God Talk – Modern Thought and Ancient Feeling

September 17, 1978
Lakeland

God Talk – Modern Thought and Ancient Feeling

An article in the NYT in July by Robert Jastrow, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, begins, “When an astronomer writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers.” There is some likeness in that to a Unitarian Universalist minister who talks about God, because 70% of Unitarian Universalists call themselves humanists. Usually this means that they would think of themselves as agnostics, atheists, or sometimes pantheists.

Jastrow’s article dealt with the current prevailing view among astronomers and physicists that the Universe had a beginning with one Big Bang about 20 billion years ago. As Jastrow writes, “In the searing heat of that first moment, all the evidence needed for a scientific study of the cause of the great explosion was melted down and destroyed....”

“Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the universe? Was the universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existent materials? And science cannot answer these questions, because according to the astronomers, in the first moments of existence the universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that first instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion. An entire world rich in structure and history may have existed before our universe appeared, but if it did, science cannot tell what kind of world it was. A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our universe, but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is. The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation....”

“Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory. At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has sealed the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

And the theologians have been writing God talk for centuries. There is something in most people that leads them to believe that if there is creation, there must have been a Creator who is eternal. Most surveys disclose that more than 90% of the American people believe in God. To further define what these 90% believe God to be, how they would define, classify she/he/it who is the Creator, would baffle the discipline of statistics.

I seldom use the word, God, publicly for this very reason. God is a word. God is a word which has many distinctions in meaning. I neither want another person to assume that my God is the same as his/hers, nor do I want to repeat my ensuing remarks each time the question is raised. Few people have the patience that I hope you will have for the next 15 or 20 minutes. I try, ordinarily, not to be like the person who, when asked what time it is, begins with a prolegomena about the history of watchmaking, then a technical discussion of the springs, gears, and hands, the electronics of digital timepieces, and then, after all that, says it is 11 o’clock.

Last week I said that a quote from the Christian mystic Jacob Boehme started me on this attempt to talk about God, along with the article by Robert Jastrow:

“For according to the outward man (woman) we are in this world, and according to the inward man (woman) we are in the inward world ... since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages and we must be understood also by two languages.”

Admittedly what I say is probably a failing attempt to express outwardly what my feelings are, what my hunch is or my intuition. Faust said,

“The same thing in all places,
All hearts that beat beneath the heavenly day –
Each in its language – say:
Then why not I, in mine, as well?”

We live in a universe of constant creativity, I believe. Greater marvel still, we are conscious of this creativity which is immersed in cosmic mystery.

The gods that have been named and worshiped have origins born of human needs, wishes, aspirations, and vanities. “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” the “Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ,” the clockmaker God of the Deists, these and others are deities that stir my interest, but do not lead me to worship. All popular and well-described gods are created by cultures and therefore limited by those cultures. In my time, I have been captivated by Gandhi’s aphorism that once he believed that God was Truth but came to believe that Truth was God. But such a theology becomes a tumbleweed too when one recognizes that Truth is relative to knowledge, time, place, culture, circumstance, semantics – subject to the same qualifications we can make about all other gods.

But I believe that behind all the veils of our roles and goals and illusory perceptions there is a creativity of such stunning force and magnitude that indeed one could speak the word, “God” with awe and reverence were it not that all the half-god sand culture gods have robbed the title of its mystery, majesty, and depth. Important to me is that I am part of this creative center, enlivened and articulated by it; and that to it I shall return. I like the way Alan Watts phrased it in THE BOOK, “We do not come into this world; we come out of it as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’”

The poets help me much more than scientists or philosophers to understand who I am and who you are. Lines such as Richard Eberhart’s in “The Incomparable Light”:

“Elusive element, final mystery,
The light beyond compare has been my visitant,
Some sort of angel sometimes at my shoulder,
A beckoning guide, elusive nevertheless,
Under the mind where currents of being are running.
It is this strange light I come back to,
Agent of truth, protean, a radical of time.”

[see notes in addendum that were inserted at this point]

The physicists instruct us that what appears to be solid is really a form of energy. Molecular structures are complex, with elements of different atomic weights active in their orbits. I’m told that more advanced studies have made the planetary model suggested by Niels Bohr somewhat dated, but it is illustrative. The atomic nucleus corresponds to the Sun and the electrons correspond to the planets moving in orbit. We may not soon get more basic than to say that at the core of eternal reality are positive and negative discharges of electricity. Which would be instructive if we knew what electricity was, really. We know what it does, we do not know what it is.

Without being able to present any evidence which would be persuasive to those who insist on tested assumptions, I believe that the same ultimate creative force is related to the dimension of depth in Self and the dimension of depth that is not Self. In this, I certainly am not a rationalist, for what I have been speaking about is not verifiable discourse.

But when we protest the follies and cruelties of war, of the need for rights to be established for all people, everywhere, of the need to understand our conflicts and other issues of a given day, such views are advanced not only for the cause in its won right, justified by that alone, but also because this Creationist Force is somehow involved when persons make serious commitments. (Brutus: “What need we any spur but our own best cause.”) Of course there is considerable relativism in manners and morals in different times, places, circumstances. Of course many persons would consider rubbish this feeling I have for a Creationist Force. Like Jacob and the angel, no one may wrestle with this “bright blur” without thereafter walking with a limp, figuratively. Nevertheless, I sometimes feel the mood which grasped Francis Thompson, poet-mystic, when he created the “Hound of Heaven.”

“I dimly guess what
Time in mist confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists awhile unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.”

What the poet describes as “the trumpet sounds”, Maslow, the psychologist, called peak experiences. When this happens, we have broken through the crust of Self or Other or both. The interpretations we give these experiences not only differ because of the unlike complexities of individual layers of Self, but also words are inadequate, although they may be the best effort we can make in such an age as ours. Alfred North Whitehead was more eloquent than most of us when he wrote (quoted by Margaret Isherwood in FAITH WITHOUT DOGMA, p. 102): “This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But the creation is a continuing process, and the process itself is the actuality since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey.”

Rainer Maria Rilke:

All those who seek Thee tempt Thee,
And all those who find would bind Tee
To gesture and form

But I would comprehend Thee
As the wide Earth enfolds Thee
Thou growest with my maturity
Thou art in calm and storm.

I ask of Thee no vanity
To evidence and prove Thee.
Thou wert in the aeons old.
Perform no miracles for me,
But justify Thy laws to me –
Which as the years pass by me,
All soundlessly unfold.

Addendum:

Colo Spgs area – Garden of Gods
Reddish sandstone – various striking forms
human eye – rock formations
2 kissing camels
Steamboat Rock – bow of a vessel
Balancing Rock – great mass
seemingly poised on a thin edge

But not fashioned to be.

Millions of years – forces heat/pressure
beneath earth fracturing/folding
submerging, uplifting the
Accumulated deposits ancient rivers/seas
when mountains thrust atmosphere
wind, sand, water, freezing, thaw
erosive forces wear away rocks
sculptured mountains, created
River valleys.

Scenic experience just one
Aspect of reality
Creation forces still engaged in chance
change so show that little if any
change Balancing Rock to latest tourist
Our perception – real –
Just as real dynamic forces
everlasting energy

Rational Religion and Deep Dimension

September 10, 1978
Lakeland

Rational Religion and Deep Dimension

Our re-affirmation ritual calls us back to our common faith, our ground of community as a Unitarian Universalist fellowship. I would like to share with you today my thoughts on those portions of our religion which can be termed rational, then point out areas in living where rationality seems weak, and lastly reach for a level of human reality which we find difficulty in dealing with – the deep dimension.

Freedom – the right and privilege of any individual to choose what he/she can believe is a primary element with us. Now what a creed insists; not what a religious authority dictates; not what a congregation votes, but what [an] individual believes to be true, from experience, knowledge, and reason.

Reason – we ask, what is the basis for a proposition? Does it fit the facts of history and contemporary experience? Is the proposal coherent with other accepted truths? Can a truth be verified? Is it logical?

Character – what is the test of a person’s religion? What they say, or what they do? Creeds or deeds?

Some social critics have characterized the 1970s as the “me” generation. So many persons seem to have turned inward. Various movements characterize this trend: meditation, assertiveness, the occult. There are common expressions.

“Before I can be anything I have to get my head together.”

“First, I have to find out who I am.”

You could add to the list. It should go without saying that much of this is of value. Many of us have not looked deeply enough into our inner selves. Meditation disciplines have been deep, moving experiences for countless persons. Many of the practices which could be called “irrational” (astrology, pyramid power, esoteric chanting, etc.) are the efforts of persons to find some powerful or helpful base on which to construct some adequate meaning for their lives. I suggest to you that an “appeal to reason” is not going to get a response with most people.

Quote from Jacque Maritain, from THE CASE FOR MODERN MAN:

“... liberal culture ... takes no account of the forces above reason that alone can lift men out of themselves; it offers men the help of no powers greater than their own; it does not tell them how the “supra-rational” can flow into them, inspiring them and illuminating their lives. And by the same token it leaves men powerless to deal with the unreason in themselves. For human reason is weak and cold, and is regularly overcome by irrational drives. Unless men can find some light and warmth above reason with which to combat the power of what is below reason, reason itself is condemned to defeat. There is, in short, something essentially self-defeating about a simple rationalistic dependence on the power of reason to affect human destiny; rationalism cannot even save the life of reason.”

This period of the late 70s seems to be a time when the question, “what does it all mean?” is flattening the hopes and aspirations of a people. Our own country, so affluent in worldly goods and privileges, is no exception.

A month ago (8/4/78) the Wall Street Journal printed a feature article based on the findings of a number of research organizations. The article began, “Outraged. Apprehensive. Angry. Frustrated. Turned off. Cynical. Bitter.”

“These are the adjectives that leading pollsters and public-opinion analysts use to describe the mood of American this summer.”

The causes for this mood are many, but “inflation, high taxes, and other economic pressures have become the dominant public preoccupation.”

People are disillusioned with government. People feel things are slipping out of control and that nothing can be done about it.

There is inconsistency, too, in these surveys, surveys I have no cause to doubt because the findings cohere with what I have been hearing.

For example, polls revealed that 70% oppose welfare, but almost the same percentage endorse food stamps and aid to dependent children.

There is much more openness on some social issues. There seems to be acceptance of the rights of women and minorities, of freer sexual relationships, of the use of marijuana. But at the same time, in Lake County, where I live, every candidate for every office (State Senate Assembly, County Commission, County School Board) has firmly taken a stand against the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment].

The surveys disclose (and my listening confirms) that there is increasing support for capital punishment, rising opposition to school busing, and gay rights ordinances.

Such are the areas where there seems to me no power in rational appeals for truth, logic, and the worth of every human personality, even though I deeply believe in these values.

Now my intention is not to have you think I am in despair about the human venture, or that I am announcing that I’ve joined the “me” generation. Rather, I am concerned that, however important it is to find oneself in the “me” generation, it is more vital for me and everyone else to share in a “we” generation.

That is why I believe we must reach for the dimension of depth in our religious enterprises. One person’s verbal hour on Sunday morning by a preacher, no matter cow cogent and informed he/she may be, will not, except on rare occasions, create a sharing, loving “we” community. You may be more aware of this than I am, but believe me, I know it too.

We, in common with many ..., are beginning to bring feeling back to our worship. I hope our shared re-affirmation pointed toward that direction. I know the occasions of music, drama, dialogue, our practice of “sharing” are pointers also.

This recognition, I hope, signals that we have begun to perceive that we are creatures of condition, emotion, feeling, even on Sunday morning. If we are wise, we will recognize that many of our so-called “reasons” are rationalizations of underlying feelings that demand expression and sharing if we are to grow as individuals and persons in a caring community.

Should we not feel free to express anger among persons who care; can we not trust enough to let others know when we are hurting; should we be ashamed to speak love and touch tenderly?

(Jacob Boehme quote)

The Myth of God Incarnate

January 1, 1978
Lakeland
(also: Naples, 1/8/78)

The Myth of God Incarnate

Among the faults I have found in myself, and other religious liberals, is the error of the single road to truth. Fact, reason, and logic have been our way of judging the rightness or wrongness of an idea or image presented for our belief. If a story cannot be historically verified, or seems unreasonable, then for us it is either superstition or swindle, or so we say.

I read to you from a statement by Rosemary Reuther. Let me repeat a key sentence: “For myself, I find a certain shallowness in the rationalist or liberal tradition, a certain lack of the depth [in the] symbolic dimension, the intuitive, the symbolic which in fact has been more characteristic of what has usually been called religious experience.”

Is she touching a weakness in us?

In taking as a focus point the recent book, THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE, my object is to present the possibility that we are depriving ourselves of some of life’s fullness by switching off the power of myth (although we do make an exception at Christmas – albeit some of us are unnecessarily apologetic and vaguely guilty about singing the Christ carols or going to midnight mass).

I will speak of a few of the main points of the book, discuss why myth seems a universal human experience, and attempt, or begin to attempt, to deal with the place of myth in a religion such as ours, a religious emphasis which seemingly places its trust in rationality.

First, THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE, a book by seven English scholars (theological professors, N.T. studies), has caused a minor furor in more fundamentalist Christian circles. The historic creeds of the Christian church have maintained that, basic to the Christian faith, is the belief that God took human form in Jesus, incarnated. That is, the deity took on the flesh, bone, blood, and mind of a human being, Jesus. The orthodox church wrestled for centuries with the difficulty of expressing this God-Man relationship. How could God become man and still be fully God? How could man be God and still fully man? In two historic councils of the church, Nicea (325) and Chalcedon (451), the orthodox bishops found their formulas for creedal understanding of how Jesus could be both God and man.

Nicea (325): “Jesus was Very God of Very God, Begotten and not made, being of one substance with the Father; who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.”

Chalcedon (451), in the attempt to stifle heresies adopted clarification of Nicea: Jesus was “perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood; in two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.”

The writers of the book are Christian scholars who attempt to deal with considerations which are certainly not new to us. In their preface, they quote T. S. Eliot: “Christianity is always adapting itself into something which can be believed.”

From the mid-19th century on to the present, “Western Christianity has had to make two major new adjustments in response to important enlargements of human knowledge. It accepted that humans are part of nature and ... emerged within the evolution of the forms of life on this earth; and it accepted that the books of the Bible were written by a variety of human beings in a variety of circumstances and cannot be accorded a verbal divine authority.” (Of course, fundamentalists have not accepted either evolution or biblical errancy).

Furthermore as the varied studies of the Christian literature (N.T.) proceeded, there was increasing recognition that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels (except for John) was a man approved by God for a special role within the divine purpose and that the later conceptions of him as God incarnate, the second person of the Trinity, living a human life, is a mythological or poetic way of expressing his significance for Christians.

The Christian myth is that God was incarnate in the baby Jesus through the miraculous conception by the God of the Virgin Mary. Miraculous births were not unusual attributions to be made of outstanding leaders or extraordinarily gifted persons. It [was a] way of explaining genius....

Plato, greatest of philosophers, was believed by many to have been of divine birth. Others said that Pythagoras was the divine son of Hermes. Plutarch, [the] biographer, seemed to believe it was beyond question that Alexander was a descendant of Heracles on his father’s side and from the mythical heroes of Troy on his mother’s [side].

Augustus was Caesar during the time Jesus was born and court circles suggested and promoted the notion that Augustus was a god come to earth – an incarnation.

In 48 BCE [an] Asian inscription speaks of Julius Caesar as “God manifest, offspring of Ares and Aphrodite and common savior of human life.” Perhaps the most noble – beautiful and different – God incarnate [was the] child of poor people whose message was to the dispossessed.

The book, THE MYTH OF GOD INCARNATE, attempts to deal with how a Christian today can confront the myth and reconcile its poetry and metaphor with the age we now live. That is not my concern today.

Most of us who are Unitarian Universalists think of Jesus as human, [and] do not have to deal with a particular doctrine of God-Man or supernatural redeeming savior based on an exclusive redeeming scheme by a savior who was God Incarnate.

In a peculiar sort of way, we religious radicals, as most might think us, are in the same position as those Christian fundamentalists who are disturbed by such treatment of myth as in the book. The Christian fundamentalists do not want to entertain the thought that the Christian salvation scheme (virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection) is mythology; they believe it to be a literal fact. We do not easily accept the Christian scheme as mythology because we believe it has been preached as fact – a fact we deny is true on historical, literary, theological, and rational grounds.

However, we Unitarian Universalists, who presume ourselves to be rational creatures, are mistaken if we easily or quickly put down or dismiss myths as stories that just are not true. We tend to forget, or ignore much of the time, that the human being is not just a creature using logic and reason, but more often is a creature possessing creative imagination.

Joseph Campbell, the scholar with the widest knowledge and deepest insight into myth, said that “myth is an imaginative elaboration of fundamental problems and tensions in the form of a story speaking symbolically to the whole human condition.”

Others speak of myth as a “rise to consciousness from the depth level of the human psyche” or the myth “wakes realities which logical thought will never be able to express.”

Jung wrote “nothing influences our conduct less than do intellectual ideas. An idea molds man/woman only when it is an expression of psychic experience.”

Persons, pre-historic as well as historic, have a hunger for meaning. Who am I? Why am I alive? Why is the cold bitter? The sun scorching? The tiger ferocious? Why does drought and flood destroy our food and leave us hungry? Why do I hurt? What and why is death? What is the God power or Powers that made man/woman, beast, field, and stream? The seasons, the tides, the sun, the moon, and stars? Does the Power care about us? Does the Power care about me?

My surmise is that the variety of incarnation myths represent answers people have made to the last question. If there is an all-powerful god, does he/she care about us? The mythical answer has been yes – He (in historic times, God has been he in the monotheistic religions) came to earth as a babe of miraculous birth, as with Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Mithra.

Welling up from deep unarticulated feelings, many peoples in many cultures have created a god who cared about people; who was incarnate in human form; who in some cases sacrificed all for the people who worshiped him. So it was with the ancient Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, Romans, even the ancient Hebrews, for Yahveh appeared to Gideon (Jud. 6/14) and Abraham (Gen 18/1 ff). In the creation myth of Adam and Eve, Yahveh was walking in the Garden in the cool of the evening – a vivid, anthropomorphic and pastoral incarnation.

We are part of a religious group that imposes no myth in the form of dogma, creed, or incarnated God. We number among us agnostics, atheists, and believers in a God based on reason. Many there are among us who assert that no myth is needed, only fidelity to the ongoing search for truth and the achieving of a greater measure of social justice for people on earth.

Yet I have a hunch that there are many among us who have asked, even as I have asked myself and speculated many times, is there love, care, imagination, beyond, behind, or underneath our human experience? Are these experiences of love, imagination, caring, sensitivity as we know them in our human condition, incarnations of forces that are part of all creation, somehow?

I do know that in those moments when I can say “yes” to that speculation, the universe is a home; in my skeptical moments, when I say “no” the universe is a house, but not a home.

The most difficult part of this talk is how to conclude it. I believe we all have mythologies – justice, truth, a better society – these are myths, too, born of our ideals and imagination – a bit thin because of being rather abstract. We have not usually allowed our imagination to bubble over with images born of our feelings [and] metaphors.

Let me end this with two thoughts, one by John Hick in the book I have referred to where he writes (p. 180) “It seems clear that we are being called today to attain a global religious vision which is aware of the unity of all mankind before God and which at the same time makes sense of the diversity of God’s ways within the various streams of human life.”

Many years ago, William James wrote “truth and fact well up in our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulations. There is in the living act of perception always something which glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught and for which reflection comes too late.”

The Spreading Light

December 19, 1965
Plainfield

also: Lakeland 1978, Port Charlotte 1978

The Spreading Light

As the human family moves in slow procession from superstition to science, from magic to understanding, and from the miraculous to the natural, the Christmas-Hanukkah message suggests differing levels of perception. Even as the spreading light of knowledge has given us wider vision of privilege and responsibility, so also may deepening comprehension of the poignant joy of the winter festival season increases our awareness of the ties that bind persons to each other and to the magnificent universe in which we live and of which we are a part.

Early, pre-literate people celebrated when they were released from fear of total darkness. The lessening light of Autumn and early Winter stirred the pangs of fear. When the sun lengthened its daily visit at the Winter solstice, men and women feasted, sang and danced. The world was not dying! Clothed in enduring green, the fir and spruce had resisted the colorful death of other foliage, thus the fragrant evergreens became living symbols of hope.

The strange gods of frost and fire were not entirely unpredictable and whimsical, but seemed to be dependable. Even the early folk began to sense that the world-process was orderly. The celebrations became regular as season after season repeated the sustaining rhythms of bud, blossom, fruit, harvest, sleep – and then bud again. Even as the late December days diffused longer periods of daytime, so the light of confidence in nature began to illuminate the darker fears of humankind. The stirrings of faith began to overgrow the tremblings of fear, even as the mistletoe festooned the oak tree.

After many centuries it came to pass that the Judeo-Christian era in our culture marked the spread of more light. In Jewish homes there is now being observed the “festival of lights” - Hanukkah. In this part of our tradition the spreading light celebrates religious freedom. When Judah Maccabeus and his brothers led a revolution against their Syrian and Roman overlords, they recaptured Jerusalem only to find that there was only enough oil to feed the lamp for a day. When the Temple was purified, the legend goes, enough oil was miraculously provided for eight days. And so the worship continued as a ceremony of light, but more vitally, it was a celebration of freedom.

Although the early Christians were children of their times and were prone to believe in magic and witchcraft, nevertheless, particularly in the writings of Paul, there is an increasing affirmation of the reliability of the God in whom they believed. This was an emphasis that light was needed in a different shadowed area of the self.

The spreading light of faith in an orderly Universe stimulated a growth of confidence that the power that underlies our Universe (name it God or what you will) is somehow tied in with the best of human experience. There is a basic liberating belief implicit in the facade of fantastic fervor which still pounds and chatters at us from authoritarian churches, pleading Pentecostals and irrepressible evangelicals. It is this: the human family is worth redeeming; the condition of men and women is not hopeless! Unitarians and Universalists resonate to that foundation of faith.

The religious primitives celebrated the Winter solstice because the gods once more saved them from darkness and death.

Then Judas Maccabeus and his followers transformed that tradition of light to an annual celebration of the anniversary of religious freedom. Then the Christian extended human hopes to much of the Greek, Roman, and North African world with the Gospel which affirmed that the Supreme Being was neither whimsical nor a-moral – God was a Power having moral relations with humanity. Even more daring, the early Christians proclaimed that God incarnated himself as a little baby to redeem mankind – and many in the ancient world responded to that dramatic and winsome theology. Little wonder that our roots in early Christian doctrine and culture lead us to respond warmly to the poetry, carols and beautiful legends and myths of Christmas. We respond even when we give neither obedience nor literal belief to the doctrines illustrated by art, music, and scripture.

Is the Christian faith the limit to which the light can spread. Many would so avow. But some of us believe that the light must spread wider and deeper still.

The early peoples joyously responded to the favors of gods who preserved or destroyed at their fancy.

The Maccabeeans demonstrated that the light of the world is cast by the lamp of freedom.

The Christian Gospel sings grateful praises to God for his redeeming power in the incarnation.

But there is a more splendid, a more daring and more audacious dream! Not only are all persons worth redeeming, but also men and women are the agents of redemption. Our faith [surmise] proclaims that it is within human power to extend the light of love and justice into the shadowed parts of our individual selves and that the same light can make social realities of the astounding ideal, “peace on earth, good will to men.” Aristotle wrote (NICOMACHEAN ETHICS), “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of our subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.” John Dewey may have intended much the same point when he wrote, “ideas are effective not as bare ideas, but as they have imaginative content and emotional appeal.”

From Ferguson, SIGNS AND SYMBOLS IN CHRISTIAN ART: “Language of sign and symbol is the outward and visible form through which is revealed the inward and visible reality that moves and directs the soul....”

The matchless beauty of the story of the holy family is a part of the spreading light. But all families are holy. Furthermore, all wanted babies are precious gifts of life, who as they grow in wisdom and stature may become redeemers. The culture-bearing carols, stories and myths embody these traits with artistic and emotional expression, giving power and lift to our lives at this season of high holiday.

Talking effectively about the deeper meanings of Christmas is nearly impossible. Brahms once said that with all his talent he could not achieve the beauty of a German folk-dance melody which every child was able to sing.

From [primitive superstition], to freedom’s light, to gospel, to one human family. This I believe is the spreading light, to goal of the light-hearted. All the glory of song and story are hints of deep humanitarian meaning. Wise men and shepherds, innkeepers, a careworn father, a weary woman, great with child – all these meet in matchless story to remind us of the superiority of a society in which all persons are equal. The festive celebrations impinge upon us, and we should be stirred by that awareness [that, if we all ate at one table, no one would be allowed to grow hungry.]

The experiences of Christmas and Hanukkah carry the impact that life is sacred; that the humblest and the proudest have equal need to belong to each other; that carol, candle and crèche open us a window through which we can see what life should be. “Peace on earth, good-will to men [and women].” But can the poetry of peace be transformed to the reality of peace? That’s the bind. Did you see the item in Friday’s paper that reported that a large firm placed a Christmas window display, “peace on earth” at Madison and 57th Street? The display featured quotations on peace from Dag Hammarskjold, Adlai Stevenson, Pope Paul VI.

The designer who received the brunt of the complaints explained, “some people interpreted the presentation as some sort of demonstration about Vietnam. So the window display was revised to eliminate such quotations as “war is the negation of peace and humanity,” and Pope Paul’s call, “War never again” was “amplified and identified.”

Is this our time? We respond to ancient wonder stories about angels singing about peace 2000 years ago, but when the meaning of peace is grappled with today, people either back away or seek to quiet things down by lambasting those who speak peace.

Can we go beyond ancient words and lilting carols? There is an old legend from Eastern Europe which may fit the reality. “A pious Russian went to a holy man and asked him to find out from God if there was going to be a war. The holy man said he would try. When he had prayed, he said that God had given him the answer: ’There will be no war, but the struggle for peace will be so furious that not one stone will be left standing on another.’” (CHRISTIAN CENTURY)

Is this not our tragic dilemma in Vietnam?

There are many, like I, who will continue to urge unrelenting efforts for peaceful negotiation and who still believe that a halt in the bombing, a cessation of escalation may provide the impetus for such confrontation across the table rather than confrontation in rice fields and villages with innocent men, women and children caught in the deadly crossfire, fire and explosion.

Albert Schweitzer (PHILOSOPHY OF CIVILIZATION) wrote, “I would be a humble pioneer of the (new) Renaissance and throw the belief in a new humanity like a torch, into our dark age.”

May our deepest Christmas concern be that light will spread, like a torch hurled into darkness, so that “peace on earth, good will to all people,” will not be only matchless poetry, but some day, political and social reality.