3.21. ON FORGETTING, AND THE NEED OF PRAYER, READING, DISCUSSION AND
WORSHIP.
One aspect of life I had very much in mind when I planned those Samurai
disciplines of mine. It was forgetting.
We forget.
Even after we have found Salvation, we have to keep hold of Salvation;
believing, we must continue to believe. We cannot always be at a high
level of noble emotion. We have clambered on the ship of Faith and found
our place and work aboard, and even while we are busied upon it, behold
we are back and drowning in the sea of chaotic things.
Every religious body, every religious teacher, has appreciated this
difficulty and the need there is of reminders and renewals. Faith needs
restatement and revival as the body needs food. And since the Believer
is to seek much experience and be a judge of less or more in many
things, it is particularly necessary that he should keep hold upon a
living Faith.
How may he best do this?
I think we may state it as a general duty that he must do whatever he
can to keep his faith constantly alive. But beyond that, what a man must
do depends almost entirely upon his own intellectual character. Many
people of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves by some
recurrent duty, by repeating a daily prayer, by daily reading or
re-reading some devotional book. With others constant repetition leads
to a mental and spiritual deadening, until beautiful phrases become
unmeaning, eloquent statements inane and ridiculous,--matter for parody.
All who can, I think, should pray and should read and re-read what they
have found spiritually helpful, and if they know of others of kindred
dispositions and can organize these exercises, they should do so.
Collective worship again is a necessity for many Believers. For many,
the public religious services of this or that form of Christianity
supply an atmosphere rich in the essential quality of religion and
abounding in phrases about the religious life, mellow from the use of
centuries and almost immediately applicable. It seems to me that if one
can do so, one should participate in such public worship and habituate
oneself to read back into it that collective purpose and conscience it
once embodied.
Very much is to be said for the ceremony of Holy Communion or the Mass,
for those whom accident or scruples do not debar. I do not think your
modern liberal thinkers quite appreciate the finer aspects of this, the
one universal service of the Christian Church. Some of them are set
forth very finely by a man who has been something of a martyr for
conscience' sake, and is for me a hero as well as a friend, in a world
not rich in heroes, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his book, "The Meaning
of the Mass."
With others again, Faith can be most animated by writing, by confession,
by discussion, by talk with friends or antagonists.
One or other or all of these things the Believer must do, for the mind
is a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is
presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of
King Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon
it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your
soul, directing it back to anarchy.
For many types that, however, is exactly what happens with public
worship. They DO get a King Log in ceremony. And if you deliberately
overcome and suppress your perception of and repugnance to the
perfunctoriness of religion in nine-tenths of the worshippers about you,
you may be destroying at the same time your own intellectual and moral
sensitiveness. But I am not suggesting that you should force yourself to
take part in public worship against your perceptions, but only that if
it helps you to worship you should not hesitate to do so.
We deal here with a real need that is not to be fettered by any general
prescription. I have one Cambridge friend who finds nothing so uplifting
in the world as the atmosphere of the afternoon service in the choir of
King's College Chapel, and another, a very great and distinguished and
theologically sceptical woman, who accustomed herself for some time to
hear from a distant corner the evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral
and who would go great distances to do that.
Many people find an exaltation and broadening of the mind in mountain
scenery and the starry heavens and the wide arc of the sea; and as I
have already said, it was part of the disciplines of these Samurai of
mine that yearly they should go apart for at least a week of solitary
wandering and meditation in lonely and desolate places. Music again is a
frequent means of release from the narrow life as it closes about us.
One man I know makes an anthology into which he copies to re-read any
passage that stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues. Others
again seem able to refresh their nobility of outlook in the atmosphere
of an intense personal love.
Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were an essential part of
ourselves. Such a man as myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored,
versatile, sensuous, curious, and a little greedy for experience, is
perpetually losing touch with his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn
over these pages that I have written and come upon my declarations and
confessions with a sense of alien surprise.
It may be, I say, that for some of us forgetting is the normal process,
that one has to believe and forget and blunder and learn something and
regret and suffer and so come again to belief much as we have to eat and
grow hungry and eat again. What these others can get in their temples
we, after our own manner, must distil through sleepless and lonely
nights, from unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of bruised
shins.
