AIMS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
I am not a good teacher in the sense that some people I have known are good teachers – those who seem to be able to explain anything clearly and effectively so that their pupils remember it forever and star the world with their achievements. I am not a good teacher, but I am a better teacher than I shd be if I thought I was good enough, or if I didn’t care whether I was good or not. I have said that, not because I want to be autobiographical, but because it illustrates a principle that I want to talk about tonight, and which is, I think, important for you in your school work and what is more important, infinitely more important, in the development of our character.
All of you have, I shd imagine, at one time or another, done a bad piece of work. The reason for this may have been that you did not care whether it was good or bad; and if you do not care whether a thing is good or bad, it is frequently bad. The remedy here is obvious: you must set yourself a higher standard of achievement to aim at. But sometimes you do work badly when you are trying to do it well, and this is where real grief may come into the situation. You have tried to write a good composition; and you stand beside me and see me making horrid marks all over it; and though you keep a reasonable face, something inside you quails and cries.
The same things may happen with your living, your character and behaviour. You may not care at all, and your character and behaviour may therefore be bad. But you may care very much, be full of good resolutions, and suddenly fail, catch yourself or be caught doing something you know wrong – and then, though again you may xxx put a good face on it, something inside you quails and cries.
Now if you are this second kind of person, in whom something inside cries, I think there is hope for you, though there may also be misery for you. If you really do not care, then the only great change in you, possibly and earthquake inside – which being a Xtn I call conversion, will enable there to be any hope at all.
We must set ourselves standards xxxxxxxx of work and character, and these standards mst be difficult to reach; otherwise we shall be content with something which is not our best, with something which is unworthy of us. Our standards must be high, or we shall be content with the low. We progress, we get better, because there is a tension between our aim and our achievement, between the standard we xxx set and the standard we reach. That tension is necessary if we are to grow and develop all the possibilities xxxxx that we have inside us. But it is not as easy as this simple statement makes it out ot be.
To set ourselves standards which we cannot and do not achieve can be a terribly destructive thing. It may lead to our feeling that we are always failing, till we are filled with a sense of failure and frustration, and we live in a ghastly discontent, with something inside us that quails and cries becoming more insistent, till we break down and cannot go on any longer. This is disastrous; and it wd be better if we cared less, and took things less seriously, than strove vainly with impossible odds till we become useless and miserable. Discontent with ourselves as failures, taken this way, is one of the most terrifying things in life; we feel that we want to find a deep hole far from everywhere, jump in and lie there, in our affliction.
But we needn’t; because this tension that results from the difficulty of reaching the standard set can be an inspiring thing. The discontent may not be destructive but may be an inspiration, leading us to something higher and better.
Now this is true in our work, and true in our living, in the development and establishment of our character. How can we make the tension that we must have in order to live and grow, into something helpful instead of destructive?
I want first of all to talk about pictures, and words. We often imagine things as pictures, and use picture-language in talking about them. We talk about the battle of life, or the struggle of life, or the race of life. Now I think it matters very much indeed what pictures we use, what words we use, in talking about these things. If life is a race, we want to win – which means that somebody else ha got ot lose; and this is an unfortunate idea. It leads to our being proud of winning, or to looking round and seeing that other people are beating us, which is a destructive idea. It may be all right if you’re good, but it’s horrid if you’re not. If we see life or work as a battle, a struggle, the very odds against us may make us quail and tremble; and we expect to win or lose – and we may come to the concludion that we have lost. Life is not a struggle, or a battle, or a race; it is a journey. Bunyan was right about it. Now on a journey you have a final destination, and a number of stages. If you set off from here to walk to London, you wd not blame yourself if you only reached Doncaster on the first day; you’d probably be extremely content. You wd not have achieved your real aim, but you wd be content in having done something towards it. If you tried to walk all the way to London in one day, you’d die.
It is no use thinking you are a great scientist or losing yourself in dreams of what you are going to do as a great scientist, until you know the difference between an acid nad an alkali. This is how misfits and failures are made. Wish to be a great scientist if you like, but ration your dreams about it until you have realised that becoming a great scientist is a journey through knowledge, of which one of the stages is learning the difference between an acid and an alkali. You will save yourself xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx from great misery. And as you move from stage to stage, you will have the discontent that you are not at the end to lead you on; and the content that you are have trodden part of the way to give you peace along the road.
It is no use setting out to be a great scientist if you find the stages too difficult; but it is possible to be an ordinary scientist, and to be content with it; most scientists are ordinary ones. So are most poets, most musicians, and most men. There are good ordinaries and bad ordinaries; one can choose which.
But if the road is all too hard, you may not be able to go on. Don’t be disheartened. There are other roads. I am sure that God and all sensibl people prefer a good housewife to a half-baked woman journalist; a good plumber to an opinionated nincompoop doing the wrong thing with atomic physics. There are many roads, and on one of them, stage by stage, you will advance towards a destination.
What matters far more than the journey towards being a great scientist or musician or poet or aircraft designer is the journey which we all must make or try to make in life, in ordinary living. I have talked about work mainly as an example; because your character is more important than your examination results, as a saintly plumber is much more worthwhile than a devilish/atomic scientist or an irresponsible brilliant writer.
All the things that I have been talking about apply here. Our standards in life, in conduct, in character, shd be higher than we can reach, and life will then be a growth, an advance, a journey towards them. It will not be a battle or a struggle. Such metaphors, such pictures, make it too difficult and promise too much excitement. A good deal of it is not waving swords about, and fighting the dragon of evil; it is steady plodding, from one inn to the next.
We are called to be saints. It is important to realise that because our modern world so frequently forgets it; it thinks we are called to be good members of a group, or satisfactory citizens, or effifient soldiers, or people who fit in. But I firmly believe that we are called to be saints. But we are not saints. Now the worst thing we can do is to sit down and xxxxxxxxxxx lament how bad we are, and give up the xxxxxxxx whole task of life. Nor is it any goo to say, after we have caught ourselves out in some unworthy action: “I must change. I’m going to be a saint from tomorrow onwards. Jesus said to his disciples, and to us, “Be ye perfect, even as our Father in Heaven is perfect.” St. Paul emphasised that we are called to be saints. Quite honestly, your reply, I shd imagine, is “What a hope!” You aren’t saints, and neither am I. Nothing I say now will make you into saints. I don’t expect you suddenly to be saintly tomorrow; and if you annoy me tomorrow I may, in a very unsaintly manner, hit you on the head. But, when you think alone, after you have found yourself out doing something unworthy of you, you do wish you were better; and you do wish , when you are found out doing something wrong, that the finder out wd realise and acknowledge that you are not wholly evil, and have lots of good points. In a way, you do wish to be good, and are miserable when it becomes publically known that you aren’t. In reality you know that you are called to be a saint, or at least you want it known that you are part of the way along the road.
Now I want to be quite practical again. You do want to be a person with goodness inside you, not a nasty evil person. But saintliness seems a long way off; it is; it is at the end of the road. It is no use thinking that you’ve got there every time you make a resolution not to steal again, or not be catty again. If you think you can change suddenly like this, you will awake to the fact that you haven’t, or what is worse, think you’re good when you’re very very bad. The old medieval mystics used to quote, in Latin: Vanum est te ante lucem surgere; which I freely translate as ‘It is pointless to get up before the dawn’. Don’t try; if you do wander in darkness. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Thinking you are good when you are not is even worse than thinking you are a great scientist when you are not; and it leads to a similar disaster. You stop walking an dream in the middle of the road, and you never get anywhere. When I suggest that you shd start on the road to being good, I don’t mean “become a prig”, but try to be kind to the person next to you. Now please do not answer: I must be sincere, and it is insincere to be nice to someone I dislike. There are two people inside you, one that wants to be good and one that one that dislikes somebody; one of them is going to be sincere; let it be the right one. Nastiness never has the justification of sincerity.
Real goodness is the final destination of this journey; but there are stages. You may never be wholly good, but you can pass from inn to inn by steady walking; and in some of them, although you haven’t reached the end of the road, you may be justified in sitting down by the fire content, but only for one night. Don’t linger there too long, though there is no harm in taking pride at times.
Lastly, I wish to say something quite definite to those who are discouraged – and at times we are all discouraged. Inside us we have this longing to be a valuable and good person; and so often we seem to be just the opposite. We feel we are failing; others criticise us; and the whole thing does seem a battle we are losing. What makes it worse is that other people do not recognise that w are trying, do not see the good things we feel are in us. But God does, and he is the only person in the universe entitled to judge. And he judges rightly and with mercy and understanding, and takes everything into account.
“All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God.”
Or, as the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing puts it: For not what thou art, nor what thou hast been, doth God regard with his merciful eyes; but what thou wouldst be” – what you really want to be and try to be (for if you don’t try, of course, you don’t really want it.) If you come to be a Xtn, you will know that this is one of the things that God offers. He accepts you as you are, with your failings and failures, if the intention is there; and it does not matter what ghastly things you may have done, what I think about you, or what Kenneth thinks about you, or what your best friend thinks, or what your worst enemy says about you. You have something inside you that at times quails and cries, that hopes and strives, that we all of us know nothing about. Often you feel that this is the real you, and nobody knows it.
But God does know it, and he is kinder, and more wise, and more knowledgeable, and more important than any of us. And he will be a companion on the road, and will if you cannot walk there there on the wings of his love but really try to, carry you to your destination.
PP/IH/01/03