Читать книгу Singing in the Rain - Anne Shannon Monroe - Страница 6

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The sun comes up these days with such gentle radiance, sending all-pervasive colour through the eastern sky, paling the morning star into insignificance, penetrating every existing thing; the farthest green tip of the long, swaying fir boughs and the sap that runs deep in their centuries-old trunks; one rose that hangs late on the highest branch of the roof-climbing vine, and its root deep buried in the mould; the old man just about finishing life in the house across the street, rousing him to a new day of work, and the little baby in his crib up under the eaves, who wakes to catch at a golden beam that touches his petal-soft cheek.... And some people doubt God!

I wonder if one reason is because of houses? When I wake, out under the trees, I think so. Imagine opening your eyes in the lap of the swaying rhythmic earth shrouded in beauty and mystery, one with the moon and the sun and the stars, one with the rolling tides, the seas pounding on the beaches, the winds beating on the earth, one with the whole Great Plan—imagine all this as compared with waking in a house, perhaps torn out of sleep by a blatant alarm clock, to four walls that close you in with a medley of tinselly trappings—a dresser over there, knick-knacks in silver and ivory.... Is it any wonder that our minds, which tend to narrow themselves to outlook, get a sort of pinhead vision of life?

I was a guest recently at an excellent club of women in a wealthy suburb—well-groomed women in rustling silks, who had come in their own cars—and a community church representative called and asked permission to present his case. He was a circumspect gentleman of middle age, unctuous, ingratiating, eager to please. He explained that he wished to start a community church in their neighbourhood which now had no church, and he hoped for their coöperation. It would be a church, he earnestly assured the ladies, to which no one could object, and of a type to draw no “objectionable” people; a church that scarcely could be recognized as a church—no steeple, nothing in the least churchy, quite bungalowish, in fact. The clergyman in charge would be a man of the very highest culture, drawing a large salary—the salary guaranteed. He named the salary in round figures; he hinted, as a probe to receptivity, that if there was not sufficient coöperation, this salary would move on and be spent elsewhere. He had chosen a large lot so as not to be too close to any one, and if any lady present objected to his location, if it was too near any of their homes, he would find another gladly, go just anywhere they might suggest. He asked only to be allowed to fit in with their plans—he didn’t wish to disturb anything, or be in any one’s way, or spoil any one’s neighbourhood.... In a moment of mind wandering I got the impression that it was a pest-house he was trying to locate in their midst.

God to be let in under cover, heavily camouflaged!

I slipped into a public meeting in a downtown hall where a college professor was advertised to speak on “the very latest word in the new psychology”; a dingy audience, frankly tired, but hopeful; the professor, young, sure of himself. His “last word” turned out to be mostly a denial of many of the unimportant claims in the name of “spiritism,” his main argument being that they couldn’t be true because they had never happened to him.

A woman beside me whispered in a dispirited tone: “We’re the backwash, that’s all; people who’ve quit going to churches and haven’t found anything else.... See the same ones every time.... Never do get anything.”

“Why do you come?” I asked.

“Same’s everyone else. Always looking for something. Never find it.”

I thought of easier-minded ones I know, people who don’t struggle much, who fall unthinkingly into the religious life they have inherited; bowing their heads in prayer with their minds on a torn hymnbook—anything; resting in a lull of development, so much fought out by ancestors, so much to be fought out by descendants—they resting on a sort of plateau, neither up nor down. I thought of those who use religion as a narcotic to deaden them to personal problems, who make of God a burden-bearer, loading on Him all their responsibilities, escaping responsibility themselves, and justifying this dodging attitude in the name of religion. I thought of the gloom, the heaviness, the dulness with which many people invest life when governed by the spirit, thinking this is being religious, when all the time gloom, heaviness, dulness are but the weight of materiality crowding in. I thought of those to whom black tragedy comes as a thunderbolt, who, back to the wall, turn wildly and appeal to God, the only One who can help ... the God who was there all the time, in the health of their days, to give them guidance—there, but neglected. I thought of those who trace their life course by the stars, by the lines in their palms, by the bumps on their heads, by the cards—and in the past few years by the ouija board—pathetically side-tracked. I thought of mothers I know who are worried: “No, Tommy isn’t getting the religious instruction he ought to have. He doesn’t go to Sunday-school as I did. The children don’t, some way.” Bewilderment, perplexity—Tommy running wild. I thought of men who leave it all to their wives. I thought of the retort of an older boy to his mother on being urged to go to church: “Why should I? It’s just your club—same’s mine.”

Were we more convincing in our religious lives once, I wonder? I am not so sure. I know as a little girl many things puzzled me greatly. The elders of that day put such a mystery about religion, treating it as something you were to accept like castor oil, as it was ladled out to you, and ask no questions; a thing about which to be hushed, embarrassed, solemn, secretive—just like sex. I was very curious, I remember, about how people actually got into communion with God. Everyone I knew claimed to be. I made inquiry.

“Pray, just pray,” I was told.

But I pushed the matter further. “Say words to God and play like He is listening?” You see, I really wanted to know, just as I wanted the cook to tell me how she made a cake.

“Tut, tut,” came back the sharp reproof, and “Tut, tut!”

Another thing that puzzled me was that so many people came right out of prayer and went on doing exactly as they had done before. I was a queer child, maybe—I expected it to make a difference. But so often it didn’t—apparently. Mothers ordered their children about with the same brusqueness, fathers were just as cranky, homes continued to be the same colourless affairs that so many children planned to run away from. Even ministers got up from praying, brushing the dust off their knees; in communion with God and aware of dust on their knees! I couldn’t make it out. I thought if one had really communed with the great God, a glory would cover his face, fill his being, make him gentle and lovely and good, and do things in a kinder, wiser way—but it didn’t always happen.

I remember being at family prayers where there was a very strict father. All were on their knees, and his prayer was long. Little Johnny, five years old, wriggling into a more comfortable position, scraped his foot along the floor. “Johnny!” reproved Johnny’s papa in stentorian tones, right in the midst of his loud and commanding address to the Almighty. I was deeply puzzled to know how Johnny’s papa, communing right there on his knees with the wonderful God, whom I never doubted, could be aware of so slight a thing as little Johnny’s foot. I thought if I had got in conversation with the great God I would not be able to hear anything else. And I didn’t doubt that Johnny’s papa had, for he said he had, and the elders were not to be doubted.

Being an elder myself now, I have lost a good deal of the childish faith that elders always speak the truth, but I have grown in the impression that too often religious life is in the nature of that demonstrated by Johnny’s papa—the ears pinned close to the ground to catch any breaking of their own established rule on earth, and only the voice lifted to God; spiritual communion accepted passively as a mere fact, rather than experienced—a vital, glowing experience through which light is shed on the personal life, vision given for action.

Now, spiritual force is real or it is nothing. It is a power in the world as definite as electricity, or it is non-existent. It furnishes a current for running purposes in the full-blooded health of our days, or it does nothing of value for us. It is a super-force, as surely there as is a reservoir of water for quenching a city’s thirst—or it is not there at all. There can be no middle course. Prayer clears the channel so that the spiritual force can flow in and become the internal driving power of our lives, or it has no effect whatever. We have nursed the delusion that the mere act of praying has virtue, when all the time we can be as inefficient in prayer as in selling goods or washing dishes, and the one inefficiency is apt to be reflected in the other. Prayer has no virtue unless it clears the channel to God. Light comes with the cleared channel, with the release of the heavy hold of materiality; there’s goldenness in it, there’s glory in it, as with the sun in a new day. What comes out of our praying? That is the test. Unless there is light, we have not cleared the channel. The light proves the clearing; the life proves the will to follow the light.

It isn’t always an easy thing to clear the channel. The world is too much with us. Sometimes we go to a concert, our minds all messed up with problems, and we lose a good part of the first number before our spirits are caught up in the music; again, we go in freer mood and are caught up at once. So with spiritual communion. We may need hours off alone somewhere, or we may achieve it instantly, or it may flood in on us in a moment when we are not seeking it, when we are merely empty. Many of the purest illuminations come unsought into the life ever open to receive them, the life never cluttered. A glory bursts in—a thought comes—a truth—a picture—and we are as one transfigured, glowing in radiance; trying to hold it, never quite losing it, never losing the eternal truth of spiritual force as a fact to which it has given testimony. It is this kind of experience that makes us know. To this kind of experience we owe all that we do know in the world. Students, diggers, and delvers, may take the truth and use it, and go on from it to something else, but the original truth first came to a mind open and in tune.

Many of us may not fully realize the need to throw self entirely out, to put our own will to one side, to cease demanding that life conform to our desires—to empty ourselves absolutely—if we are to be led by the spirit, if we are to become an instrument for the spirit’s use. We may not fully realize that we must become organized in all our faculties under God, as a well-disciplined army under a general. We may not fully realize that letting go of ourselves, letting go of the tension, makes it possible for the light to penetrate us and to arouse our latent powers to action.

All who accomplish outstandingly know the secret of clearing away extraneous matter, the débris of daily living, and creating a great emptiness into which the matter on which they are bent emerges, grows, fills all the space. Then they go out again into the world of men and create even as they have seen. When they put self out, when they let God in, what mastery they attain! Then it is we have a George Washington who emerged from prayer with the power to endure for the sake of a great free people not only Valley Forge, but the politicians of his day; a John Wesley who emerged with the bravery to go out from little churches into the fields and preach to men where they were; a Joan of Arc, a Florence Nightingale, a Clara Barton, a Frances Willard, a Jane Addams, an Alice Freeman. Then we have the many people of earth who are able to live above the cruel shafts of personal misfortune and so soften and sweeten life for those about them as not to become in turn a misfortune in other lives. But when not spiritually developed, when God is not let in, when self looms large in the clearing, we have geniuses of accomplishment who operate with diabolical cleverness against the very foundation purpose of life. Small souls that can darken and thwart all about them.

And what is the foundation purpose of life? Development under spiritual guidance. Development stirs all life like yeast. The earth and all that is in it and on it and above it are steadily developing, each thing according to the law of its nature; rock into soil, soil into plant life, plant life into food, food into body, body into an ever more perfect house for the spirit, the spirit into ever closer communion with the Great Spirit of which it is a part; everything, from the lowest cell to which we can trace life, steadily developing to a higher state. Had this not been the law, soil had remained rock, man had remained savage, and our foreheads would still be but an inch in height. When we fail to develop spiritually, we are out of harmony; we begin to disintegrate; destruction is on our track. There’s discontent, heartache, a sense of futility and failure. Then it is we begin to search here and there for a panacea, for a thing to help us stand our lives. Any going against nature is destructive, and man’s natural urge is toward God. When he turns away from this urge, he is headed for ruin.

Mothers do not always sufficiently recognize the need of early attention to the open channel in the little new life. They watch zealously for all the proper signs of development in the child’s physical or mental states, but not in his spiritual. And yet the spiritual can be started on the way to development as early as the mental, and who shall say it is not more important? There are small daily lessons that suggest the rights of others. Some mothers put out of his reach everything the baby is not to touch. Others lead the baby to an understanding that he is not to touch that which is not his. Which method turns the little new current in the right direction? He can be led early to make his contribution to the daily labour of living, if it is only to put a stick of wood in the box, a dish on the table. His little soul can be unfolded to an appreciation of beauty in the great world all about him. In his very babyhood he can be connected up with the universe, led to see that he is subject to laws written into his nature the same as are the sun, the moon, and the stars.

A little boy of three had been led to look nightly for his friends, the stars; for the moon, watching it grow from the tiniest baby to full size and then disappear. He said wistfully, one evening, looking into the empty sky: “I wish we might have a moon to keep.”

And he was drawn gently down by the fireside and told: “We have nothing to keep, dear, in all this wide world, only things to use and love. The trees, the flowers, the little children, even mothers and fathers, the house you live in, your little bed—everything goes away into some other form, some other life. That is why we must love it all every minute while we have it. Everything is all the time moving on, just like a train, never standing still. The only thing to do is to shine beautifully—like the moon—be lovely to each thing, as the moon is lovely to us. For all we can take away with us when our time comes to go is the memory of how nice we made it for everybody while we were here.”

He was still a long time, gazing dreamily into the open fire. Then he had his own observation, lifting starry eyes: “I know now,” he said, “why the little sparks fly up the chimney so fast. They are hurrying back to the big old forest which is their real home.”

Just a little bedtime talk, just a bit of opening up the channel, just a direction to the stream, a pebble thrown in to keep it from flowing that way, to help it flow this—not difficult—and the moon and the stars and the sparks are there for all the babies and all the mothers everywhere.

And what children we are, after all, never growing up, never growing beyond the softening influence of love and tenderness and beauty and sweet sounds and great thoughts, never ceasing to need a stronger hand clasping ours, never ceasing to need the leading of a light greater than is within us ... pitiful little children stumbling in the dark, denying God and crying out to Him in one breath. But God does not pick His children who shall be strong on the earth; they pick him. Then why uncertainty? Why misgivings? Why timidity? Why lukewarmness? Why half-heartedness? Why don’t we just wash our windows clean of all earthly matter and let the light flood in? Why don’t we organize our faculties under God and go on to vibrant, joyous, confident living?

We might as well; for deep down underneath everything the fretting of the spirit will go on. Wander where we will, we can never get away from it; no worldly success will ever appease it, no failure deaden it. There is no panacea for life’s ills, no opiate by which to dim consciousness, no place of oblivion in which to lose responsibility. But there is the open channel to the Great Harmony set going by Divinity when the morning stars first sang together and the planets began their rhythmic course in the heavens. In this harmony there is life-adjustment; in this harmony there is healing for the wounds of time; in this harmony there is peace. And from this harmony we must believe we go out at last to that Greater Harmony which we sense in our most exalted moments, that Greater Harmony which is but another name for Oneness with God.