It is a symptom of our spiritual phlegmatism and torpidity that the dance is no longer a part of our ritual and that we worship in churches which, as often as not, resemble cattle pens where people sit in rows and pray by leaning forward in their seats and mumbling. Sometimes people try to get away from this stiffness by putting on short pants and running out to the woods for community dancing and the cultivation of response to nature, and there are other people who try to make their prayers sincere by groveling on their knees and whimpering. This is another case of trying to make the tail wag the dog. The first essential is to feel the joy; the response follows of its own accord, but you cannot get the joy by slavishly imitating the response. In fact we first have to feel as St. Francis felt in writing his Canticle to the Sun, which is perhaps the most superb expression of the joy of spiritual freedom that was ever written:
Praise to my Lord for all His creatures;
for our brother Sun who bringeth us day
and light, and showeth Thee unto us.
Praise to my Lord for our sister Moon
and for the Stars hung bright and lovely in Heaven.
Praise to my Lord for our brother Wind
and for Air and Clouds, Calm and all Weather
whereby Thou maintainest life in all beings.
Praise to my Lord for our sister Water,
useful and lowly, precious and clear.
Praise to my Lord for our brother Fire,
mighty and strong, by whom Thou makest
for us light in darkness.
Praise to my Lord for our mother Earth
who doth uphold and teach us, and bringeth
forth in many colors both fruit and flowers.
Praise to my Lord for sister Death,
from whom none can flee. Blessed are
those who find themselves in Thy most
Holy Will, for Death shall not harm them.
Oh all ye creatures, praise and bless my
Lord, and be thankful, and serve Him in
great humility.
The Ecstasy of Creation
This hymn of happiness is more than a hymn of acceptance, for it includes not only sun and moon, fire and water, life and death; it includes also God, and those who find God are happy because they share in the ecstasy of creation. They, too, know the answer to that eternal question of philosophy, “Why does the universe exist?” They know that it exists for an almost childlike reason—for play, or what the Hindus called lila (which is nearly our own word “lilt”).1 Chesterton points out that when a child sees you do something wonderful, it asks you to do it again and again. So too he says that God made the earth and told it to move round the sun, and when it had moved round once He was pleased and said, “Do it again.” He has been saying it ever since. To some this may seem sentimental, to others irreverent, and to yet others absurd, for how can one say that all the cruelty, destruction, and anguish of life is play? And if it is play, is not God like a thoughtless child who picks a butterfly to pieces to watch it struggle? But for what other reason could it have been said that when the foundations of the earth were laid “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy”?2
But those who ask this question about the cruelty of God’s play are expecting him who answers to make excuses for God, to “justify the ways of God to man,” and as Lao Tzu has tersely and aptly said, “Those who justify themselves do not convince.” Should we ask and expect the universe to conform with our standards of good behavior and doubt the existence of God in all things because He does not observe the ordinary standards of middle-class humanitarian morality? We think of God as a meek, kindly old gentleman, or else as an infinitely powerful but essentially nebulous spirit of pure love, by which we mean pure dotingness. But, as Edwin Arnold has written, ——
It slayeth and it saveth, nowise moved
Except unto the working out of doom;
Its threads are Love and Life; and Death and Pain
The shuttles of its loom.
The dissertations on the so-called “Problem of Evil,” which has so much worried Christian theologians, are nothing more than an attempt to apologize for the Deity, and such attempts invariably indicate lack of faith. And faith in God, faith in life, faith in nature, is the important thing; that faith is the very key to freedom of the spirit.
The Faith of Abandonment
Faith is not blind belief, and it is certainly not mere intellectual assent to the proposition that God exists. Nor is it trusting that life will work out “all right” in spite of its tribulations. Faith is not hope. From one point of view faith is the most illogical thing in the world; it is trusting life because of its tribulations; it is the sense of love and wonder before the mystery of a God who is both Creator and Destroyer, love and terror, life and death, angel and demon, sage and fool, man and worm. There are those who ask why they should be expected to have faith of so unconditional a kind in a universe which takes with one hand what it gives with the other, and the answer suggests a story about Thomas Carlyle. There was a woman who wrote him a long dissertation which ended with the words, “In short, I accept the universe.” “My God!” said Carlyle. “She’d better!” For the truth is simply that without faith we are forever bashing our heads against an immovable wall. No self-deception, no trick of reason or science, no magic, no amount of self-reliance can make us independent of the universe and enable us to escape its destructive aspect. Pain is a fact and no amount of wishful theology can explain it away with promises and apologies for its existence in a universe whose God is supposed to be “love.” At the same time no amount of acceptance can make away with our fundamental horror of pain in its more extreme forms. But, even so, faith can never be real faith if it is halfhearted, if we think that it is merely a question of the “best policy,” of the best means to make an intolerable situation a little more bearable.
God, life, and the universe keep their two aspects whatever we may try to think about them, and continue their play in all its love and all its cruelty. Faith means that we give ourselves to it absolutely and utterly, without making conditions of any kind, that we abandon ourselves to God without asking anything in return, save that our abandonment to Him may make us feel more keenly the lilt of His playing. This abandonment is the freedom of the spirit.3 That is the only promise which can be given for faith, but what a promise! It means that we share in the ecstasy of His creation and His destruction, and experience the mystery and the freedom of His power in all the aspects of life, in both the heights of pleasure and the depths of pain. It may seem illogical, but those who have once shared in this mystery have a gratitude that knows no bounds and are able to say again that God is Love, though with an altogether new meaning.