Excerpt from The Chaplain, Vol. 11: December 1954

All this is second mental na ture with us, and to a degree that we seldom realize. The result is that in troubled and perplexing times like this we have all but forfeited that distinctive quality which religion should impart to man, a sense Of reposefulness, of central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation. Our religion is morally earnest, but it is strained and anxious. In our more reflective moments we real ize that God cannot be held' chargeable for the state of our world, save in so far as he has given man a genuine free will. Our wars and rumors of wars are our undoing. Thus there is abroad a widespread feeling that the cele bration of a festival like Christmas in times like this is little more than an ironical farce.

The Bible never denies for a moment, even in the Gospels perhaps least of all in the Gospels - that it is man's religious duty to be an earnest seeker after God. But this idea is always prefaced by the conviction that God is a seeker after man. Rudolf Otto cites as one of the most numi nous, i. E., mysterious and mov ing, sayings of the Bible the Gos pel statement that the Father seeketh such to worship him. Theoretically most of us accept that statement; emotionally we seldom feel its truth and tremem dous force.

If one takes the trouble, as Christmas comes around again, to read and then to ponder the Christmas stories in the Gospels one is struck by the fact that in those stories the whole movement is from God to man, from heaven to earth. The subsequent moral activism of the Gospels, as of all the later New Testament, is here prefaced by the massive, majestic and serene invasion of our too human world by divine realities. The whole record is that of an imperious taking over of our hu man world by forces stronger and wiser and better than our own meager human wit and skills. The angel of the Annunciation, the angel choirs in the skies, the calm of Bethlehem, the adoration of the Wise Men, all this has its ori gin in a world other than that of our too familiar smoke and steel. It has its origins beyond this dim spot that man calls earth.

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