The Reformation – and Martin Luther

October 28, 2001
Venice

Rewrite of
October 26, 1958, Akron
Also: Rochester 10/29/61, Revised 10/25/64

This is Reformation Sunday, marking the birthday of the Protestant Church and the revolt from Roman Catholicism. Next Wednesday marks the four hundred and eighty-fourth anniversary of the day Martin Luther tacked the 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. The religious, political, economic, and social changes effected by the Protestant Reformation represent [some] of the most important, if not the most important, changes in the history of the Western world. I would like to discuss the leading person of the Reformation, one of the most controversial persons in history, Martin Luther. He was a saint, sinner, vulgarian, or anti-Semitic bigot, depending on the point of view from which he is seen. His followers hailed him as a true prophet of the Lord. Roman Catholics called him a child of the devil and accused him of demolishing Christianity. The agrarian reformers of that turbulent sixteenth century said he was the toady, tool, and supporter of the feudal lords and princes. Religious radicals, Carlstadt and Muenster, for example, compared him to Moses, who led the way out of captivity in Egypt, but then deserted his followers, leaving them to perish in the wilderness. Those who have looked at this personal life with critical eye have thought him to be a coarse libertine who broke with his Roman Catholic tradition so that he might marry a nun and rear children in sin and vulgarity. The critics submit Luther’s own writings, TABLE TALK, as evidence of his degraded personality.

This we know, the history of the world was altered because Martin Luther lived. In abolishing the authority of the Pope, Martin Luther established the freedom of the Christian. When this principle became established, the administration of the religious institution became the responsibility of the parish, a congregation of lay people. Martin Luther did not anticipate, and actually opposed, some of the consequences of the Reformation he spearheaded. The principle of the authority of the lay congregation had extreme political as well as religious effects. The self-administration of religion pointed the way to worldly self-government as well. Therefore, it is of particular importance to the liberal groups whose guiding principle of freedom is the most uninhibited, to try to understand Martin Luther. This presentation divides into

1) the setting,
2) the Augustinian priest,
3) the reformer and supporter of princes, and
4) the man, Martin Luther.

Although Martin Luther is the most notable figure of the Reformation, he was not born when the Reformation began. To know the Reformation, we need to understand that the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the recovery of the ancient Greek belief in the worth of the humans, had been in progress for at least two centuries. Petrarch and Boccaccio had notably advanced Humanist studies. The Medici family, also of Florence, had been the greatest patrons of art, sculpture, literature, and philosophy that the European world had known. Under their patronage, Michelangelo, DaVinci, Mirandola, Raphael and others had created arts and letters that still summon our wonder at their genius. In 1453, the world’s greatest cultural center, Constantinople, had fallen to the Turks. The scholars there who had preserved the manuscripts and art objects of Hellenism fled to Italy and other parts of Europe. 12 Universities were founded in Germany between 1409 and 1506.

Not only did the Renaissance signal the revival of arts and learning, but a most important political movement was beginning to make its strong eddies felt in the ebb and flow of the Holy Roman Empire. Although Germany lagged somewhat, England, France and Spain had assumed form as nations. The mass of people had no share in the political rewards or freedoms, although they were the objects of the most severe hardships and sufferings. Their unquestioned place was serfdom.

The Roman Catholic was the authoritarian church. There was no toleration of heresy, but the seeds that were to bear fruit in Luther’s time had already been sown. John Wyclif of England, opposed to the wealth of the church and clerical interference in all walks of life, believed that the Bible should be the possession of the people and had translated the scriptures into English. Wyclif was executed for heresy, his ashes scattered on Thames, but neither his convictions nor his bravery were forgotten. 1373 marked the birth of John Hus, a Bohemian priest, who was influenced by Wyclif’s teachings and Hus preached an evangelical doctrine which was anathema to the Roman Catholic church. John Hus avowed publicly that the head of the Church was Christ, not the Pope. The unprincipled church gave him safe conduct to the Council of Constance, but broke faith and burned him at the stake, July 6, 1415, but neither was his memory forgotten nor his principles rejected by his followers. In 1498, the austere monk of Florence, Savonarola denounced the Pope. After a succession of temporary triumphs and then humiliating defeat, Savonarola was burned at the stake. But even as smoke and smell from the burning flesh and faggots were dispersed to the winds, so the knowledge of his revolt became widely perceived by later reformers, including Martin Luther, who was but a fifteen-year-old student when Savonarola was executed.

Something else had happened which was to make the world different than it had ever been before. Moveable type printing had been invented – the peoples of the world would not only become more literate, but the printed word was to bring them the wisdom of scripture in their own language, and they read the protesting pamphlets of the reformers.

In this seething caldron of social change, a baby boy was born to a peasant miner, Hans Luther and his wife, Marguerite, in 1483. November 10 was St. Martin’s day, and the infant was named Martin after the patron saint. Martin’s parents were peasants, but Hans Luther was not content to accept the poverty and misery of the miner’s lot. By individual effort he labored to make his lot better and his family more comfortable and privileged. In these beginning times of individualism, his efforts brought some rewards. Martin was able to go to school and University to be prepared for the practice of law, which was his father’s wish for his eldest son.

The schools at that time were organized, administered, and taught by the Church and its various orders. Martin’s early schooling was directed by the Brethren of the Common Life, an order dedicated to education. Then, in the University, he was influenced by the Augustinian order. Under the strong influence of the monks, together with his personality, which was unusually sensitive to supernaturalism and mystery, along with his fine mind, which was capable of wrestling with the intricate language of philosophy and theology, Martin Luther found his hopes turning toward the Church and away from the Law. Although Hans Luther was deeply religious, his wish that Martin be a Doctor of Law was so strong that when Martin announced that he was to become an Augustinian monk, his father was deeply hurt. Years were to pass before he really forgave the son who was frustrating the parent’s deepest wish.

After a farewell party, Martin’s friends escorted him to the Augustinian cloister at Erfurt on the 17th of July 1505. He entered its gates there to endure the privation of the order and to know the religious joy of humbling his passions, following the tedious routine of prayer and study, eventually, when ordained to know the mystery or celebrating the Mass, in which the wafer and wine became the body and blood of Christ.

As a monk, Martin Luther was conscientious to a degree we would believe to be unnatural. He fasted for days at a time, went night after night without sleep so that he might devote himself to prayer unceasingly (and in so doing permanently injured his health). He whipped himself to subdue the desires of the flesh. Although he was a model of holiness to his brother monks, his personal anxiety increased. He became increasingly morbid. Luther, a child of his times, feared the devil and believed the arts of witchcraft could have a dreadful effect on him. The iron discipline of the Augustine order had the natural effect of subduing his outward expressions of feeling and intensifying the inward fires of human passions.

Following his ordination as a priest, he turned to teaching at the University and soon became a most popular teacher. His large following of students was drawn for several reasons. His peasant inheritance gave him the common touch, plain talk, and natural illustration which reached the core of subjects. To a lesser degree than monks of more aristocratic background, was he bound to narrow conventions and traditional formulas. Following his master’s degree, he earned the degree of Doctor of Theology, a scholastic honor rare in those days.

His talents and drive soon won greater recognition. When only 31 years old, in 1515, he was appointed District-Vicar of the Augustinian order. Thus, in addition to his devotional duties as a monk, his university responsibilities as a teacher of philosophy, he had the additional duty of administrative responsibility, superintending the 10 Augustinian monasteries in his district.

This devout Augustinian monk was obsessed not only with neurotic fears for his salvation, but also he was upset by dishonesty and corruption readily discovered in the church of that day, which was dominated by the Renaissance Popes, who had a high degree of sensitivity to artistic beauty and an insensitive attitude toward personal and organizational corruption.

Martin Luther and another monk made a pilgrimage to Rome. He had hopes that this would be a high experience in his life, but [it] resulted in considerable disillusion. In Rome he could not help observing the corruption, hypocrisy, and political knavery of the hierarchy. The irreverence of the priesthood shocked this simple, devout German peasant priest. It is said that while climbing the sacred stairs on his knees, that Paul’s words to the Romans fixed themselves in Luther’s brain, “the just shall live by faith.” He realized that acts of piety like climbing stairs on his knees were of little effect. The extent to which the Rome visit influenced his revolt, we do not know. Perhaps it was a small but significant episode in his life.

The real spark of the Reformation was ignited when the Roman hierarchy decided that in order to build magnificent St. Peter’s Basilica, much money had to be raised. So the sale of indulgences was authorized. The doctrine was that by their purity the saints had built up a bank account (so to speak) of piety, on which the sinful could draw to lessen their years in Purgatory. So, Tetzel, a monk went through the countryside urging the peasants to buy indulgences so that their dead relatives might be released from Purgatory sooner. It is said that Pope Leo X, who was the son of Lorenzo de Medici, said cynically about the response of the believing peasants, “This story of Jesus has helped us a lot.”

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther tacked a manuscript to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. 95 propositions for debate were listed. Luther questioned the indulgences with a series of logical propositions, the most telling of which proposed that if the Pope had the power to release souls from Purgatory, then he should do so at once, not for money, but out of the spirit of love and charity.

Although years were to elapse between the nailing of the theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral and the actual formation of the Reformed Church, that date is historically looked upon as the birthday of Protestantism.

Luther’s theses were formal statements, but his vernacular comment was, “God will not tolerate this flea market.”

News of the opposition of this Augustinian monk to the plans of the hierarchy soon reached Rome, and action followed. There were years of ecclesiastical maneuvering. Luther refused to recant. He had a famous debate with John Eck and undoubtedly would have been executed except for a new historical tide. Nationalism was dawning; and the feudal lords and princes of Germany were very much opposed to the Roman Church drawing off large sums of money from the homeland for St. Peter’s or any other foreign enterprise.

Luther began to write and his statements pointed unquestionably to strong differences with the Church at Rome. He proposed the priesthood of all believers, and that there were only two sacraments authorized by scripture: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These statements were heretical, unquestionably, and Luther was summoned to appear before the Diet of Worms (“Here I stand”). Luther was excommunicated, and would have been seized, except Frederick, elector of Saxony, had him spirited away to Wartburg Castle. But the printing press was pounding out Luther’s writings, [which] were distributed widely, and the people responded. When Luther emerged from Wartburg, he found himself organizing a Reformed Church.

Then occurred one of the more puzzling aspects of Luther’s strange character: The impetus to religious freedom had other consequences. The peasants revolted against the landlords and princes. It was somewhat natural, but unexpected that they should seek to throw off political and economic oppression when the way to religious freedom had been pointed out. From our perspective we know this is one of the glories of religious freedom – other benefits to humankind are natural consequences. But Luther proved to be the the toady, the tool, the supporter of the princes. Neither the implications of religious freedom nor love for the peasant people from which he sprang mitigated the severity of his condemnation of the Peasants’ Revolt. To the aristocratic Lords and Princes, Luther offered these words of encouragement, “Hearken dear Lords... Let him who can stab, strike, and strangle... These are such times that a prince can go to heaven more easily by spilling blood than others through prayer.”

The peasants were crushed, murdered, tortured, starved.

Luther was not a tolerant man. Even admitting that like all persons, he was a child of his own age, we find it difficult to reconcile this devout man who professed the Lordship of the gentle Christ with the Luther who was savage not only with the Peasants’ War, but also had a bigoted hatred of Jews, and was unremitting in his urgings to destroy and persecute them.

Luther could not get along with other reformers. He refused to shake hands with Zwingli, because the latter would not accept Luther’s interpretation of the Lord’s Supper.

But Martin Luther was not only an Augustinian priest, a reformer of strange and devious as well as noble ways, he was also a man. When the reformers were celebrating freedom from the Roman Catholic church, the monasteries and convents were opened, the monks and nuns sought marriage and Christian homes, sometimes marrying each other. Catherine von Bora was a nun jilted by a suitor shortly after her release from the convent. Martin Luther tried to be a marriage broker for her and find a suitable husband. However, when it was reported to him that Catherine von Bora would marry only Dr. Amsdorf or Dr. Luther, he investigated further, he checked it out, with the result shortly after, Martin Luther and ex-nun Catherine von Bora were married. They established their home in the Augustinian cloister where Luther formerly had led the monastic life.

Theirs was a busy home with much affection, the ex-nun soon became “my Katie” to Luther. Not only were children born to them, but also they were hospitable and generous to the homeless. At one time not less than eleven orphans shared their home and table. The reminiscences of this home life are found in Luther’s TABLE TALK, remarkable for the insight it gives into the personality of this father. He was gentle, but at times objectionably vulgar and rude.

When illness or the plague struck, as it did frequently in those days, the hand of death entered the home. Of the children, Elizabeth died in infancy. When little Hans was ill, Martin Luther composed and to comfort him sang the famous childrens’ Christmas carol, “Away in a Manger”. Hans and Paul lived to maturity. Marguerite lived to girlhood, but in a agonizing time of trial for the busy parents, she died of illness. In the grief of that occasion, Luther formed the tune and words of his greatest hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” [CJW note: based on Psalm 46]

This aging father had innumerable organization details of the reformed church. He was called to settle disputes between princes. His health, never good since his monastic days, grew worse. After a winter journey under difficult conditions, he died after attempting to resolve a conflict between two Lords.

What shall we say of this man? He was a leading reformer. He was a reactionary who was unbelievably harsh with his fellow peasants. He was intolerant. He was an anti-Semite. He was coarse and vulgar. But also, he was a great preacher and scholar. He translated the Bible into German, giving the people the Scripture. His courage sparked the Reformation, giving birth to the numerous free Christian groups, among which in later years our own was to be numbered. He was the Reformation’s greatest hymn writer. Albert Schweitzer, who had a doctorate in music as well as doctorates in medicine and theology, remarked that the only person who really understood Martin Luther was Johann Sebastian Bach. He was a kind and loving but financially embarrassed father. He was a teacher who won the respect of his students.

But the most affectionate and most human epitaph that the Reformer earned was written by the ex-nun who became his wife and the mother of their children. A month after his death, Catherine von Bora Luther, writing to her sister, Christina, said, “Who would not be sorrowful and mourn for so noble a man as my dear Lord, who served not only one city or land, but the whole world? Truly I am so distressed that I cannot tell my sorrow to anyone. If I had a principality or an empire, it would never have cost me so much pain to lose them as I have now that our Lord God has taken from me, and not from me only, but from the whole world, this dear and precious man.”

Religion must be not only in a person’s heart as an inward loyalty to that which he or she believes true and righteous, convictions must become known in the world. And no reformation is ever complete until justice is accomplished and the world of persons ruled by all persons, because equally they are entitled to the human dignity and worth which should be the birthright of all souls. Those who are devoted to such religious values will discover in their own experience that the cause of reform is never jaded, its goals ever re-defined.

Not because we would endorse the theology of Luther’s greatest hymn, but because a tribute to him is fitting on this 484th anniversary of Protestantism, may we join in singing #104, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.”

The Authentic Interests of the Church

September 20, 1964
Rochester

September 27, 1964
Williamsville

Belair, 72

Filed under 1980

The Authentic Interests of the Church

You will understand that I am dealing with our variety of Church. Others can speak for the Roman Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, a Jewish Congregation, the Christian Science Church, a Moslem Mosque or a Quaker meeting. My concern is for the Unitarian Universalist Church. What emphases should dominate its congregational affairs, religious education, worship, discussion and social groups? Although I make little reference this morning to it, most of you know that I am aware of our heritage, Unitarian Universalist and Judeo-Christian. The past has guided us, influenced our minds and fastened a strong hold on the emotions of some of us. But the past should not dominate, The authentic interests of the Church can not be derived from what the Church was, but what it has become. Persons interested in this Church as a religious institution will stay with us or depart from us on their appraisal of its worth and character today.

The authentic interests of the Church today are to serve persons in their needs. It is hardly necessary to say that the Church is not a disembodied power that automatically generates spiritual light. The Church is always the persons who make it up at any given time. But the symbol and organization of this constitutional, cooperative community is "The Church." There is an old sermonic chestnut about the minister who preached on the subject, "Recognition of Friends in Heaven." A note was passed to him which read, "Rev. Sir, could you preach a sermon on 'Recognition of friends on earth? I've been coming to Church for six months and no one has spoken to me yet. " A reasonable task you might set for yourself is to take a pad and list the ways the Church does serve persons; and the way the Church should serve persons. How should we recognize "friends on earth?" The question is much wider than friendly hospitality on Sundays, much as we should prize such welcoming.

I would like to speak of three ways we can serve friends on earth; ways I believe to be the authentic interests of the Church:

First, the Church must serve persons in their fears and hopes. Among the most remarkable natural wonders of Yellowstone Park are the hundreds of hot springs and geysers, of which Old Faithful is the best-known. Some of the geysers erupt spectacularly on regular or irregular schedule. Many others do not make this spectacular burst of steam, gas and hot spray, but observation discloses a constant hot bubbling, as water is heated to the boiling point deep in the Earth's twisting crevasses.

The dispositions of persons are somewhat of an analogy to the Yellowstone geysers. Some of us erupt on some regular or erratic schedule; others are not inclined to furious outburst, but bubble constantly inside. We may be effective in our jobs and considered stable in our reactions, but nevertheless the anxieties steam away inside.

We fear for our jobs and status; we worry about our children's activities and future; we fret about a world whose problems seem completely estranged from any actions we might take to alleviate the tense issues. Calendar commitments are forever knocking holes in the dykes of our reserves for rest and re-creative opportunities. The point of excess strain seems hazardously close too frequently.

Increasingly, some of us note that the Church can serve persons in these small and large crises of anxieties. Now, this is not to indicate that the Church can or should be a do-it-yourself psycho-analytic production line. It cannot and should not.

But we are coming to recognize more fully that the experience of Church is not a one-way street beginning at the pulpit and ending at the pew, with other activities committed to supporting this process of sound from preacher and choir, and silence from the pew. Communication is multi-circuit.

The Church serves by providing the setting for dialogue, self-disclosure and the empathetic sharing of the concerns and anxieties of others. I hope that we ministers are beginning to recognize and embrace the value of this sharing of experience. If I may speak personally, nothing appalls me more than that I should be considered the giver of formulas or equations which swiftly solve problems of importance. Nothing attracts me more than to be among the explorers of knowledge; to be a part of spirited search for concensus; and to be among those who have shared the deep things of life wherein we heat the forge which makes malleable the iron of tough decisions.

The Church is serving and can serve better when there is recognition of the positive gains we can make as persons, who in smaller groups or larger gatherings can trust each other with our feelings.

The Church will not erase your anxieties, balance your checking account or tell you what to do about that crucial issue you must decide next week on your job. But the Church can directly and indirectly bring the scatterings of your life and strength into focus, to the end that you will be able to marshall all the resources which are yours.

The Church exists to remind you that the human spirit counts. I'm told that anybody who is anybody talks computers today. The coded tapes become the sources of great expectations for productive abundance beyond our wildest dreams; and also the triggers for nagging fears that the human family may not possess the political and economic dynamism to assimilate such amazing devices, Both the hopes and fears need to be disciplined by the religious truth that the human spirit counts. David Sarnoff stirred a reminder of this significance of the human spirit when he discussed the marvels of computers and what they could do for man. But he spoke a word of caution about the decision-making values of the computers. Then he cited an example! If a modern computer had been fed all the data about the practicality of defending England during World War 2 from the Nazis, the machine would have advised, "give up, the weapons, planes, personnel arid resources just do not exist." But there was no computer, and Winston Churchill scorned the odds and said, "fight; we shall never surrender." And a whole world is different because of that human spirit and the courageous, stubborn response of the English people. The human spirit counts. It is an authentic interest of the Church never to forget that; and to serve as a catalyst for the increasing strength of the human spirit.

A second authentic interest of the Church is a consequence of the first, in that the Church encourages, stimulates, even provokes persons to grapple with the forces that determine destiny. The Church says to you, "come to terms with your nature and your destiny." Here in a free church, it does not matter to the Church as an institution whether you are an agnostic, or Christian believer, or you-name-it. But it matters to you. THE HISTORY OF SYNANON is a fascinating book which deals with cooperative effort to help persons who have become addicted to narcotics. One penetrating observation dealing with this grievous addiction is that many of the addicts with the most fixed habit ("primary") are those who have never developed any type of constructive life pattern. This is an indication pointing to the universal need of a way of thinking. So this Church serves by urging each person discover his pattern for himself. It should no longer be any area of soreness that some of us are Humanists and some are Theists. (Parenthetically, I would say, that for me, more and more life appears to be "humanism within a mystery" of Time and Space, Creation and Destruction. My conviction grows that it is as naïve to ignore the humanistic spirit as it is parochial to reject the overwhelming reality that we have been created by a wondrous force that is not ourselves. (I intend to elaborate in a few weeks when I shall speak of the "God beyond God.")

The Church has a genuine stake in providing expression for these tides of freedom as their differentiated waves tumble on each other as persons reach for the shore of meaning. A poet and theologian have each surmised this truth. Although each speaks of art, the expression is just as true of the authentic interests of the Church. The poet, Willis Eberman wrote,

"No community altogether knows its own heart.
The artist must tell it, must reveal what the average surmise;
must make music or murals from the mass of inarticulate life.
The secrets that he must utter are their own, not his...."

The theologian, Paul Tillich, (SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, VOL. III, p. 64), wrote, "A work of art is authentic if it expresses the encounter of mind and world in which an otherwise hidden quality of a piece of the universe (and implicitly of the universe itself) is united with an otherwise hidden receptive power of the mind (and implicitly of the person as a whole.)"

A transposition of these two insights about art tells us of the genuine interests of the Church. The Church as a gathered community of seekers must "reveal what the average surmise; must make (words) music, murals from the mass of inarticulate life." The Church as a fellowship of persons covets the "encounter of mind and world" so that both these qualities of the Universe are disclosed and the receptivities of whole persons fulfilled.

Third, in my outline, but carrying the highest priority, the authentic interest of the Church is to serve persons in their need to make ethics count. "Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do the things I ask?" That ancient challenge confronts us today. In the old Jewish scripture of 2nd Chronicles, the King of Israel called in the seers and sages to seek advice for a war campaign. Their advice was that it was God's will that the king should do as he wanted to do. This is always easy advice to give; comfortable advice to receive. But Micaiah, a prophet, did not repeat what the King wanted to hear. Quite the contrary. Micaiah told the King that if he wanted his action approved by God, the King would have to change his ways. (See reference, Nels Ferre, GOD'S NEW AGE.)

Recall Savonarola (1452-98) whose stern preaching about corruption and vanity enraged Lorenzo Di Medici. Lorenzo sent word to the eloquent monk demanding that he change his preaching style, Savonarola retorted, "You change your ways!" (See Kyle Haselden, THE PULPIT, June, 1964).

There is a profusion of examples from our heritage of the central relationship between religion and ethics. What a man believes is tested by what he does. But of most relevance to us is the perennial question, which always calls for decision, "What should I do?" Morality may have its guidance counsels deep in the culture, but moral realities are always contemporaneous.

What does it mean to act ethically today? It's not enough to know that ethical decisions comprise a large part of a religious heritage. Can I separate being "good" from what I do or do not do in the major crises of contemporary life – national elections, full equality of opportunity, war and peace, nations increasingly united? In order to act ethically one must know what the human needs are in the year, month, day, hour. What does it mean to be "good" today? Anecdotes from 2nd Chronicles and the life of Savonarola may be illustrative, but what is decisive comes back to you and to me with the pressing question, ''What is the good I ought to do? What is the right attitude I must maintain?" To walk away from decision is an answer too.

There was a news item a few months ago (Christian Century, 5/20/64, p. 662) reporting that the Swiss Government had announced that when national television launches its commercial advertising next January 1, five categories will be barred – those involving alcohol, tobacco, medicine, politics and religion.

These may be taboo on Swiss televion, but there are no issues involving the genuine interests of man which can be barred from the Church. Tc do so is to deprive the religious person of the opportunity to make his ethics count.

Robert Payne in his biography of LENIN, commented, p. 632 ''human misery is rooted not in the laws of nature but in those institutions man must learn to change."

There are several ways that persons answer the call of ethical insistence. Some maintain that out of the inspiration of the Church they, individually, act ethically and decisively in politics, education, industry, trade, fraternal organizations and neighborhood. One can not criticize this kind of commitnent. One wishes devoutly that it were much more wide-spread.

Others among us see that the relevant Church is the issue-conscious Church, and believe that the ethical force of the Church as an institution should be brought to bear on other institutions and upon issues. Yet, who can deny that it is far easier to get a complex church budget passed rather than action en a social issue, even where human values dictate rather clearly the nature of decision.

Because of this, small numbers of persons form Unitarian Universalist Fellowships for Social Justice, as with the Rochester Area Chapter UUFSJ. An auxiliary organization, not subject to the will of an entire congregation, it can speak and act with far greater speed and facility. But also, the views of a great many are not brought to bear in the considerations. And this is no longer enough. With the advent of the New UUA Department of Social Responsibility, at the Continental level, we are in a new age, wherein congregations can find new incentives and ways to confront issues in novel approaches that not only will give every interested member a chance to be heard, affirmatively or dissenting, but also will provide adequate machinery for decision and communication to the entire church constituency and the public.

The role of the Church in pronouncing upon issues and laboring as a society in achieving social goals is the most central issue of our decade. Yet if as Unitarian Universalists organized in religious society, we cannot find ways to work more unitedly on ethical jobs to be dnne and identified by congregational procedures with ethical causes, then the individualism we so justly boast will have had consequences to be deplored. David McClellan, a social psychologist, studying relationships in achievement observed, '"what people are concerned about determines what they do, and what they do determines the outcome of history." (ROOTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS, p. 32).

To summarize, the authentic interests of the Church are the needs of people
to recognize who they are on earth—the person-to-person need;
to come to terms with the great questions of origin and destiny—what can we believe?
to make ethics count—what can and should we do; and how should we work together in the doing?

In his significant biography of the crucial years of Woodrow Wilson's life, WHEN THE CHEERING STOPPED, Gene Smith tells of the triumphal tour of President Woodrow Wilson prior to the deliberations of the Peace Conference at Versailles. In the course of the tour, Wilson visited a Church near the Scottish border where his grandfather, Thomas Woodrow Wilson had been the minister. With his great dream of peace possessing his soul, President Wilson, standing in front of the Communion rail said, "We shall be drawn together in a combination of moral forces that will be irresistible.... it is from quiet places like this all over the world that the forces accumulate which will presently overbear any attempt to establish evil."

Wilson's dream was shattered as his physical health was shattered in his lifetime, but the dream of a world free and fair always revives. It is from "quiet places like this that (moral) force accumulates." I believe that it is the authentic interests of the Church to help make substance of the dream:

to recognize friends on earth;
to know what we believe;
and to make our ethical convictions count.

Difficult—excruciatingly difficult—yet can we make a lesser commitment than found in those grand lines from Tennyson's "Ulysses?"

"We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven: that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by Time and Fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."

A Christmas Window on the World

December 13, 1964
Rochester

A Christmas Window on the World

Christmas festivities are profound but elusive mixtures of the sacred and the profane. Aldous Huxley grasped the puzzling cultural contradiction in his novel, THE GENIUS AND THE GODDESS, when one character says to another, “Drive carefully ... this is a Christian country and it’s the Savior’s birthday. Practically everyone you see will be drunk.”

Christian celebrations are mysterious compounds of self-satisfaction and self-transcendence. We find great ego-comfort not only in “what we are going to get for Christmas,” but also in being showered with gratitude and attention for the lavish presents we give. But moments of sensitivity occur when we are freed of the shackles of self-centered existence and wistfully we turn our eyes upward to that highest star we have never really followed wholeheartedly. In such moments of self-forgetfulness, we perceive that Christmas is a rare time when the littleness and greatness of life’s possibilities are encapsulated in a season.

I’m not concerned today with the age-old impulses and deep-rooted human traditions which stirred people from pre-historic times and in all places to celebrate mid-Winter and mark the restoration of days of lengthening light. Even as we look out on a winter world from the sanctuary of our homes, let us consider Christmas as comprising windows on a world of human wishes and fulfillments. Consider with me, Christmas as a window on a world that is; Christmas as a window on a world that could be.

Christmas is a window on a world that never was. Like many other stores at this season, large department stores in Boston arranged fascinating windows where little figures moved in mechanical rhythm through a world of fantasy. Although in our city these Christmas fantasy windows are not part of the season this year, many Main Streets in American have little elves hopping about or lovely snow princesses charming the passers-by; or wise men or shepherds reverently approaching the Madonna and child. You have seen such show window productions of fantasy and have been delighted by them.

But such windows of charming fantasy portray a world that never was. The snow-covered cottages of the Middle Ages were cold. Living was not only difficult, but many times, brutalized by the raw hardships of existence. The elves, dwarfs and snow-princess reflect a world where people believed in witches, good fairies and supernatural guardian angels, who with a touch of the magic wand or a sound of heavenly music would transform cold, hunger, misery and darkness to warmth, well-being, happiness and light.

I was interested to read yesterday of an institution that attempts to establish and maintain a world that never was. An attorney separated from his wife brought suit against her to recover his children. She had taken the children and become part of a religious colony where husbands, wives and children all lived separately from one another. In defending the colony’s right to its peculiar ways, the defense attorney is reported to have pleaded to the court as follows: “Who is to say it is narrow because the children do not have to listen to the unspeakable Beatles or see the more undesirable features of the mass media today such as the more pornographic paperbacks in the newsstands.” The defense then told the court that the children at the center have never heard a radio, seen television or newspapers, or even played at a playground (see BOSTON GLOBE, 12/11/64).

Now the point is not to dispute the right to choose a way of life in a religious community where association is voluntary, no matter how odd the Utopian plan. But to attempt to isolate children from the growth experiences of their culture is to live in a world that never was. For however our culture may be measured on a moral scale, we must live in it. If it is vulgar, we may attempt to refine it. If it is less moral, we may try to make it more moral. But to separate oneself from the forces of human society is futile, for such efforts seek a world that never was and never will be.

But because our fantasy flights at Christmas are temporary, light-hearted and a restful change from the difficult rhythm of prosaic living, we need not fear to indulge in window watching and lend a responseful heart to charming make-believe. Albert Camus (THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, p. 9) wrote “a man defines himself by his make belief as well as by sincere impulses.” In another essay, Camus extended another dimension to this thought when he wrote, “There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve men better one has to old them at a distance for a time.” (THE MINOTAUR)

When we load the buffets in our homes with stuffed dates, oranges, apples, ribbon candy; when we shut out the problems of business or politics as we relax in the evergreen-scented sanctuary of home; when our major attention is confided to the number of our household, we are achieving for the moment a fortress of self-sufficiency, healthy indulgence and mutual love which cannot endure, but which for the few hours, gives us a grasp on comfort, contentment and cheer. As psychiatrist Erik Erikson commented, “If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.” (YOUNG MAN LUTHER, p. 75)

But the second Christmas window is the world that is. The real world encounters us at Christmas, too. [lightly crossed out: Our real world cannot wiggle away from the unembarrassed accusation of modern poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in “CHRIST CLIMED DOWN.”] Our Christmas trees have lost their roots, we do put plastic babes in wallboard mangers; not only some of our relatives, but also we ourselves frequently behave in cornball fashion. In the world that is, Christmas has surface glitter. Too often we fail to probe beneath that surface to discover whether there are deeps or only shallows of meaning. [also lightly scribbled out: If Ferlinghetti’s lines offend, one should search himself to see if that hostility is born of guilt.

Christmas is a window on a world that is. Nine days ago, when all flights were canceled because of weather, I took the train in order to reach Boston for a week-end of meetings. As the train moved eastward, the severity of the ice store increased. In the Berkshires, the trees were so heavily laden with ice that the burdened boughs were struck by the train. The sound of impact of bough and train was like intermittent gunfire. One branch cracked the engineer’s window.

Upon arrival there was news of many highway deaths caused by icy roads; there had been single accidents involving hundreds of cars; there were the usual ghastly reports of death from faulty heating devices and fires caused by over-heated stoves. This is the world of Winter that is – a world of hardship, particularly for poor people. ]

People do respond to this world that is at Christmas. The coins ring in the street corner kettles where one can help hungry man and destitute families. The radioman receives thousands of pennies for the toy programs in the hospitals. We purchase Christmas seals where proceeds help persons who are ill; we purchase cards from our own UUSC and the proceeds are applied to a variety of projects whose common denominator is human need. Many persons have their private, and sometimes, substantial project where aid is channeled to persons.

But in the world that is, it is also true that the Christmas flush of giving pales. If the kettles were on the street for twelve months, there would be sharply diminishing returns. Individually our devotion lags after a while, even to good causes. Limited span of attention is not confined to children. Because this is the way of the world, Community Chests, United Funds, Social Welfare Agencies are established and maintained. If we were expected voluntarily to contribute weekly, or monthly, without a pledge campaign for a yearly commitment to the Community Chest, then the quota would be so short of fulfillment that few of the necessary agencies could begin to maintain effective service. When we raise the shade on the window of the world that is, such is the scene.

At this great season of song, worship and gifts, we hold high the ideal of peace and goodwill. We read the old gospel legends about rejoicing angels singing of peace on earth, good will to men. Yet we would be naive if we failed to perceive the world that is. Protestant theologian, Robert McAfee Brown, wrote, “It is easy to gush over ’the baby Jesus’ and what a sweet picture the stable scene makes on a Christmas card with cute little angels flying overhead. We must not forget that the baby whom everyone helps to adore will grow up to be the man everyone helps to crucify.” (THE BIBLE SPEAKS TO YOU)

In his autobiography, BORSTAL BOY, Brendan Behan, the late Irish playwright and poet who lived so boisterously and excessively, writes of an incident when he was jailed and beaten cruelly. As he was recovering, he was given some books. Even in the midst of pain and prison squalor, he was cheered-up by the prospect of being able to read. He observed, “It’s a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on.”

Our Christmas window on the world that is should never be far apart from the window on the world that never was. Reality needs to be paired with fantasy. But our Christmas observatory would be unfinished if we failed to pay attention to the third window: Christmas is a window on the world that could be; a world where all little children are brought the gifts of opportunity in the world as well as the gift of love in the home. Christmas is a window on the world that could be when we are roused from our complacency. I don’t know the source of the following lines, but many of us might ponder them to our benefit:

“The Affluent Society is only too ready to be the Acquiescent Society. Large numbers of people are so pleased to discover that they never had it so good that they lack the imagination to envisage ways in which they might have it much better and the charity to realize that there are plenty of people in the world who continue to have it badly. All too many of those who are in a position to remind people of these responsibilities and obligations are content to be as profitably acquiescent as the rest.”

Now the Christian gospel legends place a particular framework around the world that could be – a setting wherein a Messiah is expected, astrological predictions are made of his coming, humble shepherds, overwhelmed with reverence and awe, bend at the cradle; rich and wise men arrive acknowledging allegiance and respect; finally, threats to the new-born king arise from an established and tyrannical order. In Vol III of his SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Dr. Paul Tillich precisely comprehends the meaning of the legends when he notes, “the speeches and writings of all prophets and mystics and of all those who claim to have had a divine inspiration are couched in the language of the tradition from which they come, but are driven in the direction of the ultimate.” (p. 127) And again, “There is no pure Spiritual Presence where there is no humanity and justice.”

Thus, when Old Zechariah was rejoicing in his son, John, born to Elizabeth, he proclaimed,

(Luke 1, 76/79)
“And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High
for you will go before the lord to prepare his ways
To give knowledge of salvation to his people
in the forgiveness of their sins
through the tender mercies of our God,
when the day shall dawn upon us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet in the way of peace.”

Those who were in darkness and shadowed by death needed what in our day we would name freedom, peace and a rightful share in the abundance of this old planet.

The magnificent words attributed to Mary are decidedly radical, or at very least announce striking goals for society,

(Luke 1 52/54)
“he has put down the mighty from their throne,
and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.”

Zechariah and Mary, the Shepherds and Angels were not singing of a world that was, but of a world that could be and should be.

In a documentary film, years ago, about WWI, the Christmas truce in the trenches was recalled. On Christmas day the firing stopped, soldiers met in no-man’s land, fraternized, sang carols, exchanged cigarettes and food. For a brief hour they were living a world that could be. For if such a world could never be they would not have shared their songs and smokes.

In the world that is, if I walk down the street and push people around, or break a window, or start a barroom scuffle, I will be arrested for disturbing the peace.

In the world that could be, when a rascal nation disturbs peace on earth, good will to men, that nation too will be restrained by an international police force for disturbing the peace of the world. Then people living in the world will hear the angels’ song. Psychologist G. Robert Mowrer pointed to a corresponding truth when he wrote, “the only form of love that is genuinely redemptive and therapeutic is one that is demanding and expectant.” (THE NEW GROUP THERAPY, p. 31). In the world that could be and should be, peace would be demanded and expected. When it is demanded and expected by a resolute parliament of nations, then the nations will know peace, and one day, good will.

So on this midway day of the 1964 Christmas season, my wish for you is that you look through the Christmas windows on a world that never was, for fantasy has its place; on a world that is, for to run from reality is to lose one’s life; on a world that could be, for without the star of hope to guide us in the dark, the season is robbed of meaning.

Chad Walsh wrote the poem, “Letter to a Young Poet,” (printed in KEY REPORTER). I share his concluding lines:

“Meanwhile there’s many kinds of dark.
Explore them now. Explore and write
And find or make a path in the night.
Bisect the darkness with the moment’s light.”

Salvation Reconsidered

November 29, 1964
Rochester

Salvation Reconsidered

“What must I do to be saved?” That is the question that a fear-stricken Phillipian jailer asked of Paul and Silas.

The Christian Book of Acts (70-80 a.d.) recorded the fascinating story of Paul and Silas, jailed for disturbing the peace. Their real offense had been to prevent the owners of a disturbed slave girl from further exploiting her delusions. Paul and Silas were beaten and placed in irons in the town jail. At midnight, when an earthquake occurred which opened the doors and sprung the locks of the hand and leg irons, the prisoners did not escape even though the opportunity was present. It was after this astounding series of events that the jailer asked the salvation question.

As a Roman citizen, Paul had a right to be tried in Rome. Therefore he was immune from sentence in a province if he claimed his legal right. This was the historical seed which flowered in to this sensational story. Fond editorial hands of later generations have embellished the basic story with miraculous trimmings. This is not surprising; many ancient stories have supernatural escape as the theme.

What is relevant to our theme today, “Salvation Reconsidered,” is Paul’s answer to the jailer, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, you and all your household.”

All religions attempt to deal with the question of salvation. Can persons holding Unitarian Universalist faith like ours, a faith rooted in freedom and trusting in reason, find meaning in “salvation?” How do we confront the nature of this religious idea which seems universal in time and place?

Because we believe in the essential dignity and capacity of all human beings, many of us find little relevance in the question, “Are you saved?” Because of our appraisal of the supreme worth of human personality, we may reply, “I didn’t know I was lost.”

But Christianity is a salvation religion (listen to evangelists on TV). Historically, Universalism was founded as a salvation denomination, proposing that all persons would be saved through the goodness of God. No God of love and justice would sentence any human being to eternal punishment. All persons would be saved and there would be a final harmony of all souls with God.

What is salvation? The dictionary first defines salvation as “the saving of man from the spiritual consequences of sin, especially in the after-life.”

One of the most influential and central doctrines in most branches of the Christian churches is that all believers must “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved.” “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive.”

If you believe this is the final and ultimate “word of God,” nothing that is to be said will be of much interest or usefulness to you. On the other hand, if you reject any consideration of ancient religious ideas because you see no place for such reflection in a modern age, then you too might think on other things. But if you share my belief, that ideas, dogmas and institutions are the result of forces moving within the dimensions of human’s natural history, then the idea of salvation deserves investigation to ascertain whether it has any meaning for us today.

There is great confusion about religious salvation in my opinion. Generally both the religious conformist and the non-conformist think of it as a future state to come as a reward for those who have obeyed rituals or believed creeds. The believer hopes for a happy land beyond the grave. The non-conformist rejects the idea of salvation because any concept which requires postponement to an utterly uncertain future seems to him either to be “pie in the sky” or wishful thinking. Paul Tillich observed, (THEOLOGY OF CULTURE, p. 35) “... salvation is beyond time, it is always independent of any stage of time. It is the eternal present above every temporal present.”

I, too, find that unless salvation is an experience we can know in the present time, there is no profit in pursuing its meaning. But to search out any relevance for today, we must review its historical development.

The various Christian doctrines of salvation have been subjected to several ancient influences:

First, in primitive Jewish religion, there was a great ceremonial occasion when the people rid themselves of the sins which they felt guilty, by rubbing their hands on the hide of the scapegoat. This scapegoat was then driven into the wilderness, carrying the sins of the people.

In a more enlightened and responsible age, this primitive notion of carrying the guilt burden for all became transformed into corporate responsibility [in the] exalted poetry of Isaiah (53 4/5):

“Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteem him stricken
Smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities
Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
And with his stripes we are healed.”

Most scholars agree that Isaiah was not predicting the advent of Jesus, or any other individual Messiah who was to come as “the suffering servant.” Rather Isaiah in a superior blend of poetry and ethical prophecy was referring to the whole body of Israel which must bear responsibility.

Theologically and culturally the idea carried over into Christian theology, but with a complete reverse emphasis. Instead of a whole people bearing corporate responsibility for the sins of many, Christian theology proposed that Jesus was a single “suffering servant” who “bears our stripes.” This is a remarkable instance demonstrating that theology is not necessary always evolutionary, progressing to higher ideas. Here is an instance of regression to a more primitive and less human point of view.

As time went on after the death of Jesus and the missionary activity of Paul and others, Christianity not only began to influence the Oriental-Greco-Roman world, but also the new Christian faith was affected by that world also. Many of the ceremonial rites of the pagan mystery religions – initiation, baptism, sacramental meals and ornate ritualism became Christian practice. Not only pomp and circumstance, but also uniformity of belief transformed a faith which had been simply begun as a rural, communal, wandering brotherhood of disinherited people who had committed themselves as disciples of a disturbing, inspiring, non-conforming prophet, Jesus of Nazareth.

Consequently salvation became associated with sacraments. One was saved, if he was to be saved at all, by baptism, communion and death rituals. Not until the Protestant reformers, Luther, Calvin and others, who insisted that the “just shall live by faith,” was there a challenging new note in the Christian scheme of sacramental salvation.

In spite of all the weight of powerful Christian institutions, there is not the slightest evidence that Jesus would have subscribed either to the sacramental scheme of salvation or the simpler, but equally dogmatic, New Testament evangelicalism of Protestant orthodoxy.

We know Jesus only through the reports of others. But enough is recorded so that we have some assurance that the way of salvation for Jesus was not the way of most of the historic Christian churches. A man of means asked Jesus about the way of salvation. Jesus answered, “sell all that you have and give it to the poor.” (Luke 18) The man was sad, for he had great wealth.

On another occasion, Jesus seemed to shock his own followers when he told a woman her faith had saved her because she loved much. Is more needed?

I believe that Jesus held the salvation idea cherished by most of his fellow-Jews in his own time – an idea primary in modern Judaism. Salvation is moral; responsi[bility] is both individual and corporate. A person must find his own way to the good life and to the God he/she will worship or to the highest value he commits himself to cherish.

Paul said, (Ph 2/12), “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” This seems somewhat foreign to the spirit of Jesus that I sense coming through the ancient pages, for Jesus faced life differently. I believe Jesus might have said something like this, “Do not be overcome by your fears, but work out your own salvation in reverence, morality, and hope.”

We live in a different age. Their ways are not our ways. What is the way of salvation for us? We too, need a “way” - whether we will call it a philosophy, code, or way of living. Even as 1900 years ago, Christianity provided a strengthened morality to a world bubbling with ferment and change, so in our day we need a religious basis for salvation to give us inward assurance and social unity.

Most of us who would gather here would not feel at home either with over-simplified doctrinal formulas which proclaim the only way of salvation is to be linked with belief in a single Savior or over-elaborated ritualism which assert that we are saved by seven sacraments.

When I reconsider the idea of Salvation, three expressions have meaning to me: character, reconciliation, imagination.

One of the other dictionary definitions of salvation offers the thought that salvation is “preservation from destruction, disintegration, failure or other evil.” This definition uses words easier for me to understand than “the spiritual consequences of sin.”

First, salvation by character was explicit in one of the Unitarian affirmations of faith; it has been implicit in Universalist teachings for a long time. We do not claim originality. Salvation by character is an old and respected basis for living. This has always been the mainstream of prophetic, ethical religion. Centuries before Jesus, Ezekiel proclaimed (18/5), “If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right – if he does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment ... withholds his hand from iniquity, executes true justice between man and man, walks in my statutes and is careful to obey my ordinances – he is righteous, he shall surely live, says the Lord God.” Clement of Alexandria (ca 200 a.d.), a searching thinker among the early Church Fathers, remarked about this passage from Ezekiel, “This indeed is the blessed life, the life of goodness.”

Character is what we are and what we do. Character should focus our perspective so we will not make any artificial and unrealistic distinctions between things alleged to be “spiritual” and things alleged to be “material.”

John Murray Atwood used to tell the story (from a Quaker source) about the little boy who was well-smeared with dirt as he happily made mud-pies. A lady said to him, “come with me and we will wash you up and tell you how to get to be an angel in heaven.” The little boy answered, “I don’t want to be an angel in heaven, I want to be an angel here in the mud.”

Regardless of what may await us in worlds beyond our experience, salvation by character involves what we are and what we do here in this world. The English educator, the late L.P. Jacks asked, “What should we know of goodness if we only had heard it talked about and never seen a good man or a noble woman?”

When the jailer begged Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” he may not have been asking a theological question. He may have been serving self-interest. It has been suggested (Interpreters Bible) that what the jailer really wanted to know was “what must I do to escape the consequences of this?” That is, the consequences of responsibility for an unlocked jail and [unlocked] prisoners’ handcuffs and leg irons. Salvation by character is a viewpoint that affirms you do not escape the consequences of what you have done.

Whatever motives that throb within me and whatever acts I perform that consciously or insidiously separate me from the things and the principles I believe highest place additional barriers between me and redemption – whether I define redemption in some orthodox fashion or whether I define it simply as humanistic self-fulfillment and maturation.

The great poet John Masefield told (Saturday Review) how, when still in his teens he had left the sea and taken a job in a factory, although he yearned to be a poet. But like many aspiring writers, he had received little response from publishers. Then he chanced upon these homely lines,

“Sitting still and wishing
Makes no person great
The good Lord sends the fishing
But you must dig the bait.”

John Masefield was sufficiently reproved so that he persisted in his literary efforts and eventually the world recognized his ability and success came to him. The lines, “the good Lord sends the fishing, but you must dig the bait,” express a dual trust in the universe and the quality of human initiative and integrity which “salvation by character” implies. David Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 308 Harvard Classics) expressed the same challenge succinctly, “Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”

But this is not enough. We must confront the social nature of character. Thus, there is salvation by reconciliation, also.

Plain-speaking Jeremiah, another of the great prophets of our Jewish heritage mourned, (8/20) “the harvest is over, the summer is ended and we are not saved.” “We” are not saved! Salvation is not an individual affair, but an achievement of community. The leaders of the American Revolution endorsed the Declaration of Independence, “we pledge our lives, fortune, and sacred honor.” There can be no individual salvation worthy of the name unless that redemption involves reconciliation between human beings in the human community.

Herman Melville in his great novel, MOBY DICK, expressed a sensitive understanding of salvation by reconciliation, in the chapter, “The Castaway.” Melville introduced the portion, “A most significant event befell the most insignificant of Pequod’s crew.” Pip, the little cabin boy, ordinarily did not accompany the whaleboats when these were launched from the vessel when a whale was sighted. Pip, a native of Tolland County, Conn. loved life and usually remained in safety in the Pequod. But, one day on the broad Pacific, one of the oarsmen hurt his hand and Pip was enlisted as the substitute. Pip was tangled in the harpoon rope after the harpoon was fixed in the whale and was pulled overboard. Stubb, the second mate cut the rope in order to stop and pick up Pip. Strangely enough, shortly after a similar event occurred. When a whale was harpooned, it turned under the boat. One of its fins made a sharp rap on the underside of the boat. In terror, Pip jumped overboard. This time the second mate did not cut the rope. He assumed that one of the other whaleboats would pick up the cabin boy. But these boats had turned in another direction and had not seen Pip jump.

Pip was alone. He saw no other humans as he struggled to keep afloat in the Pacific Ocean. By rare chance, he was sighted after a considerable time by the vessel, the Pequod. Pip’s life was saved; but his reason was forever gone. Henceforth, he was mentally helpless. The strain of feeling that he had been completely abandoned by his human kind had been too much for him to bear. The old myth of Cain carried the same terrible condemnation, “My punishment is greater than I can bear,” when he was rejected and excluded from human community.

Salvation without restoration to bearable community seems a pointless and hollow achievement. Our world is dotted with persons yearning for fellowship, dreading rejection and hoping that there will be a breakthrough of the crusts of self-centeredness. The saving way points to persons being saved by reconciliation of individual [deeds] in cooperative citizenship, universal churchmanship and happy family living.

Last, I would submit to you that there must be salvation by imagination. Jesus remarked to Nicodemus, (John 3/3), “Truly I say unto you that unless one is born anew, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Ordinarily, the orthodox thinks of being “born again” as referring to the Christian conviction of guilt and consequent conversion that sometimes follows – a polarization of emotional extremes.

But, it seems to me, that one can also believe that Jesus was saying that imagination is necessary for salvation. You must acquire a new vision. You must “get a glory” as Berton Braley versified – see things as they could be. Even persons of moral stature and integrity can become deeply depressed unless hope continuously offers the vision of a better world.

We need the imagination to appreciate the varied ways different persons formulate salvation. Some Hindus find salvation in the way of Bhakti, “devotion.” Through faith, love and service, they find salvation, rather than in vows, pilgrimages and sacred rites. We need the imagination to welcome these different ways and say, ungrudgingly, “thou are not far from the kingdom.”

When the Buddhist holds up the Four Noble Truths and pledges himself to the Eight fold path to salvation, we need the imagination to recognize a fullness to such a faith if one embraces it wholeheartedly. Whatever power impregnates the universe, it is a universal power, available to all who seek it in honesty, even though myths and rituals and attitudes differ in time and place. Salvation must be for all, or it is for none. In our world, torn with misunderstanding, this affirmation requires a born-again imagination, but without it, we shall not be saved.

Few, if any, Unitarian Universalists believe in the myth of the Fall of Man through Adam’s sin, yet there is a symbolic way that this old religious story may be a signpost directing us to meaning. (see Alan Watts, MYTH AND RITUAL IN CHRISTIANITY). The “Fall” might represent human illusion, born of self-centeredness that he is completed in irresponsible individuality. Redemptive love might represent a born-again vision that whatever is hold or divine in our lives is linked to character, reconciliation and imagination. We are saved by our vision of what we want to become and the nature of our struggle to reach that goal.

Two Thankful Men – and How Each Was Right and Wrong

November 22, 1964
Rochester

Two Thankful Men – and How Each Was Right and Wrong

Reading: Luke 18 9/14

This parable is less an exhortation about prayer and more a parable about confused human personalities – how we should deal with ourselves. Jesus’ parables were gems of literary creation. One of the signs of their value is the summer in which they have stimulated persons in all succeeding generations to think upon the human condition and how we may improve the ways we deal with life. On this Sunday closest to Thanksgiving, will you think with me about this parable, because it suggests the necessity of establishing wholesome distinctions between self-confidence and arrogance; between humility and self-abasement.

To be thankful is to feel a sense of gratitude and obligation. Thanksgiving is a holiday when such thankfulness is expressed culturally and individually.

Consider the Pharisee. First of all, one must be alert to resist the stereotype, unfortunately anti-Semitic, which has gathered around this parable. Because the Pharisee in the parable is hypocritical, all Pharisees were hypocrites – or so the slander has persisted. To condemn an entire group for the wrong-doing of one, is not only wretched logic, but also in the case of the Pharisees, quite unhistorical. Anyone who is at all perceptive can find hypocrites among ministers, elders, merchants, middlemen and managers. But to generalize on a whole class is both wrong thinking and applied injustice. Furthermore, the Pharisees in Jesus’ time were the liberals of the day. They did not want to discard out-of-hand the old Law and ancient traditions, just because times had changed. They sought ways to reconcile the old laws with new conditions by thoughtful re-interpretations. Neither the reactionary nor revolutionist ever approves such reconciling efforts. But the achievement of working consensus in any time of trouble is usually the result of efforts of persons who cherish the same ameliorating attitude of the Pharisees. It should be clear that in discussing the parable, I am referring only to this individual Pharisee and not to his class.

This particular Pharisee, however, is the personification of smug complacency, “God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men.” Jesus commented that the man exalted himself but would be humbled by God.

The lucky majority in our nation who are well off in this world’s goods – and this includes most of us here without a doubt – should exert care that our Thanksgiving responses do not reflect, “better than thou,” and “holier than thou” attitudes. (too many times these attitudes of assumed superiority really should read, “luckier than thou.”) Do we not tend to exalt ourselves as a nation where the granaries burst with plenty and the counters overflow with commodities? We are proud of our pre-eminence of wealth and power. We no longer boast of “manifest destiny,” but we tend to think of ourselves as the “great people” who have the wisdom, wealth, weapons and power to instruct the rest of the nations what the best decisions are.

We should be disciplined by the recognition that the rest of the world does not believe that our nation holds all the keys to the kingdom of man’s finest destiny. An historian of India (see reference, H. J. Muller, USES OF THE PAST, p. 324) takes for granted that any view of world history will still be chiefly concerned with Asia because Asia is the source of all the world’s great religions and has maintained a high culture for a much longer period than the West.

In the old parable, the arrogant one used the word, “I”, five times in two short sentences. One does not have to be a psychologist to guess that such an outburst is much [more] the expression of overblown ego than it is a prayer of thankfulness. Perhaps your prayers are not so self-centered, but inasmuch as the person who gives me the most trouble is myself, I assume that your condition does not greatly differ. Therefore, let us all be cautious in reciting our accomplishments, for their virtue may be exaggerated [and] our self-satisfaction unjustified.

There is another sentiment in the Pharisee’s prayer which is even more petty than the recital of alleged accomplishments. “God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” Dr. Paul Fornier, the Swiss psychiatrist who is one of the most persuasive in finding Christian truth in the insights of psychiatry wrote, “The person who represses his conscience often tries to shift his discontent upon innocent victims. The weak are well designed to play the role of scapegoat.” (THE WHOLE PERSON IN A BROKEN WORLD, p. 14/15). The hypocrite’s prayer in the parable would seem to be a good example of such transference of guilt.

It is not only that the weak are made scapegoats, but also there is a secret and unhealthy temptation to experience a perverse sort of satisfaction when ill-fortune befalls someone else. Wise men recognized the condition long before the psychologist and psychiatrist recognized that secretly we hold some unlovely wishes. Thales (640 b.c.e.), sometimes called the first of the philosophers, said, when he was asked how people best bear adversity, “By seeing your enemies in a worse plight.” (quoted by Henderson, PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, p. 2).

Although there is no need to dwell on the subject, the hypocritical Pharisee was right, also. We should be grateful that we have not become extortioners, unjust, adulterers or grafting tax collectors. We may attribute it to our individual virtue, when we should be at least as grateful to our parents and the social environment in which we were reared, but every person should feel a certain quiet pride in living up to high standards of morality and obeying the regulations of his religion.

Those of us who may not be impressed with fasting or tithing should not feel superior to the person who is committed to a faith requiring much religious discipline. When a person lives according to his best lights, he has set an impressive mark for the rest of us.

Frequently a person must trust his own capabilities and depend on his self-confidence. Otherwise he fails to accomplish all he might. There was an old, orthodox Sunday-school song which said it well,

“Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have conviction
Dare to make it known.”

Second, consider the tax collector who, standing far from the altar with his eyes cast down, prayed, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” Now those of you interested in a side excursion in the attitudes toward tax collectors, should not that nowhere does Jesus indicate that this man was a dishonest tax collector. He may have been a grafter, but such is not indicated. Apparently just to be a tax collector for the Roman Empire in an occupied nation was sufficient onus to place one in the company of extortioners, adulterers and the unjust. So you see taxation has been a most unpopular practice long before the income tax came to the U.S. in the 20th century.

Anyway, although the tax collector is the favored one in the parable as it has come down to us, I have long been somewhat disenchanted. There is something phony about being loudly humble in public.

We should recognize that using the tax collector in the parable was another way that Jesus proclaimed his central message, which appeared again and again in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke: “Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

But even allowing for this teaching emphasis and for the parable style, a style not that of the novel or even the short story, humility is a vice when it exists only for its own sake. There is a variety of twisted arrogance which hides beneath a veneer of pretended humility. Charles Dickens’ character, Uriah Heep, is a wonderful illustration.

There is also an old legend about a king who was told by a seer that the king would live to a great old age if he would live with great humility. The king discarded his stately robes, royal luxuries and dressed in rags, left the palace and moved to a rude hut. He issued orders that no one was to show him reverence. Then in barren solitude he tried to examining his own feelings with as much self-honesty as he could muster. He realized that he was much more vain of his seeking humility than he ever had been proud of royal privilege and power.

Whereupon he took wiser advice, “dress like a king; live like a king; but be humble in the secrecy of your heart. Nietzsche was a bitter philosopher who gave Christianity little quarter or even fairness, but did he not touch a sensitive spot, at least for some, when he wrote, “A Christian’s thinking is perverted, even when he humbles himself. He does so only to be exalted. His great delight is the mean and petty pleasure of condemning others.”

In Christianity and other religions as well, there have always been some who believe the chief way to glorify God is to abuse and humiliate themselves. You may recall the story of St. Simon Stylites, who lived for years on the top of a pole, suffering continually in filth and pain. He believed that in debasing himself, he was pleasing God. The Hindu fakir, supposedly in religious ecstasy, sits on hot coals or walks barefoot on sharp nails. It’s an ironic comment on much distorted humility that our English words “fake” and “faker” come from a word supposedly signifying religious humility - “fakir.”

Humility is wise when it exists only for its own sake.

But there is a need to say emphatically that repentance when sincerely offered is an emancipating experience. Some might say, “If you repent, God forgives you.” That is what Jesus meant when he said that the tax collector “went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” Others who might be less ready to concur with the theological proposition that God forgives he who repents, would agree that to express one’s errors, and be truly sorry for them, is to be free from the burden of secret guilt we may have been carrying. To tell all is to be forgiven all – although one can still compensate for injuries to others and allow changed behavior to be the goal of a new start in living. To unburden oneself – not necessarily only to the psychiatrist or the psychologist, although that is called for in many instances – to unburden oneself is to experience an openness of living which will not only help you, but help others, who will relate to the attitude of expressed self-honesty.

The tax collector was right in his attitude of humility, too. When humility is authentic and not exhibition, it can guide us to productive perspectives. Humility is accepting certain facts about our universe, primarily a modest estimate of our place, talent and permanence. We should recognize our name and our fame, if any, is of very transient importance and temporary duration.

Michelangelo is probably the world’s most famous artist. His achievements as a painter, sculptor, architect and poet represented a life of genius almost unexcelled. Those who visited the Pieta at the World’s Fair were deeply moved by its superb form and color. Yet one of his biographers, Papini, commented on Caprese, the village where Michelangelo was born. The village is ti... a few houses and the church of San Giovanni, where Michelangelo was baptized. Papini wrote that it was significant that the village of Caprese was better known for the fine quality of its chestnuts than as the birthplace of Michelangelo. If the greatest artist of the ages ran second to the flavor of chestnuts in his home town, then perhaps we should feel, as well as act, modestly. We should have humility as well as self-confidence. We should see ourselves in the perspective of the uncountable age of the planet and the brief time we consciously will live on it.

Of course while I have been talking about character in an ancient parable, you must have guessed that I was not thinking about two different kinds of individuals, but rather two tendencies with wrestle within ourselves. There is a struggle within each of us between the hypocrite and the penitent. We have a tendency to be smug about our possessions or position; we are also conscious on occasions that we should cry out to whatever gods there may be, “have mercy on me for I have been very wrong; I have missed the mark.” If you have never known the pains and discomfort of such feelings, you probably stopped listening after the first minute anyway.

Sometimes we ride a personality curve upward; we feel complacent, assured, successful. Then the curve turns down, we wonder if we can ever come near the goal of our dreams or rid ourselves of those terrible feelings which strike us when we should have done better and could have done better, had we been less lazy, greedy or self-centered. Can we do better?

Ezekiel, that OT prophet of the fantastic visions, knew an experience of his God which may be instructive to us, even though Yahveh of the OT neither speaks to most of us nor is real to us. After a dramatic and picturesque vision of God, Ezekiel wrote (1/28 – 2/1), “Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking; and he said to me, ’Son of man, stand upon your feet, and I will speak with you.’”

We can stand upon our feet, wrestling with our own vanity as well as guilt. In the mythology of the Norse people, my ancestors, there was a strong belief in fate – one’s end was ordained from the beginning of time. They believed, however, that while fate will decide the moment and manner of death, fate will not decide how you will face it. You will decide how you will face it.

So with us. There are all variety of situations we will not control – the situation will happen to us – some will be good luck, some ill fortune. But if we stand upon our feet with a minimum of hypocrisy and an absence of self-abasement, in the long run we will know that life deserves our fulsome thanks.

Whom Shall We Hate?

October 4, 1964
Rochester

Whom Shall We Hate?

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the O.T. story of Micaiah, the prophet, who told King Ahab that there was no necessary connection between what he wanted to do and doing what was right. Because Micaiah was the only adviser who spoke so courageously and pointedly, he also became the object of the King’s anger. When the King of Judah, Jehoshaphat, had suggested that Micaiah be consulted, King Ahab of Israel said, “Micaiah ... but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.”

As things turned out, King Ahab would have lived, not ingloriously died in defeat, if he had taken the advice of the candid Micaiah, instead of hating him.

Whom shall I hate?

The person who gives me good advice that I refuse to heed?

The person who is a picture in my mind of something objectionable or evil? A picture not necessarily much like the real person?

The parents who advocate novel changes in human affairs and social structures – hating them because I am fearful that such changes will threaten my place on the status ladder or jeopardize my wishful thinking about preferment or power?

The criminal who has committed foul and loathsome crimes?

The political candidate I oppose, hating him because his possible election would put me among those who backed a loser?

Whom shall I hate?

Hate exists. One can assume from the Warren Commission report that hate was the directing force in the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Certainly hate took command in the most terrible moments of decision in their lives.

Hate exists. The “hate groups” whose scurrilous literature reaches us so widely, hate all varieties of minority groups, except their own reactionary minorities.

Hate exists. Too many times all law officers are hated because of the brutality, ignorance, or prejudice of a few.

Hate exists. There is something bizarre as well as instructive in the current re-runs of movies made 20 years ago, when the movie propaganda line helped the government propaganda by expressing and inciting hate toward Japanese and Germans – hate which now sounds almost as antiquated as if we could hear the shrill call of the junkman and the slow click of his horses’ hooves on brick-paved streets.

Hate exists. How many socially respectable and outwardly balanced persons in furious solitude have muttered curses at someone and wished him ill-fortune because such an object of hate had become “one-up,” been lucky, clever, or ready for opportunities the other had missed or delayed seizing? Or the hated one merely had been the innocent scapegoat for various frustrations?

What is hate? Hate is an outlaw emotion which has gained sufficient power over us to become a directing motive. Hate is an emotion spawned by ignorance and nursed by fear. The psychologists can outline its maverick growth. Because of our human nature, we can easily become ever-anxious about our own egos to the point of unhealthy vanity, while at the same time cherishing doubts about our own adequacy to achieve goals and our ability to perform up to expectations. When situations arise in which we seem unable to cope, fear increases together with the discomforts caused by being thwarted. If one adds the ingredient of suggestibility, particularly suggestibility to easy, over-simplified answers, then the state of ignorance and the feelings of fear, vanity, thwarting and suggestibility can merge in the guiding motive of hate.

The headline name may be a classic example. Now I neither pass judgment on Lee Harvey Oswald nor attempt an apology for him. Unfortunately for him and for our system of law, even though we are magnetized with the dreadful fascination and speculation of the assassination circumstances, he can never be convicted or absolved of the awful crime. But the Warren Report, judging from excerpts, digests and summaries, has thoroughly established a formidable array of circumstances to demonstrate that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole killer of President Kennedy. That Oswald hated authority figures seems highly probable. What made him hate?

The Warren Report indicates many of the ingredients which combine in a poison broth of hate. Oswald’s childhood was hectic, anxiety-ridden, insecure. His father died when he was a small child. After a short while with his widowed mother, he was sent to an orphanage. Following this experience, he was sent home to his mother when she married again. But this home, too, became broken in three years or less. Thwarting, fear and the pains of a bruised ego must have gathered in ominous merger.

As a boy he was known to authorities for delinquent behavior. It was said of Oswald by one counselor, “no one ever met his need for love.” Then the boy became the man who possessed a “deep-rooted resentment of all authority,” who nursed “hostility toward every society in which he lived.” The Warren Report indicates how this accumulated hostility may have directed the hate motives which triggered assassination.

We know now whom he hated, and the terrible consequences which so profoundly shocked us all and affected our destiny.

Whom will I hate? Whom will you hate? Must there be hate? Several observations:

First, we must never forget the relationship between emotion and intellect. Among the unverified statements I have recently noted, was an item that by body weight man is composed of 43% muscle and 2.5% brain. The intellect must reasonable control all that muscle or the outlaw emotion of hate can ride amok, unchecked by higher values.

It has been said that for 2400 years all Western Philosophy has been commentary on Plato. Certainly he gave many an enduring clue to the priority that reason must claim over passion if we are to be truly human. In TIMAEUS, Plato used the analogy of anatomy to make the point that reason must exert control or we fail to achieve the human stature which could be ours:

“Now of the divine, he (God) was the Creator, but the creation of the mortal he committed to his offspring ... they proceeded to fashion a moral body, and made it to be the vehicle of the soul, and constructed within the body a soul of another nature subject to terrible and irresistible affections – first of all pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil; then pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two foolish counselors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily led astray – these they mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring love, according to necessary laws, and so framed man .... That part of the inferior soul which is endowed with courage and passion and leaves contention they settled nearer the neck, midway between the midriff and the neck, in order that it might be under the rule of reason and might join with it in controlling and restraining the desires when they are no longer willing of their own accord to obey the word of command issuing from the citadel.” (See Synopticon, Vol. 7).

Plato may have underestimated the power of emotions as well as speculating fantastically on anatomy, but he did not overstate the primary role that reason must play in policing the outlaw emotions of hate and irrationality.

The reasonable mind should not be given an assignment to smother emotion, even if it could – which it can not. One of the realities of human existence is that squelched and repressed emotions can sabotage the effort to achieve health in body and mind. The power of reason is disclosed when the reasoning mind directs the expression of emotions toward the achievement of goals which are not just ego impulses, but rather goals made authentic by effective knowledge; and illuminated by the higher values which, in our better moments, we have learned to prize.

When caught up by the splendid dreams of the best of our heritage and the most inspired moments of our personal experience, we are persuaded that truth, beauty and goodness represent the true goals of human endeavor, particularly in the application of these virtues in life.

When there is knowledge instead of ignorance, then there is courage rather than fear. And when courage triumphs over fear, then love casts out hate. Nowadays, some persons wince at the word, “love.” But in the closing sentence of his essay, “Knowledge and Understanding,” Aldous Huxley, unsparingly and incisively, emphasized both the flaws and the irreplaceability of this word, “love”: “Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, ’love’ is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loud speakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced, for, after all, love is the last word.”

Let me attempt to emphasize another dimension when considering the question, “Whom shall I hate?” The hazard of falling victim to the hate virus increases when we play the treacherous game of “odd man out.” “Tag – you’re it” may be noisy, active, harmless play for children, but it can be a most dangerous game for adults when used to condemn and despise persons. Yet it’s a game we are constantly tempted to play.

For example, if I hate a person, a Communist, Fidel Castro, for example, I can expand my hostility on cussing him out in absentia; I can suspiciously surmise his secret agents are manipulating every political and diplomatic decision I oppose; and all the while because my energies have been channeled into personal hate, I may never exert myself intellectually to grapple with the momentous historical question of why people plan, carry out and sustain revolutions.

If I hate, as a person, a Neo-fascist storm-trooper, George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi, for example, I can recite the authentic list of totalitarian horrors and tremble at the possibility that it could happen here. But to the extent that I hate him as a person, I have used up my energies and emotion which should be rationally directed toward the problem of handling in a democracy the activities of those who would destroy for others, the very rights which permit these conspirators to incite and attract the ignorant, the fearful and the thwarted.

One of the insights provided by the old Hebrew Scripture of Proverbs is found in the eighth chapter where there appears a long, superb passage praising “Wisdom.” Two lines, (vs. 36), read,

“but he who misses (wisdom) injures himself;
All who hate me (wisdom) love death.”

This applies directly to the “tag – you’re it,” “odd man out” method of combating supposed danger or threat. It is far wiser to deal with problems not personalities. All who hate wisdom, by hating persons, may utterly fail to meet the issues competently.

Another way of looking at this aspect of hate is to recall how frequently the “Devil” theory of religion or history has appeared. From ancient times people have been unable to reconcile what they believed to be the goodness of God with the obvious occurrence of disasters – fire, flood, disease, tornado, volcanic eruption – disasters wherein the lives of persons, good and bad, were rubbed out indiscriminately. The belief in demonology arose in very ancient times and was carried forward into our Judeo-Christian heritage, that God could not be responsible and that there must be a supernatural spirit of evil nearly equal in power to God.

By and large, most persons do not take the notion of a supernatural Devil seriously any more, but we have been sufficiently tainted by ancient ways of believing so that we tend to personify, readily, a philosophy or government we oppose in the person of an adversary, usually a striking personality, who becomes a Devil (the nonsense about “Impeach Earl Warren” is a current and deplorable example). Somehow the crude notion arises that if we could ship this Devil back to hell, then there would be peace and light and everything nice. But most controversies are deeper and stronger than the personalities who may be their current advocates, even though we have made devils of them. I have no real expectations that conditions will be otherwise in my lifetime, but is not the whole atmosphere of political campaigns fogged over with the “Devil” theory of political choice?

We are warned about the devilish nature of a candidate’s manners, morals or associates. If we people of this land would exert some special mental effort to permit our reason to direct our 45% muscle around, perhaps some day the Devil theory of opposing factions will have gone the way of the sacrifices to Moloch; and candidates will respond to a reasonable demand that campaigns be devoted to basic issues, defined problems and authentic prospects.

But the Devil theory, the “odd man out” way, the “tag – you’re it” gambit will remain until the answer to the question, “Whom shall I hate” is “No person. I hate no one.”

The hate groups, the Neo storm troopers, those who cherish only a conspiratorial view of history are passionately involved in a search for significance, distorted and brutalized though that search is. But twisted crusades are marked by a conspicuous omission, which is the concluding observation on the topic, “Whom shall I hate?”

Those who hate neglect the ancient and imperishable reality that healthy and moral human significance is realized only when (As Hilary Frye remarked at the G.A., 1964, SF), “the individual finds worthwhileness in helping others grow and in the process, grows himself toward his own fulfillment.”

When the question is put to us, “Whom shall we hate?” and we answer truthfully, “no one,” the point is not alone that we are placing the supreme worth of human personality as a value superior to the temptation to hate; but also we are coming into our own as persons. As Dr. Herbert Mowrer, research professor of psychology at the University of Illinois has observed, “we can be true to ourselves only if we are first true to others.”

Even amidst strong differences, there is little doubt that this policy of mutual good-will is intimately related to physical health as well as moral virtue. There have been some findings to the effect that only patients with high blood pressure and kindred ills are reported with considerable consistency to be persons cherishing feelings of intense hatred or guilt.

When the greatest of the ethical prophets, Amos in the eighth century, B.C. came down to the corrupt city from the clean hills where his sheep ranged, he was caustic in his indignant condemnation of the rich and powerful who oppressed the poor and needy; he excoriated the lazy, the political grafters, the swindling merchants. Yet this prophet who is perpetually the model for the goals of ethical religion, did not hate persons. His most famous passage illuminates the clear distinction:

“I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Amos hated the hollow ritual and the solemn hypocrisies, but he did not hate people: “I hate, I despise your feasts.” In another famous passage he said,

“hate the evil and love the good,
and establish justice in the land.”

We are true to ourselves when we refrain from hating any person. Hate the evil deed, but not the person. Whom shall I hate?