Waldo Beach - "A Tender Conscience" (September 30, 1962)

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	(gentle music)	0:08
-	There's a phrase in the writings of the Puritans	0:19
	which occurs again and again	0:24
	to describe a quality of character,	0:28
	highly prized among our fathers and forefathers.	0:32
	The phrase is a tender conscience.	0:38
	Now, I suppose this term	0:43
	doesn't cut much ice with us,	0:46
	operators and climbers as we are	0:49
	in this gothic organizational jungle,	0:52
	social butterflies and lounge lizards.	0:58
	Indeed, the image we have of the whole Puritan type	1:03
	is quite uninviting.	1:06
	He looks like a tightlaced and sniveling killjoy	1:09
	with a conscious dead set	1:14
	against anybody having any fun, including himself,	1:15
	or against anybody ever taking a moral holiday.	1:21
	But a second and closer look at the Puritan	1:27
	would reveal, I think,	1:30
	that the Puritan character and the Puritan age	1:32
	had something of profound worth,	1:37
	which today's operator lacks.	1:41
	And it's this quality of a tender conscience.	1:45
	As a matter of fact, the education, or miseducation	1:50
	of conscience is one of the main things taking place	1:55
	in all of us here, whether we know or like it or not.	1:58
	Between the lines of the formal education going on,	2:05
	all the pounding in of facts and data,	2:10
	conjugations and constellations,	2:15
	beneath all the running about	2:20
	and getting to meetings and small talk,	2:21
	there is another process of moral education	2:25
	silently taking place,	2:28
	subtle shifts in valuations	2:32
	as the social scientists might call it,	2:36
	or simply conscience,	2:41
	knowhow about right and wrong.	2:44
	Things are happening to our consciences all over the place,	2:48
	daily anesthetizing or sensitizing them.	2:54
	And what happens to your conscience at Duke,	2:59
	is really of larger moment	3:04
	than what happens to your mind,	3:07
	what happens in your technical	3:11
	and factual acquisition of knowledge.	3:13
	Now, if I should ask you,	3:21
	as say a junior or senior sitting there,	3:24
	to reflect a moment on what's happened to your conscience	3:30
	since you arrived two or three years ago,	3:35
	you might conclude a little wistfully	3:41
	that it's not in such good shape.	3:45
	That in growing up you've undergone some kind of sea change	3:49
	in your view of right and wrong.	3:55
	As a freshman, you arrived saying,	4:00
	"I may not know all the fine points of microbiology	4:05
	or counterpoint, but at least I know the difference	4:10
	between right and wrong."	4:14
	You brought a little list, taught at home and church.	4:17
	There are six wrong things	4:23
	that nice people don't do	4:25
	and six right things that they do do.	4:26
	But shortly you found that your morally-tidy universe	4:31
	got all shook up, and your conscience got confused.	4:37
	Slogging along somewhere in the gray February smog	4:44
	of sophomore-itis,	4:49
	You realized that as far as your conscience is concerned,	4:52
	there are differences of opinion	4:57
	about right and wrong	5:00
	that some people do, and some people don't.	5:02
	And that it maybe after all a relative matter,	5:07
	that perhaps the best rule of conscience is tolerance,	5:12
	compromise, live and let live.	5:18
	You shifted to the conscience of the operator.	5:24
	And now you may have slid into junior or senior year	5:30
	with a dismal conclusion that your conscience	5:36
	is not after all, the voice of God	5:38
	telling you the right thing to do.	5:41
	But only the cerebral vestige of our ancestors' alarms,	5:46
	or just a spasm of the diaphragm,	5:52
	a super ego clamped down over the id,	5:56
	seriously cramping your style.	6:00
	Now such a growth as this in the education of conscience	6:06
	is usual, normal and healthy.	6:10
	Its movement out from a simple, naive, childish,	6:17
	moral sense, which thinks legalistically	6:23
	in black and white terms,	6:27
	in neat and absolute divisions	6:30
	of right and wrong actions,	6:32
	and of righteous and wicked people,	6:35
	into the wisdom of relativity.	6:40
	But a person of a really mature conscience	6:45
	doesn't stop there.	6:47
	He'll push beyond this naive relativism of the operator	6:51
	to a real sophistication.	6:58
	The awareness that within the relativities of choice,	7:02
	there is a better and a worse.	7:07
	And that it's absolutely demanded of him	7:10
	that he choose the relatively better way.	7:13
	A genuinely-tender conscience,	7:19
	is one schooled in the habit of close decision,	7:24
	among conflicting goods	7:29
	to decide for the better good.	7:32
	Choices of conscience are hard,	7:38
	exactly because it must decide,	7:42
	not between a clear good	7:44
	and a clear bad, but among competing goods.	7:48
	And a sensitive conscience,	7:57
	which is not really an instinct	8:00
	which flashes automatically green or red,	8:03
	is a habit slowly acquired of moral discernment,	8:09
	which chooses within the mixture	8:15
	the road that it must take.	8:18
	The purity of such a conscience however,	8:21
	is not the purity of innocence,	8:25
	which runs home to mother in the face of moral ambiguity,	8:28
	but the purity of obedience,	8:34
	which has a sense of the better over the worse,	8:37
	and is unswerving in its allegiance to that better	8:41
	as the form on earth	8:47
	of absolute obedience to its Lord.	8:50
	Now, how might we describe this quality	8:56
	of a tender conscience in Puritan thought?	9:01
	Or say in the makeup of the Quaker greats,	9:08
	who I suppose among Christians in history,	9:13
	stand out in their possession	9:17
	of this rare and precious quality.	9:19
	Read John Woolman's Journal sometime	9:24
	for a record of a tender conscience.	9:28
	A careful dissection	9:34
	into the anatomy of conscience would reveal,	9:37
	I think there are certain qualities	9:39
	at two levels, or two dimensions.	9:42
	On the horizontal level,	9:48
	that is of person to other persons,	9:50
	the tender conscience is sensitive	9:55
	to human needs and rights.	9:57
	It's simply the quality of considerateness or consideration.	10:01
	In every action, there is a kind of instinctive alertness	10:08
	to the human equation	10:12
	and a choice of action that serves the good of others.	10:16
	Such tenderness towards the good of persons,	10:20
	their needs, their rights,	10:23
	appears in a apparently paradoxical form.	10:26
	On the one side, it shows up	10:33
	in simple courtesy and respect,	10:35
	the habit of treating ones whole universe	10:41
	of nature, of property, of people	10:44
	with a delicate regard.	10:49
	For example, in between classes,	10:53
	there are some	10:57
	who tear out of Gray Building over here,	10:59
	headed for Student Union	11:02
	by simply cutting across the lawns in front of the chapel.	11:06
	And there are others who use the walks	11:11
	by kind of reflex action.	11:13
	And this is a mark of conscience.	11:17
	Last year, we had a character in these parts,	11:22
	a pyromaniac, who delighted in burning up	11:25
	the bulletin boards, notices and all	11:29
	in the middle of the night.	11:32
	He was notably lacking in a tender conscience.	11:35
	There are some inmates of West,	11:41
	who come in late Saturday night considerably,	11:46
	with some decent respect for the rest of the dorm.	11:51
	There are others, brawlers and night crawlers,	11:56
	unspeakable characters who delight	12:02
	in disrupting the whole place,	12:06
	with carousing at 3:00 am, in song and word,	12:09
	in language that could be called Biblical,	12:16
	but hardly tender.	12:20
	(audience laughing)	12:22
	This is a built-in quality, lacking among them,	12:29
	and present in others of courtesy,	12:34
	of a conscience tender toward the needs of neighbor.	12:38
	And that quality is what makes the traffic	12:42
	of our common life in this community	12:45
	packed in tight as we are, possible, livable.	12:48
	But here comes the paradox.	12:56
	A tender conscience is not a soft conscience.	12:59
	It knows when to bend and when to stiffen.	13:04
	The same alertness to human need	13:09
	which prompts the easy courtesy of tolerance,	13:12
	also prompts stubborn protests	13:17
	when human needs or rights are being denied	13:21
	by some structure of custom or law.	13:25
	And here, the person of conscience	13:31
	may prove a difficult	13:32
	and embarrassing character to have around.	13:36
	The rest of us, going our customary ways of complacency	13:41
	with consciences dulled by inertia or habit,	13:49
	are awakened by his word of reminder and rebuke.	13:55
	And we're annoyed by him.	14:01
	He digs in his heels at some point and says,	14:04
	"Look, I know everybody does it,	14:07
	and has been doing it for years, but it's wrong,	14:11
	and somebody has to say so."	14:17
	Such a tender conscience to human rights	14:21
	has led many Duke students to picket downtown,	14:24
	to boycott stores, restaurants, movies	14:30
	that are racially discriminatory.	14:35
	It has led other Duke students,	14:39
	along with protestors on many campuses,	14:42
	to participate in protests against nuclear testing.	14:46
	Whatever the rights and wrongs in the mixtures here,	14:53
	these persons are conscientious objectors,	14:57
	simply out of a moral sense	15:03
	that a monstrous damage to persons is being done	15:05
	and should be protested.	15:10
	These students represent what you might call	15:13
	the new Puritan.	15:18
	Not the old Puritan, fussy about moral trifle,	15:20
	but the new Puritan,	15:25
	who is alert to large social issues,	15:27
	and willing to take a stand in obedience	15:31
	to his inner moral sense and scruple.	15:33
	And his presence among us	15:40
	has a saving remnant,	15:43
	is to me a heartening sign	15:46
	that we have turned some kind of corner	15:48
	from the beat generation, the silent generation,	15:50
	the cautious generation.	15:55
	And yet he is a minority always,	15:59
	and in a sense, a troubler in Israel,	16:06
	a disturber of the peace.	16:09
	And sometimes this is the peace of his family,	16:12
	sometimes of his friends, sometimes of the Dean's office.	16:16
	So here it is in a curious way,	16:24
	out of a single-hearted passion for human rights,	16:27
	the student of tender conscience will be at once	16:32
	through courtesy, the keeper of the true peace of community,	16:35
	and through obedience to principle,	16:40
	a breaker of the peace of community,	16:43
	where that peace is false and hides human injustice.	16:47
	Still thinking on this horizontal dimension of existence,	16:55
	one can see another quality,	16:59
	or pair of qualities	17:02
	in a tender conscience.	17:05
	It's both a suffering conscience	17:08
	and an easy conscience.	17:12
	It suffers because it is alert to the world's hurt,	17:16
	to the tragedies of suffering	17:21
	that go on in the dark places of the earth.	17:24
	A tender conscience is the ability	17:29
	to read statistics with compassion,	17:32
	as Bishop Gore once spoke of Christian love,	17:36
	to feel the pain of despair	17:41
	for the victims of cruelty.	17:46
	I can sit at my desk and read that, quote,	17:51
	"In New York City,	17:57
	babies still have their throats ripped by sewer rats.	17:59
	There are places where 10 or more people live in a coal bin.	18:05
	There are women who have to sell themselves,	18:10
	and pimps and pushers and junkies and kids	18:14
	wise to the ways of the streets at nine years," end quote.	18:17
	If I have any kind of tender conscience,	18:26
	it should be stabbed broad awake	18:28
	by this sheer sociological data.	18:32
	A sensitive conscience suffers	18:37
	with the Vietnam peasants,	18:40
	whose hut and farm patches burned by gorilla fighters	18:44
	with the negro boy, at the point when he becomes aware	18:50
	of the ceilings put upon his life by his culture,	18:54
	or with those who are now sitting numb and taut	19:01
	in the waiting rooms of the Duke Hospital	19:07
	while some precious life hangs in the balance.	19:12
	Yet it would be unbearable	19:20
	if a conscience were so sensitized	19:24
	to all the human pain going on,	19:26
	that it tried to suffer with it.	19:29
	It would be overwhelmed.	19:31
	And there is another quality	19:34
	which sustains a tender conscience,	19:38
	and keeps it from despair or cynicism,	19:40
	makes it even easy, serene.	19:46
	And that is an awareness of grace within tragedy,	19:52
	that human evils and wrong can be mitigated,	19:57
	that ceilings can be lifted,	20:02
	that the city's dark streets can be brightened,	20:05
	that there are resources of healing and peace	20:10
	to be pitched against the destructive and the demonic.	20:13
	And the conscience which knows this grace	20:21
	can suffer, it must suffer.	20:25
	But it can also be easy,	20:29
	because it chooses to serve these forces	20:32
	of grace and renewal.	20:35
	This past summer,	20:40
	some of you had experiences which may confirm	20:43
	this double aspect of a suffering and a easy conscience.	20:47
	Far from this pretty country club	20:54
	you encountered squalor and filth and bleak misery.	20:58
	But I trust you were saved	21:06
	from helplessness and bitterness about it all	21:07
	by the awareness that there is an area of moral maneuver	21:11
	given by God, the Redeemer	21:16
	that something can be done about it.	21:21
	And that when you	21:24
	feel the weight of the world's tragedy,	21:28
	you also feel the lift	21:33
	that comes with an assumed responsibility	21:35
	to side with light against darkness,	21:41
	and to become an agent of reconciliation.	21:43
	These represent the qualities	21:49
	of conscience tender along a social plane.	21:51
	But there's a vertical dimension tool	21:58
	which makes the conscience of the Christian	22:01
	more than just a humanitarian one.	22:05
	For along the vertical plane	22:09
	the conscience, which is tender	22:12
	is alert to a transcendent voice.	22:16
	It feels responsible to serve human need,	22:19
	because its ultimate responsibility, or accountability,	22:23
	is to a Lord of the conscience above humanity.	22:29
	Indeed the roots of its social sensitivity	22:35
	lie here in the cultivation	22:37
	of this vertical relation,	22:41
	this ability to hear what,	22:45
	and to march to what Thoreau spoke of	22:48
	as "the beat of a different drummer."	22:52
	Perhaps now one can begin to see the relationship	22:59
	between worship and moral sensitivity	23:03
	on this campus.	23:09
	The disciplines of worship	23:11
	provide the point where we get our moral bearings.	23:14
	The whole fancy business here,	23:20
	and acted at this moment,	23:25
	this service of worship,	23:28
	all of its architecture and dress,	23:31
	the words spoken and sung,	23:35
	are intended to celebrate the deity of God,	23:39
	the majestic holiness of the Lord of the universe.	23:45
	It is a point where we come to stand	23:51
	in the presence of the one who sets	23:53
	the moral terms of our existence,	23:56
	who each day confronts us	24:00
	with the ultimate options of life and good,	24:01
	death and evil.	24:06
	To come here to worship,	24:10
	or to any other altar on this campus,	24:13
	public or private, is to step away for the moment,	24:16
	from all the moral ambiguity,	24:23
	all the tangles of our common life and decision,	24:26
	and come into the presence	24:30
	of the purity of absolute holiness,	24:32
	wherefrom then we derive a moral meridian,	24:36
	from which to measure our choices of conscience.	24:43
	Or to change the figure,	24:50
	our general moral existence is like the jumble of sound	24:53
	of the orchestra warming up.	24:58
	To worship is to hear a clear A,	25:02
	sounding in the cacophony	25:07
	from which then we get our harmonic bearings,	25:11
	from which the music that follows takes on order and sense.	25:16
	Because it has an absolute point	25:22
	from which dissonance and harmony both are measured.	25:25
	This opening time of year	25:32
	is a time for the setting of sights.	25:35
	I would propose that one aim to consider for yourself	25:42
	is the cultivation in your career here	25:47
	of a tender conscience.	25:52
	Not as though it were number nine	25:56
	on a list of things to do this week,	25:58
	along with two book reports.	26:01
	But in between the lines of all the things to do,	26:04
	to nurture a sensitivity vertically,	26:09
	to the transcendent source of moral obligation,	26:14
	and a sensitivity horizontally to human need,	26:18
	and to match one's gifts and talents to serve that need	26:24
	in an era which needs tenderness of conscience	26:31
	more desperately than it needs	26:36
	technical knowledge and bulldozers.	26:38
	And such education of conscience	26:43
	will bring by grace, as its byproduct,	26:48
	a sense of point in the whole confusion,	26:54
	and something of the joy of God's salvation.	27:01
	Amen. Let us pray.	27:10
	Oh thou holy one of Israel,	27:20
	who does set before us life and good,	27:27
	death and evil,	27:30
	and who hast given us the dreadful freedom of choice,	27:35
	grant us in all our doubts and uncertainties	27:43
	the grace to ask what thou wouldst have us to do,	27:47
	that the spirit of wisdom may save us	27:53
	from all false choices,	27:56
	and that in thy light, we may see light,	28:00
	and in thy straight path,	28:05
	may not stumble.	28:08
	Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,	28:11
	the love of God and the Communion of the Holy Spirit	28:16
	be with you all.	28:22
	(gentle music)	28:25

Item Info

Title:

Waldo Beach - "A Tender Conscience" (September 30, 1962)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r47h1jn8s

Date:

September 30, 1962

Speaker:

Beach, Waldo

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Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0200
ref5604_3xh
uachapelsermaud
duke:628332
dcrau002210
ark:/87924/r47h1jn8s
3308df5e-e2db-40f3-8fe5-31381ce10e21

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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Durham (N.C.)

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Waldo Beach - "A Tender Conscience" (September 30, 1962)

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1. Waldo Beach - "A Tender Conscience" (September 30, 1962)

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Waldo Beach - "A Tender Conscience" (September 30, 1962)

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