That’s a drastic way of putting it, and not a very precise one. I don’t wish to suggest a reality that is simply an enlarged or extrapolated version of this reality. If you think how a thing we call a stone differs from a thing we call a dream — the degrees of unlikeness within the reality we know are very extreme, and what I wish to suggest is a much more absolute unlikeness, with which we exist, though our human circumstance creates in us a radically limited and peculiar notion of what existence is. I gave a sermon on this once, the text being “Your thoughts are not our thoughts.” That was a good deal longer than two months ago. I believe it was last year. I thought at the time it might have puzzled a few people, but I was pleased with it. I even wished Edward could have heard it. I felt I’d clarified some things. I remember one lady did ask me, as she was going out the door, “Who is Feuerbach?” And that made me aware of that tendency of mine to live too much in my own thoughts. Your mother wanted to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy.
It could be true that my interest in abstractions, which would have been forgiven first on grounds of youth and then on grounds of eccentricity, is now being forgiven on grounds of senility, which would mean people have stopped trying to see the sense in the things I say the way they once did. That would be by far the worst form of forgiveness. I used to have one of those books with humorous little sermon anecdotes in it somewhere. It was a gift, I remember, no name on it. How many years ago did I get that? I’ve probably been boring a lot of people for a long time. Strange to find comfort in the idea. There have always been things I felt I must tell them, even if no one listened or understood. And one of them is that many of the attacks on belief that have had such prestige for the last century or two are in fact meaningless. I must tell you this, because everything else I have told you, and them, loses almost all its meaning and its right to attention if this is not established. If I were to go through my old sermons, I might find some in which I deal with this subject. Since I am presumably somewhere near the end of my time and my strength, that might be the best way to make the case for you. I should have thought of this long ago.
***
This afternoon we walked over to Boughton’s to return his magazine. You held my hand a fair part of the way. There were milkweed seeds drifting around which you had to try to catch, but you’d come back and take my hand again. It’s a hard thing to be patient with me, the way I creep along these days, but I’m trying not to get my heart in a state. There have been so many fine days this summer that I’ve begun to hear talk of a drought. Dust and grasshoppers are fine in their way, too, within limits. Whatever is coming, I’d be sorry to miss it. Boughton was on his porch, “listening to the breeze,” he said. “Feeling the breeze.” Glory brought out some lemonade for us and sat down with us, and we talked a little bit about television. Your mother has been looking at it, too. I don’t enjoy it myself. It’s not the last impression I want to have of this world. It turns out that when Glory found that article and asked her father if he still wanted me to see it, he asked her to read it over to him, and then he laughed and said, “Oh yes, yes, Reverend Ames will want to have a look at that.” He knows what will exasperate me, and he was laughing in anticipation as soon as I mentioned it.
We agreed it must have been fairly widely read in both our congregations, because on one page there’s a recipe for that molded salad of orange gelatin with stuffed green olives and shredded cabbage and anchovies that has dogged my ministerial life these last years, and which appears at his house whenever he so much as catches cold. There should be a law to prevent recipes for molded salad from appearing within twenty pages of any article having to do with religion. I ended up bringing the magazine back home because I thought I might want to use it in a sermon.
There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer.
But people of any degree of religious sensitivity are always vulnerable to the accusation that their consciousness or their understanding does not attain to the highest standards of the faith, because that is always true of everyone. St. Paul is eloquent on this subject. But if the awkwardness and falseness and failure of religion are interpreted to mean there is no core of truth in it — and the witness of Scripture from end to end discourages this view — then people are disabled from trusting their thoughts, their expressions of belief, and their understanding, and even from believing in the essential dignity of their and their neighbors’ endlessly flawed experience of belief. It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he’s right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness.
Here is a sentence Boughton and I got a laugh out of: “One might ask how many Christians can define Christianity.” In twenty-five volumes or less, I said.
Boughton said, “Fewer,” and winked at Glory, and she said, “Ever the stickler,” which is true.
(Of course I was simply using contemporary idiom, and he was aware of that. He just doesn’t approve of it. I don’t use it often. But I think it’s perfectly fine for making a little joke now and then.)
Here is a paragraph we lingered over: “There is indeed a note of sinful pride in the confidence with which the majority of people expressed their ideas about heaven. For although the Bible has much to say about final judgment, it offers no definitive picture of life after death. Yet fewer than one third of the American people—29 percent — admit they have no ideas on what is one of the most ambiguous subjects in Biblical revelation.” Now, that is a kind of interpretation I would call fraudulent.
To say a subject is ambiguous is not to say one cannot form ideas on it, or shouldn’t, nor is it to say even that it is possible to avoid forming ideas on it. Any concept that exists in the mind at all exists in some form, among some set of associations. I’d like to talk to that 29 percent who have no ideas, to see how they do it. I bet they just didn’t like the question. Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day.
He said, “Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I’d multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes.” So he’s just sitting there multiplying the feel of the wind by two, multiplying the smell of the grass by two. “I remember when we put that old wagon on the courthouse roof,” he said. “Seems to me the stars were brighter in those days. Twice as bright.”
“And we were twice as clever.”
“Oh, more than that,” he said. “Much more than that.”
Jack came out and sat down with us. He asked if he could look at the article, and I gave it to him. He said, “I thought he made the point in here somewhere that Americans’ treatment of the Negro indicated a lack of religious seriousness.” Boughton said, “It is very easy to judge.”
Jack smiled and handed the magazine back to me. “True,” he said.
That was the first I’d seen of him since Sunday, since the service. He went out through the chancel and the side door, to avoid shaking hands with me, I believe. I’ve been feeling some discomfort on that account as well as others. I was even a little embarrassed to meet his eyes, to tell the truth. I believe returning the magazine was mainly a pretext for looking in on Boughton and Glory, to see if they were upset with me. I wasn’t done with that article. I meant all along to bring it back with me. I conceal my motives from myself pretty effectively sometimes. I had even imagined, lying awake Sunday night, that Jack might go away again because I had brought up the old catastrophe right there in church, or so he seemed to believe. I thought of apologizing, but that would only confirm in his mind that my meaning and my intention were what he took them to be, which I do not wholly believe, and which would deprive him of the possibility of making a less damaging interpretation of them. At any rate, it would raise the issue between us, perhaps unnecessarily. Finally, I was hesitant to go to the house at all, fearing that my mere presence might be an irritant or a provocation, as I feared my staying away might be also. Then Glory came by to say hello. She seemed in fine spirits. And I was mightily relieved. If there is one thing I don’t want to do in the time that remains to either one of us, it is offend Boughton. I fell to thinking what a pleasure it must be to him to have Jack there, and it occurred to me that it might be a remarkable generosity on Jack’s part to come home to the poor old man, and perhaps to Glory also, considering; her troubles. I was downright ashamed to remember how impatient I was for him to leave, thinking only of my own life, I admit. The thought had even occurred to me that he might be there to start moving his father out of the house, so to speak, since he and the other children will inherit it. The place really did need to be put right, and there was much more to do than Glory could have done alone. Sitting there on the porch with Jack, I was struck by how much he had aged. Of course he’s old enough to have aged, he’s in his forties somewhere. Angeline would be fifty-one, so he’s forty-three. There is gray in his hair, and he looks tired around the eyes. Well, he looked tense, as he always does, and he also looked sad, it seemed to me.