Thoughts on religion at the front
N >> Neville Stuart Talbot >> Thoughts on religion at the frontXVIII
There is also the objection to an insistence upon the will of God in
accomplishment in this world, that there is so much in the New Testament
which declares (and, as we have seen in the last paragraph, experience
seems largely to corroborate the view) that the Kingdom of God does not
come in this world but in the next. I refer (only I dislike using a word
which few soldiers at the front will understand) to New Testament
"apocalyptic," which seems to present a vision of this world as
immediately to pass away in catastrophe and of the arrival of another
order of things.
It is certainly very perplexing that there seems to be so little in the
New Testament outside of the Gospels which is plainly on all fours with
the first part of the Lord's Prayer. At the front the Lord's Prayer--as
the one island of religious ground, amid marshes of ignorance, common to
Englishmen--is the padres' great stand-by. It declares better than any
words which we can frame what distinguishes the Christian religion from
others--that it begins with and glories in what God is Whose Name is to be
hallowed, and Whose kingdom is in arrival and Whose will is in
accomplishment not only in heaven but _on earth_. But elsewhere in the New
Testament the _terrain_, as it were, of these wonderful happenings seems
to be changed, and to lie in the hereafter.
It is very hard to say anything simply and shortly about this.
At any rate it is no good blinking the fact that the New Testament
expectation of an immediate ending of this world was mistaken.[3]
Yet there remains the reasonable faith--surely burnt into us by the fires
of war, surely revealed to us in apocalyptic vision--that this world is
but a part of another, and that the other gives to this and to its
concerns their supreme importance.
We need to be two-eyed here. It is a one-eyed view to hold that because
this life is a pilgrimage to another and this world is passing away,
therefore nothing matters here and nothing is happening here. It is
equally one-eyed to shut out the goal whither we all journey, and to
concentrate on the affairs of this life as alone and sufficiently
important.
The whole view is that through the entire order--here and there--the will
of God is at work, and His Kingdom in arrival, but that their full result
and accomplishment lies beyond this world. Here are the partial and
unfinished stages, there the end whither they lead. To fall back on
metaphor, a city is in the building, a whole righteous social order--a
kingdom of souls. The building is going on now,--in Birmingham and
Bermondsey,--and that gives eternal importance to their perishing and
trivial affairs. What whole structure is being built, and how much of
Birmingham and Bermondsey can be built into it, is only partially known
now. It is partially known here, as days of testing and catastrophe break
in on periods of monotony, and lay bare their soul. But full knowledge
lies in the future--the great and final 'Day shall declare it.'
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Indeed we see it change, with surprising ease of adjustment, within
the limits of the New Testament itself. In its first form it was not of
the essence of the new truth.
XIX
There is also the objection that too hard things have been said here about
the turning to God under pressure of anxiety, and the expression in prayer
of the natural desire for safety. After all, as a Jesuit fellow-padre
reminded me at the front, Our Lord at His hour of trial, when "exceeding
sorrowful even unto death," prayed in agony. And further it is plain that
prayer to Him, and as He would have it be to others, was far more than a
trustful harmony of self with the will of the Father. He urged men to take
their _requests_ to God. "Ask and ye shall receive." I can imagine that
the conception of prayer at times of emergency, as suggested in earlier
pages, might be so full of resignation as to be reduced to the fatalism
extraordinarily prevalent at the front--"If it 'its yer, it 'its yer," as
the men say. Are we not to ask not to be hit?
It is nearly enough to recall the Lord's Prayer in regard to this
objection. As I have said, men on service widely associate prayer with the
expression of need or anxiety. To restrict prayer thus is to begin the
Lord's Prayer half-way through, at "Give us this day our daily bread." It
is a question of order and emphasis. Christian prayer begins with God. It
turns away from self to the glory of God. It begins with praise and
acclamation--the glad acknowledgment of what God is and is doing. It is
only in the second place and because of what God is--because He is our
Father and is at work to bring in His kingdom and has a will for us and
for all--that the prayer which expresses our need comes in aright.
Therefore I would say to a man going into battle--"Pray now if never
before. Set God before you as you see Him, as you can clearly apprehend
Him, in Christ. He is your Father, you are His son, however unworthy. Lift
up your heart to Him Who, in and through all the turmoil around you,
presses onward with the business of His kingdom and the fulfilment of His
heart's desire. And commit all to Him. In trustful intimacy give utterance
to your longing to be brought through the perilous hour for service in His
kingdom to the glory of His Name. Commit all to Him, asking forgiveness.
He knows what you have need of in life or in death--and let the rest go!"
For such prayer in the Name of Christ--that is, prayer in accordance with
His mind and founded on the character of God as made known in Him--there
awaits undiscovered and unexhausted resources of power. So Jesus told men.
So Christian experience testifies. We have to pray truly Christ-wise, not
asking for stones to be made bread, not seeking to be hidden from life's
storms, but to be brought through them in faithful endurance.[4]
We have to pray as Christ prayed in Gethsemane in fellowship with His
sufferings. But we have also to pray as knowing the power of His
Resurrection. We have to rise in faith to claim the supernatural power
which neither He used nor we may use merely for self-preservation, which
yet is to be set free in the service of the kingdom.
Prayer in the Name of Christ is not only the prayer of resignation, based
on the self-committal of Jesus our Brother into the hands of the Father.
Such would ever tend, as uttered by our trembling faith, towards fatalism.
But it is also prayer in the Name of Him "Who was declared to be the Son
of God with power by the resurrection of the dead, even Jesus Christ our
Lord." It is the prayer of power--that power which was at Jesus' command,
and was therefore the subject of His temptation, and was drawn upon by the
faith of sufferers and yet was unused by Jesus to save Himself. This power
is the power of God. It is "the exceeding greatness of His power,
according to that working of the strength of His might which He wrought in
Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and made Him to sit at His right
hand in the heavenly places."
Here are heights where the air is charged with potentiality of new life,
hardly dreamt of by our faith on its low stagnant levels. Here are
heights to be stormed by faithful unself-seeking love. This way lies
deliverance and new creation, and the breaking of prison bars and the
turning of our captivity such as shall fill all our mouths with laughter.
A few know that these words are not rhetorical. They know, with St. Paul,
the riches of the glory of Christ's inheritance in the saints. Such was
Mary Slessor, pioneer missionary in West Africa, the leaves of whose
biography I happened to turn over as I was writing these pages. She had
frequently to take journeys through forests with leopards swarming around
her. She wrote: "I did not use to believe the story of Daniel in the
lions' den until I had to take some of these awful marches, and then I
knew it was true and that it was written for my comfort. Many a time I
walked along praying 'O God of Daniel, shut their mouths,' and He
did."[5]
This is the prayer of faith. It is the prayer which asks "not to be hit."
It is more than resignation, it is the prayer of power. It believes that
there are hardly-tapped powers and possibilities in God for those who seek
first His kingdom and righteousness. We do not know much about such prayer
in our present spiritual sickness. But it is there, a weapon to be wielded
by dauntless, simple faith. There is an inheritance to be claimed by
little-loving sons, who yet are sons--"heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ, if so be that we suffer with Him."
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Prayer after the mind of our Lord depends greatly on how we think of
Him. The following lines, written by a barrister, are, I think, a
wholesome corrective of that which is too soft in our conventional thought
about our Saviour. Despite a false or partial note here and there, they
are nearer to Him than the thought underlying the first verse of the
hymn--a great favourite among the men owing to its tune--"Jesu, Lover of
my Soul." At any rate they suggest the right association of ideas in which
our Lord should live in the mind of a young man:
Jesus, Whose lot with us was cast,
Who saw it out, from first to last:
Patient and fearless, tender, true,
Carpenter, vagabond, felon, Jew:
Whose humorous eye took in each phase
Of full rich life this world displays,
Yet evermore kept fast in view
The far-off goal it leads us to:
Who, as your hour neared, did not fail--
The world's fate trembling in the scale--
With your half-hearted band to dine,
And chat across the bread and wine:
Then went out firm to face the end,
Alone, without a single friend:
Who felt, as your last words confessed,
Wrung from a proud unflinching breast
By hours of dull ignoble pain,
Your whole life's fight was fought in vain:
Would I could win and keep and feel
That heart of love, that spirit of steel.
I would not to Thy bosom fly
To slink off till the storms go by.
If you are like the man you were
You'ld turn with scorn from such a prayer,
Unless from some poor workhouse crone,
Too toil-worn to do aught but moan.
Flog me and spur me, set me straight
At some vile job I fear and hate:
Some sickening round of long endeavour,
No light, no rest, no outlet ever:
All at a pace that must not slack,
Tho' heart would burst and sinews crack:
Fog in one's eyes, the brain a-swim,
A weight like lead in every limb,
And a raw pit that hurts like hell
Where once the light breath rose and fell:
Do you but keep me, hope or none,
Cheery and staunch till all is done,
And, at the last gasp, quick to lend
One effort more to serve a friend.
And when--for so I sometimes dream--
I've swum the dark, the silent stream,
So cold, it takes the breath away,
That parts the dead world from the day,
And see upon the further strand
The lazy, listless angels stand,
And with their frank and fearless eyes
The comrades whom I most did prize:
Then, clean, unburdened, careless, cool,
I'll saunter up from that grim pool,
And join my friends: then you'll come by,
The Captain of our Company:
Call me out, look me up and down,
And pass me through without a frown,
With half a smile, but never a word--
And so I shall have met my Lord.
[5] _Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary_, p. 106. Hodder &
Stoughton.
XX
There is also the objection that the view implied in the preceding pages
leaves out or passes over too lightly our need as sinners in the sight of
God all Holy. Is not our need for forgiveness to impel us towards God? Is
not our need--our need in anxiety, our need in guiltiness--to be a motive
in our religion?
Yes, a motive, but not the motive. It is a question of order. What must
come first is not our need, whether as anxious or guilty, but God's need,
or else our religion will be at the level of natural religion and below
the Christian level. It is because men are poor towards God and think
coldly and ungenerously of Him that they 'are not worrying about their
sins.' Men are not sorry for sin (except with the seedy remorse of 'the
morning after') until their sin has come into contact with love. The more
vital a young man is, the less will he brood in self-regard over his
wrongdoing. "Anyhow, I have lived," he will say. But if it comes home to
him what his wrongdoing has done to another who loves him, then he begins
to be sorry. "I didn't care," he will say, "for myself. I had my fling.
But now I see that what I did has broken my mother's heart. I wish to God
I hadn't done it."
Our religion must begin from God. It must spring out of love fuller and
more hungry than our desirous hearts. It must spring out of love, not--how
could it?--out of our love for God, but out of His love for us. If God's
love for us, manifested in the utterly real and suffering love of Jesus,
and in no insipid fancy of our sentimental moments, wins its way past our
guard and over the barriers of self, hatred of sin and sorrow for sin will
follow. But it is a question of order: first, what God is; second, what we
are. The more vivid the first is to a man, the more inevitable his candid
consciousness of the second. The more he is taken captive by the assurance
that God is his Father, the more glaring it will be to him that he is an
unworthy son. And the more men set out to give effect to their sonship in
service for the kingdom of God, the more they will realise their strange
impotence. The dreadful hiatus between aspiration and performance, between
acknowledged and realised ideals will widen. The eager impulse to
disregard self and to serve God with love and praise and joy, will be
found horridly at variance with a natural and rooted impulse towards
self-devotion and indulgence. The worship and praise of God, not only in
thought and word but in deed, will stumble and fall short of its goal--and
then the tears of tragic failure will start and the cry of despair ring
out. It was so with Peter in the porch and Paul beaten down in bondage
under the Law. "Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?"
I think there is no fear but that, if we do set out to put into practice
our inheritance as sons of God, we shall come to the Cross of Christ in
genuine "Rock-of-ages" fashion, bringing nothing to it in the end, except
our lovelessness. His, after all and in fact, was the one, free, utterly
loving and obedient offering of self to the Father. He did something
others could not do--He died for them, and in Him and through Him alone
did they come unto the Holy Father. I cannot work it out here, but along
this way I seem to travel home into the great evangel of the Atonement.
Only, I plead, this propitiatory work of Christ must come second in the
imagination, and His Love-of-God-revealing work first. And I think in the
course of the history of Christianity an inversion has come about. In
hymns and liturgies the _prima facie_ and predominant emphasis seems
rather to rest on our sinfulness than on God's goodness. Before they do
anything else the Prayer Book, as it is at present used, asks men to
embark on the overloaded phrases of the General Confession. I know that
this may be justified by arguing that the Prayer Book assumes that the
other parts of the Christian religion are in the minds of 'the faithful'
members of the Church. But this assumption is unwarranted as regards the
mass of soldiers whom we keep on inviting to use the more or less
mutilated forms of Morning and Evening Prayer.
And even when we come to the Eucharist, though everything can be found in
it, I often wonder whether there the Church has not come to lay more
stress upon the Cross as the offering for sin than as the disclosure of
the Divine pity for the sinner. If so, is it that too much has been taken
for granted, namely, the Love of God which alone can evoke sorrow for sin
and be worthy of the offering for sin? Has familiarity tended to disguise
and overlay the wonder-compelling revelation of God? In the Eucharist has
He been thought of rather as the Father sitting back in reception of
placation, than as the Father Who, while we are a great way off, runs out
to fall on our neck and bring us home?
I think that a re-ordering is needed. For Christianity, stressed as it
appears to be at present, will never catch the souls of men. I think of
the flying boys who, more than any one else, are winning our battles (I
have been chaplain to a squadron of them for a little time). They are far
from unsinful, but they will nevertheless, I am sure, not _begin_ with the
avowal "that there is no health in them"; they will not sing "that they
are weary of earth and laden with their sins." For as they live almost
gaily and unconcernedly on the edge of things, they know that that is not
the primary truth about themselves. Yet Christ, if in Him they see the
all-hazarding and all-enduring Love of God, can win the love and worship
of their eager hearts. He can catch those living creatures alive.
There must be a re-ordering and simplification and correction of emphasis.
It is possible, now that historical science is unravelling the Bible and
Church history, and extricating from their many levels and complexities
what is simple and specific in the glorious truths of God and of man in
Christ. Some exaggerations must be sloughed off. I think a little of the
sepia, for instance, that was in the brush of Paul must be washed away.
Has not he, or rather have not the great men of his school, over-obsessed
us with the dogma, derived from Scriptural literalism, of human corruption
flowing from Adam?
There is, by contrast, a more radiant and yet as realistic view of the
world as Christ saw it, to be recovered. Some of His glories, dimmed by
the veil of inadequate conceptions in the minds of His witnesses, will
shine as never before, as the Holy Spirit takes of Him and shows it unto
us.
XXI
Finally, I would say a word about the charge of pessimism which this
report from the front may evoke. Both pessimism and optimism are rather
moods in us than qualities which really belong to the facts of a
situation. The main point is to try to get down to reality and not to
flinch. Anyhow, I do not feel pessimistic about our holy and glorious
religion. Far otherwise. It is coming again. Actualities at the front, as
I try to learn from them, do seem to me to show a very widespread and deep
ignorance of the good news of God in Christ. But that seems only to make
more wonderful and precious those treasures of truth and joy in Christ
which God has ready for those who seek them. They are the more wonderful
because one knows that, in the silence which has fallen on many loud
voices amid the thunderous cataclysm of war, the Word of God in Christ
alone rings out anew. It is the truth of God in Him for this mysteriously
muddled and cruel world, and yet the truth which includes every partial
element of truth or goodness in the world. And there are such elements.
Only second to the wonder of the Gospel of the Cross are the achievements
of the souls of very ordinary men under unparalleled afflictions. Without
knowing it, they are seen to be worthy of Jesus, Who loves them and gave
Himself for them. If there are nearly virgin resources in God, there are
also deep unused treasures of potentiality in men. There are in them
excellences and simple heroisms which make plain that Christianity is no
artificial thing superimposed on human nature, but is the laying bare and
setting free of its inmost native quality. There is everywhere about, over
here, a diffused Christianity in men who are better than they know. It
seems like so much material that needs but a spark to set it ablaze. May
there be a great conflagration--the flaming out of the Light of the world,
to illuminate, to cleanse, to fill it with the heat of love, both human
and divine! AMEN.
THE END
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