NO DIVIDING LINE
Robert Meyers

I like what Sister Mary Corita Kent, the famed teaching nun from Los Angeles, had to say once about distinguishing between “sacred” and “secular.” She said it bluntly: “I don’t find a great deal of difference between what’s religious and not religious.”

I read her to mean that true religion interpenetrates and transforms all of life and is, in turn, affected by all of life. “If Christ were alive today,” she went on, “he’d take people to the movies instead of telling them parables.”

Except that He might find it hard to locate a movie fit for His visit today, I quite agree. Jesus was one of the world’s greatest hunters of analogies. He searched constantly for familiar events which could be used to light up the kingdom of right relationships. When He found them he told picture stories, painting with words for people who had much stronger visual imaginations than they had skills in abstract thought.

Who can doubt that if pictures in color, moving on a screen, had been available He would have used them? With little effort I can recall several from which He could have constructed memorable lessons: Lilies of the Field, A Man For All Seasons. A Patch of Blue, Marty, and (if He had known our world) A Thousand Clowns with its indictment of the frenzied greed of a modern, competitive society. He would have enjoyed our occasional sensitive films just as strongly as He would have detested most of them for their sleazy counterfeiting.

But my point is that Jesus used parables because they were an established form in Jewish life, not because they were inherently “religious.” He would, in our time, adopt any effective means of teaching which we have discovered. He was not, in God’s grace, freed from the body in Jerusalem one day only to be buried again in some time-space capsule of our own making.

So whether it stands in rebuke against some part of our world, or approves it as fruitful, our religion is isolated from nothing. There can be no compartmentalizing for His followers, no niggardly hoarding of certain times and actions in the name of a Special Day faith. The Christian’s interests are as diverse as God’s own world. Let us be thankful for that, and greet every man with a willingness to believe that his particular excitement may, in its own way, speak of and for God in a world where too many are bored to death.

Ghettoism

During my years in St. Louis, at Washington University and the Central Church of Christ, I became impressed by Sister Jacqueline of Webster College. This Catholic scholar, serving then in one of the lovely old suburbs of St. Louis, has been a brave, independent spirit. She has something to say to us.

“Indoctrination,” she says, “is a mistake in the Church and a mistake in education. The radical groups we hear so much about are always guilty of indoctrination. Whether of the Communist left or the John Birch right, it is because they are guilty of indoctrination that they are dangerous. Because they subject people to monolithic thinking, platitudes, and a conviction that you can make simplistic judgments, they rob us of that aching, full-of-wonder reality that life is tough but wonderful, that there is no such thing as being absolutely sure …

The italics are mine. I think one of the great moments in a man’s life comes when he realizes that in matters of his own mind and judgment he can never be absolutely sure, and when he then finds out that he can live quite happily with that uncertainty—if he really trusts the grace of God.

“Ghettoism or provincialism is always debilitating,” Sister Jacqueline says. “I have practically lost my head at times by saying that the worst thing that could happen to us is to achieve the old-time ideal of every Catholic child in a Catholic school. I don’t like ghettoes and I don’t want to live in a ghetto society.”

It would not do, I’m afraid, to convert Sister Jacqueline to the Church of Christ because her antipathy to ghettoism would certainly get her into trouble. We have seemed for several years to be working industriously in the direction of the ghetto life. We want our children in a Church of Christ elementary school, a Church of Christ junior high and high school, a Church of Christ college. After that we really prefer Church of Christ communities, like that near ACC in Abilene, or on Harding Drive at Searcy, but failing that we consider an “Exodus” to some place. Church of Christ hospitals are under consideration in several places; this would give us medical care under the proper hands. Church of Christ care homes are a reality all over the country. We will be able to go, soon, from the cradle to the grave and never come into more than fleeting contact with a heathen.

It may not be much like Christ, who received sinners and ate with them, but perhaps the demands of purity are greater now than in His day and we simply cannot risk that kind of exposure. At any rate it is strange to see a Catholic eschewing ghettoism just when so many of us are so happily espousing it. —Wichita State University, Wichita. Kansas

Trust men and they will be true to you. —Emerson