Begin Here
Constant Attention to the Question of Renewal
J. H. Oldham
Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of RomeAnno Domini 2019, December 31
Feast of St Melania the Younger, Nun of Rome
Anno Domini 2019, December 31
Mr. Middleton Murry tells me that in the hundreds of letters which reached him after his recent broadcast talks (to be published in the Christian News-Letter books under the title Europe in Travail) the recurring request was, “Tell us what we can do.” The same need finds expression in a letter from one of our members who is a consulting physician in the north of England:
I fear that there has been too much spiritual judgment about the sickness of the world, without deeds. The local church is not going to do anything much in the way of acting midwife to the inevitable new world. It is the common soldier’s fight and initiative in the Christian warfare which needs emphasis now.
So many people whom I meet in my own circle outside the organized Christian Church know that the world is very sick, and many of them have a fair idea of the reason why; but they do not know where they can put their shoulders and shove with any hope of being effective.
I want the News-Letter to give the largest help that it can in finding the answer to the vital question of what we can do. It will have our constant attention. In the meantime Miss Dorothy L. Sayers has given us an important clue in the title of her last book, Begin Here. We must not push the future away into the future. We must begin to shape it now, and we must start where we are.
Widespread initiative is essential to democracy. Where the democratic spirit is alive, people do not wait to be told what to do, but get to work on the job nearest to hand.
To boil the thing down to tin tacks, as a former eminent and practically minded statesman is reported to have been in the habit of saying, if God is alive there is no need to be inhabited by the fact that we cannot see more than a few yards ahead. When we have sincerely offered our lives to Him, He will show us either at once, or as the weeks or months pass, what we can do. When the light comes, let us act on it without delay, with all our might and without looking back. The next steps will be made clear when the time comes.
It is undoubtedly the business of some people to think about a world order. But for most of us excessive occupation with the blue prints of an ideal world is a form of futurism which is an escape from present and immediate duty. An acre or two of solid earth, reclaimed from the desert or jungle, and well dug and watered, is worth a thousand imaginary paradises.
Perhaps the most fruitful thing that we can do is to learn to pray. I am thinking of that deeper experience of prayer in which eager and watchful expectancy becomes a habitual attitude pervading our sub-conscious as well as our conscious life. Our spiritual vitality is not strong enough to overcome the demonic forces at work in the world, or to meet the vast demands of creating a better society. Where can we look for re-invigoration except to an invasion of our daily lives by the spiritual powers of the unseen world? The first necessity is to open our being to the eternal source of Light and Life and Love. “This is the work of God that ye believe.”
Education for a Christian Society
The Supplement is directed to the crucial question raised in Supplement No. 14 [“Educating for a Free Society” by J. H. Oldham] of the kind of society which we want and expect. It gives to that question a most challenging answer. In the eyes of many who know the world as it is, the answer must seem quite mad. I doubt whether we have really understood the world in which we are living and the forces to be reckoned with if we have not inwardly recoiled from the idea of a new Christendom as a foolhardy adventure. When I ventilated the idea more than a year ago in a letter to The Times, which Mr. Eliot has done me the honor of quoting, I said that I wrote as a fool. I still feel that way about it. But I see nothing else to aim at.
The theme of Supplement No. 14 was that you can have a free society only if you prepare its future citizens for life in such a society. Similarly the present Supplement leads up to the conclusion that we can have and maintain a Christian society only by the Christian education of its members. Both are in agreement that the ultimate aim and real purpose of a society may be known by the provision it makes for the preparation of its future citizens.
A recent leading article in The Times
on “Religion and National Life” has aroused widespread interest and has been reprinted as a leaflet. It deals with the provision of Christian teaching in the schools – a subject of the highest importance. But this is only one aspect of the large issues which are opened up in this week’s Supplement; and there is a danger, as the correspondence which has followed show, that people may be misled into seeking too easy a remedy for the sickness of modern society. The Christian faith is the ground of all our hopes; but Christian teaching loses its vital meaning if it is divorced from the social aims and practice of the society in which those who receive it have to live. Christian education and a Christian society belong together. A letter from the Bishop of St. Albans appears to suggest that the Christian purpose can be achieved by imitating the methods of Stalin and Hitler in imposing authoritatively a particular creed on the whole community. I cannot think that this is his real intention, since it would be a denial both of the nature of a Christian society and of the method by which we can advance towards it.
We are only making a beginning in the News-Letter in dealing with this vast theme. The questions that have been raised must be probed more deeply and will be followed up with vigor.
Yours sincerely,
J. H. Oldham
J. H. Oldham
* Published in the Christian News-Letter on February 28, 1940
**To access Oldham's Supplement on T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Culture,
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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