The Vital Rhythms of Religion

June 19, 1966
Plainfield

The Vital Rhythms of Religion

On a Sunday such as this when we declare a recess for awhile from formal Sunday services, it is appropriate to think about two vital rhythms of religion. One is our need to become restored spiritually by touching ancient sources of help; to seek that which grasps our human experience with the sense of wonder. Can you thrust aside the curtain of personal tensions which has beset you and be open to words which conjure up images of restoration? For if you can, you are in touch with a vital rhythm of religion:

(Take Sky – Laurie)

But while we rest and re-create, surrounded by the perfumes of parklands and picnics; while we are engulfed by the drowsiness of days emancipated from usual problems, can we remember a world that will not cease from tremblings just because we take our ease? Can you confront a world of bristling threats and uncertain future? For if you can, you are in touch with another vital rhythm of religion:

(Sestina of Sandbars and Shelters – Joss)

The vital rhythms of religion are restoration and reality. Rayner Johnson writes, "a living and vital religion ought to, broadly speaking, do two things for the plain man. It should be related to his tasks in everyday life, to the workshop, office or factory in which he earns his daily bread.

It should also set his life in the context of a greater whole so that the crises which overtake him – accident, suffering, disease, loss and finally death – can be faced with serenity and fortitude because they are believed to be part of a meaningful pattern." (NURSLINGS OF IMMORTALITY, p. 156).

Did you see the cartoon in the "New Yorker" (4/30/66? An obviously depressed business man is returning to the kitchen just after having left for the office and says to his bathrobed, hair-curlered wife, "I don’t mean my car battery has run down, I mean MY battery has run down."

There is some scientific confirmation for the cartoonist's insight. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical School not long ago offered the opinion that when a person loses his zest for life, it usually isn’t long before illness strikes. The researchers are calling this the "giving-up-complex." When a person loses confidence, when the encounters of living no longer provide zest, when one is overpowered by the feeling that one just cannot "take it anymore," then this corrosion of hope may lead to a deterioration of health.

We need restoration. For some it is travel; for others, seclusion; for others, excitement; for others, golf links, harbors, beaches, summer theatre or bustling festivals.

There is some restoring quality in recognizing that all our religious dependence must not be on the religious institution. Perhaps that is a minister's June bias as he looks forward to a break in routines. Obviously, persons in my profession point to the church as an organization deserving support, worth upholding as a functioning society which meets needs for common worship, religious education, group service, societal relationships. Yet, one should not depend on any institution for all resources, because institutions, religious institutions not excepted, can sometimes induce one to be busy and pre-occupied with externals, while the internals of conviction, awareness and resolution are neglected. We can be so busy with the outward institution that the inward faith becomes paralyzed from disuse. We need to remember Whitehead's definition that religion is what man is in his solitariness. Restoration comes from responding to the occasional rhythmic pulse which beats out our need to remember that we can become better citizens and churchmen and churchwomen, if, in addition to group responsibility, we now and then feel free to maintain a portion of our life-emphasis individually, seeking strength that may be uniquely our own.

Roger Williams (ca. 1600-1684), the exemplar of liberty of conscience, was a persuasive example of one who maintained great personal faith almost to the exclusion of the organized institution. Coming to Colonial New England for reasons of conscience, again and again he endured persecution because he placed conscience first and the institution second. He renounced the Church of England. He denounced the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony because (in Williams' view) it falsely represented the King as a Christian and because the Charter gave away title to land the King didn't own: "The Indians owned the land," declared Roger Williams. Furthermore, he stood squarely opposed to the practice of the citizen’s oath of loyalty.

His faith was strong enough to direct him to the wilderness when he was banished; to live with the Indians; to establish Providence Plantation wherein majority civil rule and liberty of individual conscience were established.

Churches, municipalities, the nation, the corporations which hire our time and talents have a major claim on our effort and loyalty. But not completely. We need the opportunity to restore our strength in re-creation, rest and change of pace. Wordsworth had some appropriate lines in "A Poet's Epitaph:"

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
of hill and valley he has viewed;
and impulses of deeper birth
have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart."


In a season of restoration there is quiet strength to be obtained from embracing the poet's injunction,

"Put not asunder
Man’s first word: wonder...wonder."

But restoration can degenerate into decadent world-apartness if reality is ignored. Think of those lines that Joce read,

"O sky and sand and blue of here and now,
how shall we keep you always for our friends
and us, and for our sons when we are gone,
or save some certainty for all, and shelter
the dream of living for a piece of time
within a known and tolerable world?"

Reality is the other vital rhythm of religion that I would have you consider today. Summer is a time for picnic and summer theatre, highway and mountaintop, sailing and surfing, sand and sun. But summer days have been days marking enormous social change and disruption when pivotal happenings have turned about the trends of history.

July 4 marked the Declaration of Independence; July 14, the French Revolution gathered irresistible momentum when the Bastille fell; it was June 28 in 1914 when Arch-duke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, plunging Europe and later, other Continents, into that awful event, World War I.

July 16 is the anniversary of a radically new world, for on that date 21 years ago, 300 scientists watched the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico. August 6 and August 9 were summer days when our nation used atomic bombs against cities – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Summer is a time when one should be alert to the religious rhythms of reality too.

Joseph Wood Krutch once observed that "the ancient world ended and the Dark Ages began when the army of Belisarius cut the Roman aqueducts and, overnight, turned Rome from a community with a water supply, said to have been comparable with that of a modern city, into a Dark Ages town where a few wells and cisterns had to serve a large population. A calamity even greater, but no less easy to imagine, might introduce us to a new Dark Age." (AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Spring 66, p.132)

Recreation can become little more than leisurely decay unless there beats also the rhythm of reality of our world. One author writes, "Why talk about World War III when the last one isn't over yet? From Warsaw comes the report that in 1965, forty-five Polish children have been killed and 718 injured by explosives left from World War II." (Jerome Beatty, Jr., "Sharps and Flats," SR 11/65)

The alternating rhythms of restoration and reality are so deeply a part of religious myth, legend and history that we can feel some degree assurance that these contrasting experiences combine to make us more whole persons. Moses retreated to the mountaintop and came back to the Exodus camp a better leader with more definitive convictions and more creative plans. Jesus went to the wilderness; and there acquired the strength of spirit which was to be his adequate reserve when his powerful convictions led him to confront fearlessly a world which neither understood nor accepted him. Toynbee wrote at length of this pattern of "withdrawal and return" as explaining the source of the courage and moral reserves of authentic great leaders.

Neither restoration nor reality are sufficient when each is emphasized alone. Gandhi once said, "you can wake up a man who is asleep, but if he is merely pretending to be asleep, your efforts will have no effect on him." (quoted by Dwight McDonald, in letter to NR, 1/29/66) Edwin Muir, writing in the British Unitarian publication, "The Enquirer", (8/31/63), summed up the matter in two sentences: "Our minds are possessed by three mysteries: where we come from, where we are going, and since we are not alone but members of a countless family, how we should live with one another. These questions are aspects of one question, and none of them can be separated from the others and dealt with alone."

Where do we come from? Where are we going? How shall we live with one another? Such are the interwoven themes of living. [We deal] with these now and then in solitude and relaxation, but it is in returning always to grapple with the living problems in the experiences of home, office, church, state, continent and world that we may expect to achieve authentically both restoration and reality.

From the murmur and subtlety of suspicion with which we vex one another, give us rest.

Make a new beginning and mingle again the kindred of the nations in the alchemy of love.

And with some finer essence of forbearance temper our minds.

Aristophanes