(Most of it spoken at York meeting in the morning, then written down and used for the Sunday Evening Talk)
SUNDAY EVENING TALK 21st January, 1968
[Teaching and the approach of retirement]
In the last few days I have had two experiences of acute enjoyment. Both were in the school laboratory and the result of science classes. The first was when a girl came to me while the rest of the class were moving out of the laboratory, came to me with her face glowing with pleasure, to tell me that this and the lesson preceding it (the previous day) had been the two most interesting lessons she had ever had in a school. I think I know why. We had been carrying out demonstrations of the “Brownian Motion”. In this, a little smoke from a burning shred of tobacco or piece of string is captured in a tiny transparent cell and observed under a microscope with an intense ray of light padding through it. Smoke is really very fine dust, not gas, and the particles of this dust are lit up like a myriad stars. But they are not still; the stars are in unceasing erratic motion, each like a football on a games field. The players are the molecules of the gases of the air far too small to see even under the most powerful microscope. The constant bombardment of these molecules keeps the smoke particles moving about and they are big enough for us to see when magnified several hundred times.
So perhaps for this girl the experience was exciting and enjoyable because it appealed to her imagination; it was a glimpse into the world of the incredibly small, a world that too many scientists have become so accustomed to that they cease to recognise what a world of wonder it is.
The second experience was of a double-period chemistry class in which everything had “gone right”. All the demonstrations had worked perfectly, in spite of the fact that I had had far too little time to prepare my mind or the apparatus. I had prepared large quantities of chlorine without gassing myself, and the explosion of a mixture of hydrogen and chlorine had been so thunderous as to win a round of spontaneous applause.
One does not always feel so good as I felt after these two lessons. More often one feels that the job could have been better done, that there has been failure somewhere, one’s inspiration has been inadequate. Teaching is a bit like painting or writing poetry. One effort in ten gives one satisfaction, the tremendous satisfaction of creative achievement; the other nine can be thrown away.
Nevertheless, these two experiences, however exceptional they might be, set me wondering about the way, as we go through our life and work, we gather knowledge and expertise into our personalities, so that we move towards the end of our lives becoming richer and richer in “knowhow”. If we can maintain our inspiration, our joy in work, our spiritual youthfulness, we become a great reservoir of useful knowledge and competence. And when I say that, I am not thinking only of teachers, but of all men and women everywhere who take their work both with joy and seriousness: cooks and plumbers, bank managers and boilermakers, dentists and – perhaps outstandingly – doctors.
As my mind traced its way through these thoughts, it had to face tragedy. In six months time I shall probably deliver my last lesson, for the last time see a child perform an experiment under my guidance. All that I have learnt in 45 years of teaching will sink into the residue of my mind, never again to be expressed. I moved on to face the fact of death.
When you get past sixty you begin to recognise acutely that you are beginning to lose your friends by death, and that other people whom you have not known as friends, but admired for their knowledge and their greatness, are disappearing from the human community. In losing them we lose not only their knowledge and expertise, but their fund of love.
It is a terrible paradox of human life – terrible because so hard to accept – that a man or woman should, in a life of sixty or seventy years of hard work, accumulate an immense amount of knowledge or a great capacity for understanding and loving - and then suddenly it is all gone. I say suddenly; but it may not be suddenly. There is an even more tragic way in which it may be lost – the way of slow degeneration in which the mind loses its grip, memory becomes hazy and thinking blurred, or in which even loving ceases to mean much, because other people are barely even recognised.
Where can we find comfort? If we have been good teachers we have passed on our knowledge and inspiration to many others, I used to admire Sir William Bragg when I was a student – admire him both for his science and his greatness as a person. Sir William is long dead, but his knowledge and his qualities were passed on to his son, Sir Laurance; and between father and son there was a remarkable cooperation. Sir Laurence is now even more grandfatherly than I am. The inspiration of the Braggs, and all their knowledge, have been passed on to the many scientists who came under their influence. I think especially of Kathleen Lonsdale and Dorothy Hodgkin, who have perfected the technique of X-ray crystallography so that it has become one of the most searching and precise methods we can use in discovering the structure of complex molecules – enabling us to discover (or Dorothy Hodgkin to discover) the structure of penicillin and therefore point the way to its artificial production in the laboratory.
Yes, this is something of an answer to our grief when we think of human loss. But it is not a complete answer. We can try to find a complete answer through religion, perhaps by the thought that somehow the person we have lost lives on, has returned to God from whom he came. But we must not take this kind of answer too readily. It has, in the mouths of too many people, a slickness that I do not like, a false comfort that dims the senses and blunts the feelings. It can be a sort of Dunlopillo cushion on which we sit to protect ourselves from the hard ground of reality. Death and suffering are a painful mystery, and they must not cease to be painful if we are to remain fully human. True comfort is not an easing off of pain but a discovery of the courage to accept pain.
The slick and false comfort I have referred to has often - in the statements of the Christian Church – taken the form of “pie in the sky when you die”. More than anything else in Christianity, this has been responsible for the Church’s failure to deal with the human predicament; so that, in general, the Church has spent its time praying for the souls of suffering and dying people when it ought to have been on its feet, trying to understand the causes of war and hatred and poverty and driving the nations to remove those causes.
A belief in immortality would perhaps be an answer to my problem - the problem of what happens to all the knowledge, the understanding and the capacity for love that we have been given in the course of our lives. But none of the usual concepts of immortality bring me any satisfaction. Is there to be another life - a life to come – in which I shall be able to understand more easily the things I can at present only grope towards? Shall I be able to do the things that are now denied me, create without having first to overcome frustration?
I can make nothing of such an idea. Life for me has been full of enjoyment – but I cannot disentangle enjoyment from difficulty. The discovery of love, which came early in my life and remained permanent, had to come through bewilderment and distress, an experience that made me ready for love. The acquiring of scientific knowledge was painfully difficult; my mind couldn’t easily narrow itself down to the quick storing of departmental knowledge. . But though I never achieved any distinction in science there is a sense in which I rejoice in science - perhaps more than do many to whom the knowledge came more easily, and who had less reason therefore to reflect upon what they were doing.
Everyone who has climbed a mountain - and you don't heed to go out of England to have this experience - will know the connectionbetween difficulty and enjoyment. We remember the aching limbs, the shortness of breath, the jaws frozen by driving rain, yes, even the blisters on our heels, all as a significant part of the achievement that brought us joy. This is a parable for the whole of life. And it makes it impossible for me to think of a life after death in which achievement and perception of truth comes without struggle.
I think we are -.probably talking nonsense in any attempt to forecast what life after death might be like, because however much we try to avoid it, we persist in thinking about it as though it were a continuation in time. But if we are to talk about it, it seems to me that there is more sense in thinking about our present life as one of apprenticeship - a preparation for a life that is even more demanding, presenting even greater difficulties but at the same time more opportunities. That's certainly what I would want,
But always one has to remember that great mass of humanity to whom our joys are denied - those who are overwhelmed by difficulties they cannot cope with, the undernourished, the hopelessly poor, the huge families in overpopulated areas who drag along in despair until despair boils over into anger, and anger into hatred and riot. Are we to hope for a heaven in which they will be rewarded for their endurance of poverty and squalor? No; there is nothing Christian in such a thought. There is nothing good in being helped off a bed of thorns into a bed of feathers. It is no better than hoping that a casual labourer will win £200,000 on the pools.
No I would want these unhappy, deprived people to be given the opportunities I have been given, the opportunity for adventure, the opportunity to overcome difficulty and distress instead of being, submerged by them.
Every Christian has to think about the mystery of the Resurrection. To many this has been a promise of bliss - the reassurance that there will be golden pavements to compensate for the stony road of injusticeand repudiation.This is, I think a false use of the mystery of resurrection.
Think first of the story of the resurrection itself. If we are fully honest we shall have to admit that we shall never know what really happened. The gospel record (which was written many years later) at one moment makes us think of a dead body that became completely alive again; at another moment of a presence that was not a physical body, because it could appear and disappear. I am one of those who cannot believe that a dead body became alive again, but I do believe that something every bit as astonishing happened and people had to express its astonishing quality in a story of this kind. I do not think it matters very much what we decide about these two possibilities so long as we understand the meaning.
The Resurrection does not mean that death is not real and that we have no reason to feel grief and a sense of tragedy when our friends die. It is sentimentalism to think that the thought of the Resurrection comforts the widow who no longer hears her husband's key turn in the front door lock, or feels his hand on hers in bed. The resurrection cannot be separated from the agony and despair that preceded it and the kind of life that led up to it. It is fully meaningful only in that whole context. Its message is not that we can by-pass grief and suffering, but that out of these life can rise again.
No one should dare to say what the Resurrection wholly means. But this is at least part of what it means to me. It was not just an event, something that happened two thousand years ago and that good Christians look back to. It is a presentation of the truth about life, as true of life now as it was true of life in Roman times. If we think of it as a past event it lays no responsibility upon us; and it lays no more responsibility upon the person who thinks of it as a dead body rising to walk again than upon the person who thinks of it as a legend or a myth.
Too often Christian "believers" have thought that in the crucifixion and resurrection something was done for us so changing the situation that it left us with less to do; we had only to endure and wait. On the contrary it leaves us with more to do. The cruxifixion asks as to become more vulnerable, to risk our own "cross". And the resurrection is not real unless we make it so for ourselves. The resurrection remains a mere event in the past, or a mere myth, unless we make it real in our own lives.
Only we, living today, can make the Resurrection real. We can make it real by making sure that we are not defeated by hatred and squalor, by making sure that out of the ashes of our hopes a new hope will always arise. Institutional Christianity has taken the resurrection too far into the world of magic for the ordinary man to realise what it asks of him. It asks him to get out of the tomb. Man is entombed by greed and fear and power. He is entombed often by his own religion, which makes such claims upon him that he cannot think a new thought or feel a new emotion; he cannot feel the new life stir within him, nor tolerate its emergence in his fellow men, He cannot recognise the "risen Lord" because he does not speak in traditional language, and presents himself like the unrecognised stranger on the road to Emmaus.
Our world is, in a sense, a crucified world, but there is a life in it that can transform it, if we give it a chance. In his book The New Being, Paul Tillich writes:-
"Keep yourselves open for the creative moment whichmay appear in the midst of what seemed to be waste.
The word "resurrection" has for many people the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images. But resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the old. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there isresurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time. The Old Being has the mark of disintegration and death. The New Being puts a new mark over the old one. Out of disinteration and death something is born of eternal significance. That which is immersed indissolution emerges in a New Creation. Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in soul and history, in nature and universe.
Reconciliation, reunion, resurrection - this is the New Creation, the New Being, the New state of things. Do we participate in it? The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality. A New state of things has appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you."
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/2 document 03