Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  When the sower goes forth to sow his seed, he goes with the certainty of partial failure and the knowledge that a long time of patience and of hazard will intervene before he can hope to see the result of his work and his venture. In sowing the truth a man may never see or trace the results. The more ideal his conceptions are, and the farther they move ahead of his time, the larger will be the percentage of apparent failure. But he can afford to wait. The powers of life are on his side. He is like a man who has scattered his seed and then goes off to sleep by night and work by day, and all the while the seed, by the inscrutable chemistry of life, lays hold of the ingredients of its environment and builds them up to its own growth. The mustard-seed becomes a tree. The leaven assimilates the meal by biological processes. The new life penetrates the old humanity and transforms it. Robert Owen was a sower. His coöperative communities failed. He was able to help only a small fraction of the workingmen of his day. But his moral enthusiasm and his ideas fertilized the finest and most self-sacrificing minds among the working classes. They cherished his ultimate hopes in private and worked for realizable ends in public. The Chartist movement was filled with his spirit. The most influential leaders of English unionism in its great period after the middle of the nineteenth century were Owenites. The Rochdale Pioneers were under his influence, and the great coöperative movement in England, an economic force of the first importance, grew in some measure out of the seed which Owen had scattered. Other men may own the present. The future belongs to the sower—provided he scatters seed and does not mistake the chaff for it which once was so essential to the seed and now is dead and useless. It is inevitable that those who stand against conditions in which most men believe and by which the strongest profit, shall suffer for their stand. The little group of early Christian socialists in England, led by Maurice, Kingsley, and Hughes, now stand by common consent in the history of that generation as one of its finest products, but at that time they were bitterly assailed and misunderstood. Pastor Rudolf Todt, the first man in Germany who undertook to prove that the New Testament and the ethics of socialism have a close affinity, was almost unanimously attacked by the Church of Germany. But Jesus told his apostles at the outset that opposition would be part of their day’s work. Christ equipped his Church with no legal rights to protect her; the only political right he gave his disciples was the right of being persecuted. It is part of the doctrine of vicarious atonement, which is fundamental in Christianity, that the prophetic souls must vindicate by their sufferings the truth of the truth they preach.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Every step toward personal purity and peace, though it only makes the consciousness of imperfection more poignant, carries its own exceeding great reward, and everlasting pilgrimage toward the kingdom of God is better than contented stability in the tents of wickedness. And sometimes the hot hope surges up that perhaps the long and slow climb may be ending. In the past the steps of our race toward progress have been short and feeble, and succeeded by long intervals of sloth and apathy. But is that necessarily to remain the rate of advance? In the intellectual life there has been an unprecedented leap forward during the last hundred years. Individually we are not more gifted than our grandfathers, but collectively we have wrought out more epoch-making discoveries and inventions in one century than the whole race in the untold centuries that have gone before. If the twentieth century could do for us in the control of social forces what the nineteenth did for us in the control of natural forces, our grandchildren would live in a society that would be justified in regarding our present social life as semi-barbarous. Since the Reformation began to free the mind and to direct the force of religion toward morality, there has been a perceptible increase of speed. Humanity is gaining in elasticity and capacity for change, and every gain in general intelligence, in organizing capacity, in physical and moral soundness, and especially in responsiveness to ideal motives, again increases the ability to advance without disastrous reactions. The swiftness of evolution in our own country proves the immense latent perfectibility in human nature. Last May a miracle happened. At the beginning of the week the fruit trees bore brown and greenish buds. At the end of the week they were robed in bridal garments of blossom. But for weeks and months the sap had been rising and distending the cells and maturing the tissues which were half ready in the fall before. The swift unfolding was the culmination of a long process. Perhaps these nineteen centuries of Christian influence have been a long preliminary stage of growth, and now the flower and fruit are almost here. If at this juncture we can rally sufficient religious faith and moral strength to snap the bonds of evil and turn the present unparalleled economic and intellectual resources of humanity to the harmonious development of a true social life, the generations yet unborn will mark this as that great day of the Lord for which the ages waited, and count us blessed for sharing in the apostolate that proclaimed it. ABOUT CROSSREACH PUBLICATIONS [image file=Image00003.jpg] Thank you for choosing CrossReach Publications . Trust. Inspiration. Hope. These three words sum up the philosophy of why CrossReach Publications exist. You want solid Christian books from respected and acknowledged Christian writers from yesteryear. We want to provide them for you.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In competitive society each man strives for himself and his family only, and the sense of larger duties is attenuated and feeble; in communistic society no man could help realizing that he is part of a great organization, and that he owes it duty and loyalty. Competition tends to make good men selfish; cooperation would compel selfish men to develop public spirit. The moral and wholesome influences in society to-day proceed from the communistic organizations within it; the divisive, anarchic, and destructive influences which are racking our social body to-day proceed from those realms of social life which are individualistic and competitive. Business life to-day is organized in growing circles within which a certain amount of cooperation and mutual helpfulness exists, and to that extent it exerts a sound moral influence. In so far as it is really competitive, it engenders covetousness, cunning, hardness selfish satisfaction in success, or resentment and despair in failure. It is a marvellous demonstration of the vitality of human goodness that a system so calculated to bring out the evil traits in us, still leaves so much human kindness and nobility alive. But the Christian temper of mind, the honest regard for the feelings and the welfare of others, the desire to make our life serve the common good, would get its first chance to control our social life in a society organized on the basis of solidarity and coöperation. It would seem, therefore, that one of the greatest services which Christianity could render to humanity in the throes of the present transition would be to aid those social forces which are making for the increase of communism. The Church should help public opinion to understand clearly the difference between the moral qualities of the competitive and the communistic principle, and enlist religious enthusiasm on behalf of that which is essentially Christian. Christian individuals should strengthen and protect the communistic institutions already in existence in society and help them to extend their functions. For instance, the public schools can increasingly be made nuclei of common life for the district within which they are located, gathering the children for play out of school hours, and the adults for instruction, discussion, and social pleasure in the evenings. The usefulness of the public parks as centres of communal life can be immensely extended by encouraging and organizing the play of the children and by holding regular public festivals. Simply to induce the crowd listening to a band concert in the park to join in singing a patriotic song, would convert a mass of listening individuals into a social organism thrilled with a common joy and sensible of its cohesion. Public ownership of the great public utilities Would be desirable for the education it would give in solidarity, if for no other reason.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Grinding social pressure and tense millennial expectations have again and again in the history of Christianity caused crowds to drop their work and wait for the Lord, who would be their emancipator from drudgery. Paul very wisely explained to them that the Lord’s coming was not quite as near as they supposed, and that in any case “he that will not work, shall not eat.” At Corinth the social unrest seized the women. They felt the hot promptings of the Spirit in their souls just like the men, and rose to prophesy. They, too, felt their intellectual life enriched with new thoughts and a wider outlook; why should they not have the right to teach in the Church? They felt the emancipating sense of equality and the glad sweep of the new brotherhood in the meeting and put off the veil, which the lustfulness of men and long-standing social inferiority had compelled women to wear when in presence of strangers. Paul in one of his bold, prophetic strains asserted that in Christ all the old distinctions of race and social standing would disappear, including the difference between man and woman. The spirit of Christianity has accomplished that result in the slow progress of centuries, and our women are now free and our equals. If these Corinthian women tried to take at once that heritage of liberty which was to be theirs eventually, we cannot help sympathizing with them. But we can also understand the unusual vexation and distress in Paul’s mind when he heard of this disorder, and agree with his prudence in bidding them keep within the bounds of customary modesty and restraint. The social unsettlement even reached family relations and created a religious tendency to divorce. There were Christians who felt that it was impossible for them to live a Christian life while married to a heathen. The question whether it was not the right or even the duty of a Christian to sever so incompatible a relation had become so pressing at Corinth that it was one of the chief subjects on which the Church consulted Paul by letter and committee. There were others with whom the new passion for sexual purity had awakened scruples even about the relations within wedlock, and who were ready to assert the right of the individual to himself on high religious grounds. Here, too, we have the anticipation of later results of Christian influences: a keener feeling that marriage should rest on spiritual affinity and sympathy and not on physical or conventional grounds, and a finer sense of the right of the soul to its own body. Of course it is exceedingly likely, as human nature goes, that in some cases old dislikes and aversions were simply seeking cover under these new religious pleas. But in any case it must have been a leaven of unrest in various families. We catch a glimpse, too, of a new stirring among the Christian slaves.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The Church could be the best ally of the State in creating civil peace, because Christians had the highest morality, and because they alone had power over the demons who menaced the security of the Empire. As the soul holds the body together, so Christians hold the world together. They exert a conservative and unifying influence. This conception of Christianity as a penetrating, renewing, and unifying power, destined to control the future of the world, was just as full of triumphant hopefulness as the apocalyptic hope, but allowed of a quiet process of historic growth. It did not regard the existing State as Satanic and evil, yet had full room for moral criticism of existing conditions and the determination to contribute to a thorough moral change. The apocalyptic hope was probably the dominant Christian conception of history in the very first generations. This other view gained power as time passed, as the number and influence of Christians increased, and as men of larger mental reach and higher education grew up in the Church. The fact that religious convictions are the living force in these theories must not blind us to the fact that they contain a consciousness of social solidarity, of social power, and of a social mission. This satisfaction for the dawning sense of a vaster human unity probably lent greater force than we now imagine to the missionary appeal of Christians among the lower and middle classes. To-day we have a similar process of international amalgamation very similar to that of the early Christian centuries. At that time a new and common civilization was growing up around the Mediterranean Sea; to-day it is growing up around all the oceans. It is significant that the prophets of the modern social movement are also the prophets of a new internationalism, which aims to supplant the narrow patriotisms and interests of a by-gone stage of human development by the wider enthusiasms and outlooks of a vaster human brotherhood. There is a profound similarity between the consciousness and the aims of early Christianity and of modern social thought, wherever it has ethical and religious impetus in it. The society-making force of primitive Christianity All that has been said so far bears intimately on the social contents of early Christianity, but it deals with its ideas and theories rather than its actual social achievements. But primitive Christianity was not in the least academic. Its distinctive quality was the passionate moral energy with which it pressed for action. Jesus had put a new spirit into his followers. That spirit spread with a noble contagion and sought expression and realization in a new society. The old social life was stubbornly hostile to it at some points and unresponsive at others. Therefore a new social life had to be created to be the fit environment for the new spirit. Hence, wherever Christianity came, we see a new society nucleating. To create a new type of social organization is always a feat of strength.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  As the cities grew in importance since the Reformation, as commerce overshadowed agriculture, and as the business class crowded the feudal aristocracy out of its leading position since the French Revolution, Protestantism throve with the class which had espoused it. It lifted its class, and its class lifted it. On the other hand, the Anabaptist movement in Germany, which propagated within the lower classes, was crushed with the class that bore its banner. If the present class struggle of the wage-workers is successful, and they become the dominant class of the future, any religious ideas and institutions which they now embrace in the heat of their struggle will rise to power with them, and any institution on which they turn their back is likely to find itself in the cold. The parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins holds of entire nations and institutions as well as of individuals. The forward call to the Church We have seen that the crisis of society is also the crisis of the Church. The Church, too, feels the incipient paralysis that is creeping upon our splendid Christian civilization through the unjust absorption of wealth on one side and the poverty of the people on the other. It cannot thrive thrive when society decays. Its wealth, its independence, its ministry, its social hold, its spiritual authority, are threatened in a hundred ways. But on the other hand the present crisis presents one of the greatest opportunities for its own growth and development that have ever been offered to Christianity. The present historical situation is a high summons of the Eternal to enter on a larger duty, and thereby to inherit a larger life. In all the greatest forward movements of humanity, religion has been one of the driving forces. The dead weight of hoary institutions and the resistance of the caked and incrusted customs and ideas of the past are so great that unless the dormant energies of the people are awakened by moral enthusiasm and religious faith, the old triumphs over the new. “Mighty Truth’s yet mightier man-child” comes to the hour of birth, but there is no strength to bring forth. But in turn the greatest forward movements in religion have always taken place under the call of a great historical situation. Religious movements of the first magnitude are seldom purely religious in their origin and character. It is when nations throb with patriotic fervor, with social indignation, with the keen joy of new intellectual light, with the vastness and fear of untried conditions, when “the energy sublime of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time,” that religion, too, will rise to a new epoch in its existence. The Reformation of the sixteenth century is a classical illustration of this fact. The popular view which regards it first of all as a restoration of evangelical doctrine on the basis of the open Bible is almost wholly misleading.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In the early part of the nineteenth century, when tiny children in England were driven to the looms with whips, and women lost even the physical appearance of womanhood in the coal mines, the owners insisted that English industry would be ruined by the proposed reform laws, and doubtless they thought so. If men holding stock in traction companies assert that municipal ownership is un-American; if the express companies say that parcels cannot be carried below their own amazing rates; if Mr. Baer in the midst of the coal strike assured a minister that “God in his infinite wisdom had given control of the property interests of the country” to him and his associates and they would do all things well—we must simply allow for the warping effect of selfinterest and pass on to the order of the day. Macaulay said that the doctrine of gravitation would not yet be accepted if it had interfered with vested interests. The greatest contribution which any man can make to the social movement is the contribution of a regenerated personality, of a will which sets justice above policy and profit, and of an intellect emancipated from falsehood. Such a man will in some measure incarnate the principles of a higher social order in his attitude to all questions and in all his relations to men, and will be a well-spring of regenerating influences. If he speaks, his judgment will be a corrective force. If he listens, he will encourage the truth-teller and discourage the pedler of adulterated facts and maxims. If others lose heart, he will stay them with his inspired patience. If any new principle is to gain power in human history, it must take shape and life in individuals who have faith in it. The men of faith are the living spirits, the channels by which new truth and power from God enter humanity. To repent of our collective social sins, to have faith in the possibility and reality of a divine life in humanity, to submit the will to the purposes of the kingdom of God, to permit the divine inspiration to emancipate and clarify the moral insight—this is the most intimate duty of the religious man who would help to build the coming Messianic era of mankind. Social evangelization The men who have worked out the new social Christianity in their own thinking and living constitute a new type of Christian. At a religious convention it is easy to single out the speakers who have had a vision of the social redemption of humanity. No matter what subject they handle, they handle it with a different grasp. Their horizon is wider; their sympathy more catholic; their faith more daring. It is significant that they predominate when speakers are selected for important occasions.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In general, it is safe to advise a man who feels “the burden of the Lord” on social wrongs to go slowly and get adequate information, especially in political economy and the history of social institutions. It is more sensible in every sermon to show the larger application of the truth to social morality than to spill out the entire tub of his mind in a course of sermons on social subjects. The former is also a severer test of his comprehension of the subject. On the other hand, he should not let the fire of the Lord cool down. If he delays utterance, it should be to speak the more forcibly and wisely when he does speak. He should not take counsel of his timidity nor wait till he is infallible. Those who hold a brief for vested wrongs are not overconscientious. Men who first begin to discuss social wrongs are likely to launch into personal invective against prominent individuals. This tendency is in part a product of our religious individualism. We have always been told that if only all individuals were regenerated and lived right, all social questions would be solved. Consequently when we see wrong done, we feel that it must be due to the personal wickedness of individuals. But the farther a man goes in his comprehension of the questions before us, the more will he realize that the great leaders of industry are not committing mischief for the fun of it, but that they arc themselves the victims of social forces. They are free only within very contracted limits. In underpaying and overworking his men, or in employing women and children, the man with kind intentions is pushed by the entire group to which he belongs. In competition the most ruthless man sets the pace. Corporate management eliminates personal sympathy and the individual sense of honor to a degree which many of us hardly understand. The moral code of the business man is largely shaped for him by the moral code of his class. If he bribes public officials, it is often hard to say if he is a corrupter of innocence or the victim of blackmail. If he breaks the law, it may be because the law is a formulation of outgrown conditions which has to be broken if commercial development is to make headway A business man may be the victim of evil hitherto done by all, or the cause of evil henceforth done by all. He may yield to the pressure of evil with alacrity because it offers him profit, or he may yield with a heavy heart because it seems the lesser evil of two between which he must choose. By these questions God will judge him. But if man undertakes to judge him, he must do it in love and mercy and with self-accusation, because we have all jointly spun the fatal web of temptation in which the sinner is entangled.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I feel impelled to locate, by way of establishing at least one survivor of the period, a recent photograph of Sophia Loren. I type her name into Google Images. I find such a photograph: Sophia Loren arriving at some kind of publicity event, one of those red-carpet arrivals during which the PR people hover close, alerting the photographers to the approach of the celebrity. As I check the caption on the photograph I notice in passing that Sophia Loren was born in 1934, the same year in which I myself was born. I am spellbound: Sophia Loren, too, is seventy-five years old. Sophia Loren is seventy-five years old and no one on that red carpet, to my knowledge, is yet suggesting that she is making an inadequate adjustment to aging. This entirely meaningless discovery floods me with restored hope, a revived sense of the possible. 35When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day’s mail with real enthusiasm—maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to staying alive—yet the next day we are walking uptown on Madison past Barney’s and Armani or on Park past the Council on Foreign Relations and we are not even glancing at their windows. One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor’s office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing. The sun damage inflicted when we swam off the raft in our twenties against all advice is only now surfacing (we were told not to burn, we were told what would happen, we were told to wear sunscreen, we ignored all warnings): melanoma, squamous cell, long hours now spent watching the dermatologist carve out the carcinomas with the names we do not want to hear. Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions of the medication that promises to replace the bone lost to aging. Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions and wondering why the Vitamin D we thought we were accumulating by not wearing sunscreen failed to realize its bone-building potential.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  There is a good deal of crude thinking, of sectarian narrowness and pride, of ecclesiastical ambition, of complete forgetfulness of the high mission to the world. And yet there is the germ of a new social life for humanity, the conception of a social morality based on love and world-wide in its obligation. Give it time! This, too, under ever changing forms, may work its way, and triumph yet. The modern emancipation of the intellectual life began in the Renaissance of the fifteenth century and is not finished yet. The modern emancipation of the religious life began in the Reformation of the sixteenth century and is not finished yet. The modern emancipation of the political life began in the Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century and is not finished yet. The modern emancipation of the industrial life began in the nineteenth century and is not finished yet. Let us have patience. Let us have hope. And above all let us have faith. ---------------- CHAPTER IV WHY HAS CHRISTIANITY NEVER UNDERTAKEN THE WORK OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION?

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The Church in past centuries repeatedly lost the respect and affections of the people by its corruptions and the oppression which it sanctioned and intensified, but it was able to regain its hold when it repented and improved. It may be that in coming days the Church in Germany will regain its old influence in the life of the people. But the outlook is not sure. The old mediæval reverence for the Church as the only mediator of salvation is gone, and the people are permanently critical in spirit. Formerly the Church was able to envelop itself in awe by the shimmering mist of idealized history which it spread about its past services. The people are now educated beyond that. So the future is sombre. When a mountain-side is once denuded of vegetation and the roots of the trees no longer lace the soil together and hold the rain, the soil is washed down into the valleys. The rocks are again corroded and might form new soil, but as it is formed, it is again washed away. Because the rocks are bare, they stay bare. From him that hath not is taken even that which he hath. In our own country we are still at the parting of the ways. Our social movement is still in its earliest stages. The bitterness and anger of their fight has not eaten into the heart of the working classes as it has abroad. Many of them are still ready to make their fight in the name of God and Christ, though not of the Church. Populistic conventions used to recite the Lord’s Prayer with deep feeling. The Single Tax movement utilized religious ideas freely. A Cooper Union meeting cheered Father McGlynn when he recited the words: “Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth!” Some of the favorite speakers and organizers of the socialists in our country are former Christian ministers, who use their power of ethical and religious appeal. In Labor Lyceums and similar gatherings, ministers are often invited as speakers, though perhaps quite as much in the hope of converting them as with a desire to hear what they have to say. The divorce between the new class movement and the old religion can still be averted. It is a hopeful fact that in our country the Church is so close to the common people. In many of the largest denominations the churches are organized as pure democracies, and the people own and run them. Our ministry is not an hereditary pundit class, but most ministers have sprung from plain families and have worked for their living before they became ministers. The Church is not connected with the State and is not tainted, as in Europe, with the reputation of being a plain-clothes policeman to club the people into spiritual submission to the ruling powers. The churches of monarchical countries have preached loyalty to the monarchy as an essential part of Christian character.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Even if a street railway should be run at a loss for a time under city management, it would at least draw the people closer together by the sense of common proprietorship and would teach them to work better together to overcome the trouble. Every step taken in industrial life to give the employees some proprietary rights in the business, and anything placing owners and employees on a footing of human equality, would deserve commendation and help. The Christian spirit of fraternity should create fraternal social institutions, and the fraternal institutions may in turn be trusted to breed and spread the fraternal spirit. It is a most hopeful fact that the communistic features of our government are awakening in some public officials a whole-hearted and far-seeing devotion to the public welfare. A number of our public health officers have thrown themselves into the crusade against tuberculosis and infant mortality with a zeal more far-sighted and chivalrous than is usually called out in the ordinary doctor who cures patients on the individualistic plan. When men at the head of some department of city government realize the immense latent capacity of their department to serve the people, they are fired with ambition to do what they see can be done. Their natural ambition to make themselves felt, to exert power and get honor, runs in the same direction with the public needs. Such men are still scarce, but they are a prophecy of the kind of character which may be created in a communistic society and of the power of enthusiastic work which may hereafter be summoned to the service of the people. The vast educational work done by some departments of our national government, for instance the Department of Agriculture, furnishes similar proof of what may be done when we abandon the policeman theory of government and adopt the family theory. Certainly it would be no betrayal of the Christian spirit to enter into a working alliance with this great tendency toward the creation of coöperative and communistic social institutions based on the broad principle of the brotherhood of men and the solidarity of thier interests. The upward movement of the working class The ideal of a fraternal organization of society is so splendid that it is to-day enlisting the choicest young minds of the intellectual classes under its banner. Idealists everywhere are surrendering to it, especially those who are under the power of the ethical spirit of Christianity. The influence which these idealists exert in reenforcing the movement toward solidarity is beyond computation. They impregnate the popular mind with faith and enthusiasm. They furnish the watch-words and the intellectual backing of historical and scientific information. They supply devoted leaders and give a lofty sanction to the movement by their presence in it. They diminish the resistance of the upper classes among whom they spread their ideas. But we must not blink the fact that the idealists alone have never carried through any great social change.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  This sharp division is the peculiar characteristic of modern capitalism which distinguishes it from other forms of social organization in the past. These two classes have to coöperate in modern production. The labor movement seeks to win better terms for the working class in striking its bargains. Yet whatever terms organized labor succeeds in winning are always temporary and insecure, like the hold which a wrestler gets on the body of his antagonist. The persistent tendency with capital necessarily is to get labor as cheaply as possible and to force as much work from it as possible. Moreover, labor is always in an inferior position in the struggle. It is handicapped by its own hunger and lack of resources. It has to wrestle on its knees with a foeman who is on his feet. Is this unequal struggle between two conflicting interests to go on forever? Is this insecurity the best that the working class can ever hope to attain? Here enters socialism. It proposes to abolish the division of industrial society into two classes and to close the fatal chasm which has separated the employing class from the working class since the introduction of power machinery. It proposes to restore the independence of the workingman by making him once more the owner of his tools and to give him the full proceeds of his production instead of a wage determined by his poverty. It has no idea of reverting to the simple methods of the old handicrafts, but heartily accepts the power machinery, the great factory, the division of labor, the organization of the men in great regiments of workers, as established facts in modern life, and as the most efficient method of producing wealth. But it proposes to give to the whole body of workers the ownership of these vast instruments of production and to distribute among them all the entire proceeds of their common labor. There would then be no capitalistic class opposed to the working class; there would be a single class which would unite the qualities of both. Every workman would be both owner and worker, just as a farmer is who tills his own farm, or a housewife who works in her own kitchen. This would be a permanent solution of the labor question. It would end the present insecurity, the constant antagonism, the social inferiority, the physical exploitation, the intellectual poverty to which the working class is now exposed even when its condition is most favorable. If such a solution is even approximately feasible, it should be hailed with joy by every patriot and Christian, for it would put a stop to our industrial war, drain off the miasmatic swamp of undeserved poverty, save our political democracy, and lift the great working class to an altogether different footing of comfort, intelligence, security and moral strength. And it would embody the principle of solidarity and fraternity in the fundamental institutions of our industrial life.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The people had the impatience of the uneducated mind which does not see processes, but clamors for results, big, thunderous, miraculous results. Jesus had the scientific insight which comes to most men only by training, but to the elect few by divine gift. He grasped the substance of that law of organic development in nature and history which our own day at last has begun to elaborate systematically. His parables of the sower, the tares, the net, the mustard-seed, and the leaven are all polemical in character. He was seeking to displace the crude and misleading catastrophic conceptions by a saner theory about the coming of the kingdom. This conception of growth demanded not only a finer insight, but a higher faith. It takes more faith to see God in the little beginnings than in the completed results; more faith to say that God is now working than to say that he will some day work. Because Jesus believed in the organic growth of the new society, he patiently fostered its growth, cell by cell. Every human life brought under control of the new spirit which he himself embodied and revealed was an advance of the kingdom of God. Every time the new thought of the Father and of the right life among men gained firmer hold of a human mind and brought it to the point of action, it meant progress. It is just as when human tissues have been broken down by disease or external force, and new tissue is silently forming under the old and weaving a new web of life. Jesus incarnated a new type of human life and he was conscious of that. By living with men and thinking and feeling in their presence, he reproduced his own life in others and they gained faith to risk this new way of living. This process of assimilation went on by the natural capacities inherent in the social organism, just as fresh blood will flow along the established arteries and capillaries. When a nucleus of like-minded men was gathered about him, the assimilating power was greatly reenforced. Jesus joyously felt that the most insignificant man in his company who shared in this new social spirit was superior to the grandest exemplification of the old era, John the Baptist. Thus Jesus worked on individuals and through individuals, but his real end was not individualistic, but social, and in his method he employed strong social forces. He knew that a new view of life would have to be implanted before the new life could be lived and that the new society would have to nucleate around personal centres of renewal. But his end was not the new soul, but the new society; not man, but Man. The popular hope was a Jewish national hope. Under the hands of Jesus it became human and therefore universal.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The question then confronts Christian men singly and the Christian Church collectively, whether they will favor and aid this trend toward communism, or oppose it. Down to modem times, as we have seen, the universal judgment of Christian thought was in favor of communism as more in harmony with the genius of Christianity and with the classical precedents of its early social life. Simultaneously with the rise of capitalism that conviction began to fade out. Prot- estantism especially, by its intimate alliance with the grow- ing cities and the rising business class, has been individualistic in its theories of Christian society. The question is now, how quickly Christian thought will realize that individualism WHAT TO DO 397 is coming to be an inadequate and antiquated form of social organization which must give place to a higher form of com- munistic organization, and how thoroughly it will compre- hend that this new communism will afford a far nobler social basis for the spiritual temple of Christianity. For there cannot really be any doubt that the spirit of Christianity has more affinity for a social system based on solidarity and human fraternity than for one based on selfish- ness and mutual antagonism. In competitive industry one man may profit through the ruin of others; in cooperative production the wealth of one man would depend on the grow- ing wealth of all. In competitive society each man strives for himself and his family only, and the sense of larger duties is attenuated and feeble; in communistic society no man could help realizing that he is part of a great organization, and that he owes it duty and loyalty. Competition tends to make good men selfish; cooperation would compel selfish men to develop public spirit. The moral and wholesome influences in society to-day proceed from the communistic organizations within it; the divisive, anarchic, and destruc- tive influences which are racking our social body to-day pro- ceed from those realms of social life which are individualistic and competitive. Business life to-day is organized in grow- ing circles within which a certain amount of cooperation and mutual helpfulness exists, and to that extent it exerts a sound moral influence. In so far as it is really competitive, it en- genders covetousness, cunning, hardness, selfish satisfaction in success, or resentment and despair in failure. It is a marvellous demonstration of the vitality of human goodness that a system so calculated to bring out the evil traits in us, still leaves so much human kindness and nobility ahve. But 398 CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS the Christian temper of mind, the honest regard for the feehngs and the welfare of others, the desire to make our life serve the common good, would get its first chance to control our social life in a society organized on the basis of solidarity and cooperation.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I find, on the other hand, somewhat to my surprise, that I actively like physical therapy. I keep regular appointments at a Columbia Presbyterian sports medicine facility at Sixtieth and Madison. I am impressed by the strength and general tone of the other patients who turn up during the same hour. I study their balance, their proficiency with the various devices recommended by the therapist. The more I watch, the more encouraged I am: this stuff really works, I tell myself. The thought makes me cheerful, optimistic. I wonder how many appointments it will take to reach the apparently effortless control already achieved by my fellow patients. Only during my third week of physical therapy do I learn that these particular fellow patients are in fact the New York Yankees, loosening up between game days. 21Today as I walk home from the Columbia Presbyterian sports medicine facility at Sixtieth and Madison I find the optimism engendered by proximity to the New York Yankees fading. In fact my physical confidence seems to be reaching a new ebb. My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether. Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp. The tone needs to be direct. I need to talk to you directly, I need to address the subject as it were, but something stops me. Is this another kind of neuropathy, a new frailty, am I no longer able to talk directly? Was I ever? Did I lose it? Or is the subject in this case a matter I wish not to address? When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, of what am I really afraid? 22What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called— What if you couldn’t meet him at the hospital— What if there’d been an accident on the freeway— What would happen to me then? All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to have been abandoned by their natural. They are programmed, by the unique circumstances of their introduction into the family structure, to see abandonment as their role, their fate, the destiny that will overtake them unless they outrun it. Quintana. All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them. Quintana. Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct. I said early on that adoption is hard to get right but I did not tell you why.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The former waned as primitive Christianity disappeared; the latter waxed as Catholic Christianity developed. Each hope was deeply and organically connected with all the other features of worship and church life characteristic of primitive Christianity on the one hand and Catholic Christianity on the other. But in so far as Christianity retained the first impact coming from Jesus and the Baptist and the prophets of Israel, its hope was predominantly the social hope. The revolutionary character of the millennial hope The millennium was the early Christian Utopia. It occupied the same place in the imagination and hope of the first generations of Christians which the coöperative commonwealth occupies in the fancies of modern socialists. The “woes” which always preceded the inauguration of the golden age corresponded to that forcible clash of the contending interests which is expected as inevitable in the coming transition of power from the possessing classes to the proletariat. It is true, all hope was put in the intervention of God and none at all in economic development or the forcible or political action of Christians. But their hope was a revolutionary hope, even though the revolutionists were as passive as sheep led to the slaughter and as meek as their Master. They hoped for a change complete and thorough; for an overturning swift and catastrophic; for an absolute transition of power from those who now rule to those who now suffer and are oppressed. What else is a revolution? The entire complexion of this hope had been inherited from Judaism. The general framework of the successive eras, the woes, the angelic hosts, the mystic arithmetic of sevens and tens, were common to Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. With slight changes Christians could adapt and Christianize Jewish apocalyptic writings, and they did so. One most important point in which the Jewish attitude was copied by some Christians was the hostility to Rome. The oppressed and tortured spirit of post-exilic Judaism had turned in fierce hatred against the nations that oppressed Israel. Rome was the last and most terrible of them all. They were all but agents of great demon powers who hated Israel and thwarted its God. When the hurricane of God’s judgment should come at last, it would mean deliverance to Israel, but necessarily it would mean also vengeance and overthrow for Rome. This attitude toward the dominant political power was readily imported into Christian thought with the apocalyptic literature which embodied it. Jews who became Christians could hardly help retaining that philosophy of contemporary history. Was not Rome built up by the aid of its gods? And what were its gods but the demons whom Christ was to overthrow and strip of their power? As surely as the true God was in irreconcilable conflict with the demon powers of idolatry, so surely would there have to be a death-struggle with the Empire before the kingdom of Christ could be set up.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The men of natural ability and idealism are most receptive to the prophetic ideas now dawning, and in turn these ideas enlarge and lift the mind that harbors them, so that even those who do not think that way pay the tribute of attention when they speak. But that type propagates itself. Mankind is so closely bound together that no man lives to himself, and no man is saved to himself alone. The new salvation is contagious. Those who have wrought out a faith that embraces the salvation of all human relations, make it easier for others to reach the same unification of all relations in the great aim of the kingdom of God. There will be a social evangelization, consciously and unconsciously. The believers will win other believers. The young men will respond, and there is no telling to what a young man will rise if the divine aim and impulse are in him. “L’homme, l’homme lui-même est une quantité indéterminable.” Such young minds are “the hidden germs of fresh humanities, the hidden founts of gathering river-floods.” After twenty or thirty years the young men who now embrace the new social faith will be in the controlling positions in society and will carry into practice some fractional part of the ideals of their youth. Few may preserve them uncontaminated to the end; they will compromise; they may surrender; but they can never be quite the same again. The men and women of Brook Farm did not all remain faithful to their early idealism, but they have left their impress on the country for good. The revolutionists of 1848 did not all remain revolutionists, but it is strange to see how many of the poets and statesmen and educators who had something of the divine afflatus in the latter half of the nineteenth century had nourished the revolutionary enthusiasm in their hearts in the earlier half of the century. A surprising number of the men who are foremost in the present struggle in our own country to reconquer for the people some of the political powers and economic privileges bartered away by a former generation, have been under the influence of the movement led by Henry George and of the diluted socialism following that. It has always been recognized that the creation of regenerate personalities, pledged to righteousness, is one of the most important services which the Church can render to social progress. But regeneration merely creates the will to do the right; it does not define for a man what is right. That is defined for him in the main by the religious community whose ideas he accepts. If his church community demands total abstinence from liquor, he will consider that as part of the Christian life; if it sanctions slavery or polygamy, he will consider them good. While the Church was swayed by ascetic ideas, the dedication of the will to God meant surrender to the monastic life.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It is inevitable that those who stand against conditions in which most men believe and by which the strongest profit, shall suffer for their stand. The Httle group of early Chris- tian socialists in England, led by Maurice, Kingsley, and Hughes, now stand by common consent in the history of that generation as one of its finest products, but at that time they were bitterly assailed and misunderstood. Pastor Rudolf Todt, the first man in Germany who undertook to prove that the New Testament and the ethics of socialism have a close affinity, was almost unanimously attacked by the Church of Germany. But Jesus told his apostles at the outset that opposition would be part of their day's work. Christ equipped his Church with no legal rights to protect her ; the only political right he gave his disciples was the right of being persecuted.^ It is part of the doctrine of vicarious atonement, which is fundamental in Christianity, that the prophetic souls * Nathusiua, " Mitarbeit der Kirche," p. 476. 41 8 CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS must vindicate by their sufferings the truth of the truth they preach, "Disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool Of the world's scorn, are the right mother-milk To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind And break a pathway to those unknown realms That in the earth's broad shadow lie enthralled; Endurance is the crowning quality. And patience all the passion of great hearts; These are their stay, and when the leaden world Sets its hard face against their fateful thought, And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror, Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, The inspired soul but flings his patience in, And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe, — One faith against a whole earth's unbelief. One soul against the flesh of all mankind." ' The championship of social justice is almost the only way left open to a Christian nowadays to gain the crown of martyr- dom. Theological heretics are rarely persecuted now. The only rival of God is mammon, and it is only when his sacred name is blasphemed that men throw the Christians to the lions. Even for the social heretics there is a generous readiness to listen which was unknown in the 'past. In our country that openness of mind is a product of our free intellectual life, our ingrained democracy, the denominational manifoldness of our religious life, and the spread of the Christian spirit. It has become an accepted doctrine among us that all great movements have obscure beginnings, and that belief tends to * James Russell Lowell, " Columbus." WHAT TO DO 419 make men respectful toward anything that comes from some despised Nazareth. Unless a man forfeits respect by bitter- ness or lack of tact, he is accorded a large degree of tolerance, though he will always be made to feel the difference between himself and those who say the things that please the great.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  So, I invite you to be my co-pilot on this healing trip as we tour some of the most difficult and treasured parts of life: grieving and loving, stumbling and flying, living and dying. I’ll bring the snacks, flashlights, and bandages. You bring the sensible shoes. Ready? Let’s go. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To Pamela Cannon, my brilliant editor. Without you this book wouldn’t exist. Thank you for your unwavering enthusiasm, can-do spirit, and “ok, now you’re just showing off” candor. For crawling into the trenches with me (index cards and all), and for every edit that made this book something I am very proud of. I appreciate you and your very big heart, my friend. To Suzanne Guillette, thank you for pouring your poetry onto these pages with me. For pushing me to go deeper, and for showing me ways to express the inexpressible. Your guidance not only made this book richer, it helped me grow. To Patty Gift, thank you for championing a topic most shy away from. For giving me the space and grace to take my time, find my way, and create my music. Je t’adore, lion. To Reid Tracy, thank you for saying yes to my writing so long ago (even the cuss words). Your friendship means the world, moon, and stars to me. To Melody Guy, thank you for coaxing out even more magic. For finding the nooks and crannies that needed more heart (or clearer explanation!), and for allowing me to go to places I was afraid to go to. Once there, you said, “It’s OK. That’s normal. Keep going.” To my wonderful literary agents, Scott Hoffman and Steve Troha, thank you for believing in my work and welcoming me into the Folio fold. To Sarah Hall, Krystin White (Cookie), Lindsay McGinty, and Lizzi Marshall, thank you for helping me spread this book far and wide. To my amazing team: Mandi, Hayley, Deidra, Abby, Morgan, Cameron, Justin, John, thank you for your creative hearts, big smarts, and caring spirits. And for loving sandwiches as much as I do. But extra thanks to Mandi Rivieccio, our Chief Creative Officer, for being a tender titan and my favorite person to word chef with. To my Inner Circle Wellness community and Thrive Mastermind members, thank you for your desire to learn and grow alongside me. To Carol, thank you for guiding me through so many storms. To Jeanette, thank you for giving me a book on grief. It scared me at first.