what if a young man encountered the stark words of Jesus in the writings of leo tolstoy
and ever after took seriously the question 'what would Jesus do'
what if he determined to treat every person he met
-the homeless beggar on the street, the millionaire, the mayor, the woman who cleaned his toilet
-with care and dignity and respect.
what if he gave away all his possessions except necessities
so few that he could tote them all in a backpack.
what if he insisted on long periods of daily meditation,
never letting a hectic schedule interfere with his time of silence and solitude.
what if he shunned modern conveniences,
stayed immune to styles and fashions
and devoted his life to cultivating inner, spiritual strength.
moreover, what if this solitary figure became, despite his eccentricities,
one of the most famous people in the world,
the moral leader of the second most populous nation.
and to complicate matters, what if this man who modeled his life after Jesus
decided, as an adult, deliberately to stay outside the christian fold.
such is the life of mohandas k. gandhi (1869-1948)
...there has been no one like him:
no one more disciplined or stubborn or inconsistent or creative or baffling or lovable or infuriating.
many of the political principles we take for granted today originated in the mind of this man
who led a fifth of humanity to independence.
he broke every rule in the political manual and in the process
helped found the largest democracy in the history of the world.
fifty years after his death, we can at least begin to assess G by asking what relevance he has
in our speeded up world of internet sites and cruise missiles.
in my trips to india with dr. brand, i was surprised to find
how little G's modern compatriots know about this remarkable man.
and because he was called a saint-a hindu saint, certainly, but one strategically informed by christianity
-we in the west should pause to ponder what message he has for us.
he sits like a superego on the shoulder of the western church,
asking all of us the question Tolstoy asked himself:
'why don't we practice what we preach?
G died three years after the US dropped the atomic bomb on japan,
an event further convincing him that, for the planet to survive,
the world must look to the east for solutions.
G believed the west had forfeited its ability to lead the human race
and represented a future of decadence, materialism and armed conflict.
(foot: 'mr. G, what do you think of western civilization? G: 'i think it would be a great idea.
he looked for a new way based on spiritual, not material, strength.
few, very few, are heeding that call today.
the US stands as the world's sole superpower
and its sex and money culture continues to spread around the world.
modern india honors, but hardly follows G.
giant textile mills have supplanted the wooden spinning wheels.
high tech office complexes churn out software that runs the world's computers.
and, three bloody wars after G, his nation brandish the ring of power that had appalled him:
nuclear weaponry.
even so, india cannot get the strange little man out of her consciousness.
if someone staged a beauty contest to select the least likely world leader, G would win easily.
barely 5 feet tall, he weighed a mere 114 pounds
and his skinny arms and legs stuck out from his body like the limbs of a malnourished child.
his ears flared straight out from his shaved head;
his squat, oversized nose looked fake,
like one of the rubber noses attached to glasses that people wear to costume parties.
steel rimmed spectacles kept slipping from that nose, tilting down toward his mouth,
itself oddly shaped due to his habit of wearing dentures only while eating.
his lips curled over nearly toothless gums.
'he's rather like a little bird, sad lord mountbatten, the last british viceroy of india,
a kind of sweet, sad sparrow perched on my armchair.
as G walked, he leaned either on a bamboo stave or on the shoulders of his 'crutches',
as he called his two young grandnieces.
he wore the same clothes every day:
loose indian loincloth and sometimes a cotton shawl,
both made of coarse material he had spun at his own wheel.
he carried all his belongings in a small sack, except for one,
an ingersoll pocket watch, which he proudly wore on a string.
G followed a strict schedule and no one,
not the king of the british empire nor the leaders of india nor his closest friends, could alter it.
he would arise daily at 2 a.m. to read from the hindu or christian scriptures and say prayers,
spend the next quiet hours answering correspondence,
then do his ritual ablutions, complete with a salt and water enema.
at noon he passed for another health regimen,
placing a porous cotton sack packed with oozing mud on his abdomen and forehead.
modern historians, who tend to pick at the scabs of the famous, tell of G's
petty demands on associates, his bizarre personal habits, his cranky stubbornness.
he tested his vow of chastity by sleeping with nude young women.
the man who could galvanize millions failed as a leader of his own family,
mistreating his wife and raising a son who rebelled to become an embezzler, gambler and penniless alcoholic.
and when his wife lay dying from acute bronchitis
and the british flew in a vial of rare penicillin that could save her life,
G refused the doctor permission to give it to her intravenously lest the violence of the needle violate her body. as a result, she died.
nevertheless, after the gossip is heard and G's image corrodes
and his own nation continues to forsake much of what he lived and died for
-even after all that, G still radiates a unique quality, one that never failed to affect those who knew him.
moutbatten, a seasoned military commander, summed up his moral power with a simple strategic formula,
at thew time when civil war was breaking out across india:
'on my western front i have 100,000 crack troops and unstoppable bloodshed.
on my east i have one old man and no bloodshed'.
somehow G mobilized his followers, millions of them, into joining a crusade like none the world had seen.
'those who are in my company, he warned his followers,
must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours,
subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets.
they fought with the weapons of prayer, fasting, prison terms and bodies bruised from beatings
and in the end their unorthodox methods helped liberate half a billion people.
...G's most famous contribution, the technique of civil disobedience, evolved gradually.
indian born, he trained as a lawyer in london, then moved to south africa.
he led marches, took his share of beatings, spent a few hundred days in jail,
and learned the discouraging results of protest under an oppressive regime.
upon return to india he confronted a very different situation:
not a minority community of indians living in a strange land, but a majority, 500,000,000 citizens strong,
in a subcontinent ruled by the british.
indians had expected the british to reword their loyal service in world war I with more independence,
but instead the colonial power clamped down with a series of harsh laws
not unlike the discriminatory laws int the american south.
as the british empire tightened the screws, G meditated long hours about the appropriate response.
it came to him early one morning, in the dawning moments between sleep and consciousness.
he decided to call for a day with no activity at all.
india would respond to its masters by simply refusing to cooperate.
shops would close, traffic would cease, the country would shut down for one day.
we who live in its wake, after dozens of adaptations around the world,
can easily miss the extraordinary nature of that move.
nothing liked it had been attempted before.
...next, G tackled the colonial economic system.
..when G lived in india, one sixth of its population seemed more animal than human.
they lived in squalid slums amid open sewers in which swarmed rats and every other disease bearing agent.
the hindu doctrine of karma gave a theological basis for the elaborate system of 5000 subcastes
that kept people in their place.
caste, a grouping of human beings that went deeper than tribe or race, had been accepted for 5000 years
and few questioned it.
the lowest caste of all, Untouchables, provided a valuable service to society,
sweeping the streets and cleaning the latrines and sewers-
acts a higher caste hindu would never perform.
you could tell untouchables by their dark color and by their posture,
for they cringed like beaten animals.
the name defined them:
if a cast hindu so much as touched one or touched a drop of water one had polluted,
he would recoil and begin an elaborate purification process.
an untouchable had to shrink from the path of caste hindus
to avoid casting a shadow and thus defiling their superiors.
in the 1930's the british discovered a new subcaste, the Invisibles,
whom they had not encountered in three centuries of presence there:
assigned the role of washing clothes for the Untouchables,
these poor creatures believed they would pollute higher castes by sight,
so they emerged only at night and avoided all contact with other people.
with little to gain but refection from his peers, G took up the cause of the Un.
first, he bestowed on them a new name;
they were no longer to be called Un, but rather Harijans, the Children of God.
at his first ashram, a spiritual commune, in south africa,
G stirred up a storm of protest by inviting an Un to move in.
when the chief financial backer of the commune experiment withdrew his support,
G made plans to move to the Harijan's own quarters.
finally he committed the most defiling act possible for a hindu,
cleaning the latrines of the Un.
when he returned to india, he called them his brothers and stayed in their homes whenever possible.
years later, after independence, when other leaders in india were pressing lord mountbatten
to accept the honorary post of governor-general,
G proposed an alternative candidate,
an Un sweeper girl 'of stout heart, incorruptible and crystal like in her purity'.
although his candidate did not get the nomination,
by such symbolic actions G helped change the perception of Uns all across india.
laws were modified and strictures removed.
today in india, the caste system continues in a milder, less repressive form.
but 100,000,000 people now call themselves not by a curse-Untouchable
-but by a blessing: they are the Children of God.
G strove to recognize the inherent dignity in every person.
in his ashram in india, he adopted a leprosy patient, another of india's outcasts.
each day he changed the man's bandages and bathed him.
he wanted, he said, to devote the same care in making a mud pack for a leprosy victim
as in conducting an interview with the viceroy of india.
he also helped elevate the status of women in the country
by surrounding himself with highly competent women followers.
G summarized his beliefs in three points, which he credited to the victorian author john ruskin:
1. that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all
2. that a lawyer's work has the same value as a barber's
inasmuch as all persons have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work
3. that a life of labor, such as that of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman,
is a life worth living.
G sought ways to put those principles into practice.
in cities like bombay and calcutta, he preferred staying in a hovel of the sweepers' colony to a hotel.
he used a pencil until it was reduced to an ungrippable stub,
out of respect for the human being who made the pencil.
...i see the face of Jesus in disguise, said mother teresa
about the dying beggars she would invite into her home in calcutta
'sometimes a most distressing disguise'.
she, like G, understood that the direction of charity is not condescending, but rather ascending;
in serving the weak and the poor, we are privileged to serve God Himself.
G worked hard at identifying with the poor, by removing any barriers that might distance him.
to anyone who has been to india, i need cite only one instance of G's outreach:
his insistence on traveling third class on trains.
he would sit on hard benches crammed together with the unwashed peasants and their farm animals,
an experience of crowdedness, noise, filth, and smells unimaginable to most westerners.
why? he was once asked.
he replied, 'because there is no fourth class'.
(i contrast that attitude to my own excitement when i collect enough mileage points
to earn an upgrade to an airline's business class.)
G had no innate love of suffering
and had been assertive in early battles for personal rights in south africa
after he was thrown out of a first class compartment because of his skin color.
yet as he immersed himself in the sacred scriptures of hinduism, islam buddhism, and christianity,
he became convinced that the humility of a servant is the one posture required by God.
only then did he strip off his european clothes, dispossess himself of material things
and seek companionship with the poor and suffering.
'a leader, he said, is only a reflection of the people he leads.
G allowed no VIPs to interfere with his preferred style.
when Lord moutbatten offered to fly him to an important meeting on his private plane,
G chose instead his normal third class rail passage.
he caused something of a scandal on a visit to england to meet with parliament and king george.
he arrived amid great fanfare and press coverage
and the nation gasped as he tottered down the steamship gangplank
wearing only a cotton loincloth and leading a goat, his milk supply, by a rope.
declining offers from the best hotels, he chose instead to stay in an east end slum.
when reporters asked him to explain why he dared meet with a king in a 'half naked' state,
G replied with a smile, 'the king was wearing enough clothes for both of us'.
G never insisted that political leaders follow his strict path;
his was a moral and religious crusade, not just a political one.
but he did ask, after indepencence, that each government minister live in a simple home
with no servants and no car,
practice one hour of manual labor daily and clean his or her own toilet box.
long after his death, congress leaders continued to wear the homespun cotton uniform he espoused
and conducted party meetings while spinning cotton threads.
...in 1947, as the momentum for independence swept across india,
centuries old animosities began to boil to the surface.
hindus and muslims turned against each other with ferocity.
muslims burned the huts of their hindu neighbors, forced them to eat sacred cows,
raped the hindu women and butchered their husbands.
hindus fought back in kind and thousands of muslims also died in the months leading up to independence.
increasingly it appeared the whole country would burst into flames.
while politicians sat in elegant palace rooms in new delhi and bartered for power and land,
G went on an 'ointment' crusade.
let them argue, he said; he was going to the people,
to the angry hordes who were assailing each other so viciously.
at the age of 77 he headed to the region where the most violence had occurred.
he led his ragtag group of hindu disciples into charred muslim villages
to face taunts and rocks and bottles.
if turned away, he would look for a tree to sleep under.
if accepted, he would read from the bhagavad gita and koran and new testament,
teach basic principles of health and hygiene, then trudge on to the next village.
in all he visited 47 villages, walking 116 miles barefoot.
in each village G tried to persuade one hindu and one muslim leader to move
into the same house together and serve as guarantors of peace.
he asked them to pledge themselves to fast unto death
if one from their own religion attacked an enemy.
incredibly, the method worked.
while debates continued in the delhi palaces,
G's personal ointment began to salve the wounds across the region.
for a while the killing stopped.
when the politicians decided to carve the separate nation of pakistan out of india, however,
the country needed more than ointment;
it needed huge swaths of bandages to stench the flow of blood that quite literally
turned rivers scarlet and filled the skies with vultures.
as G had predicted in his appeals against it,
the partition provoked a reaction with no historical precedent.
when boundary lines were finally announced,
hindus found themselves caught within the borders of a newly created and hostile pakistan
and muslims found themselves in hindu india.
thus began the greatest mass migration ever as 10,000,000 people left their homes
and attempted a frantic march across mountains and desert plains to a new home.
lord mountbatten, the british viceroy who oversaw independence,
knew that the two areas were potential conflagrations.
on the west where india bordered west pakistan, hostilities would undoubtedly break out.
but the eastern territory, along the gerrymandered border of east pakistan (now bangladesh),
posed a greater threat.
sitting along that border was calcutta, the most violent city in asia.
no city in the world matched its poverty-more than 400.000 beggars
-its religious bigotry, its unrestrained passions.
calcutta brazenly worshiped the hindu goddess of destruction,
who wore a garland of skulls around her waist.
in a one day preview of what was to come, violence had flared in calcutta
and 6000 bodies were tossed in the river, stuffed in gutters or left to rot in the streets.
most had been beaten or trampled to death.
as reports of atrocities flooded in, mountbatten sent his crack boundary force to the western frontier
to check the escalating violence (it would ultimately claim half a million victims).
that left him no reserves for the eastern front.
desperate, mountbatten pleaded with G to go to calcutta and there
among the Un he had embraced as brothers, somehow to work a miracle.
G consented only after a muslim leader, one of the most corrupt politicians in calcutta,
agreed to live with him, unarmed, in one of calcutta's worst slums.
if a single hindu died at muslim hands, G pledged he would fast to death.
so it was that two days before india's independence mohandas G arrived in kipling's
'City of the dreadfulnight'.
a large crowd awaited him as usual, but this one greeted him not with cheers but with shouts of anger.
they were hindus out for revenge and to them G represented a capitulation to muslim injustices.
hadn't they seen relatives butchered and wives and daughters defiled by muslim mobs?
G got out of his car amid a shower of rocks and bottles.
raising one hand in a frail gesture of peace, the old man walked alone into the crowd.
'you wish to do me ill, he called, and so i am coming to you'.
the crowd fell silent.
'i have come here to serve hindus and muslims alike.
i am going to place myself under your protection.
you are welcome to turn against me if you wish.
i have nearly reached the end of life's journey.
i have not much further to go.
but if you again go mad, i will not be a living witness to it'.
peace reigned in calcutta that day
and then on the formal day of india's independence
and the next
and the next,
for 16 days in all.
in the alley outside G's slum home, people gathered each night to attend his prayer meetings
a thousand at first,
then ten thousand
and finally a million people jamming the streets of the slum
to hear him lecture over loudspeakers on peace and love and brotherhood.
once again G was confronting a political crisis with that he called 'soul force'.
the innate power of human spirituality.
while whole states in india were going up in flames,
with millions of people fleeing their homes
and hundreds of thousands dying,
not one act of violence occurred in that most violent city.
'the miracle of Calcutta' it was called worldwide.
a relieved lord mountbatten dubbed G, 'my one man boundary force.'.
the miracle did not endure.
on the 17th day two muslims were murdered,
a rumor about a hindu victim spread
and then, a few hundred yards from G's house,
someone lobbed a grenade into a bus full of muslims.
the people had broken their pledge and
G began a fast unto death, directed not against the british but against his own countrymen.
he would not eat food again unless all those who had committed violence
repented and solemnly vowed to stop.
at first no one cared.
what was the life of one shriveled old man in the face of an assault on
one's religion and family and honor?
revenge seemed far more appropriate than forgiveness.
gunfire echoed through the streets of calcutta during the first day of G's fast.
within 24 hours his already weak heart started missing one beat in four,
and his blood pressure dropped precipitously.
the next day, as his vital signs plummeted, rioters paused and listened to
broadcast reports of the old man's blood pressure and heart rate.
soon the attention of every citizen of calcutta was riveted on the straw pallet
where he lay, too weak to speak.
the violence stopped.
no one was willing to take an action that might cause
the Great Soul to die.
one day more and the gang responsible for the murders came to confess to G,
to ask forgiveness,
and to lay their arms at his feet.
a truck arrived at his house filled with guns, grenades and other weapons
that people had surrendered voluntarily.
the leaders of every religious group in the city signed a declaration
guaranteeing that no more killing would take place.
persuaded by their actions,
G took his first few sips of orange juice and said his prayers.
this time the miracle held.
calcutta was safe.
as for G, he made plans to head west, as soon as he regained strength,
into the heart of the violence that had killed half a million people.
when i read the history of mahatma G alongside the history of the christian church,
i cannot help wondering what went wrong.
why did it take a hindu to embrace the principles of
reconciliation, humility and vicarious sacrifice so clearly modeled by Jesus Himself?
G credited Jesus as his source3 for these life principles,
and he worked like a disciplined soldier to put them into practice.
what has kept christians from following Jesus with the same abandon?
..G's auto biography presents events in a strange proportion.
'the story of my experiments with truth' he titled it,
portraying external events as merely the stage on which
the internal drama of his own character development was playing out.
one paragraph will mention the Great salt march, a turning point in G's career and india's history,
but four consecutive chapters will explore his internal agony over
whether or not to include goat's milk in his vegetarian diet.
G cast his life as the gradual refining of a soul.
in the autobiography, G traces the evolution of his simple lifestyle.
he had tried western ways as a law student in london,
outfitting himself in an evening suit, silk top hat, patent leather boots, whit gloves and a silver tipped walking stick.
he remained something of a dandy when he returned to india
and did not begin to change until he went to south africa.
first he ironed his own shirts, much to the ridicule of his law colleagues.
then he practiced cutting his own hair, leaving patches of unevenness that drew even more laughter.
while drawing a good salary, he experimented by halving household expenses,
then halving them again.
at the end of every day he made a meticulous accounting of every penny spent.
from these experiments, G found that the process of
spending less money and acquiring fewer possessions
simplified his life and gave him inner peace.
in addition, it allowed him to identify more closely with
the poor people he often represented in court.
over time, he winnowed his material possessions down to these:
EYEGLASSES
A WATCH
SANDALS
A BOOK OF SONGS
A BOWL
to answer correspondence he used pads made from the cut up envelopes of the letters he was answering.
he ate with a spoon that had been broken off and repaired with a piece of bamboo lashed to it with string.
reading his account, i recall with a pang that when i moved from chicago to colorado
the movers calculated my household belongings to weigh 12,000 pounds.
even subtracting the 6000 pounds of books, that leaves three tons of material accumulation!
and with all this baggage, do i have a life measurably richer than mahatma G's?
yesterday, i interrupted this chapter to spend an hour scrambling on the rood of my car
trying to repair a garage door opener.
i had another frustrating interruption tinkering with the software that runs my fax machine.
the battery for my portable phone ran down.
i realized with a start who much of my life is ruled by material things.
i can justify or at least rationalize some of these possessions,
especially those that help me in my work.
yet how carefully do i attend to Jesus' warning
against the danger of gaining the whole world and losing one's soul?
Jesus' lifestyle, i must admit, had much more in common with G's than with mine.
voices in the west today are calling for a return to simplicity.
some christians uphold the virtues of a simple lifestyle and raise questions about
the morality of western standards in the light of world inequities
(though, in fairness, the level of simplicity they recommend more closely resembles
what G started with than what he later attained)....
G had dined with great leaders.
he had seen the seduction of power,
the reliance on servants to carry out every whim,
the endless spiral staircase of luxury,
the absorbing anxiety over investments,,
the deluge of letters and speaking invitations and endorsements and phone calls.
knowing well the burden of fame, he also knew the only way to combat it
was to seek simplicity with all his heart.
if he did not, his soul force,
the inner strength from which he got the stamina and courage for moral confrontations,
would leak away.
G had suspicions about modern technology.
he believed people who owned cars, radios and well stocked refrigerators and clothes closets
would become psychologically insecure and morally corrupt.
he knew enough about soil conservation to realize that india's land
could not tolerate even a a few decades of the sold abuse caused by high technology farming.
(in 150 years, iowa has lost more of its topsoil than india has lost in 5000 years.)
he had questions about how long energy sources would last.
and besides, G said, he would continue to recommend cows
until a tractor was invented that could produce milk, yogurt and fertilizer.
ironically, the stimulus for G's drive toward simplicity
came from the writings of westerners-Tolstoy, ruskin and thoreau-
who convinced him that riches were a burden
and that only the life of labor was worth living.
G named his first commune Tolstoy farm in the novelist's honor.
..the west and india too for that matter, has ignored G...
..somehow..G managed to be fairly effective without even a hand crank telephone.
'our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things', said thoreau, his mentor.
'they are but IMPROVED MEANS TO AN UNIMPROVED END,
the end which it was already but too easy to arrive at...
we are in great hast to construct a magnetic telegraph from maine to texas;
but maine and texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate'...
G also observed every monday as a day of silence,
both to rest his vocal cords and to promote harmony in his inner being.
he held to that silence even when summoned to meetings in the heat of negotiations over india's future.
from the inside, as a journalist,i have watched a disturbing pattern in what we do to religious leaders today.
we reward them with applause, fame, enticing new contracts and a flurry of requests
for speaking engagements and media appearances.
we push our pastors to function as psychotherapists, orators, priest and chief executive officers.
when a leader shows unusual acumen, we dangle the temptation of a radio show or TV program,
complete with a fund raising machine to float the organization.
in short, we in the church slavishly copy the secular model of media hype and corporate growth.
i wonder how much more effective our spiritual leaders would be if
we encouraged them to take monday as a day of silence for reflection, meditation and personal study.
(note: or better yet follow the pattern Jesus taught the apostles:
(let the church chose spiritually qualified deacons and do anything and everything else that is not against
Jesus' mission for the church...) 'BUT WE WILL G-I-V-E O-U-R-S-E-L-V-E-S TO
THE MINISTRY OF THE WORD AND PRAYER..... (N-O M-O-R-E...not even the teeniest thing).)
in his personal habits G moved beyond self discipline into renunciation.
he allowed no room for sensuous pleasures
and in his autobiography you read nothing of a pleasant experience with music or with nature
or the delights of taste or smell.
a typical mean consisted of two segments of grapefruit, some goat's curds and lemon soup.
he also waged a lifelong struggle against lust.
at the age of 37, though married, he took a solemn vow of celibacy.
he spent much energy investigating what foods might have the slightest aphrodiacal quality,
then eliminated salt, spices, tea and most exotic vegetables and fruits from his diet.
such strictness seems strange to modern westerners,
though of course christian history has seen its share of ascetics.
the east has a continuing rich legacy of 'holy men' who seek to control human passions.
'it is for my sake, explained G to his critics, that i insist on such spartan practices.
i am the one who will suffer if i give in to my carnal nature'.
at a conference in south carolina, i heard arun G, grandson of mahatma,
ell the story of traveling from south africa to india at the age of 12 in order to meet his grandfather.
arun's father, a leader of the civil rights movement in south africa,
arranged the trip out of fear that arun was growing up as a spoiled brat.
the first meeting with the famous grandfather did not go well.
mahatma was trying to teach the young boy to keep an anger diary.
'it is normal for you to feel anger'. he said.
what matters is how you channel that anger'.
he asked arun to pause each time he had angry feelings
and in the heat of the moment to write down all his thoughts and feelings.
then, the next day, after the emotions had cooled,
he should go back and read the diary and reflect on how to channel that power for good.
'go ahead and try it, said his grandfather.
write down whatever makes you angry'.
the 12 year old arun soon felt so much rage against having to waste time recording his anger
that he broke his pencil in two and threw it over his shoulder.
gently but firmly, his grandfather sat him down and gave him a lecture.
'that pencil was just a stub, he said,
but imagine if 20,000,000 boys around the world threw away a pencil.
think of the trees that would have to be cut down.
think of the workers who put the graphite inside the pencil.
think of the needless waste'.
he borrowed a flashligh and the old man and young boy
spent the next hour searching on hands and knees for the pencil stub.
for the next several weeks, Mahatma coached his grandson on controlling his expression of emotions.
'HE TAUGHT ME TO ,MASTER MYSELF, arun recalled.
'it took many more months of practice after i returned home.
but in time I SAY THAT IT SET ME FREE.
i had been a helpless victim of my own passions.
now i was learning to be the master'.
back in south africa, arun followed in his father's footsteps as a civil rights leader...
'i could never have taken the abuse and even physical violence
involved in the campaign for civil rights in south africa had i not leaned that lesson as a 12 year old'.
the next day, at the same conference, i sat on a panel discussing the cultural trend
toward obscenity and rage as seen in rap music by performers like eminem
and in television programs like 'south park' and 'beavis and butthead'.
i listened as parents voiced concern over lyrics describing wife murder, cop killing and racial hatred
and then teenagers vigorously defended their right to express whatever emotions they felt.
'shows like that and rap music, they're our ways of getting out the hostility we feel', said one 18 year old.
'take them away and kids'll probably turn to violence'.
the difference between two approaches to human passion,
the way of the east and the way of the west, had never seemed so stark.
G knew that HIS ONLY MORAL POWER FOR OTHERS
CAME FROM WHAT HE HAD ALREADY MASTERED HIMSELF.
once, a woman in his village brought her son and asked him to
tell the child to stop eating sugar because it was bad for him.
she said the child would not listen to her, but he would listen to G.
'bring the boy back in a week, and i will tell him'.
a week later the woman returned with her son.
G took the boy in his arms and
told him not to eat any sugar,
then bid them both good bye.
the mother lingered behind and asked, 'Bapu, why did you have to wait a week?
could you not have told him last week?'
'no', he replied. 'last week i myself was eating sugar'.
it was this principle, of moral persuasion through example, through vicarious suffering,
that G would hone to perfection in his practice of fasting.
early in his career, tow of the young people under his tutelage lapsed into immorality
and G agonized for days over a fitting response.
most members of the ashram called for strict punishment of the offenders,
but it seemed to G that a guardian or teacher was at least partly responsible
for the failures of hie ward or pupil.
he doubted the other students would realize the depth of his distress
or the seriousness of sin unless he did some penance.
and so, in response to the students' transgression,
he went on a total fast for 7 days and took only one meal a day for four and a half months.
'my penance pained everybody, he concluded, but it cleared the atmosphere.
everyone came to realize what a terrible thing it was to be sinful
and the bond that bound me to the boys and girls became stronger and truer'.
...many of G's accomplishments died with him.
his beloved nation took a different path than the one he had advocated
and so has the world,
growing since his death more belligerent and less receptive to his core beliefs.
but for a time this strange, baffling man
somehow managed to raise other men and women above the level of their usual selves.
he held no office
and any who obeyed him did so voluntarily.
his only claim to leadership was the force of his own soul.
'the commonplace deed is a great step and a beautiful compromise, said G.
'the beauty of it consists in today's compromise being less impure than yesterday's;
it consists in our eyes being carried in a straight line towards something beautiful
when we look, not at the deeds, but at the direction in which they are set.'
G had intimate christian friends, such as the missionaries charlie andrews and e. stanley jones.
as his writings demonstrate, he understood the details of christian doctrine
better than most chirstians.
why, then, did he ultimately reject it?
growing up in india, G had little contact with christians as a youngster.
\rumors spread in his town that if a hindu converted to christianity
he would be forced to eat meat, drink hard liquor and wear european clothes.
G also recalls one very unpleasnat memory of a christian missionary on a street corner of his town deriding hindus and their gods.
as a law student in london, G had a more prolonged exposure to christianity.
at a friend's request, he read through the entire bible.
he confesses that the old testament was uninspiring and put him to sleep,
but the new testament produced a profound impression.
throughout his life, G found himself going back to the teachings of Jesus,
his model for nonviolence and simple living.
he also read...still, he could not reconcile the disparity he saw between Christ and christians.
G lived in south africa during the most formative poeriod of his life,
and a few nasty incidents ther did little to disabuse him of his notions of christianity. he encountered blatan discrimination in that ostensibly christian society, being thrown off trains,
excluded from hotels and restaurants, and barred from some christian gatherings.
one white woman who used to invite G for sunday meals
made it clear that he was unwelcome after she observed the influence G's vegetarianism
was having on her 5 year old son.
before then, he had been attending the wesleyan church with her family every sunday.
'the church did not make a favorable impression on me, he remembers,
citing dull sermons and a congregation who appeared rather to be worldly minded,
people going to church for recreation and in conformity to custom.
..(concerning becoming a christian) ..my difficulties lay deeper.
it was more than i couldbelieve that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God,
and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life.
if God could have sons, all of us wwere His sons.
if Jesus was like God, or God Himself,
then all men were like Gopd and could be God Himself.
my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus
by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world.
metaphorically there might be some truth in it.
again, according to christianity only human beings had souls and not other living beings,
for whom death meant complete extiction; while i held a contrary belief.
i could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice and a divine teacher,
but not as the most perfect man ever born.
His death on the cross was a great example to the world,
but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept.
the pious lives of christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give.
i had seen in other lives just the same reformation that i had heard of among christians.
philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in christian principles.
from the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the hindus greatly surpassed the christians.
it was impossible for me to regard christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.
i shared this mental churning with my christian friends whenever ther was an opportunity,
but their answers could not satisfy me.
he summarized his position.
'i cannot concede to Christ a solitary throne'.
sadly, the concepts of grace and forgiveness from God do not appear in G's works.
hinduism stubles at grace.
'if one is to find salvation, said G, he must have as much patience
as a man who sits by the seaside and with a straw picks up a single drop of water, transfers it
and thus empties the ocean'.
at the end of his autobiography, he is still lamenting that he is not passion free
in thought, speech and action.
'i must reduce myself to zero, he concludes.
G graciously omits from his autobiography one other painful memory from south africa.
the indian community especially admired c.f. andrews, whom they themselves nicknamed
'Christ's faithful apostle'.
having heard so much about andrews, G wanted to meet him.
but at his firs chance to hear andrews, G wanted to meet him.
but at his first chance to hear andrews, G was turned away from the church meeting
because his skin color was not white.
later G and charlie andrews became fast friends, but G never forgot the sting of that incident.
commenting on G's experiences in south africa, e. stanley jones concludes,
'racialism has many sins to bear,
but perhaps its worst sin was the obscuring of Christ in an hour when
one of the greatest souls born of a woman was making his decision.
on one visit to india i found myuself in a christian community in new delhi,
a kind of ashram composed of young indians who are trying to work out corporately
Jesus' radical call to his followers...
wanting to encourage my fellow christians in new delhi,
i reminded them of G's statement that insight into the world's problems
must come from the east and not the west.
'WE MUST BE THE CHANGE WE WISH TO SEE', G said.
i urged them to take the best of what their continent has produced,
some of the same ideals that appealed to G and trace their christian roots.
they could challenge my nation in a way that i as an american could not. (?!)
as shown by the fact that young americans will sometimes listen to a G before they will listen to Jesus.
the world may be receptive to this message, i said.
one thoughtful young indian who had sat quietly through the discussion spole up at this.
'i don't understand, he said. you seem to say that the west in general is receptive to a saint,
someone like G who stands apart from culture.
but is the church receptive?
you have said that american christianity has never produced a saint who follows along the lines of a G.
all the christian leaders are so different from G.
you seem to imply that if a G rose up in the american church today,
he would not be taken seriously, would perhaps be laughed at and rejected.
and yet those same christians say they worship Jesus Christ.
why don't they reject Him?
He lived a simple life, preached love and nonviolence, refused to compromise with the powers of this world.
He called on His followers to 'take up a cross' and bear the sufferings of the world.
why don't american christians reject him?
(note: maybe most of the american christian church has..)
it was a good question. one i still cannot answer.
'stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards
has been the way of the world through the ages.
today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.' mahatma gandhi
Friday, January 10, 2014
1.9.2014 PSALM 7: SONG OF THE SLANDERED SAINT
from spurgeon's (S) 'treasury of david'
title: 'shiggaion of david, which he sang unto the Lord, concerning the words (?) of cush the benjamite.
as far as we can gather from the observations of learned men
and from a comparison of this psalm with the only other shiggaion in the word of God (habbukuk 3,
this title seems to mean 'variable songs',
with which also the idea of solace and pleasure is associated.
truly our life psalm is composed of variable verses;
one stanza rolls along with the sublime metre of triumph,
but another limps with the broken rhythm of complaint.
there is much bass in the saint's music here below.
our experience is as variable as the weather in england.
from the title we learn the occasion of the composition of this song.
it appears probable that cush the benjamite had accused david to saul
of treasonable conspiracy against his royal authority.
this the king would be ready enough to credit,
both from his jealousy of david
and from the relation which most probably existed between cush and himself.
he who is near the throne can do more injury to a subject than an ordinary slanderer.
division:
v1,2 the danger is stated and prayer offered.
3-5 the psalmist most solemnly avows his innocence
6-7 the Lord is pleaded with to arise to judgment.
8-9 the Lord, sitting upon His throne, hears the renewed appeal of the slandered supplicant
10-13 the Lord clears His servant and threatens the wicked
14-6 the slanderer is seen in vision bringing a curse upon his own head
17 while david retires from trial singing a hymn of praise to his righteous God.
we have here a noble sermon upon that text:, 'no weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper
and 'every tongue that riseth against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.
TITLE-SHIGGAION OF DAVID, WHICH HE SANG UNTO THE LORD,
CONCERNING THE WORDS OF CUSH THE BENJAMITE.
..'shiggaion', though some have attempted to fix on it a reference to the moral aspect of the world as depicted in this psalm,
is in all probability to be taken as expressing the nature of the composition.
it conveys the idea of something erratic (shaggah-to wander) in the style;
something not so calm as other psalms
and hence ewald suggests, that it might be rendered,
'a confused ode', a dithyramb.
this characteristic of excitement in the style and a kind of disorder in the sense,
suits habakkuk 3, the only other place where the word occurs..andrew a. bonar
v3 O LORD MY GOD, IF I HAVE DONE THIS; IF THERE BE INIQUITY IN MY HANDS
..i deny not but you may and ought to be sensible of the wrong done to your name,
for as 'a good name is a precious ointment' (song of songs 1.3),
so to have an evil name is a great judgment and therefore you ought not to be insensible
of the wrong done to your name by slanders and reproaches, saying,
'let men speak of me what they please, i care not,
so long as i know mine own innocency',
for though the testimony of your own innocency be a ground of comfort unto you,
yet your care must be not only to approve yourselves unto God, but also unto men,
to be as careful of your good names as possibly ye can;
but yet you are not to manifest any distemper or passion upon the reproachful speeches of others against you...thomas gouge, 1660
it is a sign that there is some good in thee if a wicked world abuse thee.
'quid mali feci?' said socrates, what evil have i done that this bad man commends me?
the applause of the wicked usually denotes some evil and their censure imports some good. thomas watson
a good conscience is a flowing spring of assurance.
'for our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity,
not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God,
we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you ward. II corinthians 1.12
'beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God.' I john 3.21
a good conscience has sure confidence.
he who has it sits in the midst of all combustions and distractions,
noah-like, all sincerity and sernity, uprightness and boldness.
v4 IF I HAVE REWARDED EVIL UNTO HIM THAT WAS AT PEACE WITH ME
(YEA, I HAVE DELIVERED HIM THAT WITHOUT CAUSE IS MINE ENEMY)
then is grace victorious, and then hath a man a noble and brave spirit,
not when he is overcome by evil (for that argueth weakness),
but when he can overcome evil.
and it is God's way to shame the party that did the wrong and to overcome him too;
it is the best way to get the victory over him...as david did saul..thomas manton
v6 ARISE, O LORD, IN THINE ANGER,
LIFT UP THYSELF BECAUSE OF THE RAGE OF MINE ENEMIES
AND AWAKE FOR ME (to) THE JUDGEMENT (that) THOU HAST COMMANDED.
in the end of the verse he shows that he asks nothing but what is according to the appointment of God.
and this is the rule which ought to be observed by us in our prayers;
we should in everything conform our requests to the divine will...
'and this is the confidence that we have in Him,
that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. I john 5.14
and, indeed, we can never pray in faith unless we attend, in the first place, to what God commands,
that our minds may not rashly and at random start aside in desiring more than we are permitted
to desire and pray for.
david, therefore, in order to pray aright, reposes himself on the word and promise of God
and the import of his exercise is this,
Lord, i am not led by ambition, or foolish headstrong passion
or depraved desire, inconsiderately at ask from Thee whatever is pleasing to my flesh,
but it is the clear light of Thy word which directs me,
\and upon it i securely depend...john calvin
v9 OH LET THE WICKEDNESS OF THE WICKED COME TO AN END;
BUT ESTABLISH THE JUST;
FOR THE RIGHTEOUS GOD TRIETH THE HEARTS AND REINS.
as common experience shows that the workings of the mind,
particularly the passions of joy, grief and fear, have a very remarkable effect on the reins or kidneys.
('yea my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things. proverbs 23.16
'thus my heart was grieved and i was pricked in my reins. ps. 73.20)
so from their retired situation in the body and their being hid in fat,
they are often used to denote the most secret workings and affections of the soul.
and to 'see or examine the reins'
is to see or examine those most secret thoughts or desires of the soul...john parkhurst 1762
'I that alone am infinite, can try
how deep within itself thine heart doth lie.
thy seamen's plummet can but reach the ground,
i find that which thine heart itself ne'er found....francis quarles, 1592-1644
v11 GOD JUDGETH THE RIGHTEOUS AND GOD IS ANGRY (with the wicked) EVERY DAY.
...without the words written in italics, which are not in the original, it will read thus,
'God judgeth the righeous and God is angry every day.
..this follows the more recent translations.
there is another class, following the older, which follows,
'God is a righteous judge, although he is not angry every day'.
...speaking of another variant..'there is by this view of the original
no repetition of the divine name in the verse,
so that it will simply read, as thus restored,
'God is a righteous judge and is not angry every day'.
the text at large, as is intimated in the vulgate, septuagint and some other ancient versions,
conveys a strong intimation of the longsuffering of God, whose hatred of sin is unchangeable,
but whose anger against transgressors is marked by infinite patience
and does not burst forth in vengeance every day....
john morison in 'an exposition of the book of psalms'.
1829
title: 'shiggaion of david, which he sang unto the Lord, concerning the words (?) of cush the benjamite.
as far as we can gather from the observations of learned men
and from a comparison of this psalm with the only other shiggaion in the word of God (habbukuk 3,
this title seems to mean 'variable songs',
with which also the idea of solace and pleasure is associated.
truly our life psalm is composed of variable verses;
one stanza rolls along with the sublime metre of triumph,
but another limps with the broken rhythm of complaint.
there is much bass in the saint's music here below.
our experience is as variable as the weather in england.
from the title we learn the occasion of the composition of this song.
it appears probable that cush the benjamite had accused david to saul
of treasonable conspiracy against his royal authority.
this the king would be ready enough to credit,
both from his jealousy of david
and from the relation which most probably existed between cush and himself.
he who is near the throne can do more injury to a subject than an ordinary slanderer.
division:
v1,2 the danger is stated and prayer offered.
3-5 the psalmist most solemnly avows his innocence
6-7 the Lord is pleaded with to arise to judgment.
8-9 the Lord, sitting upon His throne, hears the renewed appeal of the slandered supplicant
10-13 the Lord clears His servant and threatens the wicked
14-6 the slanderer is seen in vision bringing a curse upon his own head
17 while david retires from trial singing a hymn of praise to his righteous God.
we have here a noble sermon upon that text:, 'no weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper
and 'every tongue that riseth against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.
TITLE-SHIGGAION OF DAVID, WHICH HE SANG UNTO THE LORD,
CONCERNING THE WORDS OF CUSH THE BENJAMITE.
..'shiggaion', though some have attempted to fix on it a reference to the moral aspect of the world as depicted in this psalm,
is in all probability to be taken as expressing the nature of the composition.
it conveys the idea of something erratic (shaggah-to wander) in the style;
something not so calm as other psalms
and hence ewald suggests, that it might be rendered,
'a confused ode', a dithyramb.
this characteristic of excitement in the style and a kind of disorder in the sense,
suits habakkuk 3, the only other place where the word occurs..andrew a. bonar
v3 O LORD MY GOD, IF I HAVE DONE THIS; IF THERE BE INIQUITY IN MY HANDS
..i deny not but you may and ought to be sensible of the wrong done to your name,
for as 'a good name is a precious ointment' (song of songs 1.3),
so to have an evil name is a great judgment and therefore you ought not to be insensible
of the wrong done to your name by slanders and reproaches, saying,
'let men speak of me what they please, i care not,
so long as i know mine own innocency',
for though the testimony of your own innocency be a ground of comfort unto you,
yet your care must be not only to approve yourselves unto God, but also unto men,
to be as careful of your good names as possibly ye can;
but yet you are not to manifest any distemper or passion upon the reproachful speeches of others against you...thomas gouge, 1660
it is a sign that there is some good in thee if a wicked world abuse thee.
'quid mali feci?' said socrates, what evil have i done that this bad man commends me?
the applause of the wicked usually denotes some evil and their censure imports some good. thomas watson
a good conscience is a flowing spring of assurance.
'for our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity,
not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God,
we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you ward. II corinthians 1.12
'beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God.' I john 3.21
a good conscience has sure confidence.
he who has it sits in the midst of all combustions and distractions,
noah-like, all sincerity and sernity, uprightness and boldness.
v4 IF I HAVE REWARDED EVIL UNTO HIM THAT WAS AT PEACE WITH ME
(YEA, I HAVE DELIVERED HIM THAT WITHOUT CAUSE IS MINE ENEMY)
then is grace victorious, and then hath a man a noble and brave spirit,
not when he is overcome by evil (for that argueth weakness),
but when he can overcome evil.
and it is God's way to shame the party that did the wrong and to overcome him too;
it is the best way to get the victory over him...as david did saul..thomas manton
v6 ARISE, O LORD, IN THINE ANGER,
LIFT UP THYSELF BECAUSE OF THE RAGE OF MINE ENEMIES
AND AWAKE FOR ME (to) THE JUDGEMENT (that) THOU HAST COMMANDED.
in the end of the verse he shows that he asks nothing but what is according to the appointment of God.
and this is the rule which ought to be observed by us in our prayers;
we should in everything conform our requests to the divine will...
'and this is the confidence that we have in Him,
that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. I john 5.14
and, indeed, we can never pray in faith unless we attend, in the first place, to what God commands,
that our minds may not rashly and at random start aside in desiring more than we are permitted
to desire and pray for.
david, therefore, in order to pray aright, reposes himself on the word and promise of God
and the import of his exercise is this,
Lord, i am not led by ambition, or foolish headstrong passion
or depraved desire, inconsiderately at ask from Thee whatever is pleasing to my flesh,
but it is the clear light of Thy word which directs me,
\and upon it i securely depend...john calvin
v9 OH LET THE WICKEDNESS OF THE WICKED COME TO AN END;
BUT ESTABLISH THE JUST;
FOR THE RIGHTEOUS GOD TRIETH THE HEARTS AND REINS.
as common experience shows that the workings of the mind,
particularly the passions of joy, grief and fear, have a very remarkable effect on the reins or kidneys.
('yea my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things. proverbs 23.16
'thus my heart was grieved and i was pricked in my reins. ps. 73.20)
so from their retired situation in the body and their being hid in fat,
they are often used to denote the most secret workings and affections of the soul.
and to 'see or examine the reins'
is to see or examine those most secret thoughts or desires of the soul...john parkhurst 1762
'I that alone am infinite, can try
how deep within itself thine heart doth lie.
thy seamen's plummet can but reach the ground,
i find that which thine heart itself ne'er found....francis quarles, 1592-1644
v11 GOD JUDGETH THE RIGHTEOUS AND GOD IS ANGRY (with the wicked) EVERY DAY.
...without the words written in italics, which are not in the original, it will read thus,
'God judgeth the righeous and God is angry every day.
..this follows the more recent translations.
there is another class, following the older, which follows,
'God is a righteous judge, although he is not angry every day'.
...speaking of another variant..'there is by this view of the original
no repetition of the divine name in the verse,
so that it will simply read, as thus restored,
'God is a righteous judge and is not angry every day'.
the text at large, as is intimated in the vulgate, septuagint and some other ancient versions,
conveys a strong intimation of the longsuffering of God, whose hatred of sin is unchangeable,
but whose anger against transgressors is marked by infinite patience
and does not burst forth in vengeance every day....
john morison in 'an exposition of the book of psalms'.
1829
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
1.7.2013 PSALM 6: KING DAVID AGONIZING OVER BATHSHEBA AND URIAH
much of the following is taken from charles spurgeon's Treasury of David, commentary on the psalms.
*there are 7 psalms that are called PENETENTIAL psalms.
*psalms 6, 32,38,51 are written by david concerning his sin against bathsheba and uriah recounted in
II samuel 11 (keil in his commentary on psalm 38 suggests that these a written in the following order:
psalm 6, 51, 38, 32
*psalm 102 is written by an (unknown) penitent for himself and jerusalem
*psalm 130 is written by a post exile penitent (compares with 136)
*psalm 143 (david?)
*spurgeon calls psalm 6 the first penitential psalm
and 'certainly its language will becomes the lip of a penitent,
for it expresses at once the sorrow (v3,6-7), humiliation (v2,4) and hatred (v8) of sin
which are the unfailing marks of the contrite spirit when it turns to God.
v1 O LORD, REBUKE ME NOT IN THINE ANGER,
NEITHER CHASTEN ME IN THY HOT DISPLEASURE
REBUKE ME NOT
God hath two means by which He reduceth His children to obedience
His word by which He rebukes them
and His rod, by which He chastiseth them.
the word precedes, admonishing them by his servants
whom He hath sent in all ages to call sinners to repentance
of the which david himself saith, 'let the righteous rebuke me' a. symson, 1638
'o keep up life and peace within,
if i must feel Thy chastening rod!
yet kill not me, but kill my sin,
and let me know Thou art my God.
o give my sould some sweet foretaste
of that which i shall shortly see!
let faith and love cry to the last,
:come, Lord, i trust myself with Thee!" ' richard baxter, 1615-91
v2 HAVE MERCY UPON ME, O LORD; FOR I AM WEAK
O LORD, HEAL ME; FOR MY BONES ARE VEXED.
FOR I AM WEAK...'behold what rhetoric he useth to move God to cure him, 'i am weak,
an argument from his weakness, which indeed were a weak argument to move any man to show his favour,
but is a strong argument to prevail with God.
..coming before God, the most forcible argument that ye can use is
your necessity, poverty, tears, misery, unworthiness and confessing them to Him,
it shall be an open door to furnish you with all things that He hath...A. symson
MY BONES ARE VEXED...'the Lord can make the strongest and most insensible part of man's body sensible of His wrath when He pleaseth to touch him...david dickson
v3 MY SOUL IS ALSO SORE VEXED: BUT THOU, O LORD, HOW LONG?
out of this we have three things to observe;
first, that there is an appointed time which God hath measured for the crosses of all his children,
before which time they shall not be delivered and for which they must patiently attend,
not thinking to prescribe time to God for their delivery...
next, see the impatiency of our nature in our miseries, our flesh still rebelling against the Spirit,
which oftentimes forgetteth itself so far, that it will enter into reasoning with God
thirdly, albeit the Lord delay His coming to relieve His saints,
yet hath He great cause if we could ponder it;
for when we were in the heat of our sins,
many times He cried by the mouth of His prophets and servants,
'o fools, how long will you continue in your folly?
and we would not hear
therefore when we are in the heat of our pains, thinking long, yea every day a year until we be delivered,
no wonder it is if God will not hear...
v4-5 *return, O Lord, deliver my soul: oh save me for Thy mercies sake.
*FOR IN DEATH THERE IS NO REMEMBRANCE OF THEE
IN THE GRAVE WHO SHALL GIVE THEE THANKS?
Lord, be Thou pacified and reconciled to me...
for shouldst Thou now proceed to take away my life,
as it were a most direful condition for me to die before i have propitiated Thee,
so i may well demand what increase of glory or honour will it bring unto Thee?
will it not be infinitely more glorious for Thee to spare me, till by true contrition i may regain Thy favour?
and then i may live to praise and magnify Thy mercy and Thy grace
..and then confess Thee by vital actions of all holy obedience for the future
and so demonstrate the power of Thy grace which hath wrought this change in me;
neither of which will be done by destroying me,
but only Thy just judgments manifested in Thy vengeance on sinners. henry hammond 1659
v6 I AM WEARY WITH MY GROANING
ALL THE NIGHT MAKE I MY BED TO SWIM
I WATER MY COUCH WITH MY TEARS.
7 MINE EYE IS CONSUMED BECAUSE OF GRIEF;
IT WAXETH OLD BECAUSE OF ALL MINE ENEMIES.
showers be better than dews, yet it is sufficient if God at least hath bedewed our hearts
and hath given us some sign of a penitent heart.
if we have not revers of waters to pour forth with david,
neither fountains flowing with mary magdalen,
nor as jeremy (jeremiah), desire to have a fountain in our head, to weep day and night,
nor with peter weep bitterly;
yet if we lament that we cannot lament and mourn that we cannot mourn;
yea, if we have the smallest sobs of sorrow and tears of compunction,k
if they be true and not counterfeit,
they will make us acceptable to God.
for as the woman with the bloody issue that touched the hem of Christ's garment,
was no less welcome to Christ than thomas, who put his fingers in the print of the nails;
so, God looketh not at the quantity, but the sincerity of our repentance.
my bed...the place of his sin is the place of his repentance..
when we behold the place where we have offended we should be pricked in the heart
and there again crave Him pardon.
as adam sinned in the garden and Christ sweat bloody tears in the garden
'examine your hearts upon your beds and convert unto the Lord;
and whereas ye have stretched forth yourselves upon your bed to devise evil things,
repent there and make them sanctuaries to God. ..symson
i water my couch with tears...now the hebrew word here used signifies properly,
to cause to swim, which is more than simply to wash.
and thus the geneva readeth it, i cause my bed every night to swim.
so that as the priest used to swim in the molten sea, (in the temple)
that they might be pure and clean, against they preformed the holy rites and services of the temple,
in like manner the princely prophet washeth his bed, yea, he swimmeth in his bed
or rather he causeth his bed to swim in tears,
as in a sea of grief and penitent sorrow for his sin...thomas playfere, 1604
v6,7..soul trouble is attended usually with great pain of body too
and so a man is wounded and distressed in every part.
there is no soundness in my flesh, because of Thine anger, says david
'the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit. job 6.4
sorrow of heart contracts the natural spirits, making all their motions slow and feeble
and the poor afflicted body does usually decline and waste away
and therefore, saith heman, 'my soul is full of troubles and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.
in this inward distress we find our strength decay and melt, even as wax before the fire;
for sorrow darkeneth the spirits, obscures the judgment, blinds the memory as to all pleasant things,
and beclouds the lucid part of the mind,
causing the lamp of life to burn weakly,
in this troubled condition the person cannot be without a countenance that is pale and wan and dejected
like one that is seized with strong fear and consternation.
all his motions are sluggish and no sprightliness nor activity remains.
a merry heart doth good like a medicine; but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
hence come those frequent complaints in scripture:
my moisture is turned into the drought of the summer:
i am like a bottle in the smoke;
my sould cleaveth unto the dust:
my face is foul with weeping and
on my eyelid is the shadow of death. job 16.16, 30.17,18-19
my bones are pierced in me, in the night season and my sinews take no rest;
by the great force of my disease is my garment changed.
He hath cast me into the mire and i am become like dust and ashes.
many times indeed the trouble of the soul does begin from the weakness and indisposition of the body.
long affliction, without any prospect of remedy, does, in process of time, begin to distress the soul itself...
timothy rogers on 'trouble of mind'
mine eye is consumed..that eye of his that had looked and lusted after his neighbour's wife
is now dimmed and darkened with grief and indignation
he had wept himself almost blind...john trapp
v8 DEPART FROM ME, ALL YE WORKERS OF INIQUITY;
FOR THE LORD HATH HEARD THE VOICE OF MY WEEPING.
the voice of my weeping...some may say, 'my constitution is such that i cannot weep;
i may as well go to squeeze a rock, as think to get a tear.
but if thou canst not weep for sin, canst thou grieve?
intellectual mourning is best;
there may be sorrow where there are no tears; the vessel is full though it wants vent;
it is not so much the weeping eye God respects as the broken heart;
yet i would be loath to stop their tears who can weep.
God stood looking on hezekiah's tears isaiah 38.5, 'I have seen thy tears.
david's tears made music in God's ears, ..thomas watson
v9 THE LORD HATH HEARD MY SUPPLICATION;
THE LORD WILL RECEIVE MY PRAYER.
..the psalmist three times expresses his confidence of his prayers being heard and received,
which may be either in reference to his having prayed so many times for help,
as the apostle paul did II corinthians 12.8;
and as Christ his antitype did matthew 26.39,42,44;
or to express the certainty of it,
the strength of his faith in it
and the exuberance of his joy on account of it...john gill, 1697-1771
v10 LET ALL MINE ENEMIES BE ASHAMED AND SORE VEXED;
LET THEM RETURN AND BE ASHAMED SUDDENLY
...if this were an imprecation, a malediction, yet it was medicinal
and had rationem boni, a charitable tincture and nature in it;
he wished the men no harm as men.
but it is rather praedictorium, a prophetical vehemence,
that if they will take no knowledge of God's declaring Himself in the protection of His servants.,
if they would not consider that God had heard and would hear, had rescued and would rescue His children,
but would continue their opposition against Him,
heavy judgments would certainly fall upon them;
their punishment should be certain, but the effect should be uncertain;
for God only knows whether His correction shall work upon His enemies
to their mollifying or to their obduration...
in the second word, 'let them be sore vexed',
he wishes his enemies no worse than himself had been,
for he had used the same word of himself before,
ossa turbata, my bones are vexed, and
anima turbata, my should is vexed;
and considering that david had found this vexation to be his way to God,
it was no malicious imprecation to wish that enemy the same physic that he had taken,
who was more sick of the same disease than he was.
for this is like a troubled sea after a tempest;
the danger is past, but yet the billow is great still;
the danger was in the calm, in the security or in the tempest,
by misinterpreting God's corrections to our obduration and to a remorseless stupefaction;
but when a man is come to this holy vexation, to be troubled, to be shaken
with the sense of the indignation of God,
the storm is past
..the indignation of God is blown over (note: Blessed be You for covering my sin!)
that soul is in a fair and near way of being restored to a calmness and to reposed security of conscience
that is come to this holy vexation...john donne
*there are 7 psalms that are called PENETENTIAL psalms.
*psalms 6, 32,38,51 are written by david concerning his sin against bathsheba and uriah recounted in
II samuel 11 (keil in his commentary on psalm 38 suggests that these a written in the following order:
psalm 6, 51, 38, 32
*psalm 102 is written by an (unknown) penitent for himself and jerusalem
*psalm 130 is written by a post exile penitent (compares with 136)
*psalm 143 (david?)
*spurgeon calls psalm 6 the first penitential psalm
and 'certainly its language will becomes the lip of a penitent,
for it expresses at once the sorrow (v3,6-7), humiliation (v2,4) and hatred (v8) of sin
which are the unfailing marks of the contrite spirit when it turns to God.
v1 O LORD, REBUKE ME NOT IN THINE ANGER,
NEITHER CHASTEN ME IN THY HOT DISPLEASURE
REBUKE ME NOT
God hath two means by which He reduceth His children to obedience
His word by which He rebukes them
and His rod, by which He chastiseth them.
the word precedes, admonishing them by his servants
whom He hath sent in all ages to call sinners to repentance
of the which david himself saith, 'let the righteous rebuke me' a. symson, 1638
'o keep up life and peace within,
if i must feel Thy chastening rod!
yet kill not me, but kill my sin,
and let me know Thou art my God.
o give my sould some sweet foretaste
of that which i shall shortly see!
let faith and love cry to the last,
:come, Lord, i trust myself with Thee!" ' richard baxter, 1615-91
v2 HAVE MERCY UPON ME, O LORD; FOR I AM WEAK
O LORD, HEAL ME; FOR MY BONES ARE VEXED.
FOR I AM WEAK...'behold what rhetoric he useth to move God to cure him, 'i am weak,
an argument from his weakness, which indeed were a weak argument to move any man to show his favour,
but is a strong argument to prevail with God.
..coming before God, the most forcible argument that ye can use is
your necessity, poverty, tears, misery, unworthiness and confessing them to Him,
it shall be an open door to furnish you with all things that He hath...A. symson
MY BONES ARE VEXED...'the Lord can make the strongest and most insensible part of man's body sensible of His wrath when He pleaseth to touch him...david dickson
v3 MY SOUL IS ALSO SORE VEXED: BUT THOU, O LORD, HOW LONG?
out of this we have three things to observe;
first, that there is an appointed time which God hath measured for the crosses of all his children,
before which time they shall not be delivered and for which they must patiently attend,
not thinking to prescribe time to God for their delivery...
next, see the impatiency of our nature in our miseries, our flesh still rebelling against the Spirit,
which oftentimes forgetteth itself so far, that it will enter into reasoning with God
thirdly, albeit the Lord delay His coming to relieve His saints,
yet hath He great cause if we could ponder it;
for when we were in the heat of our sins,
many times He cried by the mouth of His prophets and servants,
'o fools, how long will you continue in your folly?
and we would not hear
therefore when we are in the heat of our pains, thinking long, yea every day a year until we be delivered,
no wonder it is if God will not hear...
v4-5 *return, O Lord, deliver my soul: oh save me for Thy mercies sake.
*FOR IN DEATH THERE IS NO REMEMBRANCE OF THEE
IN THE GRAVE WHO SHALL GIVE THEE THANKS?
Lord, be Thou pacified and reconciled to me...
for shouldst Thou now proceed to take away my life,
as it were a most direful condition for me to die before i have propitiated Thee,
so i may well demand what increase of glory or honour will it bring unto Thee?
will it not be infinitely more glorious for Thee to spare me, till by true contrition i may regain Thy favour?
and then i may live to praise and magnify Thy mercy and Thy grace
..and then confess Thee by vital actions of all holy obedience for the future
and so demonstrate the power of Thy grace which hath wrought this change in me;
neither of which will be done by destroying me,
but only Thy just judgments manifested in Thy vengeance on sinners. henry hammond 1659
v6 I AM WEARY WITH MY GROANING
ALL THE NIGHT MAKE I MY BED TO SWIM
I WATER MY COUCH WITH MY TEARS.
7 MINE EYE IS CONSUMED BECAUSE OF GRIEF;
IT WAXETH OLD BECAUSE OF ALL MINE ENEMIES.
showers be better than dews, yet it is sufficient if God at least hath bedewed our hearts
and hath given us some sign of a penitent heart.
if we have not revers of waters to pour forth with david,
neither fountains flowing with mary magdalen,
nor as jeremy (jeremiah), desire to have a fountain in our head, to weep day and night,
nor with peter weep bitterly;
yet if we lament that we cannot lament and mourn that we cannot mourn;
yea, if we have the smallest sobs of sorrow and tears of compunction,k
if they be true and not counterfeit,
they will make us acceptable to God.
for as the woman with the bloody issue that touched the hem of Christ's garment,
was no less welcome to Christ than thomas, who put his fingers in the print of the nails;
so, God looketh not at the quantity, but the sincerity of our repentance.
my bed...the place of his sin is the place of his repentance..
when we behold the place where we have offended we should be pricked in the heart
and there again crave Him pardon.
as adam sinned in the garden and Christ sweat bloody tears in the garden
'examine your hearts upon your beds and convert unto the Lord;
and whereas ye have stretched forth yourselves upon your bed to devise evil things,
repent there and make them sanctuaries to God. ..symson
i water my couch with tears...now the hebrew word here used signifies properly,
to cause to swim, which is more than simply to wash.
and thus the geneva readeth it, i cause my bed every night to swim.
so that as the priest used to swim in the molten sea, (in the temple)
that they might be pure and clean, against they preformed the holy rites and services of the temple,
in like manner the princely prophet washeth his bed, yea, he swimmeth in his bed
or rather he causeth his bed to swim in tears,
as in a sea of grief and penitent sorrow for his sin...thomas playfere, 1604
v6,7..soul trouble is attended usually with great pain of body too
and so a man is wounded and distressed in every part.
there is no soundness in my flesh, because of Thine anger, says david
'the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit. job 6.4
sorrow of heart contracts the natural spirits, making all their motions slow and feeble
and the poor afflicted body does usually decline and waste away
and therefore, saith heman, 'my soul is full of troubles and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.
in this inward distress we find our strength decay and melt, even as wax before the fire;
for sorrow darkeneth the spirits, obscures the judgment, blinds the memory as to all pleasant things,
and beclouds the lucid part of the mind,
causing the lamp of life to burn weakly,
in this troubled condition the person cannot be without a countenance that is pale and wan and dejected
like one that is seized with strong fear and consternation.
all his motions are sluggish and no sprightliness nor activity remains.
a merry heart doth good like a medicine; but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
hence come those frequent complaints in scripture:
my moisture is turned into the drought of the summer:
i am like a bottle in the smoke;
my sould cleaveth unto the dust:
my face is foul with weeping and
on my eyelid is the shadow of death. job 16.16, 30.17,18-19
my bones are pierced in me, in the night season and my sinews take no rest;
by the great force of my disease is my garment changed.
He hath cast me into the mire and i am become like dust and ashes.
many times indeed the trouble of the soul does begin from the weakness and indisposition of the body.
long affliction, without any prospect of remedy, does, in process of time, begin to distress the soul itself...
timothy rogers on 'trouble of mind'
mine eye is consumed..that eye of his that had looked and lusted after his neighbour's wife
is now dimmed and darkened with grief and indignation
he had wept himself almost blind...john trapp
v8 DEPART FROM ME, ALL YE WORKERS OF INIQUITY;
FOR THE LORD HATH HEARD THE VOICE OF MY WEEPING.
the voice of my weeping...some may say, 'my constitution is such that i cannot weep;
i may as well go to squeeze a rock, as think to get a tear.
but if thou canst not weep for sin, canst thou grieve?
intellectual mourning is best;
there may be sorrow where there are no tears; the vessel is full though it wants vent;
it is not so much the weeping eye God respects as the broken heart;
yet i would be loath to stop their tears who can weep.
God stood looking on hezekiah's tears isaiah 38.5, 'I have seen thy tears.
david's tears made music in God's ears, ..thomas watson
v9 THE LORD HATH HEARD MY SUPPLICATION;
THE LORD WILL RECEIVE MY PRAYER.
..the psalmist three times expresses his confidence of his prayers being heard and received,
which may be either in reference to his having prayed so many times for help,
as the apostle paul did II corinthians 12.8;
and as Christ his antitype did matthew 26.39,42,44;
or to express the certainty of it,
the strength of his faith in it
and the exuberance of his joy on account of it...john gill, 1697-1771
v10 LET ALL MINE ENEMIES BE ASHAMED AND SORE VEXED;
LET THEM RETURN AND BE ASHAMED SUDDENLY
...if this were an imprecation, a malediction, yet it was medicinal
and had rationem boni, a charitable tincture and nature in it;
he wished the men no harm as men.
but it is rather praedictorium, a prophetical vehemence,
that if they will take no knowledge of God's declaring Himself in the protection of His servants.,
if they would not consider that God had heard and would hear, had rescued and would rescue His children,
but would continue their opposition against Him,
heavy judgments would certainly fall upon them;
their punishment should be certain, but the effect should be uncertain;
for God only knows whether His correction shall work upon His enemies
to their mollifying or to their obduration...
in the second word, 'let them be sore vexed',
he wishes his enemies no worse than himself had been,
for he had used the same word of himself before,
ossa turbata, my bones are vexed, and
anima turbata, my should is vexed;
and considering that david had found this vexation to be his way to God,
it was no malicious imprecation to wish that enemy the same physic that he had taken,
who was more sick of the same disease than he was.
for this is like a troubled sea after a tempest;
the danger is past, but yet the billow is great still;
the danger was in the calm, in the security or in the tempest,
by misinterpreting God's corrections to our obduration and to a remorseless stupefaction;
but when a man is come to this holy vexation, to be troubled, to be shaken
with the sense of the indignation of God,
the storm is past
..the indignation of God is blown over (note: Blessed be You for covering my sin!)
that soul is in a fair and near way of being restored to a calmness and to reposed security of conscience
that is come to this holy vexation...john donne
1.7.2014 ORTHODOXY by g.k.chesterton
the only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge.
even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.;
when some time ago i published a series of hasty but sincere papers,
under the name of 'heretics',
several critics for whose intellect i have a warm respect
(i may mention specially mr. g.s.street)
said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm his cosmic theory,
but that i had carefully avoided supporting my precepts with example.
'i will begin to worry about my philosophy, said mr. street,
when mr. chesterton has given us his'.
it was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books
upon the feeblest provocation.
but after all, though mr. street has inspired and created this book,
he need not read it.
if he does read it, he will find that in its pages i have attempted
in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than a series of deductions,
to state the philosophy in which i have come to believe.
i will not call it my philosophy; for i did not make it.
God and humanity made it; and it made me.
i have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an english yachtsman
who slightly miscalculated his course
and discovered england under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
i always find, however, that i am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work,
so i may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration.
there will probably be a general impression that the man who landed
(armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to planting the british flag
on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at brighton, felt rather a fool.
i am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.
but if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate
that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion,
then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale.
his mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
and he knew it, if he was the man i take him for.
what could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad
combined with all the humane security of coming home again?
chat could be better than to have all the fun of discovering south africa
without the disgusting necessity of landing there?
what could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover new south wales
and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old south wales.
this at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers
and is in a manner the main problem of this book.
how can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
how can this queer cosmic town, with its many legged citizens,
with its monstrous and ancient lamps,
how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town
and the comfort and honour of being our own town?
to show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint
would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this;
it is necessary to follow one path of argument;
and this is the path that i here propose to follow.
i wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need,
the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which christendom has rightly named romance.
for the very word 'romance' has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome.
any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute.
beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove.
the thing i do not propose to prove,
the thing i propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader,
is this desirability of an active and imaginative life,
picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity,
a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired.
if a man says that extinction is better than existence
or blank existence better than variety and adventure,
then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom i am talking.
if a man prefers nothing i can give him nothing.
but nearly all people i have ever met in this western society in which i live
would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance;
the combination of something that is STRANGE with something that is SECURE
we need so to view the world as to combine
an idea of WONDER and an idea of WELCOME.
we need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.
it is this achievement of my creed that i shall chiefly pursue in these pages....
(a defense of christianity and the closest thing to an autobiography he is reported to have written follow, intertwined...
even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.;
when some time ago i published a series of hasty but sincere papers,
under the name of 'heretics',
several critics for whose intellect i have a warm respect
(i may mention specially mr. g.s.street)
said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm his cosmic theory,
but that i had carefully avoided supporting my precepts with example.
'i will begin to worry about my philosophy, said mr. street,
when mr. chesterton has given us his'.
it was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books
upon the feeblest provocation.
but after all, though mr. street has inspired and created this book,
he need not read it.
if he does read it, he will find that in its pages i have attempted
in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than a series of deductions,
to state the philosophy in which i have come to believe.
i will not call it my philosophy; for i did not make it.
God and humanity made it; and it made me.
i have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an english yachtsman
who slightly miscalculated his course
and discovered england under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
i always find, however, that i am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work,
so i may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration.
there will probably be a general impression that the man who landed
(armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to planting the british flag
on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at brighton, felt rather a fool.
i am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.
but if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate
that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion,
then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale.
his mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
and he knew it, if he was the man i take him for.
what could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad
combined with all the humane security of coming home again?
chat could be better than to have all the fun of discovering south africa
without the disgusting necessity of landing there?
what could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover new south wales
and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old south wales.
this at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers
and is in a manner the main problem of this book.
how can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
how can this queer cosmic town, with its many legged citizens,
with its monstrous and ancient lamps,
how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town
and the comfort and honour of being our own town?
to show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint
would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this;
it is necessary to follow one path of argument;
and this is the path that i here propose to follow.
i wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need,
the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which christendom has rightly named romance.
for the very word 'romance' has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome.
any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute.
beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove.
the thing i do not propose to prove,
the thing i propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader,
is this desirability of an active and imaginative life,
picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity,
a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired.
if a man says that extinction is better than existence
or blank existence better than variety and adventure,
then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom i am talking.
if a man prefers nothing i can give him nothing.
but nearly all people i have ever met in this western society in which i live
would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance;
the combination of something that is STRANGE with something that is SECURE
we need so to view the world as to combine
an idea of WONDER and an idea of WELCOME.
we need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.
it is this achievement of my creed that i shall chiefly pursue in these pages....
(a defense of christianity and the closest thing to an autobiography he is reported to have written follow, intertwined...
Friday, January 3, 2014
1.3.2014 SS - TOLSTOY AND DOSTOEVSKY; yancey
my deepest doubts about the faith can be summed up in a single question:
WHY DOESN'T IT WORK?
as i travel around the world, i see that christianity brings many improvements to culture..
yet when i talk with devout muslims or hindus, they bring up the many wars...the crime, decadence and family breakdown that mark the christian west today.
i have no defense against their arguments.
i've never met a serious follower of any religion who lacks appreciation for Jesus, but what about the church?
..in his spiritual autobiography, A confession, leo tolstoy mentions that christians
sometimes treat each other worse than they treat people of other faiths.
he grew friendly with catholics, protestants, old believers and anabaptist type movements,
yet the russian orthodox church told him...
'that these people were caught in a lie,
that what gave them their vital strength was a temptation of the devil
and that we alone possessed the only possible truth.
and i saw that all those who do not profess an identical faith are considered by the orthodox to be heretics
-just as the catholics and other churches consider the Orthodox themselves to be heretics
as i think about individual christians i know,
i see some people made incomparably better by their faith
and some made measurably worse.
for every gracious, kind spirited, forgiving christian,
i can point to a proud, mean spirited, judgmental one.
in my own experience, those who strive the hardest and believe the most fervently
are sometimes the least attractive persons.
like the pharisees of Jesus' day,
they get caught up in competition and end up self righteous rather than righteous.
politicians tell me their nastiest letters come from people who quote the bible and claim to speak for God
-which i easily believe since my mailbox shows the same pattern.
how do i resolve the tension between the ideals of the gospel
and the actuality of those who profess it?
..the new testament passages, most notably the sermon on the mount spell out lofty ethical ideals
-Give to everyone who asks you,
Love your enemies,
Never lust,
Don't hate,
Always forgive,
Welcome persecution
-which inevitably shatter against the grim reality of actual human behavior.
i have felt a constant, unresolvable tension over christian failures.
as a journalist, i have observed up close both spectacular and petty defects of prominent spiritual leaders,
many of which never come into public light.
and when i decide to write about myself rather than others,
i soon discover that i write about spiritual disciplines far better than i practice them.
are we called to strive for ideals that can never be attained?
i found no way to address the cognitive dissonance that kept me in a state of spiritual restlessness
until i came upon the writings of 2 19th century russian novelists.
my understanding of the tension between christian ideals and reality
now consists of part tolstoy (1828-1910) and part dostoevsky. (1821-81)
despite nuggets of wisdom in individual passages, Tol's religious writings in the main
seem erratic and unstable.
he saw the extent of his deviation and little else.
as he diagnosed his own inner workings, what he saw filled him with disgust:
moral failure, hypocrisy, faithlessness.
perhaps for this reason, few people today read his spiritual musings.
as a counselor, he offers more discouragement than hope.
if Tod could hardly help himself, how could he be expected to9 help the rest of us?
in response to such criticism Tol replied,
'don't judge God's holy ideals by my inability to meet them.
don't judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear His name.
one passage especially, taken from a personal letter,
shows how Tod responded to such critics toward the end of his life.
it stands as a summary of his spiritual pilgrimage,
at once a ringing affirmation of the truth that he believed with all his heart
and a plangent (resounding loudly, especially with a plaintive sound) appeal for grace
that he never fully realized.
'what bout you, lev nikolayevich, you preach very well, but do you carry out what you preach?
this is the most natural of questions and one that is always asked of me;
it is usually asked victoriously, as though it were a way of stopping my mouth.
'you preach, but how do you live?
and i answer that i do not preach,
that i am not able to preach,
although i passionately wish to.
I CAN PREACH ONLY THROUGH MY ACTIONS
and my actions are vile...
and i answer that i am guilty and vile and worthy of contempt for my failure to carry them out.
at the same time, not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, i say:
'look at my present life and then at my former lire
and you will see that i do attempt to carry them out.
it is true that i have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them (christian precepts)
and i am ashamed of this,
but i have failed to fulfil them not because i did not wish to,
but because i was unable to.
teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me,
help me
and i will fulfil them:
even without help i wish and hope to fulfil them.
attack me, i do this myself, but attack me rather than the path i follow
and which i point out to anyone who asks me where i think it lies.
if i know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly,
is it any less the right way because i am staggering from side to side!
if it is not the right way, then show me another way;
but if i stagger and lose the way, you must help me,
you must keep me on the true path,
just as i am ready to support you.
do not mislead me, do not be glad that i have got lost,
do not shout out joyfully: 'look at him! he said he was going home,
but there he is crawling into a bog!
no, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.
..Tol was the first author who, for me, accomplished that most difficult of tasks:
to make good as believable and appealing as evil.
...where Tol wrote bright, sunny novels, Dos wrote brooding, interior ones.
where Tol worked out ascetic schemes for self improvement,
Dos periodically squandered his health and fortune on affairs, alcohol and gambling.
To kept a disciplined work schedule (?)
Dos usually worked all nigh, churning out stories at a frantic pace in order to pay off gambling debts.
thousands of pilgrims made their way to Tol's home, seeking wisdom;
no one would think of going to the disheveled Dos for wisdom.
he was socially awkward.
he managed money so poorly
that sometimes he could not afford the postage to send in a completed novel to the publisher.
he suffered from epilepsy and a grand mal seizure might drive him into despair for days afterward.
Dos made many mistakes in life, but achieved an amazing feat in art.
his novels communicate grace and forgiveness,
the heart of the christian gospel, with Tolstoyan force.
Dos taught me the remedy for the relentless failures exposed by Tol.
early in his life, Dos underwent a virtual resurrection.
he had been arrested for belonging to a group judged treasonous by tsar nichols I, who,
to impress upon the young parlor radicals the gravity of their errors, staged a mock execution.
after spending 8 months in jail awaiting sentence,
suddenly on a frigid morning three days before christmas the conspirators
were ordered out of their cells and carted to a public square
where to their horror an official read the sentence condemning them to death.
they had no time to absorb the news and no possibility of appeal.
a firing squad stood at the ready.
bareheaded, robed in whit burial shrouds, hands bound tightly behind them,
they were paraded through the snow before a gawking crowd.
a clerk pronounced the words, 'the wages of sin is death' to each prisoner
and held out a cross to be kissed.
the first three were selected to die and then tied to posts.
at the very last instant, as the order, 'ready, aim!' was heard,
as drums rumbled and rifles were cocked and lifted to shoulders,
as horseman galloped up with a prearranged message from the tsar:
he would mercifully commute their sentences to hard labor.
Dos, a member opf the nobility, had a sword broken over his head as a sign of shame.
one of the prisoners fell to his knees crying, 'the good tsar! long live our tsar!'
another had a mental collapse from which he never recovered.
in a very different way, Dos never recovered from this experience either.
he had peered into the mas of death
and from that moment life became for him precious beyond all calculation.
back in the prison, he walked up and down the cell, singing in sheer joy of having life restored.
he wrote his brother,k 'never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now
...now my life will change, i shall be born again in a new form.'
he folded away the burial shroud to keep as a memento.
his next ordeal involved transport to siberia.
at the stroke of midnight on christmas day, guards pounded ten pound shackles on his legs
and marched him to an open sledge.
for 18 days, in freezing cold that cause him frostbite, he endured this horse drawn journey.
the convoy paused for a few days in siberia before final dispersal of the prisoners,
and the commandant allowed a visit by three women,
wives of other political prisoners,
who had settled there to be near their husbands.
the three had made it their mission to welcome new prisoners and try to bring them comfort.
one of these, a devout woman who had studied german philosophy and knew the bible almost by heart,
handed Dos a new testament, the only book allowed in the prison.
she whispered that he should search it carefully and inside he found a 10 rubles.
believing that God had given him a second chance to fulfill his calling,
Dos pored over the new testament during his confinement.
'he studied the precious volume from cover to cover,
pondered every world; learned much of it by heart; and never forgot it,
wrote his daughter aimee years later.
'all his works are saturated with it and it is this which gives them their power.'
even after his release, Dos took that new testament with him on his travels
and at home kept it in a drawer in his writing table, always within reach.
Dos spent the next 4 years in hard labor and then another 6 in exile.
at the end of that decade he emerged with unshakable christian convictions,
as expressed in a letter he wrote to the woman who had given him the new testament:
'this Credo is very simple, here it is:
to believe that nothing is more
beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly and more perfect than Christ...
even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth,
then i would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
Dos suffered terribly while in prison.
his disordered nerves gave him epilepsy so severe that the seizures
would send him to the ground shrieking, foaming at the mouth, his limbs convulsing.
he often lay ill in the prison hospital, treated for rheumatism as well as the epilepsy.
he sorely missed having literature to read, cringed at the constant fighting and general uproar,
chafed at the shackles and yearned for just a moment of solitude away from the din
-a need, he decided, as urgent as eating and drinking.
in the years in prison, he never received a single letter from his family.
some of his fellow prisoners responded to their punishment with hatred and a thirst for revenge.
remarkably, Dos returned to civilization with a renewed joy in life and optimism about human nature.
he tucked away memories of standing for hours at a gap in the fence, his head resting on the palings,
watching the green grass and the deepening blue of the sky;
one particular work site was 'the only place where we saw God's world- a pure and bright horizon, the free desert steppes whose bareness always made a strange impression on me.
he remembered the kindness of the woman who had given him the new testament and of a little girl who had come running up to him
as he walked in the street with a guard, crying,
'there, poor unfortunate, take a kopek in the name of Christ!'
he kept the kopek coin, like the new testament and the burial shroud, as a memento.
he remembered a period in solitary confinement when each evening a shutter in the cell door opened,
and an anonymous voice whispered: 'courage, brother, we also suffer'.
these small notes of grace interposed in the midst of suffering would find a place in his later novels.
above all, Dos reveled in the sheer generosity of life.
'life is a gift, he wrote several hours after the fake execution.
'life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness....
life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not in the exterior'.
once he had returned to freedom, he wrote:
love every leaf, every ray of light.
love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing.
loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.
i had not expected this surge of joy in Dos\.
i had read his novels during a dark period of my own, after immersing myself in existentialist novels.
i lived in an emotional flatland.
i stood back from other people and judged them, approaching new acquaintances with suspicion.
people could win me over, yes, but it was exactly that, a winning over.
i found my numbed character type in Dos' Underground man,
and then went on to meet his other characters, whose overflowing goodness made them stand out in sharp contrast.
i could not help noting the paradox:
Tol, who had everything, ended up irascible and embittered
while Dos, who lost everything, ended up grateful and exuberant.
prison offered Dos a unique opportunity, which at first seemed a curse:
it forced him to live at close quarters with thieves, murderers, and drunken peasants.
indeed, he later reflected that the worst pain he had endured in prison
was the sheer hatred he confronted in peasant prisoners,
who viewed him as one of the despised upper class.
this revelation came as a great shock, for his aristocratic friends had been leading the reform movement
to bring rights to the very people whom he now found despised them.
his shared life with these prisoners later led to unmatched characterizations in his novels,
such as that of the murderer raskolnikov in Crime and punishment.
D's liberal view of the inherent goodness in humanity
could not account for the pure evil he found in his cell mates
and his theology had to adjust to this new reality.
over time, though, he also glimpsed the image of God in the lowest of these prisoners.
like Tod, he discovered the remnants of traditional christianity survived in the peasants,
which he began to see as their only hope for a new beginning.
he came to believe that
ONLY THROUGH BEING LOVED IS A PERSON MADE CAPABLE OF LOVE.
Dos saw part of his task as 'raising up the lowly'.
in the brilliant and complex novels he would go on to write,
he did just that, redeeming in the eyes of educated russians a class of peasants and criminal outcasts.
himself, he began to see as the prodigal son in exile, living in a far country among the husks and the swine.
every convict, he concluded, feels with the prodigal that he is not at home, but on a visit.
hope, 'this strange impatient and intense hope',
that something awaits outside the prison walls keeps the prisoner alive, literally.
for Dos, the hope behind bars become a symbol of the eternal hope he had felt in a flash
when he heard the death sentence in the public square.
'we shall be with Christ, he had whispered instinctively to a friend beside him.
('a bit of dust, his atheist friend laconically (using few words) replied).
Dos came to believe it, to believe in immortality, in fact,
as the only way to conceive of this life as anything j but meaningless.
at the time, russian intellectuals were toying with the exciting new philosophy of NIHILISM,
the belief that nothing matters,
that all morality is arbitrary,
that no benevolent God rules over the world,
that all actions are predetermined by our biology,
that love is a physical sensation inseparable from sexual desire.
after his release from exile. Dos countered each of these claims, one by one, in his writings.
he did not so much argue against them as show the consequences of the ideas lived out.
his novel The possessed, for example, recounts the story
(based on a true incident
of committed revolutionaries who killone of their own group
as the most convenient way to resolve differences with him.
Crime and punishment shows the end result of a nietzschean 'extraordinary man'
who lives above standard conventions of morality
and commits two murders simply for the experience.
always, though, a poignant note of grace sounds.
it was in Dos' novels, in fact, that i first began to understand grace,
not as a theological concept but a living reality worked out in a world of ungrace.
although Crime and punishment portrays a despicable human being who commits a despicable crime,
the soothing balm of grace enters raskolnikov's life through the person of the converted prostitute sonia,
who follows him all the way to siberia and leads him to redemption.
'love resurrected them, writes Dos;
'the heart of one contained infinite sources of life for the heart of the other'.
in The idiot, Dos presents a Christ figure in the form of a strange and unpredictable epileptic prince.
quietly, mysteriously, prince myshkin moves among the circles of russia's upper class, exposing their hypocrisy while also illuminating their lives with goodness and truth.
The idiot's final scene presents perhaps the most moving depiction of grace in all of literature:
the 'idiot' prince compassionately embracing the man who has just killed the woman he loved.
in a world ruled by law, grace stands as a sign of contradiction.
we want fairness:
the gospel gives us an innocent man nailed to a cross who cries out, 'Father, forgive them'.
we want respectability;
the gospel elevates tax collectors, prodigals and samaritans.
we want success;
the gospel reverses the terms, moving the poor and downtrodden to the head of the line
and the wealthy and famous to the rear.
having embraced Christ in the hellhole of a siberian prison,
among cellmates who mocked his infirmities and despised his advantages,
Dos understood grace at its most contradictory.
in his novels it enters stealthily, without warning,
silencing the skeptics and disarming the cynics.
they think they have life figured out until suddenly
an encounter with pure grace leaves them breathless.
it had happened to Dos himself.
racked with debts from gambling and a failed magazine venture,
he had fallen for the scheme of an unscrupulous publisher, who would obtain copyrights to all his past work
if he did not produce a new novel by a certain date.
Dos procrastinated, suffering from writer's block until only three weeks remained before the deadline.
the task seemed impossible and he despaired of life until
anna, a 19 year old stenographer, showed up to help him.
having suffered an epileptic seizure a few days before, he was in a foul mood.
he treated her harshly at first, scolded her and complained about her speed.
she wrote down his every word, working through the night,
then went home to copy it over and returned it with an edited manuscript in hand the next day.
with such superhuman efforts, she won him over and coaxed out of him a novel, The gambler,
which was delivered two hours before the deadline.
by then Dos had fully recognized his stenographer's charms and proposed marriage.
anna felt no physical attraction toward him, an unkempt widower 25 years her senior
with a notorious weakness for alcohol and gambling.
yet she pitied him and knew he needed her.
at considerable personal sacrifice, she agreed to the match,
moved in to organize his career and household,
and gave him 15 years of happiness-'The Miraculous Years', his biographer calls them
for in that period Dos produced all his masterpieces.
...when i first read The brothers karamazov, i realized that i was standing with ivan.
i had a long list of complaints about the world.
i had sound arguments against Go's injustice and unfairness.
i felt anger and resentment against God.
to quote Dos, 'can't i simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?'
tortured by the lack of love in the world, i was nevertheless doing nothing about it.
i lacked alyosha's instinct for common goodness, for a compassionate response.
it was then i began to see what Dos had learned in prison:
THE GOSPEL OF GRACE INFILTRATES THIS WORLD
NOT PRIMARILY THROUGH WORDS AND RATIONAL ARGUMENTS
BUT THROUGH DEEDS, THROUGH LOVE.
the people i was learning to admire most, such as paul brand and robert coles,
were expressing their faith through action, incarnationally.
as i traveled to other countries-brazil, nepal, the philippines, kenya
-i found humble people who each day faced human problems more extreme than i could imagine
and yet who responded not with paralysis or resentment but with compassion and love.
Dos showed me the logical consequences of a life based on nihilism and doubt;
living christian servants showed me the logical consequences of a life based on faith and love.
to follow Jesus, i learned, does not mean to solve every human problem
-Christ Himself did not attempt that
-but rather to respond as He did , against all reason
to dispense grace and love to those who deserve it least.
by and large, the intellectuals in Dos' day did not find him convincing.
his faith in the latent christianity in the lower classes,
his appeal to charity and compassion,
his distrust of the latest theories of social engineering
- these exposed him as an old fashioned moralist,
wholly unable to address the problems of modern russia.
they chose another path, the path of a morality based on utilitarianism, cut loose from transcendence.
'WITHOUT GOD EVERYTHING IS PERMITED', Dos warned in The brothers karamazov.
the 20th century would demonstrate just how prescient Dos had been.
'MAN MUST BOW DOWN TO SOMETHING', Dos also wrote
in the case of 20th century russia, human beings chose to bow down to each other,
enshrining lenin in a mausoleum and treating marx and stalin like prophets.
atheists, thy worshiped man-Gods rather than a God-man,
with results more tragic than any our planet had before seen.
in his 1983 templeton address, 102 years after Dos death, alexander solzhenitsyn
reviewed the tragic history of russia in the 20th century.
it was through reading Dos, Sol reports elsewhere, that he first began to understand
THE PRIMACY OF THE SPIRITUAL OVER THE MATERIAL.
that led the way to a conversion experience, also in a prison camp,
which changed the course of his life and ultimately affected the course of his nation.
this is what he said in the templeton address:
'over half a century ago, while i was still a child, i recall hearing a number of older people
offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen russia:
'MEN HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD; THAT'S WHY ALL THIS HAS HAPPENED'.
since then i have spent well nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution;
in the process i have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies.
and have already contributed 8 volumes of my own
toward the effort of clearing away the ruble left by that upheaval.
but if i were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution
that swallowed up some 60,000,000j of our people, i could not put it more accurately than to repeat:
'men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'
why doesn't it work?
i began with this question about the christian church, the source of many of my underlying doubts.
christian ideals attract admiration even from unbelievers,
yet what good are those ideals if i cannot put them into practice?
two great russian thinkers came up with different answers to this stumbling block of faith.
Tol founded his philosophy on a belief in the perfectibility of human nature.
id doesn't work because we don't try hard enough, he concluded,
though he tried harder than anyone and never managed to resolve the contradictions with himself,
let alone anyone else.
10 years in siberia purged Dos of any such delusion:
'in every man, of course, a demon lies hidden', said his character ivan karamazov.
he had no quarreled with Tol on the ideal for which russia should strive,
but many differences on the path to get there.
while exiled in siberia and before his marriage to anna,
Dos had impulsively married a widow with a young son.
they returned to st. petersburg together, but it was a marriage no happier than Tol's.
feodor's epilepsy and general slovenliness repulsed marya.
she fell into bouts of hysterical rage, which only made his epilepsy worse.
he took long trips to europe partly in search of a cure for his ailment,
but partly to get away from her.
the two had mad a bad match.
after 7 years of marriage, marya Dos died of tuberculosis.
all too characteristically, he husband had spent much of the time during her illness
touring europe with a 20 year old mistress.
now, having returned for her death, he sat in the room beside her corpse,
overcome with nostalgia over their happier times together,
grief over her death and remorse over his own behavior.
all night he kept a vigil beside her bier, making jottings by candlelight.
'masha is lying on the table, he began writing. 'will i ever see masha again?'
his melancholy reflections that night led to an odd discussion of immortality.
in answering the question of whether he will ever see his wife again, Dos ignores traditional arguments
-from the resurrection of Jesus, say or the need to balance the scales of justice-
and turns the document into a kind of personal confession.
no one lives up to the ideal, he admits.
no one can perfectly love his neighbor as himself.
no one can fulfill the law of Christ.
God cannot ask so much and be satisfied with so little.
we are made for that which is too big for us.
it is for this very reason he concludes, that he must believe in an afterlife.
without such a belief, our futile struggle to fulfill the law of Christ would have no point.
it is our very longing, our failure, our sense of incompleteness
that forces us to throw ourselves on God's mercy.
our imperfection in this life calls for another, more complete realization of that ideal.
thus Dos adds a note of wistful longing, of grace, to the christian ideals he shared with Tol.
today, i claim these tow russians as my spiritual guides
because they help answer my underlying doubts by throwing light on a central paradox of the christian life.
from Tol i learn the need to look inside, to the kingdom of God that is within me.
in that glance, i see how miserably i fall short of the high ideals of the gospel.
but from Dos i learn the full extent of grace.
not only the kingdom of God is within me; God Himself dwells there.
'where sin increased, grace increased all the more'. is how the apostle paul expressed it in romans.
there is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel
and the grim reality of ourselves:
to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to.
(note: does not luke 13.24 point us to a continual agonizing for something that is 'impossible' here..
while resting in what Christ has done for us, having come to live in us?)
Tol got it halfway right: anything that makes me feel comfort with God's moral standard,
anything that makes me feel, 'at last i have arrived', is a cruel deception.
Dos got the other half right: anything that makes me feel discomfort with God's forgiving love
is also a cruel deception.
'ther is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus', paul insisted....
absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that contrapuntal message from russian novelists,
i returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching.
in his response to the rich young ruler, in the parable of the good samaritan,
in his comments about divorce, money or any other moral issue, Jesus never lowered God's ideal.
'be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect, He said.
'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind'.
not Tol, not francis of assisi or mother teresa, not anyone has completely complied with those commands.
yet the same Jesus tenderly offered absolute grace, perhaps the greatest distinctive of the christian faith.
God loves us not because of who we are and what we have done, but because of who God is.
grace flows to all who accept it.
Jesus forgave the adulteress,
a thief on a cross,
a disciple who had denied ever knowing Him.
grace is absolute, all encompassing.
it extends even to the people who nailed Jesus to the cross:
'Father, forgive the, for they do not know what they are doing'
were among the last words He spoke on earth.
i read the new testament, especially passages such as the sermon on the mount,
with a different spirit now than in my adolescence.
Jesus did not proclaim these exalted words so that we would, Tolstoy-like,
furrow our brows in despair over our failure to achieve perfection.
he proclaimed them to impart to us
GOD'S IDEAL TOWARD WHICH WE SHOULD NEVER STOP STRIVING
and also to show the
NONE OF US WILL EVER REACH THAT IDEAL.
the sermon on the mount forces us to recognize the great distance between God and us
and any attempt to reduce that distance by somehow moderating its demands misses the point altogether.
WE ARE ALL DESPERATE
and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God.
having fallen from the absolute ideal, as Tol did,
we have nowhere to land but with Dos, in the safety net of absolute grace.
WHY DOESN'T IT WORK?
as i travel around the world, i see that christianity brings many improvements to culture..
yet when i talk with devout muslims or hindus, they bring up the many wars...the crime, decadence and family breakdown that mark the christian west today.
i have no defense against their arguments.
i've never met a serious follower of any religion who lacks appreciation for Jesus, but what about the church?
..in his spiritual autobiography, A confession, leo tolstoy mentions that christians
sometimes treat each other worse than they treat people of other faiths.
he grew friendly with catholics, protestants, old believers and anabaptist type movements,
yet the russian orthodox church told him...
'that these people were caught in a lie,
that what gave them their vital strength was a temptation of the devil
and that we alone possessed the only possible truth.
and i saw that all those who do not profess an identical faith are considered by the orthodox to be heretics
-just as the catholics and other churches consider the Orthodox themselves to be heretics
as i think about individual christians i know,
i see some people made incomparably better by their faith
and some made measurably worse.
for every gracious, kind spirited, forgiving christian,
i can point to a proud, mean spirited, judgmental one.
in my own experience, those who strive the hardest and believe the most fervently
are sometimes the least attractive persons.
like the pharisees of Jesus' day,
they get caught up in competition and end up self righteous rather than righteous.
politicians tell me their nastiest letters come from people who quote the bible and claim to speak for God
-which i easily believe since my mailbox shows the same pattern.
how do i resolve the tension between the ideals of the gospel
and the actuality of those who profess it?
..the new testament passages, most notably the sermon on the mount spell out lofty ethical ideals
-Give to everyone who asks you,
Love your enemies,
Never lust,
Don't hate,
Always forgive,
Welcome persecution
-which inevitably shatter against the grim reality of actual human behavior.
i have felt a constant, unresolvable tension over christian failures.
as a journalist, i have observed up close both spectacular and petty defects of prominent spiritual leaders,
many of which never come into public light.
and when i decide to write about myself rather than others,
i soon discover that i write about spiritual disciplines far better than i practice them.
are we called to strive for ideals that can never be attained?
i found no way to address the cognitive dissonance that kept me in a state of spiritual restlessness
until i came upon the writings of 2 19th century russian novelists.
my understanding of the tension between christian ideals and reality
now consists of part tolstoy (1828-1910) and part dostoevsky. (1821-81)
despite nuggets of wisdom in individual passages, Tol's religious writings in the main
seem erratic and unstable.
he saw the extent of his deviation and little else.
as he diagnosed his own inner workings, what he saw filled him with disgust:
moral failure, hypocrisy, faithlessness.
perhaps for this reason, few people today read his spiritual musings.
as a counselor, he offers more discouragement than hope.
if Tod could hardly help himself, how could he be expected to9 help the rest of us?
in response to such criticism Tol replied,
'don't judge God's holy ideals by my inability to meet them.
don't judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear His name.
one passage especially, taken from a personal letter,
shows how Tod responded to such critics toward the end of his life.
it stands as a summary of his spiritual pilgrimage,
at once a ringing affirmation of the truth that he believed with all his heart
and a plangent (resounding loudly, especially with a plaintive sound) appeal for grace
that he never fully realized.
'what bout you, lev nikolayevich, you preach very well, but do you carry out what you preach?
this is the most natural of questions and one that is always asked of me;
it is usually asked victoriously, as though it were a way of stopping my mouth.
'you preach, but how do you live?
and i answer that i do not preach,
that i am not able to preach,
although i passionately wish to.
I CAN PREACH ONLY THROUGH MY ACTIONS
and my actions are vile...
and i answer that i am guilty and vile and worthy of contempt for my failure to carry them out.
at the same time, not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, i say:
'look at my present life and then at my former lire
and you will see that i do attempt to carry them out.
it is true that i have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them (christian precepts)
and i am ashamed of this,
but i have failed to fulfil them not because i did not wish to,
but because i was unable to.
teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me,
help me
and i will fulfil them:
even without help i wish and hope to fulfil them.
attack me, i do this myself, but attack me rather than the path i follow
and which i point out to anyone who asks me where i think it lies.
if i know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly,
is it any less the right way because i am staggering from side to side!
if it is not the right way, then show me another way;
but if i stagger and lose the way, you must help me,
you must keep me on the true path,
just as i am ready to support you.
do not mislead me, do not be glad that i have got lost,
do not shout out joyfully: 'look at him! he said he was going home,
but there he is crawling into a bog!
no, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.
..Tol was the first author who, for me, accomplished that most difficult of tasks:
to make good as believable and appealing as evil.
...where Tol wrote bright, sunny novels, Dos wrote brooding, interior ones.
where Tol worked out ascetic schemes for self improvement,
Dos periodically squandered his health and fortune on affairs, alcohol and gambling.
To kept a disciplined work schedule (?)
Dos usually worked all nigh, churning out stories at a frantic pace in order to pay off gambling debts.
thousands of pilgrims made their way to Tol's home, seeking wisdom;
no one would think of going to the disheveled Dos for wisdom.
he was socially awkward.
he managed money so poorly
that sometimes he could not afford the postage to send in a completed novel to the publisher.
he suffered from epilepsy and a grand mal seizure might drive him into despair for days afterward.
Dos made many mistakes in life, but achieved an amazing feat in art.
his novels communicate grace and forgiveness,
the heart of the christian gospel, with Tolstoyan force.
Dos taught me the remedy for the relentless failures exposed by Tol.
early in his life, Dos underwent a virtual resurrection.
he had been arrested for belonging to a group judged treasonous by tsar nichols I, who,
to impress upon the young parlor radicals the gravity of their errors, staged a mock execution.
after spending 8 months in jail awaiting sentence,
suddenly on a frigid morning three days before christmas the conspirators
were ordered out of their cells and carted to a public square
where to their horror an official read the sentence condemning them to death.
they had no time to absorb the news and no possibility of appeal.
a firing squad stood at the ready.
bareheaded, robed in whit burial shrouds, hands bound tightly behind them,
they were paraded through the snow before a gawking crowd.
a clerk pronounced the words, 'the wages of sin is death' to each prisoner
and held out a cross to be kissed.
the first three were selected to die and then tied to posts.
at the very last instant, as the order, 'ready, aim!' was heard,
as drums rumbled and rifles were cocked and lifted to shoulders,
as horseman galloped up with a prearranged message from the tsar:
he would mercifully commute their sentences to hard labor.
Dos, a member opf the nobility, had a sword broken over his head as a sign of shame.
one of the prisoners fell to his knees crying, 'the good tsar! long live our tsar!'
another had a mental collapse from which he never recovered.
in a very different way, Dos never recovered from this experience either.
he had peered into the mas of death
and from that moment life became for him precious beyond all calculation.
back in the prison, he walked up and down the cell, singing in sheer joy of having life restored.
he wrote his brother,k 'never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now
...now my life will change, i shall be born again in a new form.'
he folded away the burial shroud to keep as a memento.
his next ordeal involved transport to siberia.
at the stroke of midnight on christmas day, guards pounded ten pound shackles on his legs
and marched him to an open sledge.
for 18 days, in freezing cold that cause him frostbite, he endured this horse drawn journey.
the convoy paused for a few days in siberia before final dispersal of the prisoners,
and the commandant allowed a visit by three women,
wives of other political prisoners,
who had settled there to be near their husbands.
the three had made it their mission to welcome new prisoners and try to bring them comfort.
one of these, a devout woman who had studied german philosophy and knew the bible almost by heart,
handed Dos a new testament, the only book allowed in the prison.
she whispered that he should search it carefully and inside he found a 10 rubles.
believing that God had given him a second chance to fulfill his calling,
Dos pored over the new testament during his confinement.
'he studied the precious volume from cover to cover,
pondered every world; learned much of it by heart; and never forgot it,
wrote his daughter aimee years later.
'all his works are saturated with it and it is this which gives them their power.'
even after his release, Dos took that new testament with him on his travels
and at home kept it in a drawer in his writing table, always within reach.
Dos spent the next 4 years in hard labor and then another 6 in exile.
at the end of that decade he emerged with unshakable christian convictions,
as expressed in a letter he wrote to the woman who had given him the new testament:
'this Credo is very simple, here it is:
to believe that nothing is more
beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly and more perfect than Christ...
even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth,
then i would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
Dos suffered terribly while in prison.
his disordered nerves gave him epilepsy so severe that the seizures
would send him to the ground shrieking, foaming at the mouth, his limbs convulsing.
he often lay ill in the prison hospital, treated for rheumatism as well as the epilepsy.
he sorely missed having literature to read, cringed at the constant fighting and general uproar,
chafed at the shackles and yearned for just a moment of solitude away from the din
-a need, he decided, as urgent as eating and drinking.
in the years in prison, he never received a single letter from his family.
some of his fellow prisoners responded to their punishment with hatred and a thirst for revenge.
remarkably, Dos returned to civilization with a renewed joy in life and optimism about human nature.
he tucked away memories of standing for hours at a gap in the fence, his head resting on the palings,
watching the green grass and the deepening blue of the sky;
one particular work site was 'the only place where we saw God's world- a pure and bright horizon, the free desert steppes whose bareness always made a strange impression on me.
he remembered the kindness of the woman who had given him the new testament and of a little girl who had come running up to him
as he walked in the street with a guard, crying,
'there, poor unfortunate, take a kopek in the name of Christ!'
he kept the kopek coin, like the new testament and the burial shroud, as a memento.
he remembered a period in solitary confinement when each evening a shutter in the cell door opened,
and an anonymous voice whispered: 'courage, brother, we also suffer'.
these small notes of grace interposed in the midst of suffering would find a place in his later novels.
above all, Dos reveled in the sheer generosity of life.
'life is a gift, he wrote several hours after the fake execution.
'life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness....
life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not in the exterior'.
once he had returned to freedom, he wrote:
love every leaf, every ray of light.
love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing.
loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.
i had not expected this surge of joy in Dos\.
i had read his novels during a dark period of my own, after immersing myself in existentialist novels.
i lived in an emotional flatland.
i stood back from other people and judged them, approaching new acquaintances with suspicion.
people could win me over, yes, but it was exactly that, a winning over.
i found my numbed character type in Dos' Underground man,
and then went on to meet his other characters, whose overflowing goodness made them stand out in sharp contrast.
i could not help noting the paradox:
Tol, who had everything, ended up irascible and embittered
while Dos, who lost everything, ended up grateful and exuberant.
prison offered Dos a unique opportunity, which at first seemed a curse:
it forced him to live at close quarters with thieves, murderers, and drunken peasants.
indeed, he later reflected that the worst pain he had endured in prison
was the sheer hatred he confronted in peasant prisoners,
who viewed him as one of the despised upper class.
this revelation came as a great shock, for his aristocratic friends had been leading the reform movement
to bring rights to the very people whom he now found despised them.
his shared life with these prisoners later led to unmatched characterizations in his novels,
such as that of the murderer raskolnikov in Crime and punishment.
D's liberal view of the inherent goodness in humanity
could not account for the pure evil he found in his cell mates
and his theology had to adjust to this new reality.
over time, though, he also glimpsed the image of God in the lowest of these prisoners.
like Tod, he discovered the remnants of traditional christianity survived in the peasants,
which he began to see as their only hope for a new beginning.
he came to believe that
ONLY THROUGH BEING LOVED IS A PERSON MADE CAPABLE OF LOVE.
Dos saw part of his task as 'raising up the lowly'.
in the brilliant and complex novels he would go on to write,
he did just that, redeeming in the eyes of educated russians a class of peasants and criminal outcasts.
himself, he began to see as the prodigal son in exile, living in a far country among the husks and the swine.
every convict, he concluded, feels with the prodigal that he is not at home, but on a visit.
hope, 'this strange impatient and intense hope',
that something awaits outside the prison walls keeps the prisoner alive, literally.
for Dos, the hope behind bars become a symbol of the eternal hope he had felt in a flash
when he heard the death sentence in the public square.
'we shall be with Christ, he had whispered instinctively to a friend beside him.
('a bit of dust, his atheist friend laconically (using few words) replied).
Dos came to believe it, to believe in immortality, in fact,
as the only way to conceive of this life as anything j but meaningless.
at the time, russian intellectuals were toying with the exciting new philosophy of NIHILISM,
the belief that nothing matters,
that all morality is arbitrary,
that no benevolent God rules over the world,
that all actions are predetermined by our biology,
that love is a physical sensation inseparable from sexual desire.
after his release from exile. Dos countered each of these claims, one by one, in his writings.
he did not so much argue against them as show the consequences of the ideas lived out.
his novel The possessed, for example, recounts the story
(based on a true incident
of committed revolutionaries who killone of their own group
as the most convenient way to resolve differences with him.
Crime and punishment shows the end result of a nietzschean 'extraordinary man'
who lives above standard conventions of morality
and commits two murders simply for the experience.
always, though, a poignant note of grace sounds.
it was in Dos' novels, in fact, that i first began to understand grace,
not as a theological concept but a living reality worked out in a world of ungrace.
although Crime and punishment portrays a despicable human being who commits a despicable crime,
the soothing balm of grace enters raskolnikov's life through the person of the converted prostitute sonia,
who follows him all the way to siberia and leads him to redemption.
'love resurrected them, writes Dos;
'the heart of one contained infinite sources of life for the heart of the other'.
in The idiot, Dos presents a Christ figure in the form of a strange and unpredictable epileptic prince.
quietly, mysteriously, prince myshkin moves among the circles of russia's upper class, exposing their hypocrisy while also illuminating their lives with goodness and truth.
The idiot's final scene presents perhaps the most moving depiction of grace in all of literature:
the 'idiot' prince compassionately embracing the man who has just killed the woman he loved.
in a world ruled by law, grace stands as a sign of contradiction.
we want fairness:
the gospel gives us an innocent man nailed to a cross who cries out, 'Father, forgive them'.
we want respectability;
the gospel elevates tax collectors, prodigals and samaritans.
we want success;
the gospel reverses the terms, moving the poor and downtrodden to the head of the line
and the wealthy and famous to the rear.
having embraced Christ in the hellhole of a siberian prison,
among cellmates who mocked his infirmities and despised his advantages,
Dos understood grace at its most contradictory.
in his novels it enters stealthily, without warning,
silencing the skeptics and disarming the cynics.
they think they have life figured out until suddenly
an encounter with pure grace leaves them breathless.
it had happened to Dos himself.
racked with debts from gambling and a failed magazine venture,
he had fallen for the scheme of an unscrupulous publisher, who would obtain copyrights to all his past work
if he did not produce a new novel by a certain date.
Dos procrastinated, suffering from writer's block until only three weeks remained before the deadline.
the task seemed impossible and he despaired of life until
anna, a 19 year old stenographer, showed up to help him.
having suffered an epileptic seizure a few days before, he was in a foul mood.
he treated her harshly at first, scolded her and complained about her speed.
she wrote down his every word, working through the night,
then went home to copy it over and returned it with an edited manuscript in hand the next day.
with such superhuman efforts, she won him over and coaxed out of him a novel, The gambler,
which was delivered two hours before the deadline.
by then Dos had fully recognized his stenographer's charms and proposed marriage.
anna felt no physical attraction toward him, an unkempt widower 25 years her senior
with a notorious weakness for alcohol and gambling.
yet she pitied him and knew he needed her.
at considerable personal sacrifice, she agreed to the match,
moved in to organize his career and household,
and gave him 15 years of happiness-'The Miraculous Years', his biographer calls them
for in that period Dos produced all his masterpieces.
...when i first read The brothers karamazov, i realized that i was standing with ivan.
i had a long list of complaints about the world.
i had sound arguments against Go's injustice and unfairness.
i felt anger and resentment against God.
to quote Dos, 'can't i simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?'
tortured by the lack of love in the world, i was nevertheless doing nothing about it.
i lacked alyosha's instinct for common goodness, for a compassionate response.
it was then i began to see what Dos had learned in prison:
THE GOSPEL OF GRACE INFILTRATES THIS WORLD
NOT PRIMARILY THROUGH WORDS AND RATIONAL ARGUMENTS
BUT THROUGH DEEDS, THROUGH LOVE.
the people i was learning to admire most, such as paul brand and robert coles,
were expressing their faith through action, incarnationally.
as i traveled to other countries-brazil, nepal, the philippines, kenya
-i found humble people who each day faced human problems more extreme than i could imagine
and yet who responded not with paralysis or resentment but with compassion and love.
Dos showed me the logical consequences of a life based on nihilism and doubt;
living christian servants showed me the logical consequences of a life based on faith and love.
to follow Jesus, i learned, does not mean to solve every human problem
-Christ Himself did not attempt that
-but rather to respond as He did , against all reason
to dispense grace and love to those who deserve it least.
by and large, the intellectuals in Dos' day did not find him convincing.
his faith in the latent christianity in the lower classes,
his appeal to charity and compassion,
his distrust of the latest theories of social engineering
- these exposed him as an old fashioned moralist,
wholly unable to address the problems of modern russia.
they chose another path, the path of a morality based on utilitarianism, cut loose from transcendence.
'WITHOUT GOD EVERYTHING IS PERMITED', Dos warned in The brothers karamazov.
the 20th century would demonstrate just how prescient Dos had been.
'MAN MUST BOW DOWN TO SOMETHING', Dos also wrote
in the case of 20th century russia, human beings chose to bow down to each other,
enshrining lenin in a mausoleum and treating marx and stalin like prophets.
atheists, thy worshiped man-Gods rather than a God-man,
with results more tragic than any our planet had before seen.
in his 1983 templeton address, 102 years after Dos death, alexander solzhenitsyn
reviewed the tragic history of russia in the 20th century.
it was through reading Dos, Sol reports elsewhere, that he first began to understand
THE PRIMACY OF THE SPIRITUAL OVER THE MATERIAL.
that led the way to a conversion experience, also in a prison camp,
which changed the course of his life and ultimately affected the course of his nation.
this is what he said in the templeton address:
'over half a century ago, while i was still a child, i recall hearing a number of older people
offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen russia:
'MEN HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD; THAT'S WHY ALL THIS HAS HAPPENED'.
since then i have spent well nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution;
in the process i have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies.
and have already contributed 8 volumes of my own
toward the effort of clearing away the ruble left by that upheaval.
but if i were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution
that swallowed up some 60,000,000j of our people, i could not put it more accurately than to repeat:
'men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'
why doesn't it work?
i began with this question about the christian church, the source of many of my underlying doubts.
christian ideals attract admiration even from unbelievers,
yet what good are those ideals if i cannot put them into practice?
two great russian thinkers came up with different answers to this stumbling block of faith.
Tol founded his philosophy on a belief in the perfectibility of human nature.
id doesn't work because we don't try hard enough, he concluded,
though he tried harder than anyone and never managed to resolve the contradictions with himself,
let alone anyone else.
10 years in siberia purged Dos of any such delusion:
'in every man, of course, a demon lies hidden', said his character ivan karamazov.
he had no quarreled with Tol on the ideal for which russia should strive,
but many differences on the path to get there.
while exiled in siberia and before his marriage to anna,
Dos had impulsively married a widow with a young son.
they returned to st. petersburg together, but it was a marriage no happier than Tol's.
feodor's epilepsy and general slovenliness repulsed marya.
she fell into bouts of hysterical rage, which only made his epilepsy worse.
he took long trips to europe partly in search of a cure for his ailment,
but partly to get away from her.
the two had mad a bad match.
after 7 years of marriage, marya Dos died of tuberculosis.
all too characteristically, he husband had spent much of the time during her illness
touring europe with a 20 year old mistress.
now, having returned for her death, he sat in the room beside her corpse,
overcome with nostalgia over their happier times together,
grief over her death and remorse over his own behavior.
all night he kept a vigil beside her bier, making jottings by candlelight.
'masha is lying on the table, he began writing. 'will i ever see masha again?'
his melancholy reflections that night led to an odd discussion of immortality.
in answering the question of whether he will ever see his wife again, Dos ignores traditional arguments
-from the resurrection of Jesus, say or the need to balance the scales of justice-
and turns the document into a kind of personal confession.
no one lives up to the ideal, he admits.
no one can perfectly love his neighbor as himself.
no one can fulfill the law of Christ.
God cannot ask so much and be satisfied with so little.
we are made for that which is too big for us.
it is for this very reason he concludes, that he must believe in an afterlife.
without such a belief, our futile struggle to fulfill the law of Christ would have no point.
it is our very longing, our failure, our sense of incompleteness
that forces us to throw ourselves on God's mercy.
our imperfection in this life calls for another, more complete realization of that ideal.
thus Dos adds a note of wistful longing, of grace, to the christian ideals he shared with Tol.
today, i claim these tow russians as my spiritual guides
because they help answer my underlying doubts by throwing light on a central paradox of the christian life.
from Tol i learn the need to look inside, to the kingdom of God that is within me.
in that glance, i see how miserably i fall short of the high ideals of the gospel.
but from Dos i learn the full extent of grace.
not only the kingdom of God is within me; God Himself dwells there.
'where sin increased, grace increased all the more'. is how the apostle paul expressed it in romans.
there is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel
and the grim reality of ourselves:
to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to.
(note: does not luke 13.24 point us to a continual agonizing for something that is 'impossible' here..
while resting in what Christ has done for us, having come to live in us?)
Tol got it halfway right: anything that makes me feel comfort with God's moral standard,
anything that makes me feel, 'at last i have arrived', is a cruel deception.
Dos got the other half right: anything that makes me feel discomfort with God's forgiving love
is also a cruel deception.
'ther is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus', paul insisted....
absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that contrapuntal message from russian novelists,
i returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching.
in his response to the rich young ruler, in the parable of the good samaritan,
in his comments about divorce, money or any other moral issue, Jesus never lowered God's ideal.
'be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect, He said.
'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind'.
not Tol, not francis of assisi or mother teresa, not anyone has completely complied with those commands.
yet the same Jesus tenderly offered absolute grace, perhaps the greatest distinctive of the christian faith.
God loves us not because of who we are and what we have done, but because of who God is.
grace flows to all who accept it.
Jesus forgave the adulteress,
a thief on a cross,
a disciple who had denied ever knowing Him.
grace is absolute, all encompassing.
it extends even to the people who nailed Jesus to the cross:
'Father, forgive the, for they do not know what they are doing'
were among the last words He spoke on earth.
i read the new testament, especially passages such as the sermon on the mount,
with a different spirit now than in my adolescence.
Jesus did not proclaim these exalted words so that we would, Tolstoy-like,
furrow our brows in despair over our failure to achieve perfection.
he proclaimed them to impart to us
GOD'S IDEAL TOWARD WHICH WE SHOULD NEVER STOP STRIVING
and also to show the
NONE OF US WILL EVER REACH THAT IDEAL.
the sermon on the mount forces us to recognize the great distance between God and us
and any attempt to reduce that distance by somehow moderating its demands misses the point altogether.
WE ARE ALL DESPERATE
and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God.
having fallen from the absolute ideal, as Tol did,
we have nowhere to land but with Dos, in the safety net of absolute grace.
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