The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  I think he was right. The religious boom of the 1950s was a blip and not a movement, and those main-line Protestant churches that largely profited from it were set up for a terrible fall from which many have yet to recover. In less than a decade the revival of religion in the America of the 1950s, expressed largely through statistics and buildings, was over, and the resurgence was indeed a “mostly futile attempt to regain what has been lost.” For Tillich what was lost was that “state of being grasped by an infinite concern,” and it was replaced by the sense of human achievement, power, and progress, of which the conquest of outer space was the most significant sign. “The loss of the dimension of depth is caused by the relation of man to his world and to himself in our period, the period in which nature is being subjected scientifically and technically to the control of man. In this period, life in the dimension of depth is replaced by life in the horizontal dimension.”

  We did put our trust in technology, economic success, and gave our utter institutional loyalties to the government, to the universities and colleges, and to the church. Technology failed us; we were not warmed but chilled by the terrors of our technology, epitomized by nuclear energy. Our economy turned sour and continues to bedevil us. The government lied to us in Vietnam and in Watergate, and continues to stumble in disrepute. Our colleges and universities turned first into laboratories of discontent, out of which came the angry violence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and since then have been unable to give a lead to the nation, or even to stem the dumbing-down of the culture. The churches, particularly those in whom such confidence was placed in the resurgence of the 1950s, have been reduced to mere observer status as men and women in search of a soul look elsewhere for meaning.

  These objects of trust all failed, and unambiguously so, proving themselves unworthy of one’s ultimate loyalty; and yet, because of these manifest failures, the issue of a loyalty worthy of our trust is even greater now than it was then. Hence the search for the good life is purer, more acute, and much less distracted by these idols and false gods than it was in the good old days, which is why this present search is not a revival or a resurgence, but rather a pilgrimage. It is also why for so many people it begins within, in the interior reaches of the soul.

  The Bible knows all about false gods and idols, things unworthy of our loyalty. Its first moral tale, that of Adam and Eve, is not about sex or even about disobedience. We might say that it is about a false trust in the benevolence of knowledge, for it was the fruit of that tree that got the first society into trouble. “O put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man; for there is no help in them,” we read in Psalm 146. “Some put their trust in chariots, and some in horses,” says Psalm 20:7–8, “but we will remember the name of the Lord our God. They are brought down and fallen; but we are risen and stand upright.” The Bible, if nothing else, is a book about the dangers of false trust:

  Put no trust in a neighbor,

  have no confidence in a friend,

  guard the doors of your mouth

  from her who lies in your bosom,

  For the son treats the father with contempt,

  the daughter rises up against her mother,

  the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;

  a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.

  But as for me, I will look to the Lord, I will wait

  for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.

  (Micah 7:5–7)

  A book that knows this about the human condition must also know a lot about God. We can trust what that book has to say about the source of trust. It is not the Bible but the God of the Bible in whom we find someone, something, worthy of our loyalty, our ultimate concern, our trust: “In returning and rest you shall be saved: in quietness and trust shall be your strength.” (Isaiah 30:15)

  For tired people weary of noise and striving after that which gives no reward, a book that promises this is worth taking seriously; and now, perhaps, having exhausted ourselves and all of the alternatives, we may just begin to do so.

  Am I on My Own?

  Despite the crowded conditions of this planet, most of us think ourselves alone and on our own in the matters that count. The two groups that I know best speak of loneliness as if it were patented for them alone. Students in their private confessions of soul, while they are anxious and fearful and full of the insecurities of youth, speak more often of loneliness than of anything else, and in those fears, anxieties, and insecurities they think of themselves as utterly alone and the first to feel this way. “It’s not that I’m homesick,” said one young undergraduate in a moment of unguarded candor, “but I do feel as if everything I do now depends entirely upon me and on me alone. I looked forward to being on my own, but now I’m not so sure.”

  The other group I know well, the clergy, have as their besetting anxiety the fearful fact of loneliness. “In the end,” said one of my colleagues, “we are all Lone Rangers. Lawyers, doctors, even computer programmers stick together; we are all soloists.” We might like to think of ourselves as Henry David Thoreau with his three chairs, “one for solitude, two for company, and three for society,” but the demands and disciplines of solitude are too much for most of us who have no woods into which we can retreat.

  We celebrate individualism and autonomy in America, and we like to think of ourselves as beyond merely following the crowd. Yet we abhor silence, and we mass together whenever we can, in sports stadia, rock concerts, and in that crowd that is defined not by physical proximity but by the deadening uniformity of the shared experience of television. Like those crowds that flock to Times Square to see in the New Year, we flock together and dare not be alone lest we discover that we are not only alone but on our own. No one knows, no one cares. This is not the fear of mere physical isolation; rather, this is what Joseph Conrad once called “moral solitude.” This is what he says:

  Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.

  Moral solitude is more than the lack of companionship and fellowship; it is that, but it is more than that. It is the loss of the sense of accountability and responsibility that at first appears to be the benefit of autonomy, but turns out to be, together with autonomy, itself a liability.

  We all know the cliché that in Africa, the archtypical “primitive” society, it “takes a whole village to raise a child.” We utter that cliché with a sense of longing and of loss, for most of us remember those villages from which we sought an early escape. When I was growing up, a small-town boy in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, now fifty years ago, I remember that the whole town was part of a conspiracy to deprive me of my liberty. “They” were all in it together, my school teachers, my pastor and Sunday school teachers, the cop on the beat, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, they were all in league with my parents, and there were no hiding places. I remember once when I was fifteen years old and able to go to the “adult” movies when “adult” was not a euphemism for “pornographic,” I decided that I wanted to see what was then the controversial film The Sandpiper, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were at the height of their notoriety. I knew that it was about a scandalous clergyman, and the presence of Elizabeth Taylor promised a little sizzle. So after school I put up my money to catch the matinee. I knew the ticket taker, and worse, she knew me. She left my money underneath the opening of her booth, and said, “Does your mother know you’re here?” I took back the money and fled. Mother probably would not have minded for she was a very sensible woman, but I minded that she would know what I had done, innocent as it seemed to me, even before I got home from the Old Colony Theatre. She would have cared, as did the ticket taker, and I would be accountable. The village, inhibiting and st
ifling as it was, worked.

  My college generation is the one that overthrew the old village concept of college life. We so harassed the college administrations of our day, heady as we were with the new wine of autonomy and revolution, that they caved in to our “nonnegotiable demands.” We killed requirements and regulations against our freedom, and with these we slew the biggest dragon on the campus, the doctrine of in loco parentis. No longer did the college stand in place of our parents. We were now customers and consumers, and the college was our shopping mall.

  We are now running these colleges and more often than not are bemused and confused when our students demand that the college take a moral stand, say on divestment in corporate malefactors of great wealth, or that it give institutional support to the values and needs, say, of minority communities. When a controversial speaker comes to town and is likely to give offense to somebody, colleges are criticized for not taking “community values” and “community sensibilities” into account. To many, institutional refuge in the principle of absolute “free speech” seems an abdication of moral responsibility and institutional accountability. Parents, and the general body politic, insist that colleges interfere more than they have done in the private lives of their students as far as drinking and drugs are concerned, and wholesale development of quasi-legal codes of conduct under the rubric of sexual harassment have made deans and college administrations far more intrusive than they ever were in the bad old days of parietal rules and the old-fashioned disciplinary rules that defined and punished “conduct unbecoming the college.” The difference between “now” and “then,” of course, is that “then” there was a reasonably broad consensus on what “conduct unbecoming” was.

  At Harvard Commencement, from ancient times the president confers degrees upon the various candidates with a little formula suited to the special qualities of the profession for which the candidates have been presented. The candidates in law, usually rowdy and surly as they rise to be admitted, are granted their degrees with the president’s ironic certification that they are fit “to assist in shaping those wise restraints that make us free.” Although the repute in which lawyers are held has perhaps never been lower, I think that all of us have an increasing appreciation of “those wise restraints,” if we could only figure out what they are; and that such “wise restraints” are necessary is not merely a concession to Thomas Hobbes’s mordant view of human nature, but an affirmation of an ancient view that we are not and cannot be “on our own.” Neither our souls nor our society can afford the luxury of such a liberty.

  Most of us do not need a seventeenth-century political philosopher to tell us this. We know and fear the moral solitude that deprives us of the fellowship of our fellow pilgrims, and it is this desire for fellowship, not just company but fellowship, that is the ambition of the men and women of our day in search of Paul Tillich’s “lost dimension.” It is a commonplace that conservative churches are growing at such a fast rate because people want quick and easy certitude, and in an age of anxiety and uncertainty they want absolutes and infallibilities. So-called liberal churches in their statistical decline denigrate the success of their evangelical competition, and argue that it is bought with the price of cheap grace and an inability to handle the ambiguities of modernity, but I suggest that while fundamentalism does offer a whole host of absolutes on to which people can cling, the reasons for spectacular growth cannot be attributed alone to the search for certitude. I would argue that people are seeking companionship, fellowship, in their pilgrimage, and that the sense of community, of being in a place that cares, where people are accountable to and responsible for one another, is an even greater and more desirable quality than theological certitude. On matters of doctrine, despite all claims to the contrary, we know now only in part and will know fully only when we are with the Lord, but we do not have to wait for the day of the Lord to know and to experience the benefits of a beloved community of memory and hope. The secret of such a community is that it stands apart from the secular culture and is not its mere reflection. It has something to offer the lonely soul who seeks soul-mates in the soul-denying culture of purely rational, secular, and utilitarian mainstream culture.

  Robert Wuthnow’s helpful book, Christianity in the 21st Century: Reflections on the Challenges Ahead, suggests that our model for religious community in the new millennium will not come from a reconstruction of the “primitive” church of biblical times or from a re-creation of the “prosperous” church of the 1950s American ideal. Rather, Wuthnow suggests that a lesson can be learned from the cults and the Twelve-Step groups that proliferated as church substitutes in the 1970s. What did they have to offer? These groups first “drew on and created a distinct past of their own,” and that past did not simply mirror “a vague vision of secular progress.” Second, they drew people apart from the larger social environment into smaller, self-contained, self-defined, and disciplined communities within which new identities could be formed and affirmed. Third, they focused on the nonrational and invented rituals and forms of meaning that got people “out of their heads.”2

  Many of us know the dangers and excesses of many of these New Age movements; we have smiled wryly at the image of overweight white men beating drums in the suburban woods, and at rational women’s rediscovery of the appeals of witchcraft and the goddess community. The reappropriation of the ancient symbols of fire, blood, and water in group-invented liturgies make many of us wonder and some of us worry about the reaccreditation of what some call the new paganism. Yet these way stations on the pilgrimage for spirituality have taken thousands beyond the inhospitable doors of their local churches and the Christian churches of their birth and have given them a meaning, a discipline, and a fellowship that most churches in their aping of modernity have been unable or unwilling to provide.

  One of the deacons of my home church told me of a visit she made with our pastor a few years ago to one of our shut-ins. The old lady on whom they called was not shut in in the conventional sense of being confined by age or infirmity to her home, but she had not come to church on a regular basis for years, and when asked why, told her church visitors that she got more comfort and consolation, “even fellowship,” from watching Dr. Robert Schuller and his Crystal Cathedral services than ever she did from sitting in the pews of our church, where no one seemed to notice her. This was not so much an affirmation of the effective television ministry of the Crystal Cathedral as it was an indictment of the ineffective ministry of the local church. When someone can feel more companionship in front of a television set than in the midst of a congregation, our first response ought not to be to smash the television. It gave our deacons and pastor much to think about, to pray on, and to work for.

  When we realize that the Bible is about the formation of a fellowship, a community of men and women who are reminded over and over again that they are not alone, not on their own but part of a communion, a company of both the living and the dead in which is to be found the living presence of a loving God, we find that the Bible’s unambiguous answer to the question “Am I on my own?” is a resounding “No!”

  In the creation story in Genesis, it is God himself who says, “It is not good for the man to be alone,” and in the New Testament it is Jesus who says to his despairing disciples, “I will not leave you comfortless.” (John 14:18)

  Willa Gather calls that sense of communion “happiness,” that sense that we are not on our own but that we belong. She writes in My Antonia, in an entirely secular sense, “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” We know, however, that it is not about happiness but about belonging that she speaks. The white Baptist sharecropper in the hills of Georgia knew it as well when he sang at his annual camp meeting or revival this hymn of Elisha A. Hoffman:

  What a fellowship, what a joy divine,

  Leaning on the everlasting arms;

  What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,

  Leaning on the everlasting arms.

 
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms;

  Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.

  Every human being wants to love, to be loved, and to know that he or she is loved, and when one does that and knows that and shares that, then the question “Am I on my own?” is answered in the place where that love is found. That is what the Bible is all about, and the good life to which it points.

  Can I Feel Good About Myself?

  Answering the telephone in my business can be both a dangerous and a revealing experience. Awhile ago, on a busy Saturday morning in the church office, I picked up the telephone when it was about to ring off the hook. It was one of the many Saturday calls we get from the anonymous public asking who the preacher on Sunday is to be. As it was I, I answered warmly but without identifying myself: “The preacher is the Minister in The Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals.” The caller paused, and then asked, “Is that that short, fat, little black man?” In some annoyance I replied curtly, “Yes,” and slammed down the receiver.

  Now what was wrong? This caller had not insulted me, and in fact had given an objective description of my basic characteristics in the course of asking an honest question. Why should I be upset? These were hardly racist or inflammatory remarks; and that was just the problem. Her description flew in the face of my self-image. Not that I think of myself as tall and blond or as a dead ringer for Denzel Washington. I usually think of myself, however, as more than the sum total of my physical characteristics, and when I was reduced to them my ego was, perhaps appropriately, rebuffed, as she had come dangerously near to my fragile self-esteem. This is not a problem peculiar to short black men!