Evening Address March 9th, 1952
NOT BY BREAD ALONE
by Kenneth Barnes
Readings: Stone to bread - Matthew 4. v.1-4
Woman at the Well - John 4. v.5-15.
Nicodemus - John 3. v.1-8
This term we have made a special effort to make your meals interesting, and judging by what some boys and girls have written home to your parents, we have succeeded. This is a very important achievement. Good food means a good deal to a community of boys and girls. But it is our duty and our desire to give them much more that food for the body. We have to give them also the instruction they need, the intellectual stimulation, the food for their minds. I am not, however, going to talk about this. I’m going to talk about a third need that we must try to meet; the spiritual need. In the stories I read Jesus appears to have bewildered his hearers. He spoke in figurative language and those who heard his words seem often to have scratched their heads and wondered what on earth he was getting at. They felt it was tremendously important, but it took sometime before its significance was understood by them.
What was this – this living water? At first the women of Samaria seemed to think that it would permanently satisfy her physical thirst and save her the journeys to the well. But it is not difficult for us to understand now that this spring of living water that she was to find within herself was very different; it was a source of energy, courage, faith and love, which, once discovered, would never fail her, so that she never again feel (sic) spiritually dry.
It should not be difficult to understand that we think it our special task to help our pupils to find this living water within, so that they will have the strength to meet whatever life brings them. Now we cannot give them this as we give them their meals. It is possible for us to see to it that they have all the food they need without calling on their help at all. In practice they do help, but they could be equally well fed if all the work were done by domestic servants. This is in no way true of their more deeply personal needs. We cannot hand them their spiritual needs as we hand them food on a plate. We cannot hand it them at all. We can only help them in the life they live with us, to discover it for themselves. If we thought we had just the right spiritual food, it would mean that we assumed we knew exactly and wholly what was right and good. People who thought that would be suffering from spiritual pride, like the Pharisees, and would be quite unfit to help others. No, we don’t give them what they need, but perhaps as adults we do know something about the way to find it, the sort of discipline through which it is to be discovered.
There is, moreover, a serious difficulty we have to face. In giving boys and girls the ordinary food for the body we can safely assume that all their stomachs work more or less alike, that they are all used to coping with carbohydrates, fats, proteins, salts and vitamins in much the same way. But they come to us with very different spiritual stomachs, very differing habits of thought and feeling, very differing spiritual experience. For instance, some have never known more than one parent, while others have always had two. Some have never had anything but a tender and loving experience of home life, whereas others have seen the home break up over their heads in bitterness and despair and defeat. Some have already known loss and tragedy and death: others have not been touched by these experiences yet. If I speak of the Fatherhood of God I have to realise that fatherhood may mean two entirely different things to two different children. How can we help when even the very words we use may mean contrary things?
The task is not however an impossible one. The very fact that here we are all together, co-operating in keeping the school going, making adjustments to each other everyday of our lives and having on the whole an active and satisfying life together, means that we are discovering things that are true for us all; and I know that boys and girls see each other changing and developing, and even in their unhappiness and mistakes discovering a little more about what is most worth while for us all. Think of the difficulties that arise among yourselves, or between yourselves and me. What are we looking for when we discuss them and try to get over them? Is it just the smooth running of the school organisation? I’m sure that if you think carefully you will realise that we are seeking much more than this. You know that what you are seeking is something in yourself that will be dependable for all time and for all experience. I know that you become distressed when your casual impulses lead you astray, when you do things that seem to betray your friends or the school. Is your distress only the distress of humiliation, the feel of being inferior, of defeat or temporary despair? Do you feel only guilty, or do you go beyond this and long for something at the centre of your personality that will save you from lapses in the future? I have no doubt that nearly always you do have something of this longing, though perhaps often you run away from it into laughter and excitement or some other escape from its challenge. Perhaps it would be well for you sometimes not to allow yourselves these escapes, but in quietness to let yourselves feel the whole weight of your mistakes and the whole urgency of your inner need.
The mistakes we make, even the injuries we do to other people, need not be evil in their final result. Even when you have deeply wounded another person, that very fact may be a step towards knowing and caring for him as you might never otherwise have done. The effort to atone for the fault may so redeem the situation as to turn hate into love. Thus what appears to be a step backward may in fact become a step forward and the action that made you feel guilty may be the thing that brings you nearer to God. It has been Christianity more than any other faith that has made us feel that there is no evil that cannot be redeemed.
Several of you, and certainly others who have left the school, will know instances of this experience, occasions when you have lapsed seriously and afterwards felt terribly ashamed. But within a short time you have been able to say: I’m glad after all that I did that: I learnt from it something about myself that I didn’t know before: I know something now about the dangers and pitfalls of life. If this situation is repeated in the world after school I shall know how to deal with it.
A school should be a place where mistakes can be made and where you can learn from them. But we do need, in you, the desire to discover what is true and good and eternally dependable. Earlier in the term you listened to a talk in which it was shown how, if we neglected or mock at sacred things, we do so at our peril, we run the risk of destroying ourselves. The word sacred was not used in any conventional sense, but in the sense that certain things, certain values and standards, certain types of feeling and experience, when we bring our whole personalities into the understanding of them, we know to be wholly good, to be worthy of our respect and devotion. These are the things that we must seek to discover and establish at the very core of our personality. We can’t do this just by thinking and making decisions with our minds, but in the way we live from day to day, in the way we allow ourselves to feel things and afterwards think about our feelings, and above all in the way we open our personalities to the light that is seeking a way in.
Now I must turn to the story of Nicodemus. Here again Jesus startles his questioner by referring to one of the simple, basic experiences of life: birth. Here again Jesus uses his characteristic method of jerking the mind out of its accustomed habits of thought, so that there can be no easy academic discussion that might end nowhere. You people have got to be born again! But how can I return to my mother’s womb and be born a second time, asks Nicodemus? Having startled him, Jesus explains that there must be two berths: of water and of the spirit. Before a baby is born it rests in its mother’s womb surrounded by water and like a diver under the surface of the sea it is nourished by a life line, from its mother, the umbilical cord. Just before birth the bag of water bursts at the mouth of the womb and the baby leaps into the world. That is how we are born of water. What does it mean to be born again - this time of the spirit? Jesus saw the Pharisees as they really were, men whose whole attitude was profoundly wrong, puffed up with spiritual pride, thinking that they were better than others, imagining that they knew what God wanted but in fact shutting God out of their lives by their conceit and self-righteousness. For them to be able to enter the Kingdom of God to know the eternal truths, there was only one way – to go right back to the beginning, to shed all their ideas and attitudes and feeling, to learn humility and to begin to see life in a wholly new way, like a baby coming from the darkness of the womb into the light of the outer world and having to learn the very simplest things.
Some people have had this experience of a complete new birth. St. Paul in his conversion is the most famous example. But to many people it is something that happens bit by bit and from day to day. In your classwork you may find that you have a sound basis for your English but you may become so confused in your Mathematics that you have to go almost back to the beginning to get a new feeling about it, a new and constructive way of looking at numbers and symbols. Similarly in your more personal life you may rightly feel confident about some of your attitudes; feelings valuations, and in others have to go back to the beginning before you can have the feeling that you are becoming a whole person.
This going back to the beginning is sometimes a painful process but never wholly so. Looking at life in a fresh way as though you had never seen it before, is found to bring a thrill. To parents perhaps the most moving thing in their experience is to watch a young child making discoveries about the world around him, coming back to show them with fascination and delight little things that the old folk have got so used to that they have lost their sense of wonder.
Never be afraid, then, to cast aside any habits of thought and feeling and behaviour and go back to the beginning. As each part of your personality – in so far as it needs it – goes through this process you will become more and more a whole person. You will understand what Jesus meant by the spring of living water within you and what it is to know God. It is not a process, however, that is ever finished, because the characteristic of a whole person is that he never stops growing, never [c]eases to discover new things to be made part of his wholeness.
Archive reference: PP KCB 3/7/2 document 01