What I should like to talk about has to do more with religion in general than with spirituality in particular: my subject is the heart of religion and the heart of God. I would like to share a story, if this were a sermon, would be absolutely the right one.
Some of you will know "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, a novel about the migration of dispossessed small croppers from the state of Oklahoma to the vineyards of California. Their small and rather meager livelihood has been destroyed by capital financing making for large ranches that dispossessed the intimate peasantry.
They are trekking to a vision of a future in California. In the course of the journey old Grandpa Joad dies – a poor old man, his health undermined by the tribulations of his journey. They have no money for funerals, so they decide to bury him by the wayside. And then it occurs to them that they may be incurring suspicion of some foul play and, wanting to come clean, they say, “Let’s put a little notice on the grave: ‘Old Grandpa Joad died of natural causes. Old, decrepit, sick. His folks buried him.’” And so they get a piece of wood and fix on it their notice. It is all so intensely pathetic.
Travelling with them there is a derelict preacher who has attached himself to their party – a rather faded renegade pastor – and they say to him as a kind of afterthought, and this is the heart of it, “Couldn’t you put somepin [something] on it so that it’ll be religious? A text for example – ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, or maybe a snatch of a hymn – ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’? Put somepin on it” – the notice that is – “so that it’ll be religious.”
Now, it seems fair to ask, What does that little text add to the integrity, the pathos, the good faith, the poverty, the suffering, the tragedy of that situation? What does it have to add? Is there not something already profoundly religious in all those qualities of good faith and integrity and a certain quiet heroism in the bearing of suffering?
You will all, I think, agree that the text has nothing basically to add to the solid religious quality of the situation and their behavior. But if they had not wanted the text, would they have been that sort of people? The answer surely has to be “No”. It was by association with “the arms of Jesus” or “the Lord is my shepherd”, through the tradition of their family worship that they had come to be that sort of people, wanting to behave with integrity, finding a certain nobility in the midst of poverty and standing in a reverent awe in the presence of their mortality. And in all those ways they are profoundly religious. There is a paradox present. The text that is added is the key to what is already there.
The point of this story is to have us capture the interrelationship between the worship that we bring and the behavior that we come by, or put another way, the heart of God and the heart of the believer. There has always been this interrelation between faith and faithful.
Spirituality is what believers find it and fulfill it to be, but how do we know them as believers except by their belonging to religion? It is like a circle. Come into the religion and you reach those who profess it. Meet those who profess it and you come into the knowledge of their faith. And this, of course, is true about all religions. So the point of the story is to have us think about how religions can fulfil authentic compassion in human society.
Now we come to the verse, in Sura 50 (Surat Qaf) 37: Inna fi dhalika la-dhikra li-man kana lahu qalb aw alqa al-samc wa huwa shahid, which translates: “Here verily is a reminder for him who has a heart, or gives ear with full intelligence” (Pickthall). It could be put into more literary, resonant English as: “A thing to ponder here for whoever has a heart, and who heeds with alert perception.” The passage is clearly talking about (1) a feeling heart, (2) a hearing mind and (3) a present self. These three belong together. But what is the context of “Here is something to reflect upon”? The context is human tragedy. (Kenneth Cragg)
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