DEEPS OF LIFE

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 55, 3 September 1945, Page 7

DEEPS OF LIFE

SEEKING THE TRUTH

CHURCH AND THE AGE

No generation had-ever been urged as ours had been to look below the surface and explore the deeps of life, said the Rt. Rev. J. S. Moyes, Bishop of Armidale, New South Wales, in an address last night. The Bishop spoke of the power of the combined power of the churches in any community. "This fact I noted in America two years ago at the Princeton Conference and after, and lately all through the San Francisco Conference members of the Federal Council of Churches of the United States of America sat as advisers to the American delegation, and the reports sent out to Australia and New Zealand show how effective and acceptable was their help," he said. "In a final memorandum they close with these words: 'The road to a better world is long. The journey is arduous, only God can assure its achievement. As we move forward we humbly seek His help.' "How are we to go forward? I put this question to you and myself, after attending the conference on Christian Order in New Zealand held these last few days in Christchurch under the auspices of the National Council of Churches. How are we to go forward? And as we seek to go, in co-operation, is there any word that can be a key to our common purpose? If there is one word which can provide a description of the way we Christians must live in these coming years it is the word 'depth.' All visible things have a surface —an appearance—but truth lies in depth, in digging below the surface to the heart of things. TOO MUCH IN A HURRY. "But is it not so that even up till today we are not yet digging deeply enough in the understanding of men, in bringing to light prejudices and opinions, in knowing how far we are prisoners of our experience, and judge by appearances, and how far we are j living on the surface of life and missing its truth, in our own lives and in our thought of others? It is obvious that most of our life goes on at the surface. We follow out a routine of daily living in work and leisure, in food and rest. We are too much in a hurry to look up at the heights or down to depths, unless some tragedy jolts us out of the rut of our monotony. We just go on going on. We don't perhaps really know ourselves, and of what we are capable. And certainly we don't know one another. But what is true of us as individuals is also true of our common life; indeed, it is only in this common life of relationships with one another that we become what we are. In history we usually live as much on the surface as we do individually—we see the surface appearance of our nation, and of other nations. We get the stream of daily news, of propaganda, of sensation; a stream of events we call history. And the noise of their shallow rippling prevents us from listening to the depths, to what is really happening underneath in our social structure and in the longing hearts of the many. I FORCES OF DESTRUCTION. "We believed almost until now that we were moving forward in an inevitable progress. Unknown to us, forces of destruction were gathering in the depths. We believed we had conquered Nature and could order history. We had produced ever better tools and more perfect means of comfort and culture. But history lies not in events but in character. No generation has.ever been urged as ours has been, to look below the surface and explore the deeps of life. We take it for granted the Church will utter warnings and we don't much heed. But far beyond the limits.of religious and philosophic thought, there have been prophets who have told us the message for the times. "The whole world of art in its widest sense has been a dislocated and disrupted world for 50 years. We have tended to hurl judgments upon painters, novelists, poets, musicians, never realising that in a true prophetic spirit they were revealing to us the tragedy of our age, asking us to go below the surface and explore the deeps of life and find meaning. Painters have disrupted the surface appearance of men and nature in their pictures and shown us distortions, cubes, jazz patterns; to us their works were a joke and a caricature, but to some ofthem at least they were an ugly picture of life as it really was in its depths and reality. Poets and novelists have used strange and offensive words and rhythms, have told offensive blatant stories to uncover for us the contrast between our respectability and the cess pools underground in life. "Musicians have provided us with music in which the individual sang or played against the beat, each interoreting according to his will, and thus have opened up the sheer anarchy of our emotional life of today—if we were willing to see. And at last the filthy inhumanities of war have tossed [these depths into life's surface and into the lap of our experience. EMPTY MINDS. "We hate to look below the surface. Even today, after years of war, there are those who would quickly turn their backs on the depths and return to the broken surface of life as if nothing had happened. Business as before. Methods as of old. It can't be done. As in some part the landscape is empty where once there were cities, so there are minds empty of faith and hope. They believe nothing, think nothing, support nothing, are nothing. Unless we help these lives, further tragedy awaits. No planning alone will do it; for we need more than form of life, mo^e than instruments of life —we need a greater faith and a deeper love of men than that which some have lost. We need fellowship, understanding, consideration, self-control. No longer can Christians look on the surface of life and see and judge men by appearance. First, we need far more deeply to know God. We need again to read the Bible and know Him Who is the source of life, the Creator of life, the Friend of man, for such knowledge is life. Then we need to know men, not just their circumstances, nor the accidents that place them here or there in the social scale, but men as men, each with a value as a child of God; and not least, we'need to dig deeply and know the church, as one of God's mighty acts for man's redemption, and thus find the fellowship and unity which will allow the Spirit of Jesus to reach out with power hitherto unrevealed and draw men, all men, to Himself and to each other."