THE WAY OF VISION
I
DAYS OF GREATER VISIBILITY
From the porch of my little summer cottage in Maine I can see, across the
beautiful stretch of lake in the foreground, the far-distant Kennebago
Mountains in their veil of purple. But we see them only when all the
conditions of sky and air are absolutely right. Most of the time they
are wrapped in clouds or are lost in a dim haze. Our visitors admire
the lake, are charmed with the islands, the picturesque shore and the
surrounding hills, but they do not suspect the existence of this added
glory beyond the hills. We often tell them of the mountains “just over
there,” which come out into full view when the sky clears all the way
to the horizon and the wind blows fine from the northwest. They make a
casual remark about the sufficiency of what is already in sight, and go
their way in satisfied ignorance of the “beyond.”
Next day, perhaps—Oh wonder! The morning dawns with all the conditions
favorable for our distant view. The air is altogether right for far
visibility. The clouds are swept clean from the western rim, the blue is
utterly transparent—and there are the mountains! We wish our skeptical
visitors could be with us now. We guess that they would not easily
talk of the sufficiency of the near beauty, if they could once see the
overtopping glory of these mountains now fully unveiled and revealed.
Something like that, I feel sure, is true of God and of other great
spiritual realities which are linked with his being. Most of the time
we get on with the things that are near at hand; the things we see and
handle and are sure of. The world is full of utility and we do well to
appreciate what is there waiting to be used. There is always something
satisfying about beauty, and nature is very rich and lavish with it.
Friendship and love are heavenly gifts, and when these are added to the
other good things which the world gives us, it would seem, and it does
seem, to many that we ought to be satisfied and not be homesick for the
glory which lies beyond the horizon-line of the senses. I cannot help
it; my soul will not stay satisfied with this near-at-hand supply. A
discontent sweeps over me, an uncontrollable _Heimweh_—homesickness of
soul—surges up within me and I should be compelled to call the whole
scheme miserable failure, if the near, visible skyline were the real
boundary of all that is.
Sometimes—Oh joy! When the inward weather is just right; when selfish
impulse has been hushed; when the clouds and shadows, which sin makes,
are swept away and genuine love makes the whole inner atmosphere pure and
free from haze, then I know that I find a beyond which before was nowhere
in sight and might easily not have been suspected. I cannot decide
whether this extended range of sight is due to alterations in myself,
or whether it is due to some sudden increase of spiritual visibility in
the great reality itself. I only know the fact. Before, I was occupied
with things; now, I commune with God and am as sure of him as I am of the
mountains beyond my lake, which my skeptical visitor has not yet seen.
There can be no adequate world here for us without at least a faith in
the reality beyond the line of what we see with our common eyes. We have
times when we cannot live by bread alone, or by our increase of stocks;
when we lose our interest in cosmic forces and need something more
than the slow justice which history weighs out on its great judgment
days. We want to feel a real heart beating somewhere through things; we
want to discover through the maze a loving will working out a purpose;
we want to know that our costly loyalties, our high endeavors, and our
sacrifices which make the quivering flesh palpitate with pain, really
matter to Someone and fill up what is behind of his great suffering for
love’s sake. We can not get on here with substitutes; we must have the
reality itself. Religion is an awful farce if it is only a play-scheme, a
cinematograph-show, which makes one believe he is seeing reality when he
is, in fact, being fooled with a picture. We must at all costs insist on
the real things. It is God we want and not another, the real Face and not
a picture.
“We needs must love the highest when we see it;
Not Lancelot nor another.”
He is surely there to be seen, like my mountain. Days may pass when we
only hope and long and guess. Then the weather comes right, the veil
thins away and we see! It is, however, not a rare privilege reserved for
a tiny few. It is not a grudged miracle, granted only to saints who have
killed out all self. It belongs to the very nature of the soul to see
God. It is what makes life really life. It is as normal a function as
breathing or digestion. Only one must, of all things, intend to do it!
II
THE PROPHET AND HIS TRAGEDIES
There will always be in the world a vast number of persons who take the
most comfortable form of religion which their generation affords. They
are not path-breakers; they have nothing in their nature which pushes
them into the fields of discovery—they are satisfied with the religion
which has come down to them from the past. They accept what others have
won and tested, and are thankful that they are saved the struggle and the
fire which are involved in first-hand experience and in fresh discovery.
The prophet, on the contrary, in whatever age he comes, can never take
this easy course. He cannot rest contented with the forms of religion
which are accepted by others. He cannot enjoy the comforts of the calm
and settled faith which those around him inherit and adopt. His soul
forever hears the divine call to leave the old mountain and go forward,
to conquer new fields, to fight new battles, to restate his faith in
words that are fresh and vital, in terms of the deepest life of his time.
We used to think—many people still think—that a prophet is a foreteller
of future events, a kind of magical and miraculous person who speaks
as an oracle and who announces, without knowing how or why, far-off,
coming occurrences that are communicated to him. To think thus is to miss
the deeper truth of the prophet’s mission. He is primarily a religious
patriot, a statesman with a moral and spiritual policy for the nation.
He is a person who sees what is involved in the eternal nature of things
and therefore what the outcome of a course of life is bound to be. He
possesses an unerring eye for curves of righteousness or unrighteousness,
as the great artist has for lines of beauty and harmony, or as the great
mathematician has for the completing lines of a curve, involved in any
given arc of it. He is different from others, not in the fact that he
has ecstasies and lives in the realm of miracles, but rather that he has
a clearer conviction of God than most men have. He has found him as the
center of all reality. He reads and interprets all history in the light
of the indubitable fact of God, and he estimates life and deeds in
terms of moral and spiritual laws, which are as inflexible as the laws
of chemical atoms or of electrical forces. He looks for no capricious
results. He sees that this is a universe of moral and spiritual order.
If he is an Amos, he will refuse to fall in line with the easy worshipers
of his age, who are satisfied with the old-time religion of “burnt
offerings” and “meat offerings” and “peace offerings of fat beasts.” His
soul will cry out for a religion which makes a new moral and spiritual
man, “makes righteousness run down as a mighty stream,” and sets the
worshiper into new social relations with his fellows. If he is an Isaiah,
he will refuse “to tramp the temple” with the mass of easy worshipers;
he will have his own vision of “the Lord high and lifted up,” with his
glory filling not only the temple but the whole earth, and he will
dedicate himself to the task of preparing a holy people and a holy city
for this God who has been revealed to him as a thrice-holy God. If he is
a Jeremiah, he will not accept the view that the traditional religion of
Jerusalem is adequate for the crisis of the times. He will insist that
true religion must be inwardly experienced; that the law of God must be
written in the heart, and that the life of a man must be the living
fruit of his faith. He will cry out against the idea that the moral
wounds and spiritual sores of the daughter of Jerusalem can be healed
with easy salves and cheap panaceas.
The supreme example of this refusal to go along the easy line of
contemporary religion is that of One who was more than a prophet. His
people prided themselves on being the chosen people of the Lord. The
scribal leaders had succeeded in drawing up a complete and perfect
catalogue of religious performances. They supplied minute directions for
one’s religious duty in every detail, real or imaginary, of daily life,
and the world has never seen a more elaborate form of religion than this
of the Pharisees. But Christ refused to follow the path of custom; he
could not and he would not do the things which the scribes prescribed. He
broke a new path for the soul, and called men away from legalism and the
dead routine of “performances” to a life of individual faith and service,
which involves suffering and self-sacrifice, but which brings the soul
into personal relation with the living God.
St. Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a rabbinical scholar of the first
rank, a man rising stage by stage to fame along the path marked out by
the traditions of his people, came back from his eventful journey to
Damascus to take up the work of a path-breaker and to set himself like
a flint against the old-time religion in which he was born and reared.
Luther, a devout monk, an ambassador to the papal court, a professor of
scholastic theology, discovered that he could not find peace to his soul
along the path of the prevailing traditional religion, and he swung,
with all the fervor of his powerful nature, into a fresh track which
has blessed all ages since. These are some of the supreme leaders, but
every age has had its quota of minor prophets, who have heard the call to
leave the old mountain and go forward and who have fearlessly entered the
perilous and untried path of fresh vision. As we look back and see them
in the perspective of their successful mission to the race, we thank God
for their bravery and their valiant service, but we are apt to forget the
tragedies of their lives.
Nobody can enter a fresh path, or bring a new vision of the meaning of
life, or reinterpret old truths—in short, nobody can be a prophet—without
arousing the suspicion and, sooner or later, the bitter hatred of those
who are the keepers and guardians of the existing forms and traditions,
and the path-breaker must expect to see his old friends misunderstand
him, turn against him, and reproach him. He must endure the hard
experience of being called a destroyer of the very things he is giving
his life to build. Christ is, for example, hurried to the cross as a
blasphemer, and each prophet, in his degree, has had to hear himself
charged with being the very opposite of what he really is in heart and
life. To be a prophet at all he must be a sensitive soul, and yet he must
live and work in a pitiless rain of misunderstanding and attack. Still
more tragic, perhaps, is the necessity which the prophet is under of
doing his hard tasks without living to see the triumphant results. He is,
naturally, ahead of his time—a path-breaker—and his contemporaries are
always slow to discover and to realize what he is doing. Even those who
love him and appreciate him only half see his true purpose, and thus he
feels alone and solitary, though he may be in the thick of the throng.
It is only when he is long dead and the mists have cleared away that he
is called a prophet and comes to his true place. While he lived he was
sure of only one Friend who completely understood him and approved of his
course, and that was his invisible and heavenly Friend. But in spite of
the tragedy and the pain and the hard road, the prophet, “seeing him who
is invisible,” prefers to all other paths, however easy and popular, the
path of his vision and call.
III
A LONG DISTANCE CALL
Just when life seems peculiarly crowded with items of complexity and
importance, the telephone rings a determined, significant kind of ring.
This is evidently no ordinary passing-the-time-of-day affair. I interrupt
my weighty concerns and take up the receiver with expectation. I say
“Hello!” but there is no answer, no human recognition. The wire hums and
buzzes, instruments click far away, plugs are pulled out and pushed in.
Little tiny scraps of remote, inane, unintelligible conversation between
unknown mortals furnish the only evidence I get that there is any human
purpose going forward in this strange world inside the telephone system
where I can see nothing happening.
Suddenly a voice which is evidently hunting for me breaks in: “Is this
Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Hold the wire, please.” I am led on with increasing
interest and confidence. Somebody somewhere miles away in this invisible
world of electrical connections is seeking for me. I forget the
multitudinous problems that were besieging me when the telephone first
rang, and I listen with suppressed breath and strained muscles. All I
get, however, is an immense confusion. There is no coherence or order to
anything that reaches me. Faint and far away in some still remoter center
than at first I hear clicks and buzzes, vague unmeaning noises, and the
dull thud of shifting plugs that connect the lines. Once more a kindly
voice breaks in on the confusion, a voice seeking after me from some
distant city: “Is this Mr. ——?” “Yes.” “Wait a minute.”
I do wait a minute as patiently as I can. I dimly feel that we are
plunging out into yet remoter space, and that I am being connected up
with the person who all the time has been seeking me. A low hum of
the far-away wire is all I get to repay me for the long wait. I grow
impatient. I shout “Hello!” “Is anybody there?” “Do you want me?” Not a
word comes back, only endless, empty murmurs of people who have found one
another and are talking so far off that the sense is lost in the mere
broth of sounds. This dull world inside the telephone seems to be a mad
world of noise and confusion but no substance, no real correspondence. I
am on the verge of giving the whole business up and of returning to my
interrupted tasks, which at least were rational.
Suddenly a voice breaks in, this time a voice I know and recognize. The
person who had been seeking me all the time, across these spaces and
over this network of interlaced wires, calls me by name, speaks words of
insight and intelligence, and gives me a message which moves me deeply
and raises the whole tone of my spirit. When finally I “hang up” and
return to the things in hand, I have renewed my strength and can work
with clearer head and faster pace. The pause has been like a pause in
a piece of music. It has been full of significance, and it has helped
toward a higher level.
Something like this telephone experience happens in another and very
different sphere—a sphere where there are no wires. In the hush and
silence, when the conditions are right for it, it often seems as
though some one were trying to communicate with us, seeking for actual
correspondence with us. We turn from the din and turmoil of busy efforts
and listen for the voice. We listen intently and we hear—our own heart
beating. We feel the strain of our muscles across the chest. We push back
a little deeper and try again. We feel the tension of the skin over the
forehead and we note that we are pulling the eyeballs up and inward for
more concentrated meditation. All the muscles of the scalp are drawn
and we notice them perhaps for the first time. Strange little bits of
thought flit across the threshold of the mind. We catch glimpses of dim
ideas knocking at the windows for admission to the inner domain where
we live. Then, all of a sudden, we succeed in pushing further back. We
forget our strained muscles and are unconscious of the corporeal bulk of
ourselves. We get in past the flitting thoughts and the procession of
ideas contending for entrance. The track seems open for the Someone who
is seeking us no less certainly than we are seeking him. If we do not
hear our name called, and do not hear distinctly a message in well-known
words, we do at least feel that we have found a real Presence and have
received fresh vital energy from the creative center of life itself, so
that we come back to action, after our pause, restored, refreshed, and
“charged” with new force to live by.
Some time ago a long distance call came to my telephone and I went
through all the stages of waiting and of confusion and finally heard the
clear voice calling me, but I could not get any answer back. I heard
perfectly across the five hundred intervening miles, but my correspondent
never got a single clear word from me. We found that something was wrong
with our transmitter. The connection was good, the line was pervious, the
seeking voice was at the other end, but I did not succeed in transmitting
what ought to have been said. Here is where most of us fail in this other
sphere—this inner wireless sphere—we are poor transmitters. We make the
connection, we receive the gift of grace, we are flooded with the incomes
of life and power and we freely take, but we do not give. We absorb and
accumulate what we can, but we transmit little of all that comes to us.
Our radius of out-giving influence is far too small. We need, on the one
hand, to listen deeper, to get further in beyond the tensions and the
noises, but on the other hand we need to be more radio-active, better
transmitters of the grace of God.