Monthly Musing . . .

A PULPITEER'S DILEMMA
Robert Meyers

I have been reading again, with greater appreciation, John Middleton Murry's Not As The Scribes, a collection of short religious talks which the famed literary scholar made to members of his communal farm family. In one place he tells the group that he is speaking for the last time from a pulpit. He says that in the last few times he has done this there has come upon him "an increasing sense of some fundamental incompatibility between a pulpit and myself. A pulpit is, I feel, a place where a man should utter certainties; I possess no certainties. And nothing fills me with a more profound and painful misgiving than the fear that I may be suggesting to others that I am certain, when I am not."

 I can sympathize readily with this, although Murry overstates his doubts. He admits this later, but the admission is not necessary; no one can read his collection of Sunday evening talks without discovering at least one overwhelming certainty which is stated as brilliantly as it has ever been by anyone.

 That certainty is the one which also sustains me: that love is the absolute and ultimate value, and that the meaningfulness of life depends upon the earnestness with which one seeks to know what love is and how it may be turned loose to work in any given context.

 I resist the pressure I often feel to be certain about all kinds of other things. Perhaps a part of my reluctance is explained in Murry's own apology. He says that the cause of his hesitation and misgivings is that he is a man of letters. "That is to say, my mind has long inhabited a world in which downright and positive assertions concerning the nature of things have singularly little place."

 I am no "man of letters" in the sense John Murry was, but the academic world I inhabit does make devastating assaults upon one's certainties and dares him to be positive about very much. To read the different responses, for example, which equally capable critics make to great works of art is to understand that one cannot enforce a single meaning upon the whole world. To read the great works for oneself is to enter a world of such complexity and richness that no credal formula can possibly capture it all.

 When one turns, then, to that most amazing collection of literature in the world, the Bible, he finds such diversity and wealth that dogmatism seems equally impossible. Despite the easy jeers at open‑mindedness ("His mind is open all right, just like a sieve; everything he learns runs right on through it!"), I find myself ever more humbled before the complexities of the Bible.

 What is left for me is, first, honesty in the confession of what I believe at a given moment in my growing life and, second, a conviction of the preeminence of love. Holding these, I shall be able to stand in a pulpit before audiences with some understanding of the tentative nature of life and faith.

The cross is "I" crossed out. —Anonymous