The Love of God and the Love of Neighbor
typed by
daughter Tina (photo of how it looked
originally)
Nadine
Martin, Advanced Composition, Philosophy of Life Assignment, 1964
My philosophy of life, the values I
cherish and try to live by, are based principally on the teachings of Christ,
specifically the commandment to love my neighbor. Jewish friends have told me that the New
Testament teachings, or at least the moral principles set forth by Christ, are
essentially reworkings of Hebraic standards for the conduct of the good life—a
life acceptable to God. Perhaps I should
be more at home in the synagogue than in the Christian Church, for many axioms
of Christian belief, particularly the intransigence of Paul’s dictum on
“faith,” leave me uneasy. Often I feel I
should not presume to say I am a Christian.
My “belief” is a sometime thing.
I might find a place with the
Unitarians who seem to have dispensed with problems of incarnation, the virgin,
Mary, the Trinity, the resurrection. But
I cling to a meager hope that I may achieve some sort of religious
experience—“revelation”—which will make the mystical element of Christianity
meaningful. I am reluctant to give up
the emotional impact and influence of liturgy and creed. Am I hoping to hypnotize myself with beauty
and tradition so that the Fatherhood of god, the sacrificial Crucifixion, the
miracle of Resurrection will be unified and serve as a truly “religious” basis
for the day-to day effort to mold my thinking and my acting on the Christian
ethic?
As a child I was blessed by having a
father whose life was governed by allegiance to the two commandments to
love—first, his God and second, this neighbor.
My father’s years were filled with a bleak succession of failures, and although
his faith in God’s omnipotence was not shaken, I believe his self-judgment was
harsher than it needed to have been, He
may have felt that as an instrument of God’s will he was inadequate. He was a shy and inarticulate man. His position on applied Christian ethics was
quite often either misunderstood in our family, or else found unacceptable--impractical—a
position appropriate, maybe, to a man of wealth or a monk or mendicant. His behavior was constantly challenged as
being unfitting for a “family man” in daily battle for the material necessities
of life.
The stresses and moral conflicts
within my home led me, I believe, to find it imperative to explore new points
of view in a larger world. I held my
teachers in very high regard, and they had tremendous influence on me.
When I was in my early teens the
dispossessed of the dust-bowl began to come in numbers to the part of
California in which we lived. Looking
back, I recall that the high school faculty seemed to be of roughly three differing
responses. The counselor was distraught
and spoke gloomily of the teaching problems involved in absorbing a new,
culturally deprived, unstable group into the community. The physics teacher, herself a Roman
Catholic, went each week with a group of Quakers to distribute food, clothing,
aspirin, cough syrup, to the stranded share-croppers in the Imperial Valley. Grapes
of Wrath contains few scenes of anguish that this teacher did not
witness. Then my teacher of French, a
middle-aged woman of European background, saw the sharecropper’s plight as only
one of a hundred interlinking and inevitable horrors of a competitive economic
system. She was, she felt, working on
the local problem by hazarding her job and her reputation by contributing
financial support to the cause of the Spanish Loyalists in the Civil War then
raging.
These teachers had supporters among
the other faculty members. The students,
by and large, were indifferent. Ours was
a suburban community, more like the small town of the middle-west than like an extension
of a large metropolitan city. I am sure
that the fact that I was backward socially, very insecure and unsuccessful I my
dealings with those in my age-group, motivated me to develop a
more-than-average interest in the dilemmas of the adult world. The teachers were eager to share their
concerns and to suggest reading material which placed, in print, their
points-of-view. Eager to find acceptance
in their world, I read widely if not knowledgeably.
As open and willing as the teachers were
to communicate with a young disciple about politics, economics, practical
social institutions, they only rebuffed me when I tried to discuss my chronic
(by then) problem of faith, my religious quest.
They seemed embarrassed or even openly contemptuous of my queries about
prayer, the significance of the Bible, life after death. I was given the distinct impression that
these were the neurotic concerns of a young girl who was seeking escape from
life in unwholesome preoccupations. Nor
was my minister able to aid me. He
suggested that I pray for faith. If my
prayer were sincere, I would find that my faith had only been misplaced—not
irrevocably lost. However, to pray required
an initial act of faith and belief; I felt hypocritical in petitioning a God I suspected
did not exist.
During my sophomore year at the
university, Poland was invaded. My
ethical problem seemed to settle about the implication of the injunction—“Love
thy enemy.” I felt that the “swords must
become ploughshares;” I thought no true justice could be achieved by adopting
unworthy means to the goal. Had I been a
man, I should have been a conscientious objector, I believe.
Some acquaintances formed a Marxist
study-group while I was at the university.
The book selected for study was Das Kapital. The group seemed to be concerned with a purer
Marx—a “revealed” Marx. It seemed to me
that they were seeking in their close scrutiny of their messiah, just as I had
been seeking, in my intense study of the Gospels. To me they seemed to be the nuns, the monks,
the unworldly order of visionary revolutionists. They were not in the least concerned with social
application of their study. Perhaps they
could have been properly termed “Parlor Reds.”
I think I left the group less as a gesture of disapproval of Marxian
Communism than as a repudiation of study isolated from activity.
When the Japanese truck famers were
forced from their gardens on the pacific coast, I went with some Quakers to say
good-bye, with some notion, I think, of making a token gesture of apology for
the barbarity of their uprooting. Some
said that there were Communists among the Quaker group, but the Quakers, to me,
have been admirably consistent in following the tenets of Christian fellowship.
When the enormity of the Nazi
extermination-camps was disclosed, I was unable to comprehend the acquiescence
of the German people to the infamies. I
wondered if the Lutheran preoccupation with St. Paul’s “faith” as being a thing
apart from “good works” could be in any way responsible for the callousness which
seemed to have permeated the German society.
No longer was it possible to believe the millions had been murdered
through the efforts of a small handful of sadistic criminals.
My husband and I became members of
the American Civil Liberties Union, and I faced the problem of the Union’s
support of the “right” of the Nazis to march, to speak, to agitate for the
support of all the horrors that so outraged me.
The argument on the political freedom principle was sound, I finally
concluded, but implied a counterbalancing and ceaseless advocacy of the sanctity
of the human life. This, I felt, was a
legitimate activity of the Christian church.
But the National Council of Churches was abused for its efforts in any
area outside of the confines of the pulpit.
When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, I
was convinced that ours was a nation which could not call itself Godly or
Christian, and no alteration of the Pledge to the Flag to include “one nation, under
God,” could do more than mislead a people into a crisis of religious schizophrenia.
When we moved to the South, the bus
boycotts and counter sit-ins were just beginning. The deep-South, with its statistically high
proportion of church-going citizens, could not accept the concept that
race-relations were a concern of the Church.
A businessman sat next to me in a café and boasted that he had told his
clergyman that his support of the Church had ceased until the minister got back
to old-time, “basic” religion and left controversial issues to the “outside
world.” On the afternoon of President
Kennedy’s assassination, I was told by a grocery clerk that the incident was
shameful, but that the President had just asked to be killed—trying to force
radical notions down people’s throats.
(At that early hour both liberals and conservatives were assuming that
the killing had been done by a segregationist.)
The last two Popes have made clear
statements of the stand the Roman Catholic Church should take with regard to
race-relations. Yet, our youngest
teen-ager, attending parochial school, was asked why she was a “nigger-lover”
and her effort to reply in terms of the brotherhood of all men was scorned and
ridiculed. The resistance of the laity
of both Catholic and Protestant sects to the Church in the world” is
apparent—though I find it encouraging that the clergy is not, for the most
party, making the fatal split.
Our current foreign policy, in Viet
Nam for example, maybe be a practical policy—an expedient policy. It is not a Christian policy. In reading Dag Hammarskjold’s reflections, Markings, I have been re-stimulated to
conviction that it is never enough to withdraw in despair, to wash one’s hands
of that which arouses disgust and violates one’s moral principles. It is necessary to take a public stand with
respect to convictions and refuse to commit spiritual suicide.
There is danger in assuming a moral
position. I think the danger is
particularly threatening when the position involves interpreting the message of
a spiritual leader—a Christ, for my example.
One may too easily become the victim of self-pride, vanity; contempt and
condemnation follow predictably.
Self-examination and self-correction are correctives. A sober evaluation of one’s motivations is
essential to escape self-aggrandizement and a consequent invalidation of the
very principles one has set out to defend.
If I can conquer my own proud heart
and see my own shortcomings in a clear and constant light, I may someday have
the blessing of a religious peace which I crave. As I stand today, incomplete and dissatisfied
with m religious perplexities, I am clear about very little. I do know that I may not retreat from the
practice of what I conceive of as the basic teaching of Christ—the second
commandment of the New Testament to love my neighbor as myself. I must make myself more lovable and I must
ever fail to interpret the word “neighbor” in the light of the other teachers
of Christ.
