Samuel H. Miller - "Basic Simplicities" (October 31, 1965)
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| - | Generally, it is our custom, | 0:32 |
| particularly in university chapels | 0:36 | |
| to speak of the difficulty of being Christian in our day | 0:41 | |
| in such a way as to lay the major blame | 0:48 | |
| on either a decadent church, | 0:52 | |
| which has not sustained us in our Christian faith | 0:56 | |
| or upon those subtle complexities | 1:04 | |
| of a sophisticated theology, | 1:08 | |
| which it is difficult to attain to, | 1:11 | |
| or per chance the strange historic impotence | 1:15 | |
| of those symbols which once supported the Christian faith | 1:21 | |
| in the mystery of the world, but no longer do so. | 1:26 | |
| All these conditions may indeed affect us | 1:32 | |
| and make it difficult to be Christian in the 20th century. | 1:38 | |
| But I rather surmise that in back of these | 1:44 | |
| and underneath of them, | 1:49 | |
| there may occur certain simple difficulties, | 1:51 | |
| which are much more radical and much more revolutionary. | 1:57 | |
| I should like this morning to deal | 2:05 | |
| with a very simple situation. | 2:07 | |
| Namely, how do we handle experience? | 2:10 | |
| What do we do with it, if anything. | 2:18 | |
| When we turn to the great thinkers of the world, | 2:24 | |
| Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, | 2:30 | |
| we're confronted almost immediately | 2:36 | |
| with a remarkable simplicity, | 2:40 | |
| a simplicity that is somewhat deceptive however | 2:46 | |
| for it is not easily plumbed, | 2:51 | |
| nor even exhaustible. | 2:56 | |
| Even so when we turn to Jesus, | 3:00 | |
| we come immediately in the presence of the parables, | 3:05 | |
| simple, easy to read | 3:12 | |
| thoroughly memorable, | 3:18 | |
| and yet, over and over again, | 3:23 | |
| one returns to them with the unexpected surprise | 3:27 | |
| of new dimensions of truth and meaning | 3:32 | |
| when one thinks he has plumbed them to the very bottom, | 3:38 | |
| there are still depths beyond | 3:43 | |
| when one thinks he has understood their references to life. | 3:48 | |
| One confronts unexpected references to their wisdom | 3:53 | |
| that one had not known before. | 4:02 | |
| This inexhaustibility of the parable | 4:06 | |
| is a continual fascination, | 4:12 | |
| somewhat like the mountains in their grand simplicity | 4:14 | |
| or the sea in its greatness, | 4:20 | |
| which remains forever the same. | 4:24 | |
| And yet with remarkable changeableness | 4:27 | |
| eludes any standard normative definition, | 4:33 | |
| but continually sustains our imagination | 4:41 | |
| and thrusts it further and further | 4:46 | |
| into new aspects and modes of our perception. | 4:51 | |
| These parables of Jesus, | 4:57 | |
| of which the parable of the sower is but one example | 4:58 | |
| are like mirrors. | 5:03 | |
| Unless you hold them up to your own experience, | 5:05 | |
| you see nothing. | 5:10 | |
| Or what you see is very little | 5:12 | |
| for the parable is not referring | 5:16 | |
| to some kind of an objective corelative in the world, | 5:19 | |
| but to some mystery in the heart of man, | 5:24 | |
| which requires a renewal of the imagination, | 5:28 | |
| a continuing humility | 5:33 | |
| that allows one to put down alongside the parable | 5:35 | |
| one's own mortal life. | 5:39 | |
| It is a very bold parable, | 5:44 | |
| a sower went forth to saw. | 5:47 | |
| God is like a farmer | 5:52 | |
| out of the common places one grasps at divinity. | 5:56 | |
| God is like a farmer with wide and generous hand | 6:05 | |
| who streams the furrows of time | 6:11 | |
| of night and day with events and circumstances of our life. | 6:13 | |
| And some of these seeds fall on very poor ground | 6:20 | |
| and others on good ground | 6:26 | |
| in such strange and moving simplicities | 6:31 | |
| Jesus moves beyond all the complexities | 6:36 | |
| of sophisticated theology | 6:40 | |
| to those inner insights that seem to be perennial | 6:43 | |
| and sustaining for men always and everywhere. | 6:47 | |
| How realistic he is, | 6:52 | |
| the seeds that fall from the hand of God, | 6:58 | |
| fall on rocky soil, on thorny soil, | 7:02 | |
| on traffic ridden soil. | 7:08 | |
| Three out of every four seeds | 7:11 | |
| that fall from the hand of God | 7:13 | |
| never come to anything. | 7:15 | |
| They are good seeds. | 7:18 | |
| They are fertile. | 7:21 | |
| They have the possibilities of meaning. | 7:23 | |
| And yet in spite of this vitality, | 7:26 | |
| they are not fulfilled | 7:31 | |
| three out of every four experiences in our life | 7:34 | |
| I suppose we must say are wasted. | 7:38 | |
| They happen, but we do nothing with them. | 7:43 | |
| There is an interesting story told of Henry James, | 7:49 | |
| who at lunch in one day sat beside a lady | 7:53 | |
| who began to tell him about the sale at auction | 7:58 | |
| of one of the magnificent estates of England. | 8:02 | |
| And as Henry James began to think | 8:07 | |
| of this extraordinary event, | 8:09 | |
| which would scatter to the four winds of chance, | 8:13 | |
| the accumulated heritage of many generations | 8:18 | |
| in which discrimination and wealth had brought together | 8:23 | |
| one of the most superb collections of art | 8:27 | |
| and had created a home with the enrichment of the ages. | 8:31 | |
| He tried to get together in his own mind, | 8:37 | |
| a picture of this situation only to have the lady beside him | 8:40 | |
| continue to chatter about other matters. | 8:48 | |
| And in his journal, | 8:51 | |
| he wrote " Would God that she could have kept quiet | 8:53 | |
| until I could get my hands on this idea and get it rooted." | 8:58 | |
| All of our life is like that | 9:06 | |
| it is filled with distraction and with frenzy, | 9:10 | |
| with torment and with tumult. | 9:15 | |
| If somehow people would be quiet. | 9:21 | |
| If we could sit down a moment, | 9:26 | |
| if we could take what had happened to us | 9:29 | |
| and hold it quietly, | 9:32 | |
| meditatively, reflectively in our hearts, | 9:34 | |
| if we could have pushed away all the traffic of restlessness | 9:39 | |
| and provided a hospitable soil. | 9:45 | |
| If it could have been tilled | 9:49 | |
| so as to be ready for the seed, | 9:51 | |
| if somehow we could only learn that that event, | 9:54 | |
| however small or commonplace could be grasped | 9:58 | |
| by the imagination | 10:03 | |
| held until at last, the roots had gone down | 10:05 | |
| into the depths of our imagination | 10:10 | |
| and begun to fulfill itself in meaning and significance. | 10:12 | |
| Unfortunately, | 10:19 | |
| we are distracted by distraction from distraction. | 10:21 | |
| We are written with haste and obsessed with a frenzy | 10:26 | |
| that will not let us rest. | 10:31 | |
| We are thrust across the surface of life at terrific speed | 10:34 | |
| and waste our time. | 10:39 | |
| Indeed kill our time with meetings | 10:41 | |
| and activities in which there are no meaning | 10:48 | |
| until at last, | 10:55 | |
| the seed that was sawn falls on rocky ground, | 10:56 | |
| thorny soil, traffic ridden hearts and mind. | 11:02 | |
| Some years ago I said to Dr.Woodworth at Harvard | 11:10 | |
| that I was singularly impressed as many have been. | 11:18 | |
| And over and over again, | 11:22 | |
| with that mighty motif that occurs | 11:24 | |
| in the "Ninth Symphony" of Beethoven | 11:26 | |
| and how incredible and heavenly it was, | 11:31 | |
| how magical as if it came by revelation | 11:36 | |
| rather than the anguish of a mortal man. | 11:40 | |
| And he smiled at me and said, | 11:46 | |
| "but you must know that that motif occurs earlier." | 11:50 | |
| And I said, "I'm sorry, I'm ignorant about it. | 11:57 | |
| Where does it occur earlier?" | 12:02 | |
| Then he said, "as nearly as I can find out, | 12:04 | |
| it occurs in eighteen places, | 12:07 | |
| beginning with the earliest work of Beethoven." | 12:12 | |
| This is the way in which life gathers depth. | 12:18 | |
| This is the way in which a great man handles experience. | 12:25 | |
| It is not enough for Beethoven to take the first seed | 12:30 | |
| that fell upon the soil and to shape it. | 12:35 | |
| But even in that first time, | 12:40 | |
| however noble and grand it was, | 12:43 | |
| it was the greatness of Beethoven | 12:47 | |
| recognized that relatively this was a failure | 12:50 | |
| compared to that, which it might become. | 12:54 | |
| And so year after year, decade after decade | 12:58 | |
| in agony and difficulty, | 13:03 | |
| he's shaped and wrestled with this recalcitrant material, | 13:06 | |
| until at last, instead of being a mediocre success, | 13:13 | |
| it became the revelation of sound and music | 13:18 | |
| of glory and grandeur that man had never heard before. | 13:22 | |
| Reality is not merely what happens. | 13:28 | |
| Reality is what a man does to add the insight, | 13:36 | |
| perceptiveness, reflection and understanding of his soul | 13:41 | |
| to what has happened. | 13:46 | |
| What has happened is so small a portion of what ought to be | 13:50 | |
| that it never comes to be, | 13:57 | |
| unless I mind knows what to do with it. | 13:59 | |
| The seed takes more than sowing | 14:03 | |
| experience takes more than living. | 14:07 | |
| When a thing happens, | 14:13 | |
| there ought to be clear soil and reflectiveness | 14:16 | |
| and understanding | 14:22 | |
| and such care in the rain and the sun | 14:26 | |
| in all the weathers of the world | 14:31 | |
| in the eliciting of strength and power, | 14:33 | |
| goodness and beauty from this event | 14:38 | |
| that at last it may be fulfilled in all its inexhaustible | 14:41 | |
| and eternal character. | 14:47 | |
| I suspect that the reason why psychiatrists are so busy | 14:51 | |
| in our world is simply that most of us never understand | 14:55 | |
| what has happened to us before we rush madly | 15:01 | |
| to the next experience and fill our days and nights | 15:05 | |
| with so many events | 15:10 | |
| that they become deeply tangled | 15:12 | |
| and only the man of extreme patience | 15:16 | |
| and extraordinary skill who can let us talk | 15:21 | |
| and ramble for hours on end at a very high cost | 15:26 | |
| is able to get back to the meaning of the things | 15:32 | |
| we have buried in our forgetful and haste ridden lives. | 15:35 | |
| The problem of being a Christian is not in the calculus | 15:45 | |
| of the subtlest theology we can achieve | 15:53 | |
| by rational thought. | 15:57 | |
| The difficulty of being Christian | 16:00 | |
| is the rather inexhaustible simplicity | 16:03 | |
| of trying to handle the events of our mortal life | 16:07 | |
| in such a way that they shall bear their fruit. | 16:11 | |
| Some 30 fold, some 60, some a hundred. | 16:14 | |
| The daughter of Leo Tolstoy tells an extraordinary story | 16:23 | |
| of his sitting after breakfast and reflecting, | 16:31 | |
| I suppose, in good American fashion, | 16:36 | |
| we should have said that he wasn't doing anything. | 16:38 | |
| For the hardest work in the world is simply | 16:44 | |
| this interior exercise of the imagination, | 16:48 | |
| which seeks to work upon the raw material | 16:52 | |
| of human experience and find out what it means | 16:56 | |
| that particular morning Leo Tolstoy | 17:00 | |
| had a Turkish dressing gown on, | 17:06 | |
| and as he sat, seemingly idle, | 17:12 | |
| his hand ran down the collar of it, | 17:17 | |
| where there was some needlework. | 17:20 | |
| And as his thumb and finger felt the needle work | 17:24 | |
| his mind turned to the work of women in the world. | 17:30 | |
| This exquisite piece of needlework | 17:38 | |
| was a seed of commonplace and rather minor size, | 17:42 | |
| but it fell upon a fertile imagination, | 17:51 | |
| which began to conjure up | 17:54 | |
| the life and mystery a womankind. | 17:58 | |
| A world into which man scarcely enters | 18:05 | |
| in its profounder subtleties and significances. | 18:14 | |
| And as Tolstoy thought of womankind, | 18:21 | |
| of her work, her labor in the world, her skills, | 18:24 | |
| her heart and wisdom, her affections and agonies. | 18:30 | |
| There was born bit by bit | 18:36 | |
| the basis for "Anna Karenina". | 18:43 | |
| The classic novel of the life of woman. | 18:48 | |
| It wasn't much, a bit of needlework, | 18:54 | |
| but in the mind of Tolstoy, it flourished, | 18:59 | |
| it flourished magnificently. | 19:03 | |
| It deepened its roots, its prying into a vast tree. | 19:06 | |
| It covered all the relationships of the world. | 19:12 | |
| It became cosmic in its dimension. | 19:15 | |
| It became the very ground of the tragic nature | 19:19 | |
| of life among mortals. | 19:24 | |
| One of the interesting journals of Bonhoeffer, | 19:29 | |
| he asks the simple question of pathos. | 19:33 | |
| Why is it, he said that in the life of Martin Luther, | 19:37 | |
| he talks over and over again about the thunder storm | 19:43 | |
| that shook his soul early in his life. | 19:48 | |
| Year after year and decade after decade, | 19:52 | |
| that thunderstorm reappears and sustains | 19:55 | |
| and supports new meanings and significances | 20:00 | |
| to the expanding social responsibility of the reformer, | 20:03 | |
| Martin Luther | 20:08 | |
| and then Bonhoeffer said, | 20:10 | |
| "But last night in our prison, we had an air raid. | 20:12 | |
| There was destruction all about | 20:17 | |
| men face death momentarily, | 20:20 | |
| but 10 minutes after it was over, | 20:27 | |
| we went to bed, slept well | 20:30 | |
| and this morning we have forgotten all about it." | 20:33 | |
| The difficulty of being Christian is simply the difference | 20:40 | |
| between paying attention to life, holding it, | 20:47 | |
| nurturing it, exploring it, reflecting upon it | 20:55 | |
| until at last what happens as a grain of mustard seed | 21:05 | |
| grows into a vast tree in which all the birds of the air, | 21:12 | |
| all the events of history, | 21:18 | |
| all the many leveled activities of man, | 21:20 | |
| the arts and the scientists, all things come together, | 21:23 | |
| life and death, night and day | 21:27 | |
| and reflect their mystery in this event. | 21:31 | |
| A sower went forth to sow | 21:38 | |
| he will be sowing today, and tomorrow and the day after. | 21:42 | |
| And most of the scenes good though they are, | 21:49 | |
| will be wasted on man, | 21:57 | |
| who is a great waster of sorrows and of joys | 22:02 | |
| of life and of death, of wars and of knowledge. | 22:07 | |
| But here and there a seed, a circumstance, a commonplace | 22:15 | |
| will fall upon the hospitable soil | 22:24 | |
| and it will grow and it will bear fruit, | 22:31 | |
| 30 fold, 60 fold, a hundred fold | 22:35 | |
| and fill the air with song and joy and peace. | 22:40 | |
| Let us pray. | 22:46 | |
| All mighty and everlasting God | 23:04 | |
| let the plow share of thy stern mercy break | 23:08 | |
| the complacent ground of our souls | 23:12 | |
| until the soil is ready for the thy coming. | 23:16 | |
| Let the broad hand of thy providence | 23:23 | |
| strew the soil with seed of circumstance, | 23:25 | |
| which we shall welcome with hope. | 23:30 | |
| And in thy time, grant us a harvest of hours and of life | 23:35 | |
| wherein the labor and suffering of our hearts | 23:42 | |
| shall be fruitful with eternal grain. | 23:44 | |
| And now may the love of God, the father, | 23:51 | |
| the grace of Jesus Christ, his son, our savior, | 23:54 | |
| and the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit | 23:58 | |
| rest and abide with you both now and forevermore. | 24:01 | |
| Amen. | 24:07 |