spruce tree whose top boughs broke through into the light of heaven. (p. 32) The tree grew out of a luminous snow-white carpet spread over rock-strewn hills. This tree was the sisterhood of humanity. Its roots were the tribes. This was the symbolic concept of ‘the universal law of equity, righteous and well being’, of the Great Confederation, in the minds of Deganawida and Hiawatha. The carpet coveted the lands of the nations who had accepted the gospel of Hiawatha and Deganawida. It could be extended to cover the earth. All men of all races could find sanctuary upon it, as when children they had found sanctuary in the arms of their mothers.

The soil from which this tree would grow was composed of three double principles:

“Ne Skenno – health of body and sanctity of mind, peace between individuals and groups.
“Ne Gaiinwiyo – righteousness in conduct, thought and deed; equity and justice in the adjustment of human rights.
“Ne Gashedenza – maintenance of self-defense and military power; maintenance and increase or orenda and spiritual power....”

These religious prophets of the Iroquois had the big idea for they saw the whole human family as being part of the same roots of the great tree of life.

The Big Idea, the universal human community whose roots are irrevocably intertwined, must be more than the unifying symbol of universal religion. If it is only words for religious devotion or only a dream that has no reality, then it is not the big idea. Rather if it is but an echo of occasional wishful thinking; if it is but an empty dream with no fulfillment wanted, and no fulfillment possible, then it is a snare and a delusion and the foulest obscenity of the ages.

But there is substance to the dream. The ideal has begun to become real. This week at the San Francisco Opera House the tenth anniversary ceremonies of the United Nations are the living testimony that the big idea is more than a then the longing of an Israelite the fantastic dream of a native American. FIX. Many Americans have felt aggrieved that the United Nations has not always been a rubber stamp for the United States. Probably many Russians have similar grievances from their point of view. All the prejudices of the tribe have not yet been exorcised from our emotions. We dearly love to hold to and favor what we think of as our own. So sometimes we forget the big idea because we fear Danish silverware, Icelandic fish, English woolens, German Folkswagens, or Japanese gadgets will reduce the abundance of material wealth that is ours. Even more, we fear that delegating part of our sovereignty to a parliament of mankind will produce some terrible sort of disaster.

So in spite of many doubts, some of which obviously are caused by selfishness, and some less clearly provincial, the United Nations is the best spelling out in practice so far of the big idea.

Of course men have died in Korea. There can be no evading of those agonies. Other men have suffered in captivity. A plane has been attacked in the narrow Bering Strait. But threatened wars have been averted many times by UN action or influence – in Israel, Iran, Greece and other spots that might have been the fire to heat up the Cold War. There is no need to repeat to you things that have been said before, which have been shown you this year in movies, slides, pamphlets and newsletters. But when wars are averted, when hungry children are fed, when disease is cured or prevented, when technical assistance begins to lift the burden of burdensome labor and brings the light of knowledge into the faces of those who have been illiterate – one can affirm that the big idea can be achieved.

The dream has become the possibility. This we now know. The Big Idea can become true.

But in our time we cannot rest with the assurance of the possibility. In our time we must face one more fact. The Big Idea must be achieved. How many atomic and hydrogen bombs would it take to reduce all living things to ashes? Winston Churchill, not a scientist, but a man wise enough to understand the implications of what scientists discover, said 50 atomic bombs would do it. Both the United States and the USSR have been manufacturing atomic bombs for years. It has been reported that the United States has thousands of atomic bombs, to say nothing of hydrogen. Perhaps the Russians lag far behind; perhaps not. Even if we decided to take the way of aggression, there is no assurance that the “survival of the country with the most terrible and greatest quantity of atom and hydrogen bombs would have more than a Pyrrhic victory. There is not much comfort in strength because if the Russians fry to dust, so probably will we. A larger quantity of unused inventory of bombs will be slight consolation because no one will be left to be comforted.

The Big Idea must be achieved because there are nervous fingers on the hair triggers of the weapons of mutual extermination.

A scientist speaking before a group of manufacturers and business-men not long [ago] held a one-inch cube of solid uranium metal. He told them that the fissionable power in that one inch cube was equivalent to a “good many hundred thousand pounds of TNT.” Just a single inch cube!

But also, that single one inch cube was equal also to 3 million pounds of coal: equal to the power created by several hundred thousand gallons of gasoline. That potential, for a horrible death or a more abundant life can be held easily in the palm of one’s hand.

Two of three children in the world must go to bed hungry tonight. If all the potential power that is stored so that a nation can make the death strike were used to create power machinery for consumer goods, farm machinery, canneries of food, meat, and fish.... If all the power equivalent to millions of tons of coal were created to turn the wheels of transportation, heating plants, textile mills, drug manufacture, perhaps those children might be fed and clothed with a life before them.

Perhaps you say the cost of this Big Idea is too much. Perhaps you read only the headlines of squabbles and disagreements in the U.N. Perhaps you have not followed our UNESCO newsletters posted on our bulletin board.

The philosopher George Santayana once defended the much criticized Greek philosophy of Epicureanism by remarking that with all its alleged defects in the eyes of Christian philosophers, it had certain values. It taught men that their reliance was on themselves. They were “comrades afloat on the same raft together with no fate not common to them all, and no possible helpers but one another.”

We belong to a religion that teaches that all mankind is one; their roots are one and the future of each is unavoidably bound together with the fortunes of all. The same life-giving fluid runs through all the roots and out to the outermost twig and leaf. Whether we like it or not the people of earth, white, black, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, unbeliever – we are all one. When we recognize and discipline our thoughts, our feelings and our acts in harmony with the feeling of universality, one mankind of many colors, one god with many names, then we are [within] sight of the city of God.

“Earth shall be fair, and all her people one;
Nor till that hour shall God’s whole will be done.
Now, even now, once more from earth to sky,
Peals forth in joy man’s old undaunted cry --
Earth shall be fair, and all her people one.” (Clifford Bax, #342, HS...)

That’s Universalism and that’s the big idea.