Summer Questions

"We are amazed, as we also often are during our lives, that our most prodigious experiences take place in the setting of the everyday world, that the same scenery should be used for the pantomime and the tragedy." -Rebecca West

Religion, as I am fond of repeating, means simply “to rebind together,” implying something which has become separated or fragmented, something which was once whole but is now come asunder. The fabric is torn: but it can be sewn back together.

I often think of that definition, and its appropriateness, in a world in which religion has ever played, and continues to play, such a central and too often negative role. For what we often are forced to endure, I think, is a kind of anti-religion: a force whose primary purpose is unbind, to separate, and to tear apart.

I usually try to avoid the daily news as much as possible during the summer months, but this summer it has been difficult. The ongoing and escalating violence in the middle east is a reminder of how much work we supposedly religious people still have to do. It is a reminder of how much rebinding there is to do.

I admit that it brings me close to despair sometimes. If our role as religious people is in some sense to love the world, then it is sometimes difficult to look upon our world with even a reasonable hope.

But that is what we religious folks are called to do. We are called to be peace-makers and reconcilers, and we are called to cast out fear and to replace it with love. We are called to place hope above despair.

So, while I try to avoid obsessing about the depressing scraps of daily news which, despite my best efforts to avoid them, continue to seep into my vacationing consciousness during these summer months, I keep an eye out as always for those signs and wonders which point to something transcending the tragedy which is an all too evident part of the world in which we live.

“To have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown,” is the way author Rebecca West puts it, in the book which has been my major reading project for the last several months, her magnum opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about her journeys to the Balkans in the years just before World War II. A terrible shadow, not unlike the one being cast in our own time by religious conflict and environmental degradation, stands over the scenes about which she wrote. But despite that, she wrote. She wrote though the world looked as if it might soon end.

This great book--all 1150 pages of it--purports to be a travel book, but is much, much more. Through a lens called the Balkans, West managed to shine a light upon our humanity which is unsurpassed in its insights and in the difficult questions it raises about our nature as human beings, about both the suffering and joy that we creatures experience in our brief journey through life, and the good and evil that we perpetuate.

Herewith just a few of her observations:

There is no other way of living which promises that man shall ever understand his destiny better than he does, and live less familiarly with evil.

Human beings love to inflict pain on their fellow-creatures, and the species yields to its perverse appetite, allowing vast tragedies to happen and endure for centuries, people to agonize and become extinct.

It is necessary to have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable existence lest they should impede us on a journey which may never be accomplished, which never even offers comfort.

. . . the state of mind suitable for conducting the practical affairs of daily life is not suitable for discovering ultimate meaning in life.

There cannot be taken an inventory of time contents when some among the most precious are locked away in inaccessible parts and lose their essence when they are moved to anyplace where they are likely to be examined carefully, when their owners are ignorant of parts of their nature and keep secret such knowledge of them as they have.

. . . our most prodigious experiences take place in the setting of the everyday world. .. . Existence in itself taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

. . . Perhaps we are ignorant about life in the West because we avoid thinking about death. One could not study geography if one concentrated on the land and turned one’s attention away from the sea.

It was at the Battle of Kossovo, in 1389, that the Ottoman Empire’s 500 year incursion into the west began, bringing Islam into closer and more complicated relation to Christianity than it had ever been before. The consequences of that historical event and its aftermath are still being worked Out, and as recently as 1998, in Kossovo, were once again brought to the world’s attention. Indeed, this “clash of civilizations,” as some have unfortunately called the meeting of east and west, would seem still to be a dominating factor of our existence in this summer of our discontent. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

We long for that “reality which lies above the world of appearances,” and for that “order which transcends the disorder of events.”

What we cannot afford, in this or in any other time, is an ignorance of our history. It seems impossible to believe that anyone who would take the time to read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon could ever come up with as simplistic a view of the world and of human motives as many in the halls of the world’s governments seem to have composed for themselves.

We long for a few statesmen and women with a more complicated vision of the world. But perhaps that is asking too much.

Not all of my summer thus far has been filled with such dark preoccupations, but how could I in conscience this morning ignore the elephant sitting in the middle of our global living room?

In sunny Portugal, which Sabrina and I visited recently, the lively mixture of dark and light skins among the inhabitants gives hope that people can learn to live together peacefully and happily and that the religious dream of one world is not fantasy, but impending fact. The history of imperialism and colonialism are visible in the colors and kinds of people, in their faces and physiques, and it is not all suffering and pain that we see there. The weather is fair and hot most every day, the young men and women are handsome and beautiful--or “cut and buff,” as I am told are the proper fitness descriptions for men and women--and life is nothing more than a day at the beach. The food is terrific, the wine good and cheap, the people for the most part friendly.

As in most places, this is not the whole picture, I am sure. There is also the all-to-apparent conspicuous consumption by the rich and famous. Brazilians are imported to do much of the mundane work of Portuguese society, as Hispanics are of ours. The ever-increasing population of this inviting part of the world’s real estate is already putting pressure on its ecosystem.

But it is wonderful to cast off the “world’s policeman” and “making the world safe for democracy” roles for even a few days. It is wonderful to be able to take oneself less seriously. There must be some power in weakness, just as Jesus said. Portugal remains, except in the realm of soccer, blissfully marginal to the day’s great and tragic events. Its great and powerful history is in the distant past. Life is sweet: it is obviously meant to be lived, not to be taken and squandered. And even if that is not the whole story, it’s the one I choose to read, at least for now.

Rebecca West had no illusions about the realities of life in the Balkan region during the 1930s. Like Faulkner, she understood how “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” But she saw many reasons to be hopeful. Above all, she recognized the beauty of the people and the landscape, how people learn to survive under the most difficult circumstances and in the harshest environments.

She was hopeful about the future in such a beautiful place among such enduring people. If not for the second world war and its 50 year legacy of Communism, what might have been? Instead of the dream of a southern Slav homeland--the actual meaning of ‘Yugoslavia”--we saw in the Balkan wars of the early 1990’s the fragmentation of a society which, who knows, left to its own devices might have accomplished something of lasting value to the world. It still might.

And that must be our hope, and our dream, even as our world seems to be intent on tearing itself apart. It is the true religious dream, to make things whole: to bring people together, to refuse hatred and bloodshed, to cast out fear by love, to remain ever optimistic that what we see is not all that there is, or all that there can be.

In a couple of weeks I will be heading out to Minnesota where my first church will be celebrating its 125th anniversary. I look forward to once again hitting the road and heading out into the heart of our great country. It will be a time to celebrate and rejoice. Though much has changed since my time there in the early 1980s, much, as Tennyson’s Ulysses says, “abides.” It is the timeless that I will be seeking when I return there, the timeless that I am always seeking, the values that endure, the hope that must never be relinquished.

Tennyson’s poem [“Ulysses”] seems an appropriate place to end, or even to begin:

Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods . . .
Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,-
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock