Difficult Tests for Seekers’ Religion

June 5, 1966
Plainfield

Difficult Tests for Seekers’ Religion

In most institutions of education, the tests are given before graduation. In the institution of religious education, as we attempt to practice it in the First Unitarian Society of Plainfield, graduation comes before most of the tests. In the second service, we will recognize 9th grade students who have finished the stated years [of our] church school program. We hope that these 9th graders will continue to participate in the life of the Church: in Liberal Religious Youth, attend morning services, sing in the choir or otherwise maintain direct involvement,

Tests follow graduation in this Unitarian Church because we have attempted to lead you to a seekers' faith. By a seekers' faith, we propose that there shall be a continuing search for religious knowledge and that religious faith grows. There has been no attempt to indoctrinate into a faith which can be yours forever – for any such faith so designed is inevitably a static faith.

Living faith should be dynamic – responding to changing conditions and new discoveries. Certain ways of believing are built into our attitude toward religious training from childhood to youth which suggest the seekers' faith.

First: We believe that each child, each person, is a unique person of supreme worth. Furthermore, each person has the capacity to grow by understanding his experience – to learn because of what happens in his environment; and to learn to become aware how the person may influence the course of events in his experience.

Second: Because we believe in the autonomous person and the validity of his own experience to him, we hold that the purposes of education are growth towards one's potential ability to live the good life, to strengthen character and to develop the ability to think intelligently and critically about what is presented as true or false.

Third: It follows that in an effort to provide room for development, we shall introduce the growing person to what others have believed in times past and what people believe who are living today. Students have studied the culture of our Judeo-Christian religious heritage to discover through history, through ancient songs, religious stories and doctrines what our fore-runners believed religion should be and what a religious person should do. But we have not attempted to limit this search for truth and knowledge to our particular segment of religious culture. We encourage persons to look beyond, to what other great religions have proposed as ways to understand life's deepest meanings and what life's deepest obligations are.

Our students have been encouraged to learn about some of the “isms”: Communism, Fascism, Nationalism, etc., - sometimes called the great secular religions. Students have been urged to observe how ideas can cause powerful whirlpools of social disruption; also how great ideas can lift rising tides of human progress.

One might say in summary that our goal of growth in intelligent, critical thinking as a measure of an effective religious education program requires no artificial boundaries to separate what is "religious" from all other ways of learning. When a person can integrate the tested findings of the sciences with the thoughtful propositions of the philosopher; and find a place in the scheme of life for the arts (music, painting, sculpture, literature) then that which is named "religion" is enlightened and supported. More than that, the sciences, the arts, philosophy should all integrate with religious belief; the whole being justified by one's conduct in the actual experiences of living.

Such is a seeker's faith: testing propositions by intelligent, critical thinking and testing claims by discovering if they work out in actual experience. But there are difficult tests for a seeker's faith beyond the measures of knowledge and reason.

One formidable test of a seeker's faith is to possess understanding as well as knowledge. One can know a great deal about someone else's beliefs and still not understand the other person sympathetically.

A friend of mine who has studied the early documents of colonial history on this continent told me a story which illustrates how we can know without understanding. In Colonial days, one of the largest Indian villages was Ganagora, now known as Boughton Hill, in Victor, New York, not far from the shores of Lake Ontario. On a hot July day in 1687, the Marquis Denonville led a French-Indian expeditionary force to punish the Senecas who lived on Boughton Hill because the Senecas had favored the English in the struggle for the lucrative fur-trade routes to the West. After a difficult, bloody battle, the French invaders were successful and the large Indian village burned. In the course of the battle, the Senecas committed acts which horrified the French; the French committed acts which horrified the Senecas. The Senecas in some cases ate the flesh of their fallen enemies. The French were utterly revolted by such cannibalism. The French, as they gradually gained victory, not only burned the shelters in which the corn of the Senecas was stored, but ruthlessly slashed down the standing corn which had been growing rapidly in the hot July sun.

To the French it was utterly unthinkable that the human body should be eaten; but as a strategy of war, the French destroyed the food of the enemy as a way of reducing future danger. The Senecas thought it utterly unthinkable that the food stores of living people should be destroyed with the consequence that a whole population might starve to death in the year or more before another crop could be harvested – and even this required seed corn which had been destroyed. As to eating the flesh of their foes was concerned, the Senecas did this ritually as their tribute to a brave enemy who had fallen in the battle.

Who is to be the more condemned? We need not make judgment at this late date,
but can we not understand the reasons for the acts as well as acquire the plain knowledge about the acts? Try to understand the viewpoint of a French soldier or Seneca brave.

Understanding as well as knowledge is always needed. To understand is one of the difficult tests of a seeker's faith. The writer Edgar Friedenberg has stated the goal perceptively, "The highest function of education is to help people understand the meaning of their lives, and become more sensitive to the meaning of other people's lives and relate to them more fully." (TC Record, Mar. 66). One must be compassionate as well as critical. For only then can we fully understand other persons who also have hopes, fears and vanities. This applies not only to the land of the Senecas, but also and more vitally to the land of living persons today.

Another formidable test of a seeker's faith is to have convictions of one's own as well acquiring sufficient knowledge to make comparisons of the beliefs of others. In our younger years, we seek to know what other people believe and how they came to their doctrines or fixed ideas. We study the Egyptian captivity of the Hebrews, the mighty legends of the Exodus, the wanderings in the wilderness and re-establishment in their ancient land. We try to learn how the Christian churches began and why their founders were convinced of the need to labor and to sacrifice in order to establish this new departure from ancient ways. We seek out the stories of our Unitarian and Universalist founders – why some beliefs became so important that they could live by such
convictions, and if necessary, die for them. We try to understand the passionate belief in One God cherished by the Moslems; we seek to acquire some insight into the abstractions of some varieties of Hinduism; we learn why the Buddha's name is revered as one of the founders of a great world religion. We may want to compare the merit of one faith as against another; or we may appraise one faith as much more intelligent than another; or we may pass judgment that one faith did much more for the welfare and condition of the human family than others. Such comparisons are good; we will learn much by such comparisons. But also we need convictions of our own.

Being attached to a critical, intelligent way of thinking about what other people believe has value in any event. But it is of even greater significance to use such evaluations as steps to build a faith of one's own. We need convictions of our own to support us in mind and heart when we meet the inevitable set-backs that always occur in living. To an underestimated degree, we need convictions of our own when everything goes along smoothly. Otherwise we may find ourselves vulnerable when rough times come. And they come.

We live in an age when there seems to be greater opportunity for individual achievement, personal comfort and economic security than in any other age in which man has lived. At least for us here in the U.S. Why do we need convictions when hunger is not likely here and if we are ill or injured we will receive good care? The clouds of war threaten, but on the whole, people are complacent. Things are pretty good; except in the opinion of some of us who are in that class the President calls "nervous nellies."

But convictions are still needed. Few afflictions bring more misery than the boredom which comes when one has no cause to serve, no purpose in which to invest mind and heart. Sara Henderson Hay once wrote lines, "Heresy Indeed," which make the point precisely,

"It is a piteous thing to be
Enlisted in no cause at all,
Unsworn to any heraldry;
To fly no banner from the wall,
Own nothing you would sweat or try for
Or bruise your hands or bleed or die for.

This were a greater sin against
That hostage of your living breast,
Than to rouse all the world incensed
At something you believed your quest,
And stormed the skies and suffered pain for
And fell and cursed and fought again for.

To take the smooth and middle path,
The half-hearted interest, the creed
Without extremes of hope or wrath,
Ah, this were heresy indeed
That all God's pity will not stay for,
And your immortal soul will pay for."

The list of difficult tests for seekers' faith is still incomplete. It is well to have understanding as well as knowledge; it is the more human way to be compassionate as well as critical; it is necessary for our well-being to have convictions as well as make comparisons, but to begin to give seekers' faith a wholeness, one must test the ideas in action in order to discover if they work in actual practice. Newspaperman James Wechsler (NY Post, 1/6/66) wrote, "it is an ancient axiom that the way to ruin a big story is to explore the facts."

So it is with the virtues of understanding, knowledge, convictions, comparisons – one doesn't know how much they represent the true against the false until they are tested by exposure to human affairs. There are lines by Lodene Brown Hathaway (Xn Century, 5/18/66),

"Great approbation can be won
For words of truth well spoken
Greater demoralization done
By acts proving them token."

Perhaps some of you have become bored to a fare-thee-well with the educational cliche, "learn by doing." In truth, this phrase, which has been interwoven with John Dewey's educational ideas and the emphasis [on] "progressive education," is incomplete. As Kilpatrick pointed out, the valid proposition is "learn by doing successfully." Nearly sixty years ago, John Dewey told a story which has not lost its pertinence with many tellings. Actually it is a parable not only about learning but about how one acquires vigorous faith. In a certain swimming school, young people were taught to swim
without going in the water, being repeatedly drilled in the various movements which are necessary for swimming. When one of the young men so trained was asked what he did when he got into the water, he laconically replied, “Sunk.”John Dewey then went on to observe, "The story happens to be true; were it not, it would seem to be a fable made expressly for the purpose of typifying the ethical relationship of school to society....The only way to prepare for social life is to engage in social life." (MORAL PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION, p. 13-14)

The measure of a seeker's faith has an equally realistic dimension. In actual meeting with men of other faiths and diverse convictions, can you understand and still maintain your own convictions? Can you behave in the social order in accordance with the ethics of responsibility which you have studied? Talking about literary critics, Kenneth Tynan, "once remarked with some degree of accuracy, ‘(Critics) all know the way, it's simply they cannot drive the car.’"(TC RECORD, April 66, p. 519)

So do not underestimate this test of learning by doing successfully, for almost always, persistence is necessary because one may fail in his first tries; almost always resistance is required, because of the temptation to give up after one, or two, or three, or whatever number of failures. If one would pass this test of a seeker's faith, one must persist and resist.

One thing more: If you would know the greater fulfillments of a seeker's faith, you must always see beyond your self – locate a higher horizon than the edge of your own self-seeking and self-gratification. In an article Peter Borden passed on to me, there is an anecdote which sums this up succinctly. A businessman who had finally "made it" and able to gratify his wishes, purchased a gigantic Rolls Royce. He was seen at a traffic light sitting in back, looking sad, even though he was surrounded by beautiful girls. The friend asked, "How come you are so gloomy? You've made it – you have this Rolls Royce and such company." The man wound down the window and said, “Yes, but I can't see myself in it.” When one is limited to seeing only oneself, then of course the image of success is only that, the image of success. One's own image quickly becomes a crashing bore if that is the boundary of vision. A most difficult test of faith is to get beyond self. The rewards of passing such a test can be known only when one has passed it,

Earlier this year, a number of writers were involved in a conversation with several teenagers in Lower Manhattan in connection with project LEAP. LEAP is a particular manner of working with youth which not only provides tutorial help, legal, medical and other services and counseling, but also sets up face-to-face relationships between teenagers and prominent persons. The whole conversation as reported in RENEWAL, March 66, grips the attention, but the closing remark of Lefty, one of the teenagers, has impact which should be shared: "What would I like to learn? I'd like to learn something. I haven't made up my mind yet. But I want to do one thing. I want to really know the beauty of things. I don't just want to read books, because I could read books for the rest of my life and not learn a thing. But if I find something I like in a book, or something I like underneath a rock, or behind a tree, or over the next hill, then I'm going to enjoy it the rest of my life.”

To which Nat Hentoff, the writer, responded, "That's the best definition of education I ever heard." Consider also how much this teenager recognized that one must get beyond ones self –

to know beauty
to find truth
to search underneath rocks, behind trees

and over the next hill – all these are wonderings and wanderings beyond self. And to get beyond self is a crucial test of a seeker's faith.