Where Faith Falls Short

One of my favorite stories from the gospels is that of the man who brought his son to Jesus to be healed of his fits. And Jesus asked the father, "How long has he been like this?" "From childhood," he replied; "often it has tried to make an end of him by throwing him into the fire or into the water. But if it is at all possible for you, take pity upon us and help us." "If it is possible!" said Jesus. "Everything is possible to one who has faith." And the boy's father cried out, "I have faith; help me where faith falls short." Or as the older Bible put it, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

The father wants to believe, clearly, in some power higher and greater and more holy than any power of man, and he wants to be helped in his unbelief. Further he has at this moment a particular reason for belief in such a power, because he has decided that only such a power can heal his son. Lastly, the story shows us that faith and doubt, belief and unbelief, can exist side by side in the same person.

I think we should accept that fact at once. It is the cry, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" It is a common experience in the history of the Christian Church, to feel thus forsaken, to endure periods of what are called dryness. And sometimes to get angry with God, who seems to make no effort to succor us, an anger expressed so well by that extraordinary Saint Theresa, who said to God, "If this is the way you treat your disciples, it is no wonder that you have so few of them."

I am going to discuss the problems of faith as seen and experienced by a Christian layman who is not a theologian, and who has never been able to devote to these problems what might be called systematic thought. I have always regarded theologians and philosophers as systematic thinkers, and I have had some envy of those whose actual job it is to think systematically and who actually get paid for it.

One of these theologians and philosophers, for whom I had a deep affection and respect, had a long association with this University. That was Reinhold Niebuhr, whom I first heard speak in 1946 in London. I have heard many speakers in my life, but he surpassed them all. He moved his argument forward with every sentence that he spoke, in language of the greatest clarity. I could not remember the substance of his address after all these years, but I think that this is true of all great speeches--what one remembers is not their substance but one's own enthrallment. I do, however, remember one thing, for it was one of his recurring themes, that one should not expect too much of human society; an individual may become a saint, but collectively we are a tough proposition. One cannot live without hope, but one should beware of optimism. He wrote these words:

            Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore, we
            must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes
            complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must
            be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished
            alone. Therefore, we are saved by love.

I heard him again eight years later, at the Golden Jubilee of Kent School, Connecticut. He had had a stroke then, and delivered his address sitting at a table. He slurred some of his words, but the old magic was there. In the course of his address, he again dealt with human society, and in particular American society, with its civil rights and its civil wrongs, its riches and its poverty, its lofty idealism and its not so lofty materialism. He looked at us earnestly and then said judgmentally. "It's a mess." Then he considered that for a moment, and he added, "But I like it." It brought down the house, because in seven short words he captured the human condition. Earnestness is often made endurable by wit.

Are the difficulties of faith greater today than they have ever been? Who can answer such a question? It has become customary to refer to the "ages of faith". We say that the great cathedrals of Europe were built in the ages of faith. There is a tablet in an old Yorkshire church which bears these words: "In the year 1652 when throughout England all things sacred were either profaned or neglected, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet, whose special praise it is to have done the best things in the worst times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous." And if one goes back another 1600 years, one can find in the Revelation given to John on Patmos, in the message to the Seven Churches, the record of human faithlessness. Or go back another 1500 years, and we find Abraham pleading with God to spare the city of Sodom, if only there could be found fifty righteous persons there; and if not 50, then perhaps 45, or 40, or 30, or even 20. And Abraham said, "Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there." And the Lord said, "I will not destroy it for ten's sake."

Yet it may be that the difficulties today are greater. I have no doubt that the unbelief of many today is a direct result of the unbelief of others. Undoubtedly the unbelief of many of our children is either because they witness the unbelief of their elders or because they are not deceived by their conventional religion. Jesus said, "Whosoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child, will never enter it." But it is hard for a modern person to behave like a child. We know too much. We fly to the moon. We have discovered the very secrets of inheritance.

When I was 32 years of age, I went to Johannesburg to be the principal of Diepkloof Reformatory. I was a member of the Diocese of Johannesburg, under its great bishop Geoffrey Clayton. I attended African churches in the black satellite town of Orlando, which was the forerunner of the giant city of Soweto, now troubled by endemic unrest. I have seen many a time old black men and women entering the churches on their knees. Their abasement smote me to the heart. Is it something we sophisticates have lost, this willingness to abase ourselves before the Maker of Heaven and Earth? And are we ashamed to abase ourselves before God in the presence of others?

When I was in Johannesburg, I met a man of my own age, Tom Savage, later to become Bishop of Zululand. I am tempted to say that he was the holiest man I ever knew, but the description doesn't quite fit, because of the earthiness and saltiness of his humor. He had been an engineer before he became a priest, and he told the story of how he took his parish car to a garage for some small repairs. When he went to fetch it again, he was presented with a bill that staggered him. He asked for details, and when he was given them, he said to the proprietor, "Look here, mate, don't be fooled by this collar; before I took to wearing it, I was an engineer, and I tell you these things that you put right didn't need putting right at all." Tom Savage had innocent blue eyes and an irresistible smile, and he had the extraordinary gift of making people feel repentant without accusing them. He could make a tough believer in the color bar begin to feel ashamed of it, a gift I never had myself. I can make people feel guilty, but he could make them feel penitent. When he prayed before the altar, he would prostrate himself. His standards were high, and he would judge every act by them, but there was no sanctimony in him because his judgements were salty, too. My first wife and I went to see him when he was dying, and he spoke calmly about death and eternal life. When we left, we kneeled to receive his blessing, but while we wept he smiled and perhaps, indeed, he was smiling at our weeping. I would find it impossible to believe that Tom Savage lived his life in the service of a Power that did not exist, that he prostrated himself before the creation of his own imagination. People have said to me, "Where's this Holy Spirit? Show it to me." It was a question much easier to answer when Tom Savage was alive, though I don't think that makes it a good answer. One hesitates to point to oneself, yet one's faith is that God is there, too.

Is it true that we, Western People, are no longer able to believe in anything that cannot be seen or heard or touched or tasted, in anything that cannot be weighed and measured and counted? Is it true that in our materialism we can no longer believe in the evidence of things not seen? Is it true that we have grown so old and so clever that we can no longer believe in the story of the birth and the death and the resurrection, in the myth of a man who said he was the son of God, who said that those who had seen him had seen God also, in the myth of a man whom simple fishermen called Lord. This was the Lord for whom Francis of Assisi yielded literally everything, possessions, and ease and the love of women, except for his Lady of Poverty. He, like Tom Savage, was a saint who never ceased to be a man. When he was about to die--I am quoting from Elizabeth Goudge--he made a strange request. He asked to be well clothed upon his bier, and to have candles about him, and a cushion for his head. He saw no sin in it because his body would be dead and would feel no pleasure.

He asked his brothers to remove his tunic and to lay him naked on the ground. There he lay with his left hand covering the wound in his side. Seeing him thus lie, the Father Guardian of the Portiuncula brought his own tunic and breeches to cover him, and to forestall Francis' refusal he said to him, "I lend you this tunic and breeches, and in order that you may know that you have no right of property in them, I deprive you of all power to give them to anyone else." Francis' face lit up with joy, and for two reasons, for this speech was meant as acknowledgement that Francis had always been true to his vows of poverty, but it was tender and teasing also, a remembrance of the many times that Francis, to the despair of the brothers, had given away all that he possessed.

When they put him back on his bed, he was content though in much pain. The next morning he asked for his brothers, and for a loaf of bread to be broken in pieces, and he gave to each of them. This was their last meal together.
When he was about to die, he asked again to be laid on the ground, and with what voice was left to him he sang the 142nd Psalm, beginning "I cried unto the Lord with my voice; with my voice unto the Lord did I make my supplication," and ending, "Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the righteous shall compass me about, for thou shall deal bountifully with me."
And having so sung, he died.

Some people say that the days of faith are over, that Francis of Assisi lived in times that will never be known again, and that is why he was able to die singing. Such people should read that book, Dying We Live, which to me is one of the noblest books of this century. It contains the last letters of German men and women, some of them young, so young, who accepted death under Hitler rather than deny their faith. I have no doubt that Hitler himself was in large part responsible for the sickness of our age, though he was no doubt a product of it also. He did a great deal to shake the faith of the West in the redeemability of the human race. But I have found that for every thousand people who know of the apostasy of Hitler, there may be one person who knows of this record of the lives and deaths of those who would not bend the knee to him.

Let me read to you the last letter of a farm boy from the Sudetenland, one of the immortal letters of our century.

                                                                                                February 3, 1944
                        Dear Parents: I must give you bad news--I have been condemn-
            ed to death, I and Gustave G. We did not sign up for the SS, and
            so they condemned us to death. You wrote me, indeed, that I should
            not join the SS; my comrade, Gustave G., did not sign up either.

Both of us would rather die than stain our consciences with such
            deeds of horror. I know what the SS has to do. Oh, my dear parents,
            difficult as it is for me and for you, forgive me everything; if I
            have offended you, please forgive me and pray for me. If I were to
            be killed in the war while my conscience was bad, that too would be
            sad for you. Many more parents will lose their children. Many SS
            men will get killed too. I thank you for everything you have done
            for my good since my childhood; forgive me, pray for me....
            On February 18, 1943, Hans Scholl, age 23, and his sister Sophie, age 21, were caught dropping copies of the leaflet "Pamphlet of the White Rose" from a gallery into the main lobby of the University of Munich, calling on the German people to throw off the yoke of Nazism. This was when the Russians were turning the tide of war, and the Nazis were at their most vicious. One of the group was Christoph Probst, age 23. He was sentenced to death on February 21 and executed on February 22, 1943. His mother and sister were allowed to read his farewell letters in the presence of the Gestapo, but were not allowed to keep them. This is how they remembered them.

To his mother: "I thank you for having given me life. When I really think
            it through, it has all been a single road to God. Do not grieve that I must
            now skip the last part of it. Soon I shall be closer to you than before.
            In the meantime I'll prepare a glorious reception for you all."

To his sister: "I never knew dying is so easy. . . .I die without any feelings
of hatred. . . .Never forget that life is nothing but a growing in love and a preparation for eternity."

One can note in passing that words of such beauty and simplicity can only be written either by the greatest of poets and writers, or by quite ordinary men and women who are confronting some kind of ultimate experience and are so purified by it that nothing can be added to their words and nothing taken away, words such as those spoken by Polycarp when he was promised his life if he abjured his faith: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He hath done me no wrong. How then can I speak evil of my King who saved me?"

It is impossible, when we read the letters of Dying We Live, to say that the days of faith are over. Yet one cannot say that one lives in an age of faith. I do not mean only faith in God, a faith that the world is a creation and that it is the work of a Creator, and what is more--and this is the essence of the teaching of the gospel--that God the Creator has a love for Creation, and that means a love for us who are God's creatures. I don't mean just that kind of faith. I mean--almost--a faith in anything at all. For many the universe has no meaning at all, or if it has a meaning, or if it appears to have a meaning, that meaning is the chance product of its evolution. People--and very clever people, too--speculate about its origin. I do not belong to this band of clever people. I do not understand the Big Bang. Something in me resists the conclusion that out of this elemental cataclysm came Shakespeare and Beethoven and Einstein, even myself. When I was young, we liked to believe that the existence of life was the final and irrefutable proof of the existence of God, because it was inexplicable except in terms of divine and supernatural power. But you can't believe that any more. For it has been proved that the origin of life can be explained in terms of chemistry, and in my youth it was supposed that atoms and molecules, not possessing what we call life, could in no circumstances produce what we call life. It has been shown that an incredibly unpredictable conjunction of certain chemical constituents does in fact bring about a miracle.

Life in itself is miracle enough, but the forms which life takes are even more miraculous. One of the greatest miracles of all is the human body which we inhabit, the brain that can think and plan and manufacture rockets that fly to the moon, and make music and poetry. The eye that can see, the ear that can hear, the tongue that can taste, the fingers that can feel. There is no more wonderful instrument than the eye.

Some people--and some very clever--believe that there is no purpose whatever in this evolutionary process, that the brain and the ear and the eye are the products of millions of years of the operations of chance, that there is no moral law except that which has emerged from fear and self-interest, that the supreme law--almost the only law--is the survival of the fittest.

Consider the miracle of reproduction. The infinitesimal sperm of the man unites with the infinitesimal ovum of the woman, and the product of the union lies in the womb of the woman for nine months, and in those nine months are formed the brain and the eyes and the ears and the tongue, and the heart that will pump day in, day out, year in, year out, for perhaps a hundred years, and the arms and the legs and the fingers and the toes, till there emerges if things go well, the perfect reproduction, a man-child or a girl-child, who will grow for another twenty years until he or she is in the image of the father and mother, a young man or young woman whose being was hidden in the sperm and the ovum, which neither apart nor together bore any resemblance to what would emerge, yet they contained the secrets, not only of heart and eye and ear and limbs, but even deeper things, of mental and physical gifts, of defects too, of genius, even of illnesses of mind and body that might not manifest themselves for many years to come.

You can take the coldly materialistic view that these are not miracles but only the products of millions of years of blind and purposeless chance. Or you can take the religious view which is expressed in the sublime poetry of the 139th Psalm:

O Lord thou has searched me and known me.
            Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising,
            Thou understandeth my thought afar off.
            Thou compassest my path and my lying down
            And art acquainted with all my ways.
            For there is not a word in my tongue
            But lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
            Thou has beset me behind and before
            And laid thine hand upon me.
            Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
            It is high, I cannot attain unto it.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
            Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
            If I ascend into heaven, thou art there;
            If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
            If I take the wings of the morning
            And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
            Even there shall thy hand lead me
            And thy right hand shall hold me.
            Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee;
            But the night shineth as the day: the darkness and
            the light are both alike to thee.

            Thou didst form my inward parts,
            Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
            I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
            Marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.
            My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret,
            And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
            Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect;
            And in thy book all my members were written, which
            in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
            How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God!
            How just is the sum of them.

Here is the sublime expression of the creature's dependence on and reverence for the Creator, the faith indeed that nothing is hidden from Him, the same faith that was expressed by Our Lord in the words, "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows." And again in the words of the Communion Service: "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. . . ."

Neither the mechanist view of the origin of the universe, of life and of man, nor the creationist view that such a universe is the work of some almighty and incomprehensible Power, neither of these can be proved. They are in fact, both of them faiths. And the first point that I would make is that we, as Christians, choose to hold a creationist faith. We exercise our right as sentient beings to choose between a mechanist faith and the faith that God is the Creator of the World, but more, that He is what Jesus taught us to believe, that He is not only our Creator, not only our Judge, but also our Father. This faith is going to raise great problems for us, because it is not always easy to reconcile God the Creator with God the Father. I shall try to do this later.

When I was at the University of Auburn in Alabama, some three weeks ago, I was given a volume of the lectures given by eminent Americans on the occasion of the Bicentennial. One was by Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, one of the leading American astronomers, on the history of cosmology in the United States since 1776. It is quite clear that Dr. Wheeler is not only a student of the universe, that he is not only fascinated by the universe, but that he stands in awe of the universe.

It would be in the highest degree presumptuous of me to interpret Dr. Wheeler to you. I can only tell you what I thought him to be saying. It was Max Planck in his Quantum Theory who put forward the proposition that the moment the human being observes an event, the event is changed by the very act of observation. If there is such a thing as the event--in--itself, it must remain forever unknown. The language of mathematics and physics is in some way the language of the universe itself. Einstein advances our knowledge of the universe by an equation almost too simple to be believable. E = mc . Is it possible that the emergence of the human race is not the result of an infinite number of chance events, but that it is the crowning event of the Creation? There is the much loved story of the rabbi who kept two pieces of paper, one in each pocket. And when he was arrogant and pleased with himself, he would take out the one and read, "I am but dust and ashes." And when he was in despair, he would take out the other and read, "For my sake was the world created."

Was it for my sake that the world was created? Or am I the chance product of an evolutionary process that is entirely indifferent to me and my purposes? I have chosen to believe that the world is a creation and that I am part of the creation, that God the Creator is God the Father. I shall try now to deal with the problems that are raised by such a belief.

Christians are often deeply troubled by the cruelty of the Creation, the destructive power of what used to be called "acts of God", of great epidemics, of cancer and leukemia, of accidents on land and sea and in the air; by the incidence of pain and suffering, of lingering illnesses, of early death. They are troubled by the long catalogue of man's inhumanity to man, of the inhumanity of the rulers to the ruled, of the rich to the poor, and in my own country, the white to the black.

There is one thing that we have to learn, and that is that there is a wound in the Creation. Jesus knew it. He said, "Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must need be that offences come; but woe to the man by whom the offence comes." St. Paul wrote to the Romans: "For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain until now." Yet in the first chapter of the book of Genesis it is written: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." How is one to understand the story of Man's fall, when evil entered the creation? The truth is that those questions are unanswerable. Why should one love and serve the God of a flawed Creation?

This question was answered for me--forever I think--by a rich young man who lived in the town of Assisi, in Italy. He was Francis, the son of the wealthy merchant, Bernadone. He lived a gay and purposeless life, full of pleasure. He longed that it could be better, that it could be put to some better use, but this restlessness he concealed from others. I read to you a passage from the Little Flowers. "One day Francis was riding along on the Umbrian plain, on his gaily caprisoned horse, when suddenly his horse shied under him, and he saw on the road in front of him the sight that he feared more than any in the world--a leper. Then happened for him, and for us also, a tremendous event, for Francis, fighting down his loathing and his fear, dismounted from his horse, and going to the leper, put money into his hand. Then impelled by some power that had overcome his fear, he took the hand and kissed it, putting his lips to the leper's flesh. And the leper, seeing that Francis was afire with love, took hold of him and gave him the kiss of peace, and Francis kissed him also. Then Francis mounted his horse and rode back to Assisi with joy. From that day onwards, he began to visit the lepers in the lazar house of Assisi, bringing them gifts and kissing their hands. He wrote in his will, 'The Lord Himself led me amongst them, and I showed mercy to them, and when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of body and soul.'

To this story is added a legend, which you can reject with your head and believe with your heart. "Francis remounted his horse and rode away. Then suddenly he turned round, but there was no one to be seen on the road at all. Then he knew that he had kissed the Lord."

This story is so rich, and so much further enriched by the well-known prayer of St. Francis, that I want to make only a few observations. We have been thinking about the incomprehensibility, sometimes the cruelty of the Creation, but Francis did not curse God nor did he curse leprosy, he got off his horse and kissed the leper. It was a sublime example of discipleship that has never been surpassed, and it is little wonder that for many people he is the most beloved of all the disciples.

We shall never comprehend the Creation, nor shall we ever comprehend man's inhumanity to man, but one thing we may know for certain, that the only way to make endurable man's inhumanity to man is to try to exemplify in our own lives, humaneness toward humanity. And in conclusion, there is only one way in which to make endurable the wound in the Creation, and that is to ask to be given a part in the healing of it. That is the teaching of all the Saints.

Just before I left home I had a letter from a young girl of seventeen from a white high school not far from my home. She wrote that she would like to come to see me. She was not satisfied with her life, and she wished to be something more than a conventional Christian. Above all she wished to work for racial justice and for the destruction of Apartheid.

So she came to see me. She was not starry-eyed, but rather down to earth. At an age when many young white people think of moving to some other country, she was willing to give her life to the one in which she was born. If she had been at the University of Munich in 1943, she would have joined the League of the White Rose, and she would have been executed.

I discussed with her the difficulties of belief. She knew that there were such things, but she had made her choice. That was the way she wanted her life to be lived.

For you young people I would wish the same. Before I would wish you happiness, I would wish you to find some purpose for your lives, some purpose that is higher than yourself. But I would also wish you to have the faith that the Holy Spirit rules the world, and that you, if you choose, can make yourself His instrument, however weak, however humble you may be. It is not an easy faith to hold.

And I close with the prayer of Francis of Assisi, who asked to be made the healer of the wound in the Creation:

            Make me, O Lord, the instrument of your peace.
            Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
            Where there is injury, pardon;
            Where there is doubt, faith;
            Where there is despair, hope;
            Where there is darkness, light;
            Where there is sorrow, joy.
            Teach me, O Divine Master, to seek not so much to be consoled as to console,
            Not so much to be understood as to understand,
            Not so much to be loved as to love;
            For it is in giving that we receive;
            It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
            It is in dying that we are born again into eternal life.
                                                               Amen.

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Where Faith Falls Short