Come unto me...

I have read theology for years. All the waves and all the fads. And much of it has enriched my mind and life. But when it gets right down to it, to the essentials, most of it does little to heal a wounded spirit-and we are all wounded spirits. Better the words of Jesus, "Come unto me..."

The following comes from a young Japanese man who was converted by orthodox missionaries, later came to a Unitarian view of the Christian faith and, at the time of this writing, was studying at Harvard Divinity School. It was published in The Unitarian Review in 1891.



"The third and last essential element of Christianity is the true way of salvation. "Come unto me," said Christ, "all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest"; and many came, and found rest. This occurred more than eighteen centuries ago, but it is also actually occurring among us. We ourselves are crushed under the burden of sin. Fear and anguish are distracting our hearts. We try to repent, bu^t we are weak. We do not like sin, but we cannot but sin. We are miserable, and our hearts are heavy-laden. With such hearts we go to Christ and learn the truth: that God is our merciful Father, who forgives all our sins, if we repent sincerely. By this knowledge we get a new motive to repent. Thus the door is open for repentance. We repent, and experience the removal of the painful consciousness of sin. This happy experience, strongly contrasted with the former miserable condition, creates in us a new disposition to hate sin and to love God. The more we realize our sinfulness, the more we realize the love of God. The more we realize the love of God, the more our gratitude makes us to love him. Thus our hearts are renewed, and we are born again. By repentance the burden of sin is removed. By regeneration the power of sin is destroyed. The process is mysterious, but the result is indisputable. "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh." In this sense, salvation has to do with the present moment. Salvation is not something that comes in a hazy future or on the other side of the grave. It will never be accomplished if it does not begin now, for future is nothing but the coming now."


Nobuta Kishimoto. Harvard University, Cambridge, Dec. 22, 1890.

Amen and blessings

endeared by daily use...

Frederic Henry Hedge continues, today, on authority and speaks of the qualities that gave Jesus his. A special thanks to batbogey for yesterday's comment relating the words of Rev. Susan Smith-well worth reading...

Hedge's "Authorities and Scribes" cont...

"What the world requires in its spiritual leaders is not intellectual acuteness, but truth incarnate in the life. Such a leader, a teacher with authority, the Christian world acknowledges in its Founder. It finds him pre-eminent in those respects in which philosophers and philosophy fail.

1. Universality. Jesus represents no school or epoch or race. he speaks a universal dialect, the dialect of the heart; addressing himself not to a few select and disciplined natures, but to universal man. 'Come unto me,all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' 'Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.'...

There is no philosophy here; but what consciousness, what authority! Who else ever uttered words like these? Translatable into every idiom and losing little or nothing by translation, the words which were uttered so long ago in the solitudes of Galilee or the streets of Jerusalem are household words to-day in the remotest corners of the globe, endeared by daily use and consecrated by centuries of faith and worship, wholesome as daily bread, and still revered as bread from heaven."

Blessings

new born thought...

Most of the teachings that have really changed my life and angle of vision are things that I had read or heard many times before with little or no reaction. Frederic Henry Hedge talks about revelation and "seers" and the impact of such teaching in this continuation of his sermon "Authorities and Scribes"

"The recorded words of Jesus and of Paul take very little room, and may be read in a couple of hours; but the writings to which they have given rise in the way of comment and controversy and discourse, if preserved from the beginning and collected together, no man could read in a lifetime. The greater part of these has perished and the rest will follow...while the little volume which has furnished the topic of so much discoursing is likely to endure, and be read and received as authority until some new convulsion of the globe shall sweep every vestige of existing civilization from the face of the earth. This is Humanities verdict on the relative value of these two classes of teachers,-the authorities and the scribes.

Authority is adequate testimony, the word of a competent witness. We call it revelation. And what is revelation? Let us free our minds from a certain confusion which seems to mystify this term. Revelation is not a voice from without, but a voice within; not a prodigious communication out of the skies, a doctrine appended to the tail of some portent, but the intuition of a rapt soul that has met the Spirit of God in its meditation...

The truth thus obtained is not necessarily new, in the sense that the like had never been said before, but it is new in the sense of having been new-born in the thought of him who declares it. That makes it as fresh as the morning, the ever new surprise of a new day.

Such teachers we call "seers," signifying thereby that they see what they teach. Of such seeing the first and most essential condition is unconditional surrender to the truth. "

Blessings

a new day shed abroad in our minds...

When the now famous "Transcendental Club" began meeting, it was called by Emerson the Hedge Club as it tended to meet when Frederic Henry Hedge, serving as minister in Maine, was back in the environs of Boston. Though the Transcendentalist circle had high hopes for Hedge, he was an ecclesiastical conservative at heart and shied away from directions taken by that group.
Hedge was a Boston Unitarian in many of its best senses and his call for ecumenicism and "the broad church" still resonates. His biography is fascinating and can be found here.
Hedge will be my companion for the next few days and hope he will be for you as well. This from his sermon, "Authorities and Scribes"

"He taught them as one having authority, and not as scribes. Matt. 7: 29

There are still, and always, these two kinds of teaching,-the teaching of authority and the teaching of scribes. We all have felt the difference without perhaps defining it to ourselves...

What constitutes authority in a teacher? The answer is, Competent testimony, original observation by a qualified witness...But what constitutes authority in religion? Who is the qualified witness of moral and spiritual truth? Here is a kind of knowledge accessible to all...We listen to one teacher, and, though what he says is undeniably true, and his manner of saying it unexceptional, he makes no impression...He teaches as the scribes. We listen to another who says substantially the same thing, and immediately a new world is open to our perception, a new day shed abroad in our minds. It is nothing new that he propounds, but it comes to us with the force of a new revelation. Before it was a truism, now it is a truth.

What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount-that which made his hearers astonished at his doctrine-was not new; the scribes had said substantially the same; but the spirit with which it was said was new, and that new spirit made the Christian evangel a new creation, so that history dates from that teacher's word...

More tomorrow and
Blessings

be bold, be bold...

My children started school yesterday (7th, 5th, and 3rd grades) and, though I cant say I am sorry to see the start of a school year, it is true that I ache when I watch them set off to navigate the thorny world of "society." Some "advice" today from Ralph Waldo Emerson (via the "Faerie Queen") from his description of Plato in "Representative Men"...

"But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he had read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane,- "Be bold"; and on the second gate,- "Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold"; and then again had paused well at the third gate,- "Be not too bold." His strength is like the momentum of a falling planet, and his discretion the return of its due and perfect curve..."

This could also serve as a description of the virtues of many of the Boston Unitarians. Balance, balance and balance...

Blessings

sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean...

It is a very cool morning-until this weekend, we had had a stretch of heat and humidity, the dog days...Reading Emerson this morning (Plato in Representative Men) I came across this appreciation of the Vedas expressed by RWE in a letter written in 1840:

"In the sleep of the great heats there was nothing for me but to read the Vedas, the bible of the tropics, which I find I come back upon every three or four years. it is sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble and poetic mind...It is of no use to put away the book; if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, nature makes a Bramin of me presently; eternal necessity, eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence,-this is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment-these penances expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods."

Blessings