MISCELLANY
Robert R. Meyers

One has many adventures of the mind which do not lend themselves to being shaped into full-fledged essays. A provocative visit to some religious meeting, bits and pieces culled from the week’s reading, brief talks with people who care about man’s ties with God — these may lack the substance needed for long articles, yet hold value for readers who like having their minds teased on a variety of subjects.

The word “miscellany” is as adequate as any other for such a collection. I considered the word “leftovers” as a humbler title, but it seemed a bit more whimsical than some of the material warranted. For I am not merely salvaging the odds and ends that clutter the mind and bulge the drawers of the desk. Anyone who thinks almost constantly upon a subject grows curious about many matters which are peripheral to its main issues, but which he knows will interest readers with the same preoccupations. For such readers, the following grab-bag of observations and reported experiences is presented. It invites nothing more than browsing. Those hot-eyed seekers of the eternally profound should pass on at once to greener pastures.

Business Men Reprimanded

One of the more intriguing Texas Church of Christ bulletins which came my way recently printed a rather unusual plea under the heading: CATHOLIC CALENDAR. It points all men of the party to a clear and present danger now facing the church. I have corrected a couple of grammatical errors, because these are easily made and it ought to be beneath dignity to have fun at the expense of such slips. Otherwise, the paragraph reads as follows:

I notice that more and more of the calendars being given out by business men are ‘Catholic Calendars,’ that is, they’ are designed for use by Catholic people. These calendars have all Catholic ‘fast days’ marked with fish. Thus, every Friday and other ‘fast’ days have a fish in the space for that day to remind Catholics not to eat meat that day, but to eat fish . . . Many Christian and non-Catholic merchants somehow, unintentionally, get these “Catholic Calendars” and never noticing, pass them out to their customers, and many Christian and non-Catholic customers take them home and put them up — still never noticing. Let me suggest that you pay more attention to this and refuse such calendars when they are offered to you, and very courteously explain to the merchant that you are a Christian — not a Catholic, and that you do not care for a calendar designed especially for the Catholic religion.

This alarmed me so that I took another look at my own little desk calendar, and sure enough, I was the owner — all unsuspectingly — of one of those nefarious “Catholic Calendars.” The Fridays all had fish symbols, and I found some other days of the week similarly marked. It was clear that I had on my hands “a calendar designed especially for the Catholic religion.”

As I leafed through my little piece of propaganda, however, I came upon some disturbing sights. I found that Yom Kippur and the date of Israel’s becoming a state were prominently indicated. The conspiracy grew worse! Now I had a Catholic-Jewish calendar on my clean Protestant hands.

Then I discovered a memorial to the day when the Pilgrims landed, to the Monroe Doctrine, and to Veteran’s Day. It seemed I had a Patriot’s Calendar, as well. But Father’s Day and Mother’s Day were vividly marked, as was Thanksgiving, so I had to include Domestic Calendar in the maker’s scheming. When Woman Suffrage was celebrated, I saw clearly the Feminist conspiracy at work, and my heart sank even more when I came upon the date of the founding of the Republican party. What more, I thought, could I expect, when a successful businessman put this thing out?

I was almost in despair when I came at last to a day marked MARTIN LUTHER’S BIRTHDAY. At last I had a Protestant. Small print, grudgingly, perhaps, but a Protestant none the less. And there was Christmas, which some of us rather enjoy even within the precincts of the Church of Christ movement. I decided I could keep my Catholic-Jewish-Patriot-Domestic-Feminist-Republican-Protestant Calendar.

Then the blow fell cruelly upon me. I saw marked in large capital letters such positively pagan reminiscences as made it clear who was really behind this propaganda. There were months named for Janus, for the Roman festival of purification, for Mars, for the goddess of increase Maia, and for such busy Romans as Junius, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar — none of them Restoration Christians. Since these came only once a month, they disturbed me less than the underhanded way in which the pagans had tried to influence our thinking on every single day of the week!

There was the sun’s day and the moon’s day, those ancient objects of worship which the Old Testament often warns against. And the day of Tiw, god of war among the Anglo-Saxons. And Thor’s day, and Woden’s day, and Freya’s day, that pagan goddess of love. Not to mention Saturn’s day.

The Catholic plot pales into insignificance beside all this. The whole thing is a subtle, pernicious pagan plot designed to lure us into relapsing into that ancient pre-Christian unsoundness. My advice to all who hold such calendars is this: return them to the merchant who gave them to you and say, courteously, that you are a Christian, not a pagan, and that you do not care for a calendar obviously designed especially for pagans. It may be that some merchant can dig up an old Quaker calendar for you. They saw this pagan plot long before I did and insisted that the months and the days be designed only by numbers.

The satire is heavy-handed, I admit, but such foolishness in print may deserve it. More seriously I would suggest that one who has no more important Christian involvements than such a warning hints at should restudy the entire Christian movement. The best starting place for one who really worries about the marking of fast days on a calendar might very well be Romans 14, some of which is almost unbelievably relevant to this issue:

Again, one man thinks some days of more importance than others. Another man considers them all alike. Let every one be definite in his own conviction. If a man specially observes one particular day, he does so ‘to God.’ The man who eats, eats ‘to God,’ for he thanks God for the food. The man who fasts also does it ‘to God,’ for he thanks God for the benefits of fasting . . . Why, then, criticize your brother’s actions, why try to make him look small? We shall all be judged one day, not by one another’s standards or even our own, but by the standard of Christ.

Who said, among Other things, “When you fast . . . “ and who once fasted Himself during a forty-day period of meditation and trial. It happens not to be a part of my religious tradition to fast, but I shall not make fun of those who do so in the belief that they thus strengthen themselves spiritually. If some who fast abuse the idea, it is doubtless no worse than some other abuses I see within my own religious community.

It seems to me that we are still petulant children when we disseminate and approve such trivia. I was given my “Catholic Calendar” by one of the finest Christian elders and businessman I have ever known. I am sure he thought it no crime against humanity or religion to indicate that on Fridays his Catholic customers fast. Neither do I.

Beware The Pattern

Sometimes a Christian minister falls into a pattern of performance, so that he conducts himself always the same even when circumstances are different. What worked well with one person may be an utter failure with another, but if he is victimized by his pattern approach, he may not even notice it. Since every worker in the church is a minister and does what we call “personal work,” it seems wise to illustrate how the rate performance can fail.

Recently I had a letter from an elderly lady whose sensitivity and intelligence go rather beyond the usual. A world traveler and onetime European magazine editor, she wrote the following indictment of the imperceptive approach:

Sometime ago I had a call from the new minister from the church down the street. His wife brought him and while I appreciated the gesture, frankly I was unimpressed. He prayed with me and read verses from the Bible to me, all of which should have given me an uplift and a measure of gratitude. However, I was embarrassed!

To what depths I must have fallen to allow such a reaction to take possession of me! Strangely enough, I felt that his wife was watching me very closely as though she sensed the effort I was making to be polite and friendly. Be that as it may, I found the assignment tough. The whole thing was so different from the easy companionship of other days when (she names two other Church of Christ evangelists) held out their hands to me.

This lady is eighty-five years old. She has read hundreds of the best books and has written exceptionally fine short stories and magazine articles. Her letter suggests that she dislikes being treated as an object of ministerial concern. She wanted to be, instead, a person. The Bible reading and the praying were so managed that they seemed “pattern” activities to her. They might profitably have been put off until the minister got to know this lady as an individual. His pattern called for certain things to be done automatically on such a visit, but she clearly wishes he had waited until he was asked to read and pray — until he had offered friendship and sought to know a person.

When The Church Stood Firm

A Mennonite minister from Illinois read someone’s comment about the “outdated and archaic beliefs and customs” of Christianity and decided to make a response. In his defense, he cited the appraisal once made of the church by Albert Einstein. It is so glorious a tribute to the church, when the church is brave, that I wish to make it available for all readers of this magazine.

Einstein said:

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came to Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to the individual writers, but they too were mute.

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any great interest in the Church before. But now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

How proud every Christian ought to be at such a witness from the great scientist. We have no Nazi movement to combat now, but challenges of social injustice and racial prejudice still demand brave responses from the Church. The children of God are being maimed even now by the hostile, the greedy, and the apathetic. It ought to be a major concern for every Christian in every denomination to ask constantly what his group is doing (not just saying) about the great social, economic and moral issues of our time. No man of depth will ever get excited about a church which meets occasionally for safe services, but never dirties its hands or bloodies its brow in the ceaseless battle for human rights.

“We Found The True Church”

Ever so often one of the Church of Christ journals reports the discovery of a “true church” meeting in the heart of some wild and primitive region. With pardonable elation the report will say that with no help at all from American Christians (members of The Church of Christ) these natives took their Bibles, obeyed the proper entrance rites, and found the original order of worship.

Such a group was reported upon in the Christian Chronicle some months ago. Located in the interior of Ethiopia, these folk were said to be “using only the Bible as a guide.” A missionary with the proper credentials investigated them and sent in his account, from which I shall quote below.

He said that the translator, who brought the news about the group, made arrangements for him to meet with two of the 29 congregations in the province. “Previously there had been 480,” he explained, “but all except the 29 had been led away by false teachers.”

Such a mortality rate is staggering and rather discouraging, but worse is to come. Even the 29 were in trouble, since while using only the New Testament they had nevertheless been observing the Lord’s Supper only once each month. “Unquestionably,” the missionary assured his readers, “there are practices which must be corrected. I believe they can and will be with proper and adequate teaching.”

“The Bible only” is apparently not quite enough, since invariably preachers of the “true church” must go in and correct certain false impressions which these primitive students get. These, in addition to their fuzziness about how often to observe the Supper, were described as only “generally free from denominational concepts.” One would like very much to know what other denominational concepts the natives picked up as they read “only the Bible,” but the reporter chooses not to say.

I suppose others will react quite differently, but I am saddened by the thought that these good Ethiopian people probably had not learned yet that they were the only Christians and had still to discover that all other religionists are in grievous error and hopelessly lost. They will find this out soon, of course, in the name of that party which wants to preserve the last 29 congregations from error. Whether they will then be nearer to the Lord, or farther away, is a matter about which men are likely to differ. With 29 congregations still left, there will be at least one each for all the various factions within our religious group. Soon, instead of squabbling with other denominations whom they have learned are all lost, they can settle down to quarreling among themselves in civil strife. One surely may be pardoned for wishing they might have been left with their Bibles to work out their own salvation.

Back From Russia

Dr. Lawrence Shepoiser, superintendent of the Wichita, Kansas public schools, returned recently from a month-long tour of the Soviet Union. In a full-page newspaper story, he tried to evaluate the Russian way of life and the Russian schools. He appeared to be trying to be objective about it, and this strikes me as risky business in modern America.

Readers of this journal will be stimulated by some comments he made on Russian ethics. He said that much in Russian theory and practice is paradoxical, that atheism is taught and religion frowned upon as ignorant, but that the people are honest and moral. It takes a man of profound naivete or profound courage to say something like that in Kansas, the state where Madelyn Murray wanted to set up her center for the promotion of atheism.

Not only that, but he went on to say that shopkeepers leave their stores for long periods at a time with no fear of anything being stolen, and that the superintendents in his party deliberately left some articles in places that would invite theft in this country. Nothing was stolen. One boy walked five miles to return a camera case ‘to one of the superintendents. Said Shepoiser: “I never saw cheating in any classroom. They help each other because they believe in it.”

Dr. Shepoiser would have been much more popular around here, with many people, if he had related some juicy tales of how immoral all those dirty Russian atheists are. This would have provided grist for the mill in dozens of pulpits around town. But he refused to do it, and I must suppose that it was because that was simply not the way he saw things.

The thought that an atheist might be moral and honest is shocking to many Christians, but it is true nevertheless. It does the Christian cause no good when its adherents assert, blindly, that all atheists are without moral standards and cannot be trusted. Anyone who knows a few atheists intimately, or has some grasp of history, knows better. But the shallow indictment keeps being made, probably because it frightens the ignorant and comforts the arrogant.

It seems to me that a Christian might legitimately feel sorry for an atheist, since the atheist lacks certain spiritual comforts which the Christian enjoys. But to assume that the inability to believe in our God inevitably turns others into immoral, dishonest and unreliable people is pure nonsense. Dr. Shepoiser is a courageous man to prick this old bubble, and I must confess I admire him.

His comments came just after I had talked to a family in a counseling session and had had occasion to recommend that the family urgently needed a good church life to bind them all together. The husband said, “Well, I can’t have that, because I am an atheist.” He sat there looking at me expectantly, waiting for shock and horror to spread across my face.

I refused to gratify him. I said, “Well, there are a number of people around who feel that way, including some friends and relatives of mine. I must respect any man who has honestly and carefully weighed the arguments for and against the existence of God, and decided against it. I need not agree with his conviction, but I must respect it, and I respect yours. I hope you may have cause to change your mind someday.”

And I thought later, after reading of Dr. Shepoiser’s visit and his views, how wonderful it would be if the Russians rediscovered God one of these days, and if Americans should learn at the same time to pay more attention to the God they claim already to have found.

Earthquakes and Theology

With the Alaskan earthquake still fresh in our minds, it may be interesting to notice that no one has suggested a supernatural origin for the disaster. No one has said, at least not in any reputable media known to me, that God was punishing the Alaskan people for their wicked ways.

Instead, newspapers and journals have printed detailed studies of the natural causes of quakes, complete with fascinating pictures and diagrams. Much is known about stress and strain in the earth’s outer covering and where there is still ignorance, scientists assume that the unknown factors are natural and may yet be understood.

It is easy to forget how recent such approaches to disaster are. As the Jewish people developed their concept of God, they found Him involved directly in all sorts of natural catastrophes. Floods, fires, quakes, storms, plagues of locusts — all these were initiated by God as punishments. When the Jews were hit themselves, they were positive that they had sinned. When their enemies were hit, they were positive that God was showing whose side He was on.

It was a time when the mysteries of nature were still many and deep. God is represented in the book of Job as asking these questions: Do you know when mountain goats bring forth? Do you observe the calving of the hinds? Do you know the gestation period of these animals? In those times, Job could not answer, and his ignorance became a source of awe. In these days, one can answer, but his very knowledge may be equally a source of awe. God has not changed, but man’s knowledge has expanded enormously and his dominion has increased. Some of the explanations which once increased piety and reverence would now destroy them in many of us.

For example, have you studied the explanations given for the famed Lisbon earthquake of 1755? Catholics were sure that God was punishing Portugal because Protestants were there in some numbers. Protestants were sure that God was showing the world how He felt about the masses of Catholics in the city. Theologians were greatly agitated. Why did this devout and famous city suffer so horribly at the hands of a loving God-with the innocent dying alongside the guilty?

Rousseau and others of his faith declared that this is the best of all possible worlds, so earthquakes must be for the best. It is only the evils of society that are bad. If we were not cooped up in cities, earthquakes would not kill us. It was this kind of glib, shallow optimism that infuriated the French philosopher Voltaire and caused him to write Candide, his devastating satire on all such thoughtless comment.

One fascinating argument ran like this: that God meant to shock all of Christendom into penitence by the destruction of some famous and wealthy city. Since He especially favored Portugal, He decided that the Portuguese “for their own good and as a result of the heavenly priority that was their due” should be singled out for the honour of being the first punished, and the most severely punished!

One sees how easily any event may be made to fit into a predetermined pattern. Each philosophy saw itself justified in the Lisbon terror. Theology strained itself memorably in its attempt to fit the disaster into the prevailing theories about God. Yet some good came out of it, because it began a series of inquiries which led ultimately to the belief that quakes were natural rather than supernatural phenomena, and thus were amenable to observation and to explanation by a rational theory. — 876 Spauding, Wichita, Kan.