Clergyman, author, and professor of Homiletics
at Yale Divinity School, Halford Luccock, used to tell the story of a father
who took his young son camping. At one point the father handed his son binoculars
so he could better see the beauty of a mountain range. But the boy took the
binoculars and looked through them from the wrong end. He complained that
everything seemed so small, that he couldn’t make anything out. His father
turned them around and said, “Now, you can see things as they are.”
I read that story years ago and have never
forgotten it. It seems an appropriate example of the error of our day.
We seem, as a society, to be looking through
the wrong end of the binoculars. Everything is small, insignificant, trite,
unclear. We have no grand vision, no breathtaking sense of the beauty of our
world and its people. We have lost our perspective.
The gifted historian and novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
was a voice of courage and truth against the old Soviet Union. His books
confronted the cruelty and emptiness of Communism. He bravely revealed the evil
of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camps, where he himself had been a prisoner for
11 years for criticizing the brutality of Joseph Stalin.
Solzhenitsyn concluded that a society, a
government, without any spiritual depth will ultimately buckle and crumble. He
once wrote, “The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of
its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market
economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of
human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not
be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any
industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”
We’re not talking here about the shallow, self-absorbed
silliness that is often promoted as spirituality today. And we’re not talking
about the politically partisan, elitist, often misguided religious foolishness
that claims to be Christian, advanced in many American churches.
The spirituality we need today seeks a deeper
understanding. It touches our core values and brings them into the light for us
to see and own. It is a spirituality that feeds on beauty, tenderness, and
tolerance. It promotes compassion. It generates feelings of connection with all
people. It breathes in us a love of life.
This kind of spirituality is found when we
learn to cherish nature; when we prize all of life both human and animal; when
we open ourselves to honesty and insight into our own human needs and desires.
It is a force that humbles us and guides us to not take ourselves so seriously.
It reminds us, often, that good and evil reside in all of us and so there is no
superiority, no call for pretentiousness from any of us.
There is a sense today that learning,
education, thinking through our attitudes and actions, are all somehow highbrow
and uppish. We seem to be led today only by primitive emotions, by anger and
resentment, by jealousy and betrayal. We have become a wounded people, carrying
with us the pain of our indifference to others, holding on to old prejudices,
ancient myths about race and religion and culture.
We miss out on so much of life when we are
unwilling to learn new things, to see life through a fuller perspective, to
risk entering the larger world around us where we experience different
religious ideas, meet people not of our class or race, try exotic foods, listen
to music that comes from other cultures, and put ourselves out there. We stunt
any depth of spirituality when we close ourselves off to only what we have
always believed, what we have always known, what we have always done.
There is an old saying by the ancient mystics, “If
you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to
learn, no one can stop you.”
That would be a lovely motto for America these
days.
I don’t want to spend my life looking through
the wrong end of the binoculars seeing life as small and impossible to see
clearly. I long for an enlarged perspective, to see things up close, to realize
just how gorgeous our existence is. I want to keep learning. I want to be open
to loving the entire world. I want to be possessed by the force of a maturing, meaningful
spirituality.
© 2018 Timothy Moody
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