It could be true that my interest in abstractions, which would have been forgiven first on grounds of youth and then on grounds of eccentricity, is now being forgiven on grounds of 143
senility, which would mean people have stopped trying to see the sense in the things I say the way they once did. That would be by far the worst form of forgiveness. I used to have one of
those books with humorous little sermon anecdotes in it somewhere. It was a gift, I remember, no name on it. How many
years ago did I get that? I've probably been boring a lot of people for a long time. Strange to find comfort in the idea. There
have always been things I felt I must tell them, even if no one listened or understood.
And one of them is that many of the attacks on belief that have had such prestige for the last century or two are in fact meaningless. I must tell you this, because everything else I have told you, and them, loses almost
all its meaning and its right to attention if this is not established. If I were to go through my old sermons, I might find some
in which I deal with this subject. Since I am presumably somewhere near the end of my time and my strength, that might be
the best way to make the case for you. I should have thought of this long ago.
This afternoon we walked over to Boughton's to return his magazine. You held my hand a fair part of the way. There
were milkweed seeds drifting around which you had to try to catch, but you'd come back and take my hand again. It's a hard thing to be patient with me, the way I creep along these days, but I'm trying not to get my heart in a state. There have been so many fine days this summer that I've begun to hear talk of a drought. Dust and grasshoppers are fine in their way, too, within limits. Whatever is coming, I'd be sorry to miss it. Boughton was on his porch, 'listening to the breeze,' he said. 'Feeling the breeze.' Glory brought out some lemonade for us and sat down with us, and we talked a little bit about tele144
vision. Your mother has been looking at it, too. I don't enjoy it myself. It's not the last impression I want to have of this world. It turns out that when Glory found that article and asked
her father if he still wanted me to see it, he asked her to read it over to him, and then he laughed and said, 'Oh yes, yes, Reverend Ames will want to have a look at that.' He knows what
will exasperate me, and he was laughing in anticipation as soon as I mentioned it.
We agreed it must have been fairly widely read in both our congregations, because on one page there's a recipe for that molded salad of orange gelatin with stuffed green olives and shredded cabbage and anchovies that has dogged my ministerial life these last years, and which appears at his house whenever he so much as catches cold. There should be a law to
prevent recipes for molded salad from appearing within twenty pages of any article having to do with religion. I ended up bringing the magazine back home because I thought I might want to use it in a sermon.
There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the
second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes
of the individual believer.
But people of any degree of religious sensitivity are always vulnerable to the accusation that their consciousness or their understanding does not attain to the highest standards of the faith, because that is always true of everyone. St. Paul is elo145
quent on this subject. But if the awkwardness and falseness and failure of religion are interpreted to mean there is no core of truth in it—and the witness of Scripture from end to end discourages this view—then people are disabled from trusting their thoughts, their expressions of belief, and their understanding, and even from believing in the essential dignity of their and their neighbors' endlessly flawed experience of belief. It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness.
Here is a sentence Boughton and I got a laugh out of: 'One might ask how many Christians can define Christianity.' In twenty-five volumes or less, I said.
Boughton said, 'Fewer,' and winked at Glory, and she said, 'Ever the stickler,' which is true.
(Of course I was simply using contemporary idiom, and he was aware of that. He just doesn't approve of it. I don't use it often. But I think it's perfectly fine for making a little joke now and then.)
Here is a paragraph we lingered over: 'There is indeed a note of sinful pride in the confidence with which the majority of people expressed their ideas about heaven. For although the Bible has much to say about final judgment, it offers no definitive picture of life after death. Yet fewer than one third of the American people—29 percent—admit they have no ideas on what is one of the most ambiguous subjects in Biblical revelation.' Now, that is a kind of interpretation I would call fraudulent.
To say a subject is ambiguous is not to say one cannot 146
form ideas on it, or shouldn't, nor is it to say even that it is possible to avoid forming ideas on it. Any concept that exists in
the mind at all exists in some form, among some set of associations. I'd like to talk to that 29 percent who have no ideas, to
see how they do it. I bet they just didn't like the question. Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day.
He said, 'Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes.' So he's just sitting there multiplying the
