THE TEMPLE
And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? Know ye
not that I must be in my Father's house?
S. Luke II, 49.
We give thanks unto thee, O Lord, who lovest mankind, Thou
benefactor of our souls and bodies, for that Thou hast this
day vouchsafed to feed us with Thy Heavenly Mysteries; guide
our path aright, establish us all in Thy fear, guard our
lives, make sure our steps through the prayers and
supplications of the glorious Mother of God and Ever Virgin
Mary and of all Thy saints.
RUSSIAN.
The time was come when by the law of His people the Boy Jesus must
assume the duties of an adult in the exercise of His religion. Therefore
His parents took Him with them to Jerusalem that He might participate in
the celebration of the Passover. It would be a wonderful moment in the
life of any intelligent Hebrew boy when for the first time he came in
contact with the places and scenes which were so familiar to him in the
story of his nation's past; and we can imagine what would have been the
special interest of the Child Jesus who would have been so thoroughly
taught in the Old Testament Scriptures, and who would have felt an added
interest in the places He was now seeing because of their association
with His great ancestor, David. Still His chief interest was in the
religion of His people, and it was the temple where the sacrificial
worship of God was centred that would have for Him the greatest
attraction. This was His "Father's House," and here He Himself felt
utterly at home. We are not surprised to be told that He lingered in
these courts.
"And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus
tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and His mother knew it not."
They had perfect confidence in Jesus; and yet it seems strange that they
should have assumed that He was somewhere about and would appear at the
proper time. When the night drew on and the camp was set up there was no
Child to be found. Then we imagine the distress, the trouble of heart,
with which Mary and Joseph hurry back to Jerusalem and spend the ensuing
days in seeking through its streets. We share something of our Lord's
surprise when we learn that the temple was the last place that they
thought of in their search. Did they think that Jesus would be caught by
the life of the Passover crowds that filled the streets of Jerusalem?
Did they think that it would be a child's curiosity which would hold him
fascinated with the glittering toys of the bazaars? Did they think that
He had mistaken the caravan and been carried off in some other direction
and was lost to them forever? We only know that it was not till three
days had passed that they thought of the temple and there found Him.
"And when they saw Him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto Him,
Son, why has thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have
sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought
me? Know ye not that I must be in my Father's house?"
S. Mary and S. Joseph were proceeding on certain assumptions as to what
Jesus would do which turned out to be untenable. It is one of the
dangers of our religion--our personal religion--that we are apt to
assume too much which in the testing turns out to be unfounded. We reach
a certain stage of religious attainment, and then we assume that all is
going well with us. When one asks a child how he is getting on he
invariably answers: "I am all right." And the adult often has the same
childish confidence in an untested and unverified state of soul. We are
"all right"; which practically means that we do not care to be bothered
with looking into our spiritual state at all. We have been going on for
years now following the rules that we laid down when we first realised
that the being a Christian was a more or less serious matter. Nothing
has happened in these years to break the placidity of our routine. There
has never been any relapse into grievous sin; we have never felt any
real temptation to abandon the practice o£ our religion. We run along as
easily and smoothly as a car on well-laid rails. We are "all right."
But in fact we are all wrong. We have lapsed into a state of which the
ideal is purely static: an ideal of spiritual comfort as the goal of our
spiritual experience here on earth. We have acquired what appears to be
a state of equilibrium into which we wish nothing to intrude that would
endanger the balance. We are, no doubt, quite unconsciously, excluding
from life every emotion, every ambition, as well as every temptation,
which appears to involve spiritual disturbance. But we need to be
disturbed.
For the spiritual life is dynamic and not static; its ideal is motion
and not rest. Rest is the quality of dead things, and particularly of
dead souls. The weariness of the way, which is so obvious a phenomenon
in the Christian life, is the infallible sign of lukewarmness. What we
need therefore is to break with the assumption that we know all that it
is necessary to know, and that we have done or are doing all that it is
necessary to do. It is indeed the mark of an ineffective religion that
the notion of necessity is adopted as its stimulus, rather than the
notion of aspiration. The question, "Must I do this?" is a revelation of
spiritual poverty and ineptitude. "I press on," is the motto of a
living religion.
Personal religion, therefore, needs constantly to be submitted to new
tests, lest it lapse into an attitude of finality. Fortunately for us,
God does not leave the matter wholly in our hands, but Himself, through
His Providence, applies a wide variety of tests to us. It is often a
bitter and disturbing experience to have our comfortable routine broken
up and to find that we have quite miserably failed under very simple
temptations. And the sort of failure I am thinking of is not so much the
failure of sin as the failure of ideal. It is the case of those who
think that they have satisfactorily worked out the problems of the
spiritual life, and have reached a satisfactory adjustment of duty and
practice, and then find that if the adjustment changes their practice
falls off. The outer circumstances of life change and the change is
followed by a readjustment of the inner life on a distinctly lower
plane. It is revealed to us that the outer circumstances were
controlling the spiritual practice, and not the practice dominating the
circumstances. The ruling ideal was that of comfort, and under the new
circumstances the spiritual ideal is lowered until it fits in with a new
possibility of comfort in the altered circumstances. It is well to
examine ourselves on these matters and to find what is the actual
ruling motive in our religious practice.
We may have assumed that we have Jesus, when all the assumption meant
was that we thought that He was somewhere about. After all, it will not
aid us very much if He is "in the company," if we go on our day's
journey without Him. It is a poor assumption to build life upon, that
Jesus exists, or that He is in the Church, or that He is the Saviour. It
is nothing to us unless He is _our_ Saviour, unless He is personally
present in us and with us. And it is not wise or safe to let this be a
matter of assumption, even though the assumption rest on a perfectly
valid experience in the past; we cannot live on history, not even on our
own history. That Jesus is with us must be verified day by day, and we
ought to go no day's journey without the certainty of His presence. We
can best do that, when the circumstances of life permit, by a daily
communion. There at the altar we meet Jesus and know that He is with us.
When the circumstances of life do not permit, (and often they do, when
we lazily think they do not) there are other modes of arriving at
spiritual certainty.
It is quite easy to lose Jesus. He does not force His companionship upon
us, but rather when we meet Him. "He makes as though he would go
farther." He offers Himself to us; He never compels us to receive Him as
a guest. And when we have in fact received Him, and asked Him to abide
with us, He does not stay any longer than we want Him. We have to
constrain Him. In other words, we lose Jesus, we lose the vitality of
our spiritual life (though we may retain the routine practice of our
religion), if we are not from day to day making it the most vital issue
of our lives. That does not necessarily mean that we are spending more
time on it than on anything else, but that we are putting it first in
the order of importance in our lives and are sacrificing, if occasion
arise, other things to it, rather than it to them. That a man loves his
wife and child does not necessarily mean that he actually spends more
time on them than he does on his business, but it does mean that they
are more important in his life than his business, and if need arise it
will be the business that is sacrificed to them and not they to the
business. Spirituality is much less a matter of time than of energy. A
wise director can guide a man to sanctity who will probably consecrate
his Sunday, and give the director one half hour on week days to
dispose of.
To lose Jesus does not require the commission of great sin, as we count
sin. The quite easiest way to lose Him is to forget Him and go about our
business as though He did not exist. That is a frequent happening. For
vast numbers Jesus does not exist except for an hour or so on Sunday.
They give Him the formal homage of attendance at church on Sunday
morning and then they go out and forget Him, not only for the rest of
the week but for the rest of the day. The religion which thus reduces
itself to a minimum of attendance at Mass on Sunday morning is surely
not a religion from which much can be expected in the way of spiritual
accomplishment. If it be true that there is a minimum of religious
requirement which will ensure that we "go to heaven," then that sort of
religion may be useful; but I do not know that anywhere such a minimum
_is_ required. The statement that I find is "Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind, and with all thy strength." The outstanding characteristic of love
is surely not niggardliness, but passionate self-giving. All things are
forgiven, not to those who are careful to keep within the limits
required, but to those who "love much."
The study of many cases, the experience of over thirty years in the
confessional, convinces me that the chief cause of spiritual failure
among Christians is not the irresistible impact of temptation but the
lack of spiritual vision. The average man or woman is not consciously
going anywhere; but they are just keeping a rule which is the arbitrary
exactment of God. It might just as well be some other rule. That is, in
their minds, the practice of the spiritual life has no immediate ends;
it is not productive of spiritual expansion; it is not a ladder set up
on earth to reach heaven on which they are climbing ever nearer God, and
on the way are catching ever broader visions of spiritual reality as
they ascend. The knowledge and the love of God are to them phrases, not
practical goals, invitations to paths of spiritual adventure. Hence,
having no immediate ends to accomplish, they find the whole spiritual
routine dull and unattractive and naturally tend to reduce it to a
minimum. It is not at all surprising that in the end they drop religion
altogether, as why should one keep on travelling a road that leads
nowhere? How can one love and serve a Jesus whom one has lost?
The problem of personal religion is the problem of finding Jesus, of
bringing life into a right relation to Him. The plain path is to follow
the example of His parents who sought Him "sorrowing." Sorrow for having
lost Jesus is the true repentance. Repentance which springs from fear of
consequences, or from disgust with our own incompetence and stupidity
when we realise that we have made a spiritual failure of life, is an
imperfect thing. True repentance has its origin in love and is therefore
directed toward a person. It is the conviction that we have violated the
love of our Father, our Saviour, our Sanctifier. Sorrow springing from
love is sorrow "after a godly sort." It is easy for us to drift into
ways of carelessness and indifference which seem not to involve sin, to
be no more than a decline from some preceding standard of practice which
we conclude to have been unnecessarily strict; but the result is an
increasing disregard of spiritual values, a growing obscuration of the
divine presence in life. Then the day comes when some quite marked and
positive spiritual failure, a failure of which we cannot imagine
ourselves to have been guilty, when we were living in constant communion
with our Lord, arouses us to the fact that for months our spiritual
vitality has been declining and that we have ended in losing Jesus. It
is a tremendous shock to find how fast and how far we have been
travelling when we thought that we were only slightly relaxing an
unnecessarily strict routine: that when we thought that we were but
acting "in a common sense way," we were in reality effecting a
compromise with the world. Well is it then if the surprise of our
disaster shocks us back to the recovery of what we have lost, if it send
us into the streets of the city, sorrowing and seeking for Jesus.
Mere spiritual laziness is at the bottom of much failure in religion.
There is no success anywhere in life save through the constant pressure
of the will driving a reluctant and protesting set of nerves and muscles
to their daily tasks. The day labourer comes home from his work with his
muscular strength exhausted, but he has to go back to the same
monotonous task on the morrow: his family has to be fed and clothed and
he cannot permit himself to say, "I am tired and will stay away from
work to-day." The business or professional man comes back from his
office with a wearied brain that makes any thought an effort, but he
must take up the routine to-morrow; the pressure of competitive business
does not permit him to work when and as much as he chooses. But the
Christian who is engaged in the most important work that is carried on
in this world, the work of preparing an immortal soul for an unending
future, is constantly under the temptation "to take a day off"--to let
down the standard of accomplishment till it ceases to interfere with the
business or the pleasure of life; is constantly too tired or too busy to
do this or that. In short, religion is apt to be treated in a manner
that would ensure the bankruptcy of any material occupation in life. Why
then should it not ensure spiritual bankruptcy?
Surely, to retain Jesus with us, to live in the intimacy of God, is the
most pressingly important of our duties; it is worth any sort of
expenditure of energy to accomplish it. And it cannot be accomplished
without expenditure of energy. The view of religion which conceives it
as a facile assent to certain propositions, the occasional and formal
participation in certain actions, the more or less strict observance of
certain rules of conduct, is so far from the fact that it is not worth
discussing. Religion is the realised friendship of God; it is a personal
relation of the deepest and purest sort; and, like all personal
relations, is kept alive by the mutual activities of those concerned.
The action of one party will not suffice to keep the relation in healthy
state. The love of God itself will not suffice to maintain a being in
holiness and carry him on to happiness who is himself quite indifferent
to the entire spiritual transaction--whose attitude is that of one
willing to be saved if he be not asked to take much trouble about it.
That lackadaisical attitude can never produce any result in the
spiritual order; it can only ensure the spiritual decline and death of
one who has not thought it worth while to make an effort to live.
Jesus can be found; but the finding depends upon the method of the
seeking. There are many men who claim, and quite honestly, to be in
pursuit of truth: to find the truth is the end of all their efforts. Yet
they do not succeed in finding it. Why is this? I think that the
principal reason is that they are constituting themselves the judges of
the truth; they first of all lay down certain rules which God must obey
if He wishes them to believe in Him! They insist on having, before they
will believe, a kind of evidence that is impossible of attainment. They
assert that this or that is impossible, and the other thing incredible.
They partially ascertain the laws that govern the material universe, and
they deny to the Maker of the universe the power to act otherwise than
in accord with so much of the order of nature as they have discovered!
They deny to God the sort of personal action in this world that they
themselves constantly exercise.
The method is not a method that can be hopeful of success. And it is
worth noting that it is not a method that these same men followed in
their investigations of the natural world. They have not accumulated
information about natural law by first laying down rules as to how
natural law must act, and refusing to listen to any evidence which does
not fall in with these rules: rather, they have set themselves to
observe how nature does act, and then deduced rules from their
observation. Why not pursue the same method in religion? Why not in an
humble spirit observe how God does act? Why start by saying, "Miracles
do not happen?" Why reject as incredible the Virgin Birth and the
Resurrection? Why not get a bigger notion of God than that of a
mechanician running a machine, and think of Him as a Person dealing with
persons? The relation of persons cannot be mechanical or predetermined;
they are and must be free and spontaneous: they have their origin, not
in the pressure of invariable law but in the impulse of love.
Nor is the search for Jesus that is inspired by mere curiosity likely
to be a success. There are many people who are curious about religion,
and they want to know why we believe thus and so; and particularly why
we act as we do. Why do you keep this day? What do you mean by this
ceremony? Do you think that it is wrong to do this or that? Such people
wander about observing; but their observation we understand is the
observation of an idler who does not expect to be influenced by what he
observes, but only to be amused. These are they who run after the latest
thing in heresy, the newest thing in thought. What is observable about
them is that they never seriously contemplate doing anything themselves.
They are like those multitudes who followed our Lord about for awhile
but were dispersed by the test of hard sayings.
But Jesus can be found. He is found of all those who seek Him humbly and
sincerely, putting away self and desiring simply to be led: who do not
challenge Him with Pilate's scornful, "What is truth?" but rather say,
"Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief." He is easily found of those
who know where to look for Him. There is no mystery about that,--He will
certainly be in His Father's House. The surprise of Joseph and Mary that
He had thus dealt with them is answered by Jesus' surprise that they did
not certainly know where He would be: "Wist ye not that I must be in My
Father's House?"
In the House of God, the Church of God, is the ready approach to Jesus.
It is in the last degree foolish to waive aside the Church in which are
stored the treasures of more than nineteen centuries of Christian
experience as though it did and could have nothing to say in the matter.
A seeker after information as to the meaning of the constitution of the
United States would be considered a madman if he impatiently turned from
those of whom he made enquiry when they suggested the decrees of the
Supreme Court as the proper place to seek information. Surely, from any
point of view, the Church will know more about Jesus than any one else:
if in all the centuries it has not discovered the meaning of Him Whom it
ceaselessly worships there is small likelihood that that meaning will be
discovered by an unbeliever studying an ancient book! If the Church
cannot lead us to Jesus, and if it cannot interpret to us His will,
there is small likelihood that any one else will be able to do so. And
if during all these centuries His will has been unknown it can hardly be
of much importance to discover it now. If His Church has failed, then
His Mission is discredited.
For us who have accepted His revelation as made to the Church and by it
unfailingly preserved, who have learned to find Him there where He has
promised to be until the end of time, there is another sense in which we
think of His words as words of encouragement and consolation. There are
hours in life which press hard upon us; there are other hours when the
sense of God's love and goodness fills us with thankfulness and joy. In
such hours we crave the intimacy of personal communion: we want to tell
our grief or our joy. And then we take our way to the temple, and know
that we shall find Him there in His Incarnate Presence in His Father's
House. We go in and kneel before the Tabernacle and know that Jesus is
here. Here in the silence He waits for us. Here in the long hours He
watches; here is the ever-open door leading to the Father where any man
at any time may enter. He who humbled Himself to the hidden life of
Nazareth now humbles Himself to the hidden life of the Tabernacle: and
we who believe His Word, have no need to envy Joseph and Mary the
intimacy of their life with Jesus, because here for us, if we will, is a
greater intimacy--the intimacy of those of whom it can be said: They
evermore dwell in Him and He in them.
Lady of Heaven, Regent of the Earth,
Empress of all the infernal marshes fell,
Receive me, thy poor Christian, 'spite my, dearth,
In the fair midst of thine elect to dwell:
Albeit my lack of grace I know full well;
For that thy grace, my Lady and my Queen,
Aboundeth more than all my misdemean,
Withouten which no soul of all that sigh
May merit heaven. 'Tis sooth I say, for e'en
In this belief I will to live and die.
Say to thy Son, I am his--that by his birth
And death my sins be all redeemable--
As Mary of Egypt's dole he changed to mirth,
And eke Theophilus', to whom befell
Quittance of thee, albeit (so men tell)
To the foul fiend he had contracted been.
Assoilzie me, that I may have no teen,
Maid, that without breach of virginity
Didst bear our Lord that in the Host is seen:
In this belief I will to live and die.
A poor old wife I am, and little worth:
Nothing I know, nor letter aye could spell:
Where in the church to worship I fare forth,
I see heaven limned with harps and lutes, and hell
Where damned folk seethe in fire unquenchable:
One doth me fear, the other joy serene;
Grant I may have the joy, O Virgin clean,
To whom all sinners lift their hands on high,
Made whole in faith through thee, their go-between:
In this belief I will to live and die.
ENVOY
Thou didst conceive, Princess most bright of sheen,
Jesus the Lord, that hath no end nor mean,
Almighty that, departing heaven's demesne
To succour us, put on our frailty,
Offering to death his sweet of youth and green:
Such as he is, our Lord he is, I ween:
In this belief I will to live and die.
PART TWO