Most men's love will grow cold. Matthew 24:12
Nothing is stranger in contemporary life than our fear of emotion. And one of the strangest features of this fear is its inconsistency. We are, for example, irrationally afraid of emotion in our religion, but we habitually give way to something like frenzy at basketball games. Our greatest fear of emotion is always found in areas of deep meaning and conviction. We are a little ashamed to show any depth of feeling in connection with patriotism and we are even more ashamed to show it in connection with our faith. Thus there are many who would resent it bitterly if doubt were cast upon their sincerity as Christians, but who, nevertheless, feel self-conscious and reticent about singing "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" or some other gospel song which expresses deep feeling. The idea is that we are not intellectually respectable unless we keep cool. Other and lesser men may be deeply moved, but it is our priviledge to stay above the battle of emotionally held convictions. Even the free way of life is something which is quite all right, but certainly not something to get hot and bothered about. We hate Marxism, but we are singularly reticent about the efforts to develop or adopt an alternative creed to which we can give ourselves enthusiastically. Students are terribly shy of school loyalty and are increasingly self-conscious while singing Alma Mater. Strong enthusiasm is frowned upon among "organization men" of all generations. Such fear is even reflected in our popular language. How else can we explain the fact that the word "cool" is, in our current jargon, a word of approbation.
One of the best ways to overcome the popular fear of emotion is to try to understand the reason for it. When we begin the examination seriously the answer is abundantly clear. We are afraid to exhibit emotion because we are afraid of appearing ridiculous. Man is so made that he hates terribly to be the object of laughter. He can face antagonism or fierce hatred with magnificent courage, but laughter is much harder to face. Now it is perfectly clear that everyone who shows emotion about some cause, or even about some person, living or dead, runs a serious risk of seeming to be foolish. The cause may not succeed; the person may turn out to be less perfect than the admirer supposed; the ideal espoused may cease to be popular.
In the light of such danger anyone can figure out where the path of safety lies. Safety lies in not going out on a limb; it lies in staying coolly aloof; it lies in carefully maintained detachment. This path of detachment is so plain and so clearly marked that it has led to the development of something like a cult. The members of the cult are marked everywhere by the unwillingness to take a strong position of either approval or disapproval. Let us say that we are looking at a new painting or listening to a new poem. Warmhearted people may react with natural enthusiasm or possibly disgust, but this the person who is carefully cool cannot afford to do. His plan is to play it safe. Accordingly, his response is that the object in question is interesting or, in extreme cases, amusing. One who sticks to this level of response has not said anything of importance, of course, but he has the enormous advantage that he is not likely to be proved wrong.
There are a good many professors in our universities who play this game and play it with great skill. They present ideas, but they do not espouse them. Platonism Pragmatism, Christianity - all are presented in complete emotional detachment, much as would be done if the objects in question were different numerical systems. And this is done, in spite of the fact that the ideas presented are matters of the highest significance for the human race. Propositions about reality are either true or false, if they are meaningful, but this painful fact is often skillfully avoided. It is easier to present ideas of God than to make a balanced judgment of revelant evidence about the truth of God's objective reality.
Most difficult of all is a personal witness concerning conviction. Often the students have no way of knowing what the professor's own position is, for adherence to the cult of detachment will not permit him to reveal this intimate fact. Sometimes he is actually impressed by a particular conception of the nature of scientific method that he thinks that espousal of any view, or involvement in any faith, would incapacitate him for his scholarly task. If he were more thorough, however, he would know better. He would become alert to the fallacy of misplaced detachment, realizing that the mood appropriate to the study of an atom may not be at all appropriate in study of a man. The cult of detachment is one result of the growth of scientism in our age, a growth which is shown in its extreme form in Russia, but is by no means limited to that country. No doubt it will pass, but for the present it does harm, even in our religious experience.
It is a healthy sign that the fear of emotion is beginning to be challenged and challenged by the very people among whom the fear has been most widespread and damaging. Listen, for example, to a letter written recently by a high school girl in a great American city. The letter was an unsolicited response to a sermon which she heard.
"I have been thinking much this year about the importance of caring, of passion in life. I have often realized that it takes courage to care. Caring is dangerous; it leaves you open to hurt and to looking a fool; and perhaps it is because they have been hurt so often that people are afraid to care. You can't die if you are not alive, but then who would rather be a stone?
I have found many places in my own life where I keep a secret store of indifference as a sort of self-protection, but I have been trying instead to feel the wholeness of the part and not shut myself to life and still to keep a perspective of the eternal and infinite potential, which prevents the inevitable disappointments in some parts from becoming a disappointment or fear of all of life. It is a hard thing and I have often failed. Sensitivity, or caring, is its own reward.
Caring is like the love T.S. Eliot speaks of in his Four Quartets:
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being*
In this last aspect, common to all of us, we cannot help but desire; yet I feel that desire not based on love cannot end in other than frustration.
Sincerely, Jane"
When we remember that this is written by a high school girl, we recognize that it indicates a truly penetrating insight. Notice her reference to "a secret store of indifference." She understands perfectly that, apart from the fear of ridicule, caring would be admitted by all of us. If you are passionate, she tells you, you are vunerable; you are running the risk that you may be hurt. If you love another person with all your heart, you can be hurt far more by that person than by anybody about whom you do not care. Devotion to a cause puts you in a situation in which you can look ridiculous. What if that about which you are passionate fails? What if your cause is not accomplished? You can look like a fool and do. This then is the advice to give anybody who never wants to be hurt: don't care! Don't care and then nobody can ever say, "I told you so." Don't care and you cannot be wounded because of caring. If you don't want to be hurt, don't marry, and then you can't lose. If you never want to be hurt, don't have a child. A child whom you love so much could be a terrible disappointment. If you never want to be hurt, don't enter the church. Even this redemptive fellowship, on which Christ depends, can itself be disappointing and manifestly unworthy. Don't care and then you will be safe.
You can, if you wish, develop a hard, glittering exterior, never involved, never personally concerned, and then nobody can ever chide you for having gone out on a limb. Nobody, then, can ever truthfully say that the idea you have espoused has turned out to be false, because you have never espoused any. But those who take this road to safety pay a heavy price, the price of turning their backs upon all of the best things in life.
The important thing to say now is that cool detachment is the exact antithesis of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Christ calls us into a kind of life in which we can be wounded. You cannot look at the Cross in detachment; you have to carry it yourself and you have to carry it in your own heart. Caring is, indeed, dangerous, but it is essential to Christian discipleship. One of the greatest contributions which the gospel can make to our confused age is that it may be the very means by which men and women can overcome their crippling fear of emotion. The gospel is highly relevant to our time if it can help to produce the courage to care.
The Christian emphasis in this direction now has assistance from a somewhat surprising quarter in the general existentialist analysis of the knowing situation. What the main stream of existentialism has taught is that, in important matters, there is no true insight without involvement. Every man knows things about himself which no one else knows, even though others may understand some things about him to which he may be blind. But the outsider never knows, if he remains merely an outsider. If he is to understand, he must put himself metaphorically into the other person's shoes.
There is a tiny grain of truth in the old saw that love is blind, but in most respects the adage is false. The man who loves is aware of aspects of the personality of the beloved which are entirely hidden to those who hate and largely hidden to those who do not care. Caring heightens the sensitivity and sharpens the vision. It was only in their passionate attachment that Simon Peter and the other Apostles began to understand who Jesus really was. Out of His affection the unstable Simon was able to see that Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Son of the Living God. This insight did not come to those who stood off in splendid detachment or who were mere curious observers. And the revelation did not come to the Apostles at first; it came to them only after they had experienced personal involvement in Christ's cause. Very little is revealed, in any area, to those who are not so involved that they have a stake in the outcome of events. It is probable that even a system like that of Leninism is not really understood by those who have not shared in its misguided demand for commitment.
Long before existentialism was originated, Christianity maintained that insight through involvement was the only method by which real understanding is ever possible. Christ's first words to disciples were concerned not with belief, but with participation in a movement. The gospel begins and ends on the note, "Follow me." The last chapter of the last gospel represents the risen Christ as saying, in response to Peter's question about another, "What is that to thee? Follow thou me." The secret of understanding according to the Letter to the Ephesians is of a similiar nature. Love is presented, not as a deterrent to knowledge, but as the very organ of knowledge. "That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have the power to comprehend" is one important way of stating a whole theory of knowledge. Often, in subsequent developments of Christian literature, the same note has been struck. The best-known example is in the widely loved hymn, "Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee," in which the crucial lines read:
The love of Jesus what it is
None but His loved ones know.
The outside observer cannot expect to perceive with any adequacy, because he has not met the conditions of insight. That there are also dangers of self-delusion in this approach anyone can see, but the part of wisdom is to face these dangers boldly by combining both involvement and a high degree of intellectual honesty. The point to remember is that the intellectual honesty, without the courage to care, is bound to end in intellectual and spiritual sterility.
What is a Christian? A Christian is a person who has fallen in love with Jesus Christ and who is, consequently, willing to witness to that love and try to demonstrate it, as Christ's emissary, to all the rest of God's children. It is not cold detachment. It is not looking at the gospel and saying, "That is an interesting idea." Such an approach, whatever the field of inquiry, doesn't get us anywhere at all. Life is a great mystery at best; it is the sort of thing that is never penetrated apart from passion. A Christian is one who looks at the life of Christ and who is so moved by it that he says, "I love Thee, Lord Jesus. Come into my heart; come in today, come in to stay."
One cannot study many pages of the New Testament without a keen realization of the passionate character of early Christianity. This is shown, at white heat, in the recorded experiences of those who entered the fellowship immediately after the first Pentecost. In one day, according to the Book of Acts, there were added three thousand souls.
'And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayers. And fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts.
Such a passage assists us greatly in our effort to understand how original Christianity was able to endure and to win against such odds as existed. It involved study, and fellowship, and unlimited liability for one another, and prayer and reverence and joy. There is, therefore, really no mystery about the endurance of the movement. Theirs was a fellowship of the concerned, a society of those who cared and who were not ashamed to care.
There are some people who think that this kind of religion is unsuitable for modern intellectuals, even though they admit that it was the New Testament pattern. They think that this is the kind of religion found only in the fringe groups. But this is where they are wrong. The greatest of the intellectuals, like Kierkegaard, are the ones who have seen most clearly that life without passion is no life at all. The sober truth is that there is no new life without passion. No baby was ever conceived without passion; no great poem was ever produced without passion; no great piece of music was ever composed without passion. Passion is what takes us beyond the superficiality of life to a deep and wonderful glow in which we learn to care.
Most people go through a phase in which they are ashamed to show any genuine emotion in relation to their families or in relation to their religion. Some feel a certain hesitancy in singing such a hymn as "When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died," and they would be terribly embarrassed by a public call to commitment, but often this is only a phase, a kind of extended adolescence. The fact that this is so common, particularly in youth, is what makes the letter from the high school girl so remarkable. What is encouraging is to see the evidence that, while pseudo-sophistication may make people fear to express any deep passion, a greater advancement may lead to the complete overcoming of this fear. In this connection it is heartening to read the accounts of how Thornton Wilder, in a sophisticated academic environment, used to gather boys about him on Sunday evening to play and to sing the old gospel songs. He had outgrown his fears, if ever he had any, and could be utterly unself-conscious about the love of Christ. Yet Wilder is bound to be counted among the true intellectuals of this generation. Only one who has outgrown the fear of showing emotion could have used so effectively, in 'Our Town', the singing of "Blest Be the Tie That Binds." The person who can see this and can weep without fear of ridicule has already escaped some of the worst perils of our age.
The recovery or discovery of the significance of caring may be a really creative feature in contemporary thought. In part it comes from the study of the works of Martin Heidegger, but this is not the only source. A prominent philosopher of England has suggested the wisdom of using "caring" as our best modern translation for the almost untranslatable Greek word, of which the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians is an inspired definition. The difficulty with "charity" as a translation is that, to modern ears, it means philanthropy and not much more. The trouble with "love" is that it has been oversentimentalized in modern literature and smacks of softness. But caring is, as yet, an unspoiled term. It is the best we know. Thus we may begin: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and do not care, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." "Caring never ends." Try, in the intimacy of your own meditation, to restate that marvelous chapter, substituting "caring" for the key word. The consequences may be that you have a new vision of the truth as you begin to understand what it means to have "the courage to care."
Though it seems hardly necessary to mention it, it may be worth while to say that, however necessary caring is, we can care for the wrong things. This is why we need to develop critical insight at the same time. The point to make, however, is that we do not solve the critical problem by a retreat into detachment. Critical investigation and involvement are wholly compatible. We must be honest, but we do not have to become cold in order to do so.
Love, or caring, is the greatest thing in the world, but the awful truth, as Christ said, is that love can grow cold. This is why we gather for worship week by week. We are trying to keep our love warm. We are trying not to lose it. How wonderful if we can keep the glow! What a glorious thing it is to see a man and woman married to each other for years and, instead of settling down into the dull business of living together, they keep the glow and you see their faces light up when they meet in a room. The glory is that their love has not grown cold. It is even more important that this should be true in regard to our love for Christ. Has your love grown cold?
This sermon is taken from Elton Trueblood's book, 'The Yoke Of Christ And Other Sermons' in its entirity.
