The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  My Ample Creed

  The thought that science could somehow box in the majesty of the Bible, that science had an answer that would of necessity supplant the sense of mystery and awe that the author of Job puts into the mouth of the thundering God, that geology, or biology, or astronomy would hold hostage the teachings of the law and the prophets, the poetry of the psalms, the passion of Jesus, and the revelations of the saints—all of that seems hard to imagine and difficult to credit, as if, for example, we should not have Homer, Virgil, or Shakespeare because they are all prescientific. Secular arrogance and religious ego and anxiety have not served us well, but what remains to stimulate and provoke beyond the capacity of the human mind or imagination is indeed the thought of God, the enlargement of which was the reason for an obscure minister’s annual sermon on the latest developments in astronomy. Perhaps old Dr. Adams had his people sing this hymn of Frederick Lucian Hosmer:

  One thought I have, my ample creed,

  So deep it is, and broad,

  And equal to my every need—

  It is the thought of God.

  We were meant for such thoughts, created for them, in fact, and the Bible, if we understand it rightly, is a book not about limits but about infinity, and visions, not history minus but poetry plus. The Bible represents the longing of the human imagination to find expression for itself in infinity. The mind is the gift of God with which the Bible is both written and read. Former Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell once wrote:

  Man cannot set a limit to this thought. Man cannot conceive of a boundary to space, or a time that began and will end because he cannot fetter the processes of his own mind. He was made for infinite conceptions of which he is to partake. Only at infinity can the vision be finished and the end complete.7

  Lowell was neither biblical scholar nor scientist, but he understood something of the medieval notion that the mind was the soul’s road to God: “He was made for infinite conceptions.” The Bible has nothing to fear from science, and science, with its sense of wonder and awe and infinity, has much to learn from the Bible. The believer need not be afraid.

  Chapter 16

  The Bible and Mystery

  MYSTERY is not an argument for the existence of God; mystery is an experience of the existence of God. Very much like suffering and joy, mystery can often be that place in which we come to know better who God is, and who we are. The Bible is valuable to us because it is the record of those for whom mystery and meaning are not antithetical but a life’s work in the growing knowledge of self and of God. It is my impression that this biblical ambition for humankind is perhaps more urgent and vital now than at any previous point in history.

  Before we make the case for mystery as one of those thin places in which the human and the divine encounter one another, we must in some sense demystify mystery. I am not trying to be clever. Mystery has a bad reputation in religious language as an all-pervading, argument-proof cop-out when something cannot be explained; when there is a problem to which there appears to be no answer, the temptation is to call the entire thing a mystery. To the impious, or just to the garden-variety secularist, such a device is merely clothing naked ignorance in the fig leaf of mystery, and to the pious and the generally reverent, mystery is not the opposite of knowledge but the opposite of pride or of hubris. Mystery in this sense is the frontier between what we know and can explain and what we experience and cannot explain. Mystery can be seen in the American sense of a frontier, a place or space that remains to be settled or conquered. Mystery here is merely unfinished or un-addressed business, which in the fullness of time and with the inevitable improvements in skills and technologies will be solved. As might be easily said, a mystery is merely an unsolved problem, and unsolved problems do not provoke awe or devotion but merely irritation, intrigue, and persistence.

  Some years ago I took up Princeton theologian Diogenes Allen’s little book on temptation for my Lenten reading, and through it I learned a lot about temptation, but surprisingly and unexpectedly, I learned more about mystery; and what I learned there has helped me ever since in the appreciation of mystery. Speaking of the greatest mystery of the human experience, the relationship between good and evil or, as Saint Paul says, the conundrum we experience when we want to do good but persist in doing evil and seemingly cannot separate good intentions from bad effects, Allen says, “Mysteries to be known must be entered into.” He then goes on: “For we do not solve mysteries; we enter into them. The deeper we enter into them, the more illumination we get. Still greater depths are revealed to us the further we go.”

  It is not so with problems. “When a problem is solved, it is over and done with. We go on to other problems…. But a mystery once recognized is something we are never finished with. It is never exhausted. Instead, we return to it again and again and it unfolds new levels to us…. We live in a universe permeated by a divine reality whose hem we touch when we encounter mysteries.”1

  Such a useful distinction between a problem and a mystery set me off on a consideration of one of my favorite forms of literary diversion, the mystery novel; and I began to take some liberties with Allen’s characterization and to apply them to the genre by which so many of us have been so well entertained for so long. When I think, for example, of the Queen of Mystery, Dame Agatha Christie, I am reminded that invariably she sets up the police, the professionals in the murder business, as problem solvers. Somebody is dead, somebody has killed him, and the problem is to find out who as quickly as possible. This problem must be solved so that one can get on to the other problems awaiting solutions; thus Agatha Christie’s policemen are usually in a hurry, eager to follow obvious leads, anxious to jump to conclusions because of the very reasonable desire to conclude. Thus, her policemen are made to look impatient, superficial, even careless in their pursuit—not of the truth but of proof toward a solution. The problem-oriented police are what we might call tidy-minded.

  Miss Christie’s stable of amateur detectives, on the other hand, Miss Marple and the annoyingly fastidious Hercule Poirot, look upon their murders not as problems to be solved but as phenomena to be entered into. They seem to understand, as Allen does and the police in general do not, that “we do not solve mysteries; we enter into them,” and they also understand that “the deeper we enter into them, the more illumination we get. Still greater depths are revealed to us the further we go.” Thus Miss Christie’s detectives are neither distracted by the apparent nor impatient with the apparently obscure. They are usually not in a hurry, and unlike the harried police, they have time to pursue in a fashion that appears to be leisurely but is actually thorough, unraveling the whole skein of relationships, motives, personalities, and the like. True, both the detectives and the police share one objective: the solution of the crime. In that sense they are each problem-oriented, but as with so many things in life, it is not the end that counts so much as the perspective.

  An essential ingredient in that perspective is imagination, a characteristic the police are frequently described as lacking in the mystery/ detective story genre, and it is to the greatest of all detectives, Sherlock Holmes, that we must turn for the definitive word on the use of imagination in mystery. In “Silver Blaze,” the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mystery story in which the dog did not bark in the night, Holmes and Dr. Watson have an encounter with a very competent, aggressive, and self-satisfied young policeman named Gregory. Taking the clues and evidence fully into account, Gregory comes to a conclusion as to the circumstances and culprit, and rules out the inexplicable in favor of a solution. Holmes, however, as we know, is always fascinated more by the inexplicable than by explanations, particularly by those drawn from clues that often stifle the imagination. Basing his investigation upon what isn’t there, the absence of the explainable, Holmes goes on to solve the mystery and to get his man—or, in this case, his horse. In characteristically modest triumph, he explains to Dr. Watson: “See the value of imagination. It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what m
ight have happened, acted upon that supposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed.”

  Through the sympathetic but informed eyes of Dr. Watson, the man of science and of rational sympathies, we are led over and over again to marvel at the triumphs of instinct, intuition, intelligence, and the passion for imagination with which the amateur sleuth enters into his mysteries, and thereby manages, in fulfillment of the expectation of the genre, to solve not a few problems.

  Two Problems and a Mystery

  The two days of the year upon which the churches of Christendom are filled to capacity with the eager, the curious, and the devout are of course Easter and Christmas. There remains, even in these secular and sophisticated times of near barbarous proportions, a primal, almost homing instinct to go to church on the part of even the most casual and remote of Christians; and any of us who has ever been in church on one or both of these days knows this experience. While Easter continues to generate the larger of the two very large crowds, Christmas, I have always found, is by far the most vivid example of the phenomenon, perhaps because the world has been so saturated with the secular banalities and vulgarities of the Christmas season since mid-October that it is a wonder that there is anything left to behold on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day. Yet I have done duty in churches on Christmas Eve where a capacity congregation with standing room only has been in place for two hours before the service is due to begin, while enormous crowds of disappointed would-be worshipers, many of whom have just risen from Lucullan dinners, are left outside in the cold, literally banging on the doors and demanding admittance. I recently heard one very angry excluded person harass an usher at the door, screaming at him and saying, “This is Christmas Eve! You’ve got to let me in! I’ve got my rights; you can’t keep me outta church on Christmas Eve!” He represented the same kind of disappointed crowd as that left out of a rock concert or a sporting event.

  Inside, the scene was remarkable, made up of the good, the great, and the smart—those who had arrived early—surrounded by those who had been drawn in either again or for the first time, and who knew that this was where they wished to be on this night. The vast crowd knew the hymns for they were the great carols and songs of Christmas, hardly ruined by their tinny overorchestration and exposure at the hands of crooners, TV specials, and Luciano Pavarotti, and the roar of their glad tidings was overwhelming. The secret delight of the clergy is that we live all year for a night like this.

  Then the great paradox of the evening began to unfold. The liturgy was unfamiliar to this vast throng and they didn’t know when to stand or when to kneel or when to respond or to join in. Every effort was made to make the liturgy user-friendly in an attempt to reduce the unnecessary distinctions between those who knew what they were doing in the service of worship and those who did not; yet what unfolded before us was a tableau of what might be called a “speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy.”

  They loved the music. They liked the familiar lessons. They endured the sermon. They embraced the Eucharist. Then they were gone, far more quickly than they had arrived, out into the silent and very dark night and back to God knows where. They would not be seen again soon, certainly not on Christmas morning, which was intimate by comparison, and perhaps not again until Easter day.

  Who are they? Why do they come? What do they expect? What do they want? Easter and Christmas are the two problems that most clergy have the most difficulty in solving.

  In my preaching classes I am almost always asked, both by novice preachers and by old hands, “What am I to do with Christmas and Easter?” The problem is real, and for many the answer is, initially at least, clerical violence of a holy, righteous sort, but violence nonetheless. I can remember the pastors of my youth who on Easter Sunday would let out a year’s accumulated bile against the “twicesters,” as those who came but twice a year were called. One of them went so far as to welcome them at Easter by wishing them a Happy Memorial Day, a Glorious Fourth of July, a Good Labor Day, a Peaceful Veterans’ Day, and a Gracious Thanksgiving, and by wishing them as well a Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Father’s Day, Happy Children’s Day, and Happy Birthdays for the year. He did this with a smile, while making the point that not only did he not expect to see them again before the next Easter, but he was annoyed, and so too was God. The large congregation of course blushed and tittered, and waited for him to get it out of his system.

  The problem of clerical anger on these great holy days is one thing, but there is an even greater problem, and that is what to say to people who give you at best two opportunities to tell them all they need to know about the gospel. “What do I do with these religious voyeurs?” is the question I often hear. Before I even attempt to answer the question, I force myself and my colleagues to look very closely, very hard, at who comes to these great days, and to speculate, in the absence of a poll, as to what brings them once and what brings them back. Suspending the personal and professional umbrage we may take at their neglect of us and of our services, we should ask not what it is that we are doing wrong on most of the other Sundays and holy days of the year, but what it is that brings them out in such consistently huge numbers on these two occasions.

  The analysis is often quite heated, at least at the start. “Rank superstition and primitive, barbaric fear” is one. “Mere social habit, custom, the weight of unexamined tradition” is another. “Lack of imagination; they would not know what else to do on Easter and Christmas” is a third. “Cheap grace, an insurance policy against the possibility that there is a hell and that they may be going to it” is yet another. “Fear and loneliness, perhaps hope and nostalgia as well” is perhaps a more sympathetic view. My experience tells me that it is all of the above, and then some, and this I have found is not a problem but a splendid opportunity, and evidence beyond compromise that people even today seek out those places both deep and thin where they have reason to believe that they will be satisfied. When you are hungry you go to a restaurant. When you are thirsty you seek out water. People are hungry and thirsty, and somewhere in the recesses of their spiritual subconscious they have heard or remember that you can expect to be filled in church. Perhaps they remember from childhood Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes in Matthew 5: “Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” Or “satisfied,” as some translations render it.

  They don’t come to church on Christmas and Easter because they are cynical. They come because they are hungry and thirsty, and we are told also by Jesus that when a man or a woman is hungry we should not offer stones in place of bread. In Milton’s delicious figure in “Lycidas,” “the hungry sheep look up, yearning to be fed.” It is perhaps inconvenient that they should all want to be fed at once and only twice a year, for it plays havoc with our sense of the seemliness of things, and yet I believe that we should honor and affirm what they know: that these are the right times to be in the right place.

  I discussed the problem of the twicesters with some rabbi friends who noted a similar phenomenon in Judaism at the time of the autumn High Holy Days. There is real anger in the congregations, not simply on the part of the rabbis but on the part of those who are always there, who pay their dues and sustain the operation on lean and unfashionable Sabbaths. Then along come all these strangers, taking up pew and parking space, and shoving out the regulars who ought to get some credit for their regular virtue. One of these rabbis said that it was one of his congregation’s most vexing problems until someone recognized it as an opportunity, and perhaps even a God-sent one at that. “We see it as an opportunity for what you Christians call ‘evangelism.’ Except that with you, that usually means you are trying to convert us, but with us, on these Holy Days, maybe we ought to be in the business of trying to convert our fellow Jews.” I liked what he said, and half the battle is won by the fact that the people are in the right place at the right time; the rest now is up to us.

  Now that we have them, and their attention, what do we do with them? What d
o we give them? I hope that we don’t give them an explanation because certainly on Christmas and Easter the people deserve more than an explanation. That is a hard proposition for the clergy to understand or to accept. Surely we must teach these uninformed, occasional worshipers what it is all about? Well, must we really?! Some of the worst preaching I have ever experienced has to do with the well-intentioned efforts of able and conscientious clergy to “explain” Christmas, or to “make sense of” Easter to their thronged congregations, and these efforts to put people at their theological ease stem, in my opinion, from a profoundly mistaken assumption that people are driven to church on these days by a craving for facts, explanations, and solutions. People don’t come to church to seek out truth, as we customarily understand that concept as a form of scientific, rational verification of the facts; rather, the churches are filled with people who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, satisfaction, and yes, meaning. Unlike American television’s Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department, they want, and they deserve, more than “just the facts.”