own life has none. But if my life has no meaning and hence no purpose, it will go to pieces. Psychology tells us that without a strong controlling purpose, which coordinates life, the personality disintegrates through its own inner clashes—no purpose, no personality.
But my purpose must be high enough to lift me out of myself. If my purposes end with myself, again I disintegrate. They must include God, who gives basis and lasting meaning to my purpose. If I lose God, I lose myself, my universe, everything. I see that the eighteenth-century French critic Voltaire was right when he said, “If there is no God, we will have to invent one to keep sane.”
If I let go of Christ, then God becomes the Distant, the Vague, the Unreal. In Christ, I find “the near side of God.” In him, God speaks to me a language I can understand, a human language. And as I listen to that language, my universe seems to become a Face—tender, strong, forgiving, and redemptive. Law becomes Love.
If I do not sincerely get in touch with him through the written Word, I neglect the greatest and most redemptive fact of history, and I pay the penalty of being unfed at the place of my deepest need. If I do not pray, I shall probably become cynical and shallow. If I do pray, I shall probably get nerve and courage, a sense of adequacy, power over wayward desires and passions. If I undergo a moral and spiritual change called conversion, I shall probably be unified, morally straight, and spiritually adjusted. If I do not, I shall probably become a stunted human soul.
If I must vote, then I do. I vote for Life.
O God, our Lord, I make the choice. I do choose life with all its fullest, deepest implications. Help me to find life and live it victoriously. Amen.
Week 2 Sunday
Week 2 Sunday
Why Are We Religious?
Matthew 5:48; Romans 8:19-23 (Weymouth)
There are a hundred and fifty or more various definitions of religion. One says it is “what we do with our solitariness”; another that it is “how we integrate ourselves socially”; another that “the root of religion is fear,” and so on.
The reason that it is so difficult to define is that life is difficult to define. When we define religion in terms of its various manifestations, we get partial, sometimes contradictory definitions. Religion, having many forms, has one root. That root is in the urge after life, fuller life. In everything, from the lowest cell clear up to the highest man, there is an urge toward completion, toward perfection; “all creation, gazing eagerly as if with outstretched neck”(Rom. 8:19 Weymouth). The religious urge is found in that urge for more complete life. It is that urge tuned toward higher, nobler ends. We feel that we cannot be complete unless this urge for life is fastened upon the highest life, God. Religion is the urge for life turned qualitative. It is not satisfied with life apart from quality. The urge for quantitative life reached its crest in the dinosaurs. That failed; it was a road with a dead end. The huge animals died. In human beings, the life urge turns from being merely big to being better. The qualitative and the moral emerge.
We are religious, then, because we cannot help it. We want to live in the highest, fullest sense, and that qualitative expression of life is called religion. So religion is not a cloak we can put on or off; it is identified with life itself. We are all incurably religious. Even the Communists, though repudiating religion, are deeply religious. They want a better social order. They may be right or wrong in the method of getting it, but the very desire for a better social order is religious. For religion is a cry for life.
O God, our Lord, who planted this urge for completion within us? Did you? Then, O my God, this urge is not in vain. You inspired it. You shall satisfy it with yourself. Amen.
Week 2 Monday
The Divine Initiative
John 1:1, 9, 12-13, 16-18
Yesterday we said we are religious because it is the qualitative expression of the life-urge. But this is only half the truth. This upward movement of the spirit of humanity would not of itself account for our religious spirit.
The other side of the truth is that we seem to be pressed upon from above. We do not merely aspire, we are inspired. We feel we are being invaded by the Higher. This pressure from above awakens us, makes us discontented with a divine discontent; makes us pray, sometimes with unwordable longings; makes us revolt, at least inwardly, against things as they are and against what we are. This is the divine initiative—the cosmic Lover wooing creation to God and thus to its own perfection.
Friedrich Von Hugel, the Catholic theologian, speaks of this double movement in religion as the going up of one lift and the coming down of another. Humanity moves toward God and God moves toward humanity. The Old Testament is the human search for God, the New Testament is God’s search for humanity. This is true in general but not entirely true, for there would have been no search for God in the Old Testament and in the various religions had not God inspired and initiated that search. So when people began to seek, they had in a sense already found God. God was in the very search for the Divine —its author and hence its finisher.
Impossible? Too good to be true? Not if we study the nature of life. Life not only wants more life but also wants to impart life. The creative urge is within it. God being the perfect life, would of the very necessities of the divine being, desire to impart, to share, to create. Hence the divine initiative. We are religious because we long and because God loves. God creates, we crave.
My Lord, if this be true, I am not far from you, for you are not far from me. Perhaps this very longing in my bosom is a scent of your being; there my heart grows eager, for I would find you. Amen.
Week 2 Tuesday
In Which Religion Is Defined for Us
John 1:14; 1 John 1:1-4
Yesterday we said that religion resulted from the double movement of our aspirations and God’s inspirations. God’s life impinges upon ours at every point. The result? Something disturbs our clod (our lump of clay); we aspire, we pray, we revolt against what we are.
The meeting place of this upward movement and this downward movement is Christ. He is humanity ascending and God descending—the Son of man, the Son of God. Since he is the meeting place of the two sides of religion, he becomes its definition. To the one hundred and fifty definitions we add one more: Christ. This is not a spelled-out, but a lived-out definition. Some things cannot be said, they have to be shown. So it has been shown us what constitutes religion: Christ’s spirit of life. His relationships with God and people, his purity, his love, his mastery over the environments of people and things, his care for the sinful and the underprivileged, his redemptive purposes for us and for society, his overleaping sympathy that wiped out all race and class and bound us into a community, his final willingness to take all our pain, all our defeat, all our sin into his own heart and die for them, and his offer to us of a new way and program of life—the kingdom of God on earth—all this and his sheer victory of spirit amid it all constitutes religion.
Never was there such a definition of religion as Christ gives in his own person. It cleans away all irrelevancies, all magic, all superstition, all controversies about rite and ceremony and superiorities and turns us to the serious business of learning how to live and to live victoriously. When people, therefore, ask me about this rite and that ceremony, this order, that church polity—all marginal—I simply say, I am not interested, for I have seen the Center. This grips me.
O God, we have seen what we ought to be, what we must be, if we are to live. Help us from this day to give ourselves to it with a whole-being devotion until
