Читать книгу The School of Charity - Evelyn Underhill - Страница 12

The Divine action bathes the whole universe. It penetrates all creatures, it hovers above them. Wherever they are, it is. It goes before them, it is with them, it follows them. They need but let themselves be borne upon its waves.—De Caussade.

The governing thought of the Creed is truly the first and last word of religion. It covers our whole response to reality. “I believe in One God”—not “I want,” or “I feel,” but “He Is”—all the rest flows from that, or is a special exhibition of it. Christian history is not the story of a number of individual religious experiences and developments. It describes the self-revelation and self-giving of that one infinitely generous God in whom, because of that revelation and self-giving, the soul believes. All the various forms of prayer and contemplation, or the disciplines of the spiritual life, only matter because they help, deepen, and purify our humble communion with this One God, infinite in His richness, delicacy and power; who is touching, calling and changing His creatures in countless ways, by the unceasing action of creative love. He is there first, over-passing in His Perfection all our partial discoveries. That which we really know about God, is not what we have been clever enough to find out, but what the Divine Charity has secretly revealed.

And so we go on to make our first statement about this One God who is the controlling reality of life, and try to see what this should mean for our prayer ; that is, our small effort to correspond with Him. Christianity says that this One God is best defined as “Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible.” No limits are placed to the Divine fatherhood. The universe in its wholeness, and with all its disconcerting contrasts—the world of beauty, the world of science, the world of love, and those mysterious deeps of being of which the spirit can sometimes in prayer discern the fringe—these, visible and invisible, the very heavenly and the very earthy, are the creations of the Divine Charity; the living, acting, overflowing generosity of God.

In practice, of course, no one can grasp this mighty declaration: nor indeed should we expect to be able to grasp it. If the Reality of God were small enough to be grasped, it would not be great enough to be adored; and so our holiest privilege Would go. “I count not myself to have grasped ; but as one that has been grasped, I press on,” says St. Paul. But if all real knowledge here is a humbly delighted knowledge of our own ignorance—if, as the dying artist said, “The word we shall use most when we get to heaven will be ‘Oh!’”—still we can realize something of what it means, to consider our world from this point of view. It means that everything we are given to deal with—including ourselves and our psychological material, however intractable—is the result of the creative action of a personal Love, who despises nothing that He has made. We, then, cannot take the risk of despising anything; and any temptation to do so must be attributed to our ignorance, stupidity or self-love, and recognized as something which distorts our vision of Reality.

“He shewed me a little thing” says Julian of Norwich, “the quantity of a hazel nut in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. . . . In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it.”

That is a saint’s comment on the first article of her Creed. It is a vision that takes much living-out in a world in which injustice and greed are everywhere manifest; full too of tendencies which we are able to recognize as evil, and of misery and failure which seem the direct result of corporate stupidity and self-love, offering us ceaseless opportunities for the expression of disapproval and disgust, and often tempting to despair. “All-thing hath the Being by the Love of God,” says Julian again. And then we think of a natural order shot through with suffering, marred at every point by imperfection, maintained by mutual destruction ; a natural order which includes large populations of vermin, and the flora and fauna of infectious disease. It is easy to be both sentimental and theological over the more charming and agreeable aspects of Nature. It is very difficult to see its essential holiness beneath disconcerting and hostile appearances with an equable and purified sight; with something of the large, disinterested Charity of God.

To stand alongside the generous Creative Love, maker of all things visible and invisible (including those we do not like) and see them with the eyes of the Artist-Lover is the secret of sanctity. St. Francis did this with a singular perfection; but we know the price that he paid. So too that rapt and patient lover of all life, Charles Darwin, with his great, self-forgetful interest in the humblest and tiniest forms of life—not because they were useful to him, but for their own sakes—fulfilled one part of our Christian duty far better than many Christians do. It is a part of the life of prayer, which is our small attempt to live the life of Charity, to consider the whole creation with a deep and selfless reverence; enter into its wonder, and find in it the mysterious intimations of the Father of Life, maker of all things, Creative Love.

This loving reverence for life is not to stop short even at the microbe and the worm. It must be extended to ourselves, and the qualities, tendencies and powers which God has implanted or brought forth in us. We have to discriminate between our natural passions, which are a true part of His creative material, and the way we handle them, which is left to us. It is no proof of spirituality to discredit the fiery energies which He has implanted in the natural order, and in which we all share. All genuine re-ordering of character must be based on an adoring faith in the maker of our wonderful psycho-physical machine, and humble acceptance of its capacities and limitations. If it is not running right, the fault is not with the original design; but with our oiling and timing and ill-conceived adjustments, our poor attempts to keep it clean and give it the right mixture, and our pessimistic feeling that it is hard lines to have inherited the family tourer, with all its unfortunate peculiarities, whilst others seem to be making the journey in a well-sprung six-cylinder saloon.

If we do not acquire this habit of looking at the complex natural world, including our natural selves, with eyes cleansed by prayer and brought into focus by humility—if we attempt to judge it from our own point of view, without a loving movement of the mind towards the Creator of all this splendour, this intricate web of life—then how easy it is to get lost in it, and lose all sense of its mysterious beauty; because we mistake our small self-interested conclusions, our vulgar utilitarianism, for the truth. Like the Scottish student who was asked for an essay on elephants, we at once write at the top of the paper “The Elephant, its Economic Possibilities”; without the slightest suspicion that this attitude towards the rich mystery of life is both blasphemous and absurd. For we have been shown the heavenly vision of the whole natural order, no less than the spiritual order, rising, growing and falling within the Holy Presence of God, supported and accompanied by the Creative Charity: and what is called the “Practice of the Presence of God,” when we think of it in this fashion, calls for a very high level of loving admiration, self-oblivion, gentleness and faith—a certain child-like loyalty and humble awe, in the darkest moments as well as the best.

All this reminds us of the span and the depth which is required of a full Christian life of prayer. For one part of prayer associates us with that creative and supporting Love, and requires us to give ourselves as open channels through which it can be poured out on all life ; and the other part of prayer keeps us in humble awareness of our own complete dependence, plastic to the pressure of the moulding Charity. When we consider our situation like this, we realize that the very best we are likely to achieve in the world of prayer will be a small part in a mighty symphony ; not a peculiarly interesting duet. When our devotional life seems to us to have become a duet, we should listen more carefully. Then we shall hear a greater music, within which that little melody of ours can find its place.

This truth of the deep unity of creation links us with our lesser relations, and with our greater relations too. It makes us the members of a family, a social order, so rich and various that we can never exhaust its possibilities. “My little sisters, the birds,” said St. Francis. “I am thy fellow-slave,” said the great angel of the Apocalypse to the seer. We are all serving on one Staff. Our careful pickings and choosings, acceptances and exclusions, likes and dislikes, race prejudice, class prejudice, and all the rest, look rather silly within the glow of that One God, in Whom all live and move and have their being; and the graduated splendour of that creation which is the work of His paternal Love. The Creed shows up human pride for the imbecility it is, and convinces us that realism is the same thing as humility. It insists upon our own utter dependence on the constant, varied, unseen Creative Love; and the narrow span of our understanding of our fellow-creatures—how slight is the material we have for passing judgment on them—because our understanding is no wider than our charity.

And now we come down to the more painful consideration of all that this demands from us, if our inner and outer life are to match our belief about Reality; and only when this has happened will Christianity conquer the world, harmonizing all things visible and invisible because both are received and loved as the works of One God. There are still far too many Christians in whose souls a sound-proof partition has been erected between the oratory and the kitchen: sometimes between the oratory and the study too. But the creative action of the Spirit penetrates the whole of life, and is felt by us in all sorts of ways. If our idea of that creative action is so restricted that we fail to recognize it working within the homely necessities and opportunities of our visible life, we may well suspect the quality of those invisible experiences to which we like to give spiritual status. “I found Him very easily among the pots and pans,” said St. Teresa. “The duties of my position take precedence of everything else,” said Elizabeth Leseur; pinned down by those duties to a life which was a constant check on the devotional practices she loved. She recognized the totality of God’s creative action, penetrating and controlling the whole web of life.

A genuine inner life must make us more and more sensitive to that moulding power, working upon His creation at every level, not at one alone: and especially to the constant small but expert touches, felt in and through very homely events, upon those half-made, unsteady souls which are each the subject of His detailed care. A real artist will give as much time and trouble to a miniature two inches square, as to the fresco on the Cathedral wall. The true splendour and heart-searching beauty of the Divine Charity is not seen in those cosmic energies which dazzle and confound us; but in the transcendent power which stoops to an intimate and cherishing love, the grave and steadfast Divine action, sometimes painful and sometimes gentle, on the small unfinished soul. It is an unflickering belief in this, through times of suffering and conflict, apathy and desperation, in a life filled with prosaic duties and often empty of all sense of God, that the Creed demands of all who dare recite it.

We are so busy rushing about, so immersed in what we call practical things, that we seldom pause to realize the mysterious truth of our situation: how little we know that really matters, how completely our modern knowledge leaves the deeps of our existence unexplored. We are inclined to leave all that out. But the Creed will not let us leave the mystery out. Christ never left it out. His teaching has a deep recurrent note of awe, a solemn sense of God and the profound mysteries of God: His abrupt creative entrance into every human life, coming to us, touching us, changing us in every crisis, grief, shock, sacrifice, flashing up on life’s horizon like lightning just when we had settled down on the natural level, and casting over the landscape a light we had never dreamed of before. The whole teaching of Christ hinges on the deep mystery and awful significance of our existence; and God, as the supreme and ever-present factor in every situation, from the tiniest to the most universal. The span of His understanding goes from the lilies of the field to the most terrible movements of history. He takes in all the darkness and anxiety of our situation, whether social or personal; and within and beyond all, He finds the creative action of God, the one Reality, the one Life, working with a steadfast and unalterable love, sometimes by the direct action of circumstance and sometimes secretly within each soul in prayer. And this creative action, so hidden and so penetrating, is the one thing that matters in human life.

Jesus chose, as the most perfect image of that action, the working of yeast in dough. The leavening of meal must have seemed to ancient men a profound mystery, and yet something on which they could always depend. Just so does the supernatural enter our natural life, working in the hiddenness, forcing the new life into every corner and making the dough expand. If the dough were endowed with consciousness, it would not feel very comfortable while the yeast was working. Nor, as a rule, does our human nature feel very comfortable under the transforming action of God: steadily turning one kind of love into another kind of love, desire into charity, clutch into generosity, Eros into Agape. Creation is change, and change is often painful and mysterious to us. Spiritual creation means a series of changes, which at last produce Holiness, God’s aim for men.

“O support me,” says Newman, “as I proceed in this great, awful, happy change, with the grace of Thy unchangeableness. My unchangeableness, here below, is perseverance in changing.” The inner life consists in an enduring of this deep transforming process. The chief object of prayer is to help it on: not merely for our own soul’s sake, but for a reason which lifts the devotional life above all pettiness—because this is part of the great creative action which is lifting up humanity to the supernatural order, turning the flour and water of our common nature into the living Bread of Eternal Life. So, the first movement of our prayer must surely be a self-giving to this total purpose, whatever discipline and suffering it may involve for us.

It is a part of the great virtue of self-abandonment, to acknowledge the plain fact that God knows the recipe He is working from and the result He wants to obtain, and we do not. Some need the flame, and respond to its quick action. Others, like the cracknel, come to perfection by moving at a steady pace through the long dark oven which makes a perfect biscuit from a dab of paste. A generous acceptance of this ceaseless creative process, as the thing that matters most in human life, and a willingness to be transformed in whatever way is wanted and at whatever ‘cost, unselfs the inner life, and makes it from the beginning accessible to the searching and delicate action of God; working in ways of which we know nothing, entering and controlling every action, and using every creature, its efforts, sufferings and sacrifices, for the accomplishment of His hidden design.

In Paul Claudel’s great play, “The Satin Slipper,” the whole of the action is made to depend on the single prayer of a dying missionary, left by pirates on a derelict ship. Bound to a spar as to a Cross, he offers up his death; and so gives it the quality of a creative martyrdom, moves the secret springs of the spiritual world, and sets going a series of events which, after long years, save his brother’s soul. The whole scene—the ship in the empty spaces of the Atlantic, the solitary man dying by inches, with the bodies of his companions piled up at his feet—looks to the world a frightful tragedy, a waste of noble lives. But the martyr himself takes it with great tranquillity, saying, “Doubtless the vintage could not come to pass without some disorder: but everything after a little stir, is gone back again into the great paternal peace.” It is as if he said, “I believe in the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, whose vision and love penetrate His whole creation; and who deigns to use my small pain in the workshop of charity.” Within this unseen spiritual order—which is, after all, the order into which we pass whenever we really pray—he gives with solemn joy his agony and death; that so his brother, who will never know the price of his salvation, may be brought back to God. Twenty years later, the secret powers which his sacrifice released complete their work; and by many crooked paths and strange places his brother’s soul is brought to the feet of God.