Images Of Restoration And Reality

June 2, 1985
Lakeland

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 images of religion. One symbolizes our need to be restored by touching ancient sources of help; to seek that which grasps our human experience with a 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? Do you recall the words about sky read a few minutes ago?

But while we rest and re-create, surrounded by the perfumes of parklands and picnics; while we are engulfed by the drowsiness of days delivered from usual problems, can we remember a world that will not cease from troublings just because we take our ease? Can we confront a world of bristling threats and uncertain future? Richard Lattimore reminded us in the verse, “This could be the last summer for the world.”

The vital images, or rhythms, of religion are restoration and reality. Rayner Johnson wrote, “a living and vital religion, broadly speaking, ought to do two things for the plain man (and woman). It should be related to his (her) tasks in everyday life, to the workshop, office, or factory in which they earn daily bread. It should also set their lives in the context of a greater whole so that the crises which overtake them – 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)

There was a cartoon in the NEW YORKER: an obviously depressed business man is returning to the kitchen immediately 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 medical confirmation for the cartoonist’s insight. Some time ago, researchers at the University of Rochester medical school offered the opinion that when a person loses zest for life, it usually isn’t long before illness strikes. The researchers called this the “giving-up” complex.” When a person loses confidence, when the experiences 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 failure of health.

We need restoration. For some it is travel; for others, seclusion; for others, excitement; for others, harbors, beaches, summer theatre, bustling festivals, study, books, walks, picnics.

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 has he/she looks forward to a break in routines. Obviously, persons in my profession point to the fellowship/church as an organization deserving support, worth upholding as a functioning community which meets needs for common worship, education, social relationships, [and] the need to proclaim the demands of justice and peace. Yet, one should not depend on any institution for all resources, because institutions, religious institutions not excepted, can some times induce one to be so busy with the outward institution that inward strength becomes rusted from disuse. We need to remember Whitehead’s definition that “religion is what man is in his solitariness.” [CJW note: even though it is an incomplete definition.] Restoration also comes from responding to the occasional pulse which throbs our need to remember that we can become better citizens and churchmen and women 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), an 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 New England for reasons of conscience, again and again he endured persecution because he placed personal integrity first and the institution second. He renounced the Church of England. He denounced the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony because, in Roger 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 convictions were strong enough to direct him to the wilderness when he was banished from the colony to live with the Indians; to establish Providence Plantation, wherein majority civil rule and liberty of individual conscience were established.

Churches, cities, the nation, the public, and employers which hire our time and talents, [all] exert a major claim on our effort and loyalty. But not completely. We need opportunity to restore our strength by recreation, rest, and a 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,

“But put not asunder
Man’s first word: wonder ... wonder...”

But restoration can slide into decadent world-apartness if reality is ignored. Think again of the lines:

“O sky and sand and blue of here and now,
how shall we keep you always for our friends
and us, 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 image of religion that I would have you consider today. We think of summer as picnics, summer stock, travel, rest, sailing and sunbathing. But summer days have been days marking enormous social change and disruption when pivotal happenings have turned the trends of history.

July 4, 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 40 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 images of reality, too.

The late 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, 66, p. 182)

Recreation can become little more than leisurely decay unless there be before us also the image of reality in our world.

The alternating images of restoration and reality are so deeply a part of religious myth, legend, and history that we can feel to some degree 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 stronger convictions and more creative plans. Jesus went to the wilderness, and there acquired the resource of spirit, which was his adequate strength when powerful convictions led him to confront 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 in themselves. 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 NR 1/29/66). A writer in a 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 should we 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. In dealing with these, now and then in solitude and relaxation, but returning always to grapple with living problems in the experiences of home, office, church, state, continent, and world ... we may expect to achieve a mature balance of restoration and reality.