PP/IH/01/10
O DEUS EGO AMO TE.
I wonder how you would answer if someone asked you what was the purpose of your life, what was your aim in living it. Do you live from day to day without an aim; or could you, if driven to make an answer, make some kind of a shot at it? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sooner or later you will, consciously or unconsciously, have aims, and what they are is very important, because your whole view of life, your happiness or misery in life, will be determined by them. Your aims will determine how you look at life. A man keen on explorig and mountain-climbing may be happy wrestling with cold and difficulty on mount Everest; but a man whose idea of a life is being in London and seeing plays in well-heated theatres will be made miserable by just the things that make the explorer happy. It all depends on how they look at things, an how they look at things depends on their aim. I have known men very happy as farm-labourers living in small cottages; but if you set out to make money and be influential and powerful, you will regard yourself as a failure if you end as a farm-labourer in a little cottage. It matters then what you set out to be. But if you think a little harder, you will see that your aims are of two kinds: what you want to do and what you want to be. Suppose two men sets out to be wealthy and powerful and both succeed. One may xx use his power like Hitler; another may use it like Lincoln. Two men may become rich, and one, like Lord Nuffield, give much of his wealth to medical research, whereas another may give nothing away but settle down to enjoy it all. Which course is followed is decided by what the men wished to be, not but what they wished to do or to get. Some of you may aim at being famous explorers or pilots or artists; well and good. But a famous pilot or explorer or artist is also a human being, good or bad. An artist or pilot may love his wife and children or beat them and be horrid to them; a famous writer may write xxxx for the good or evil of mankind. There is always, joined to or along with an aim about how we are going to spend our life and what we are going to do, 2
another is about what kind of people we are going to be. If there isn’t, whatever we may achieve we shall turn out to be evil or miserable or both. The world will be ill served by men of power who don’t care how they use it, rich men who know no generosity, or pilots who do not mind whom the bomb or why they bomb, or who will xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx try to break records at the expense of crashing on a hospital.
Ultimately, then, we are all concerned, in our aims, with being good people or had people. If we are not, we shall probably be bad people. But what does being good mean? And why should we be good?
To this there are, I think, two replies. There is first of all a human reply: that life is happier all round if people are good, they have a better time of it in the end. If we knew that no one in Wennington wd steal our money if we left it on a shelf, or break our tennis-racket if we left it lying about, if we knew that no one wd say nasty things about us when our backs were turned, - everything wd be much happier and this wd be a better place. I think that this answer is a good one, and true as far as it goes. It provides a reason for being good – general welfare and wellbeing – and some kind of definition about what being good means – being honest, considerate of others, careful or one’s conversation, etc. But I don’t think it goes half far enough. If this is sufficient reason for being good, why aren’t we good? It’s plain enough. We are not, and there seems to be a snag somewhere.
I think there are two snags: the reason given for being good is intellectual, and depends on the idea that we live by reason, that our actions result from brainwork. And secondly, the idea of what it means to be good is too legalistic, that is, it becomes a matter of keeping rules, not stealing, not backbiting, being considerate because it is right to do so.
But we do not live by reason, and we all know that however excellent we know rules to be, we do not always keep them. Our rules and our reason may stop us from stealing a sweet or a sixpence, when we have money and chocolates, or aren’t in
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dire need. But they do not stop us from losing our temper with someone, possible because they have been beastly, and destroying something belonging to them in our rage, or saying nasty things to them. Our rules and our reason do not prevent us from picking something up which we want and not trying our hardest to find the owner. Our lives are governed by emotion as well as reason, and our desires often make us break rules that we agree with in our minds. If being good depended on being intelligent and having good rules, heaven wd have dawned on earth a very long time ago.
Now this is, of course, where God enters the argument. We cannot be good on our own steam, so we ask God for grace, and hey presto, by magic, we get the power. In our moments of difficulty we fall back on God. It isn’t as easy as that We are told that we cannot be good on our own steam but God will help us, that if we are good, God will reward us, that if we persist in being evil he will forgive X us and continue to give us another chance until we succeed. Now I believe this, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Xxx The message has been so often xxxxxxx distorted that to many people it means one of two things: first, be good and God will reward you, so it is to your advantage to be good; secondly, you can’t be good on your own steam, then call in God, and hey presto, by magic, all will be well; if you are in difficulties, turn on the tap and the grace of God will flow. Both of these are complete distortions of the truth, for the same reasons: both of them make goodness into the keeping of the rules. In one if you keep the rules you get a prize; in the other, God will apparently help you to keep the rules. I do not think that this is the Xtn answer to why be good? And what is goodness at all?. Jesus did not tell us to disobey the rules; he gold us to keep them; but he told us that xx if we kept them we were unprofitable servants, we hadn’t done enough. He asked for something much more than keeping the rules which we already find it so difficult to keep. Have you ever loved anyone because you thought it was the right thing to do? We arr told to love everybody, what do we do with our
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next door neighbour whom we find quite horrid? I don’t think we can say “The rule says I must love him”, grit our teeth, pray, and set out to do so. It isn’t being charitable to see a beggar and say, “I am told to be charitable, so here is sixpence, but pleasego away; you smell.” We have to go beyond the law. I know of no method of loving someone except the realistn that he is a child of God; that realisation does away with rules and helps us to overcome the drawbacks.
But this is not easy. We cannot realise that everyone is a child of God as an intellectual statement to be considered with our minds; it is our hearts that must realise it; it is our hearts that must feel the love. And this is where I come to the second answer to the question why be good? And what is goodness?. I answer quite simply: we are good because we love God and goodness is loving him, Ind allowing him to do his will through us. If we love him, we are of him, for he is love. The fact that God is love is the meaning of the xxx doctrine of the Trinity. There are two persons, the Father and the Son, and the mutual love between them generates a third person, the Holy Spirit; and that love, that Holy Spirit, can dwell in our hearts if we love God.
Why shd we? Not in order to be good, not in order to keep the rules, not to gain Heaven, not to escape misery and hell, but because God is lovable, has loved us, and died for us. Does a man love a woman because she can cook and make a house for him? Or a woman a man because he is strong and can earn the money to buy a house and shelter her from the world? I hope not.
God created the universe and gave many things in it freedom of will, that they shd not be machines but real beings; he gave man freedom of will to love him or not, to serve him or not, so that the love wd be real and the service real. And man has fallen away, put other things in the place of God, loved other things instead of God, served other things and not God: xxxxxxxxxxxxx thought that his inventions and creations, cities, art, literature, aeroplanes, films, music, science were worth more than God, when they were part of the universe thatGod gave. But God xxxxxxx did not turn away from man who did not
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love him and turned from him. He came down to earth as a man, lived for men, and was crucified by men, to demonstrate his love for those who hurt him; hoping by this to stir them, to show what love was; and he is love. Can we not love one who does this?
This is the answer to the question why be good? and what is goodness? It is not a matter of rules, or reasons. It is a matter of response from one person to another – besi e which these other things do not matter, because xxxx once a man loves God he finds them solved. God is not a kind of electric socket into which you can put a plug and get extra power to do what you want; or a judge who sits to decide whether or not you have kept the xxxlaw and deserve a pension or a term or imprisonment. He is a person who loves and wishes for a response from his children, so that his whole scheme for the happiness of the family will work for their joy; for loving them, he wishes their joy.
I do not think that many of you will agree with this, because it is so simple and so hard. You may begin by questioning whether God exists at all, and wanting proofs of him. There are very convincing proofs for those who wish to study philosophy; but the best proof is to take the four gospels and read them right through; the proof is then the same as that of the existence of a, lion when you meet one. But do not think that because something is simple it cannot be true. Some things are not as intellectually complicated as the intelligent wish them to be. What matters far more is the hardness; we may give up the truth because accepting it is hard. We are called to love God more than anything else, and it seems at first that we must give everything up, sacrifice everything to him and for his. He upsets all our ideas. But if we love him, as the mystics have loved him, and as many ordinary people who are not written about have loved him, we may find this not so bad as we thought. Yet, and here is the rub; we are not to love him in order to get things. We xxx shall either love him or not, with no prizes xxxxxxx guaranteed.
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What a risk! Sooner or later you will find that loving anything or anybody is a risk. You never know what will happen. You never can know what will happen. But if youxxx because of this you live without love, life will be a poor thing, even if all your aims are realised.
To you God may be vague, you don’t know him. But did you know your best friend when xxxx the friendship started? All that Gd asks is that you shd seek him in love; not for anything but for himself; as you want someone to seek you. If you wd try it, it might solve many problems by the way. But don’t seek him because of the problems: seek him.