ON GOING OUT AND COMING IN

Evening Star, Issue 19517, 26 March 1927, Page 2

ON GOING OUT AND COMING IN

This is n summary of life. It just consists of going out and coming in. The way this is done, the experiences met with, the work or waiting accomplished —these begin and end the history of human life. Let us consider it. »«* # , Somebody has said that life’s doom is largely determined for us on the doorstep. We might say, indeed, that it is wholly determined there, if by the doorstep we mean the world within and the world without. Begin with our going out. One watches in the early morning the city crowds- arriving by I tram and train for their daily labors. ; They emerge from the termini like a great river volume, then break-up into little diverse streamlets, thinning away from less and less to nothing. By 10 o’clock or earlier they have found their places and faced their duties. These duties may not seem to them great or heroic. They indeed appear the opposite—humdrum, scarce worth the doing. To drive a pen or a typewriter all day, to guide a machine, to sew leather, cut cloth, sweep rooms, wash dishes, tend customers, get meals, and the hundred and' one other things to which we go out every day, how humdrum and unheroic it all appears. But it is not so. If it looks commonplace or trivial it is because we ourselves are this. To the spiritualised vision the familiar street is as hazardous as the trackless desert, and the commonest duties of life in shop or office, mine or mart as perilous as the threatening deep. One of onr New' Zealand poets depicts the feelings of a girl in the backhlocks: Just look at me! Four years—say, seven and forty solid months. Over a thousand days!—l’ve faithfully Feasted and fried, made beds and bread and butter, Scrubbed, rubbed, and all the rest — with what result? . . . With all the doing nothing’s Done, With all the endless making nothing’s ■ Made. Oh, yes. We ourselves are being made, and that is something. That is the purpose of it all. It is to create character—and how? Every day and every hour as we go out to our doing thought is involved, and desire and ctioice and feeling and movements of emotion and will. The thought becomes a desire, the desire a wish, the wish a will. The repetition of these twist into habits, habits hasten into character, and character is destiny. So it comes about that our going out to the crowded street or the homely humdrum office is as big a venture as shooting lions in Central Africa or pioneering to the Poles. It is this because our life is in the balance. Dives found his fate as he drove every day past the lame beggar at his gate. “ Over the school desk, office bar, or shop counter are offered either the sordid bargain of Judas or the sacramental' cup of Jesus.”

He fixed thee ’raid this dance Of plastic circumstance, The present thou would fain ap-rest, Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent. Try thee and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed. e ■ * * ■»

But we may think of our going out not merely with the body, hut out of the body. Wo go out of it in thought. Strange how imprisoned in fire or sis feet of flesh we can yet transcend it, traverse the universe, and go and com© as we will. WeP Yes, for is not thought pressure ? Are, we not where our thought is, whether in the body or, on the other side of the earth or sky? And comes a day, too, when the mysterious something we call i —myself—slips out of the body finally. It has been practising going out through all the years, but up tiil now the goings out were like kite-flying. We were somehow subtly tethered to the flesh, and always pulled back by it again. But death slits the thread and lets us go from it. That will be some going outl All the preceding ones were prophetic of it. Even the commonplace, everyday ones rightly understood were its harbingers. And they were this, perhaps, even in their very unexciting l and ordinary character. This seems to be the testimony of those who have been rescued on the verge of death. Mr A. C. Benson, in one of his books, relates an experience of this sort. He met with an accident in the Bel Alps. The snow concealing a crevasse suddenly gave way, and lie swung down the cavity like a sack. Ho found himself dangling, as though hanging at the very summit of the vaulting of a cathedral. He describes, in some detail, the thoughts and feelings ho had in which seemed to him at the moment the end of life. Among other things, he says, “the strange thing about it to me was its utter unlikeness to anything that I would have imagined such an experience to be—the simplicity of it, the ''commonplace thoughts that came to me, the entire absence of any tragic, or melodramatic, or, indeed, emotional elements. I should have supposed it would all have been emotion; but I suppose emotion comes with reflection, and that w© pass through the most critical and tragic moments of life without any immediate consciousness that they are either critical or tragic at all.” Just so. That is how we go forth beyond our door step to life’s daily duties. We are even thinking of some groat day to come, some striking events that shall give us the chance to be distinguished and heroic, and lo! it is all here, and all happening in the humdrum hours through which we are living and working every day. But we must pass on to the_ other segment of life: coming in.

Coming in. “ Man goeth forth to his work and to his labor till the evening.” Night comes and we cross the threshold to our home. The other half of our life or more is passed there. How various are the comings in to the home! One man comes in to find—what? Sometimes it is to find a haven of peace, a warmth of welcome and encompassing of love that banish the cares of the day and make life more light as carrier pigeons in the air. Saints—of a sort—wear hair shirts and scourge themselves, tormenting the body in the interests of the soul. But there are homes to which men and women come in in which artificial martyrdoms of this sort are needless. “To endure the unreasonableness of some inmate is to wear a hair shirt; to bear patiently their tongues is to be beaten with stripes; to jive with them is to suffer martyrdom in a slow fire.” Others come in to a home only to miss a hand that can grasp no more and hear never

again the sound of a voice that is still. Or they com© in to find a sufferer on a sick bed, a child or wife worn with pain, yet giving them a welcome that may sometimes be almost harder to bear than a sharp reproach. “And so,” writes Bunyan, “1 went home to prison.” Yet it was only outwardly so, because, for one possessing tho faith of ffhnyan, never do stone walls a prison make nor iron bars a cage. And so there and thus we arrive at another coming in. » ■» * * There is in all of us a house more secret than any that we or others call' our home. Christina Rossetti has a lovely little poem entitled ‘ Memory.’ Sho tells of a certain choice she had to make. She made it silently. It broke her heart. Then she goes on to say she has a room where no one enters except herself. If anyone should force an entrance she would 'fined one there “ buried, yet not dead.”

And often in my worn life’s autumn weather I watch these with clear eyes, And think how it will be in paradise

When we’re together. That suggests a coming in that wc all practice. It is the coming in to thought, to feeling, to memory, to conscience, to tho rooms of our life that are filled with glad or sad or mad presences. Sometimes we admit others —one or two, not often more. Oliver Wendell Holmes says that every person’s feelings have a front ddor and. a side door by which they may be entered. The side door opens at once into tho secret chambers of the life. And there is usually at least one key to this side door. His wedding ring, for instance, conveys a right to one, alas! if none is given with it. And then he goas on to warn us to be very careful as to whom we trust any of these keys of the side door. The fact of possessing one of these may make the possessor very terrible to you. “No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul. It takes one that knows it well—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a side door key.” A similar thought is embodied in these lines of a living poet— The littlest door, the inner door, I swing it wide; Now in .my heart there is. no more To hide. Tho furthest door, the latch at last Is lifted; see I kept the little fortress fast—- ' Be good to me. a * » « But what if it is not so ? What if the key of the side door should chance to get into the hands of a thief, of an irreverent and deceitful intruder? Then comes the great tragedy of life. Then we retire into our innermost shrine and live there alone. Orablike, the shell of life shuts close. No outsider or even side key holder is ever permitted to enter again. Occasionally, indeed, it may be that wo are afraid to go in ourselves. For the company is unpleasant, sometimes terrifying. In that inner room of life there may sit “regret, with its pals brow and shame with dust on her forehead, and memory with tears in her eyes,” and we may add remorse with its face in the dust, and conscience that whirls the lash of an incessant woe. These are ill companions to consort with. Men and women try to go out from them. For a little they may succeed. They may find distraction in work or pleasure, drink or drugs. These heal hut sligh'tly the hurt. In the end they make it worse. And what then ? The old Hebrew poet, thinking of his going out and coming in, felt that he must give the key of the side door into the keeping of a stronger and better than man. He called this great and good One by the name we all know so well. He said tho “ Lord shall keep thy going out and coming in.” Can we improve upon tho ancient faith? If “you know of a better ’olo, go to it.” But, though many have been tried, history seems, on the whole, to say that none has yet been found. So this innermost room in which we spend so much of our life may he a torture chamber or a shrine of peace. It all depends on how we furnish it and what companionships wo make for ourselves there. Among them all we may be well advised not to forget to include Him of whom tho Hebrew sings. For, as Georgo Macdonald says, “ a self with no God to protect from it, a self unrulable, insatiable makes of existence to some the hell called madness. Godless man is a horror of the unfinished and a hopeless search for the unattainable.”-