|
| |
Julia
Cameron
Carmina Gadelica
Joan Chittister
|
Make
love your aim, not biblical inerrancy, nor purity nor obedience to
holiness codes. Make love your
aim, for
“Though
I speak with the tongues of men and of angels”—musicians, poets,
preachers, you are being addressed;
“and
though I…understand all mysteries, and all knowledge,”—professors,
your turn,
“and
though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor”—radicals take note;
“and
though I give my body to be burned”—the very stuff of heroism;
“and
have not charity; it profiteth me nothing” (I Cor. 13:1-3 KJV)
I
doubt if in any other scriptures of the world there is a more radical
statement of ethics. If we
fail in love, we fail in all things else.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
Of
God’s love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for
everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly,
God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates value. It is not because we
have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value.
Our value is a gift, not an achievement.
Because
our value is a gift, we don’t have to prove ourselves, only to express
ourselves, and what a world of difference there is between proving
ourselves and expressing ourselves.
We
don’t have to be “successful,” only valuable. We don’t have to
make money, only a difference, and particularly in the lives society
counts least and puts last.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
I love
the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
It is
terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap
of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must
see, then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we
will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare
to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.
I love
the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
There
is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not
believing without proof but trusting without reservation. Faith is no
substitute for thinking. On the contrary, it is what makes good thinking
possible. It has what we might call a limbering effect on the mind; by
taking us beyond familiar ground, faith ends up giving us that much more
to think about. Certainly Peter and Andrew and James and John, in deciding
to follow Jesus, received more to think about than had they stayed at
home. And so it is with all of us: if we give our lives to Christ, if we
leave familiar territory and take the leap of faith, what we receive in
return fills our minds altogether as much as it fills our hearts.
William
Sloan Coffin
|
|
Miracles
do not a Messiah make. But a messiah can do miracles. If you ask me if
Jesus literally raised Lazarus from the dead, literally walked on water
and changed water into wine, I will answer, “For certain, I do not know.
But this I do know: faith must be lived before it is understood, and the
more it is lived, the more things become possible.”
I can also report that in home after home I have seen Jesus change
beer into furniture, sinners into saints, hate-filled relations into
loving ones, cowardice into courage, the fatigue of despair into the
buoyancy of hope. In instance after instance, life after life, I have seen
Christ be “God’s power unto salvation,” and that’s miracle enough
for me.
William
Sloan Coffin |
|
All
saving ideas are born small. God comes to earth as a child so that we can
finally grow up, which means we can stop blaming God for being absent when
we ourselves were not present, stop blaming God for the ills of the world
as if we had been laboring to cure them, and stop making God responsible
for all the thinking and doing we should be undertaking on our own. I’ve
said it before and will probably say it many times again:
God provides minimum protection, maximum support—support to help
us grow up, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as
God’s universe. God doesn’t want us narrow-minded, priggish, and
subservient, but joyful and loving, as free for one another as God’s
love was freely poured out for us at Christmas in that babe in the manger.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Joy is
the most important Christian emotion. Duty calls only when gratitude fails
to prompt.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
What
is… important for all people to realize is that what is literally true
is insignificant. What is significant is what is eternally true, and it is
eternally true of the bible that its words come to us not as universal
precepts for all time to which we must give assent, but as words directed
to eternally human situations in which we must decide.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
And
Gracie Allen had a strong suggestion: “Never put a period where God has
put a comma.”
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
If we
misconceive God as Father Protector, as one, so to speak, in charge of all
the uncontrolled contingencies along the way, then each disappointment
reduces what may confidently be affirmed about God. And this is how most
people lose their faith.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
So why
are Christians so often so joyless? It is, I think, because too often
Christians have only enough religion to make themselves miserable. Guilt
they know, but not forgiveness. Nietzche correctly noted, “Christians
should look more redeemed.”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Fear
destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to
each other, which is the death of freedom. Fear has so many ways to
destroy life. Love alone can hold onto and recreate life. Only love can
create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing
else has to be one—neither clothes, nor age; neither sex or sexual
preference; race nor mindset.
William
Sloan Coffin |
|
What a
wonderful thing it would be if once and for all we could lay to rest the
notion that it is a virtue to love others and a vice to love oneself. For
what is vicious is not self-love but selfishness, and selfishness is more
a product of self-hate, than self-love. All forms of selfishness are
finally forms of insecurity, compensations for self-love.
William
Sloan Coffin |
|
Love
is its own reward. For its inspiration, love does not depend on the pay it
receives, which is why, out of hand, we have to reject all notions of
heaven as pie in the sky by and by—deferred gratification. (I hate the
way some TV evangelists try to overcome my selfishness by appealing to my
selfish motives!) But the fact
of the matter is, love does have a reward. Just as the proper benefits of
education are the opportunities of continuing education, so the rewards of
love are to become yet more vulnerable, more tender, more caring.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
“He
who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.” That’s
not really cruel. Loving Christ more than our fathers and mothers simply
saves the love we have for our parents from idolatry. You remember the
poem of Lovelace that goes
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.
(Richard Lovelace, “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”)
Substitute
“Jesus” for “honor” and you have the formula for saving God-given
mercies—our loved ones—from becoming a Satanic temptation: to think
there’s nothing more. I don’t hear Christ asking us to pull the house
down on the heads of our mothers and fathers, husbands, wives, and
children. I hear him only reminding us that God, as the source of love, is
the proper head of every loving household.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
Love,
and you are a success whether or not the world thinks so. The highest
purpose of Christianity — which is primarily a way of life, not a system
of belief — is to love one another. And the first fruit of love is joy,
the joy that represents meaning and fulfillment.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
Too many religious people make faith their aim. They think “the
greatest of these” is faith, and faith defined as all but infallible
doctrine. These are the dogmatic, divisive Christians, more concerned with
freezing the doctrine than warming the heart. If faith can be exclusive,
love can only be inclusive.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
Tolerance
and passivity are a deadly combination. Together they allow us to tolerate
the intolerable, to ignore the power of anger in works of love; for if you
lessen your anger at the structures of power, you lower your love for the
victims of power.
William
Sloan Coffin |
|
Too
often the churches have taught that the opposite of love is hate, just as
they have taught that the opposite of peace is conflict. What the opposite
of peace is I am not sure. I know it is not conflict, maybe not even
violence; perhaps it is injustice. But as regards love, I am sure the
Bible is right: the opposite of love is not hate but fear. “There is no
fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Truth
is always in danger of being sacrificed on the altars of good taste and
social stability.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
When
we are intent on being, rather than on having, we are happier. And when we
are intent on being, we don’t take away from other people’s being—in
fact, we enhance it. But when we are intent on having, we create
have-nots—and invariably lie about the connection.
William
Sloan Coffin
|
|
To believe you can approach transcendence without drawing nearer in
compassion to suffering humanity is to fool yourself. There can be no
genuine personal religious conversion without a change in social attitude.
William
Sloan Coffin
|
|
The
word “homeless” is devastating, suggesting neither comfort nor
companionship, dignity nor grace, and precious little identity. To have no
place is to be no place. Homelessness is nowheresville—whether you’re
one of the world’s 14 million refugees, a boat person from
Indochina
, one of
Calcutta
’s 400,000 semi-starved sidewalk dwellers, or one of the 36,000 who in
New York City
spend so much pf their time huddled in doorways, wrapping themselves in
the Daily News.
William
Sloan Coffin
|
|
The
biblical reminder is clear; whatever our economic system, the enemy is
excess, not possessions. The battle cry is “Enough!” not
“Nothing!” “Enough” so
that we can all break bread together, so that everyone’s prayer can be
answered—“Give us this day our daily bread.”
There
are two ways to be rich: one is to have a lot of money; the other is to
have few needs. Let us remember that Jesus—who influenced history more
than any other single person, institution, or nation—died, his sole
possession a robe.
William
Sloan Coffin
|
|
Ponder
the fact that all those conspicuously “called” in the Bible—like
Moses—were called through the voices, the sorrows of the poor. All the
prophets responded to the voices of the oppressed. Think then of what we
receive when we accept the invitation to become Good Samaritans. We
receive our identity; we receive our life. Once again “we pass out of
death into life because we love the brothers and sisters.” Yes, indeed, as
Saint Francis said, “It is in giving that we receive.”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
The
biblical reminder is clear: whatever our economic system, the enemy is
excess, not possessions. The battle cry is “Enough!” not “Nothing!”
“Enough” so that we can all break bread together, so that everyone’s
prayer can be answered—“Give us this day our daily bread.”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Had I but one wish for the churches of America I think it
would be that they come to see the difference between charity and justice.
Charity is a matter of personal attributes; justice, a matter of public
policy. Charity seeks to alleviate the effects of injustice; justice seeks
to eliminate the causes of it. Charity in no way affects the status quo,
while justice leads inevitably to political confrontation. Especially I
would hope that Christians would see that the compassion that moved the
Good Samaritan to act charitably—that same compassion prompted biblical
prophets to confront injustice, to speak truth to power, as did Jesus,
who, though more than a prophet, was certainly nothing less.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
I
want to join the many people I know in the United States and abroad, and
the many more I have yet to meet, who feel as I do that fresh energies
have been released, that now is the time to devote themselves anew to the
creation of a world without famine, a world without borders, a world at
one and at peace. It may well be that our efforts will not be successful
if only because what human beings seem most to fear is not the evil in
themselves but the good—the good being so demanding. But it’s there,
stubbornly there, even after we have finished deploring all that is
deplorable in human nature. So while not optimistic, I am hopeful. By this
I mean that hope, as opposed to cynicism and despair, is the sole
precondition for a new and better life. Realism demands pessimism. But
hope demands that we take a dark view of the present only because we hold
a bright view of the future; and hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse,
a passion for the possible.
William Sloan Coffin’s final paragraph of his autobiography
Once to Every Man, published in 1977 |
|
Perhaps the crucial question is this: Is charity ever a substitute for
justice? I’ve listened to many a Marxist accuse the churches of having a
vested interest in unjust structures that produce victims to whom good
Christians can then pour out their hearts in charity. I’ve listened and
I’ve shuddered, because so often in history it’s been true. In other
words, if there is a danger in politicizing the faith—a danger we are
coming to—there is also a counter danger, which is depoliticizing the
faith. In times of oppression, if you don’t translate choices of faith
into political choices, you run the danger of washing your hands, like
Pilate, and thereby, like Pilate, plaiting anew Christ’s crown of thorns
for “in as much as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did
it unto me.” In Scripture, there is no purely spiritual answer to slavery;
no purely spiritual answer to the pain of the poor, nor to the arrogance
of tyrants. In Scripture charity is no substitute for justice, anymore
than is ritual, no matter how beautiful. “Take away from me the noise of
your songs; to the melody of your hearts, I will not listen. But let
justice roll down like mighty waters, and righteousness like an
ever-flowing stream.”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
There is a real temptation
to think that an issue is less spiritual for being more political, to
believe that religion is above politics, that the sanctuary is too sacred a
place for the grit and grime of political battle. But if you believe
religion is above politics, you are, in actuality, for the status quo—a very
political position. And were God the god of the status quo, then the church
would have no prophetic role, serving the state mainly as a kind of
ambulance service.
William Sloan
Coffin |
|
My dream for
America is to see economic justice established in an atmosphere of democratic
freedom. But I am old enough to have seen how corruption works in a
democracy, how the taint of it spreads bit by bit, touching one person and
then another, until it is carried by a whole culture. I have seen how
painfully and degradingly simple it is for leaders to deceive the people.
Foreigners, for example, are often struck at how many Americans, even poor
Americans, think privilege is something earned or deserved. Rarely do
Americans see privilege as a form of theft.
William Sloan
Coffin |
|
Already it
is by the laws and policies of this country—whether we are talking about
an insane war abroad or the mental genocide that takes place in slum
schools—it is by the laws and policies of this country that the
consciences of people are being racked.
Of course, we need to
be concerned for order. Without it there is chaos, and with chaos there is
no justice. But today what Christians in particular need to remember is
that God never stands for stability at the expense of truth, that God has
no interest in any status quo whatsoever. For God does not want to freeze
history, but rather to move it continually toward that ultimate goal of
his kind of unity in justice and mercy.
So what
the Christian community needs to do above all else is to raise up men and
women of thought and of conscience, adventuresome, imaginative people
capable of both joy and suffering. And most of all they must be people of
courage so that when the day goes hard and cowards steal from the field,
like Luther they will be able to say, “My conscience is captive to the
word of God…to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I
stand. I can do no other. God help me.”
William
Sloan Coffin |
|
In his time
on earth, Jesus “stood tall,” but not by making others cringe. He had
power, but used it solely to empower others. He healed, but with no
strings attached. He competed with none, loved all, even when we were
least lovable, even to the point of dying for us on the cross. Walking
with Jesus we can no longer be heartless, heedless in our haste to “join
the general scramble and pant with the money-making street.” Scales of
heedlessness fall from our eyes. We see ourselves walking not alone with
our Lord, but with all the peoples of the world whom we now view as fellow
walkers, not as those who fall in behind. And all are marching to Zion,
the mountain of God, where—can anyone doubt it?—God will cause the nations
to beat their swords into plowshares and return to the people the peace
that only God could give and no nation had the right to take away.
William Sloan
Coffin |
|
Christians forget that it was the Devil who tempted Jesus with unbounded
wealth and power. And it is the Devil in every American that makes us feel
good about being so powerful.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
“America, love it or leave it.” I believe that. The trouble with that
slogan, which found its way onto endless bumpers during the Vietnam War,
was that it didn’t mean what it said. It meant “American obey it or
leave it,” as if national unity were more patriotic than national debate,
especially when that unity seems to many to be based on folly. If the
American people are worth the salt I think they’re worth, they will never
be politically united, for as Barbara Tuchman recently wrote, “A nation in
consensus is a nation ready for the grave.” Love of country, like love of
parents, is never to be equated with blind obedience, as Jesus himself in
both cases so poignantly demonstrated.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Individuals and nations are at their worst when, persuaded of their
superior virtue, they crusade against the vices of others. They are at
their best when they claim their God-given kinship with all humanity,
offering prayers of thanks that there is more mercy in God than sin in us.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Life
is consequential. We are punished not so much for as by our
sins. We do not so much break the Ten Commandments as we are broken on
them. Consequential for us as individuals, life is even more so for the
nations of this nuclear world. Hadn’t we better learn to be merciful when
we live at each other’s mercy? If we do not learn to be meek, will there
be any earth for anyone to inherit?
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Jesus
was more, not less, than a prophet; more, not less, political than others.
Only his views were the politics of eternity. And the politics of eternity
insist not only on nonviolence — an affront to almost every revolutionary;
they insist on “one world” — an affront to every nationalist. We shall
begin to understand the politics of eternity when we recognize that
territorial discrimination is as evil as racial discrimination.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
There are limits to growth. This has to effect our
understanding of the biblical term “dominion.” It is even possible that we
have misconceived “dominion.” For God doesn’t exploit. God doesn’t
manipulate. It may well be that instead of exploiting we are going to have
to conserve nature. Maintenance will have to replace the notion of
progress. Nurturing will have to replace the notion of engineering. A new
doctrine of stewardship will have to come more important than doctrines of
ownership — that is, if we are to stop devouring our planet, spewing out
wastes in all directions. And the new doctrine of stewardship will have to
go hand in hand with the old doctrine of social justice, for in an age of
scarcity the question of equity can no longer be deferred. Needed is a
soulful kinship with the land and with each other.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
It may be that as civilization advances, the sense of wonder
declines. But it is ironic that just as technology frees us to be full
human beings, not mere survivors of the earth’s rigors, at this very
moment we may be about to lose the whole planet because we have lost our
sense of wonder. For finally only reverence can restrain violence,
violence against nature, violence against one another.
William Sloan Coffin
|
|
It’s a heavy responsibility, to be a parent. But we kid
ourselves when we celebrate our freedoms without realizing that it is our
obligations that give our lives their meaning. Children are the anchors
that hold us to life. Chubby children clinging to our necks keep us low
and wise!
Simply having children, however, does not make mothers. Nor,
as I suggested, do you have to have children in order to mother. “Whoever
does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” All of us are
called to love each other into all God made and meant us to be.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
I
believe the power of God is lodged in the very marrow of our substance and
is pressing, constantly pressing, for release in order to permeate every
fiber of our being. And the demand is not for self-denial, as is so often
preached, but rather for self-discovery and self-realization, which
includes the commitment to God that is the final fulfillment of human
life. This I think is what St. Paul means when he says, “God searches our
inmost being” and “The kingdom of God consists not in words but in power.”
To think we can escape wrestling with this power is to dream.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
The
only form of suffering that can’t possibly put us in closer touch with
nature and all living creatures is the suffering of a bruised ego. Always
self-centered, pride is never more so than when it is hurt. But other
forms of suffering can produce selfless courage. They can widen our circle
of compassion, putting us in closer touch with those who suffer as we do
and far more, the world around—provided our own lives are rooted and
grounded in the secure knowledge of God’s love for us. Only by knowing
“the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge” can we in cloud and
sunshine pass on the riches of that love.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
The
longest, most arduous trip in the world is often the journey from the head
to the heart. Until that round trip is completed, we remain at war with
ourselves. And, of course, those at war with themselves are apt to make
casualties of others, including friends and loved ones.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Our business in life is less making something of ourselves
than finding something worth doing and losing ourselves in it.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
It’s comforting to be bitter about evil—not creative, but
comforting. It’s also easy to blame everything on a tragedy. But in my
experience most people give up on life not because of a tragedy, but
because they no longer see joys worth celebrating; they do not see that
human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have meaning. Tragedy
offers the opportunity to find new meaning and most of all to reevaluate
what’s important.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
There
is an enormous discrepancy between what we are brought up to believe and
what American society rewards as belief. Talk about the cussedness of the
race! It’s money that measures the success or failure of most of the games
we play most of our lives. It’s money that gives us our identity, compared
to which our identity in God is but a footnote. We expect more from
financial success than from our relationship with God.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
If
indeed we love the Lord with all our hearts, minds, and strength, we are
going to have to stretch our hearts, open our minds, and strengthen our
souls, whether our years are three score and ten or not yet twenty. God
cannot lodge in a narrow mind. God cannot lodge in a small heart. To
accommodate God, they must be palatial.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Often
in life, when we find ourselves in binds, we choose the path of least
resistance, or maybe we refuse to choose. When we need to be most
decisive, we go passive. I think that you have to be good by choice and
that much evil is simply a refusal to choose. In fact, most evil in this
world probably stems from indecision. This is an important point to make
in a country that makes so much of freedom of choice. For what is freedom
of choice if you’ve lost the ability to choose?
William Sloan Coffin |
|
What’s
the point of being Christian if you don’t also know that what God
withholds in the way of protection, he more than supplies in the form of
support. For the world breaks God’s heat, too. No pain our spirits endure,
no weakness that impairs our bodies, no grief that bows us low fails to
find its counterpart in God who, as we see, in Christ suffers with and for
us. “He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber or sleep.” Sometimes I
think it’s God’s pain, not God’s peace, that passes all understanding. So
come home to church, not for protection against all the travails of this
earth, but rather for all the support that haven alone can provide.
Finally, come to leave. For we come to God’s house, to this open house, to
find love and to defeat hate, in order that the world itself can become an
open house.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Of course the Church is
conservative for it has so much to conserve. But let it conserve a vision
of the world’s destiny and not the structures of the world’s past. Let the
Church in remembering Christ remember that it is conserving the most
uprooting, the most revolutionary force in all human history. For it was
Christ who crossed every boundary, broke down every barrier. He crossed
the boundaries of class by eating with the outcasts. He crossed the
boundary of nations by pointing to a Samaritan as the agent of God’s will.
He transgressed religious boundaries by claiming the Sabbath was made for
man (sic) and not man for the Sabbath. Everywhere he manifested his
freedom and called others to theirs, calling them forth from family,
national, and religious loyalties to loyalty to the world at large. If
ever there was a man who trusted his origins and had the courage to emerge
from them, it was Christ.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
This
tarnished but still glittering wonder of God’s creation is worth fighting
for. Kindness that seeks at all costs to avoid trouble is not Christian.
Yes, we know it in our own lives—God must afflict the comfortable before
he can comfort the afflicted. Why then, we may ask in God’s name, is the
Church in this country placating, entertaining, reverently rearranging
minutiae when knowledge for salvation for a confused, inert, and
frightened people has been put into her mouth to proclaim?
All
hands are needed to save this sinking ship. Let Christians not quibble
about commitments to Christ. Let all those who want to keep civilization
civilized—put quality into culture, humanity into business, life into the
millions who are no drifting—let them all be drawn to the cause and then
if they will, let them find Christ as the leader who can achieve it.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
It
behooves us North American Christians to realize now what the German
churches learned too late some forty years ago: it is not enough to resist
with confession; we must confess with resistance.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Most
church boats don’t like to be rocked; they prefer to lie in anchor rather
than go places in stormy seas. But that’s because we Christians view the
Church as the object of our love instead of the subject and instrument of
God’s. Faith cannot be passive; it has to go forth—to assault the
conscience, excite the imagination. Faith fans the flames of creativity
altogether as much as it banks the fires of sin.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
At
Riverside Church during infant baptism, I take the baby in my arms and
say, “Little child, for you Jesus Christ came, he struggled, he suffered;
for you he endured the darkness of Gethsemane, the anguish of Calvary; for
you he triumphed over death, and you, little child, know nothing of this.
But thus is confirmed the word of the Apostle: ‘We love God because God
first loved us.’”
Then
in baptizing the child, I state the name and say, “I baptize you in the
name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, mother of
us all.”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
It
seems to me that in joining a church you leave home and home town to join
a larger world. The whole world is your new neighborhood and all who dwell
therein—black, white, yellow, red, stuffed and starving, smart and stupid,
mighty and lowly, criminal and self-respecting, American or Russian—all
become your sisters and brothers in the new family formed in Jesus. By
joining a church you declare your individuality in the most radical way in
order to affirm community on the widest possible scale.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
It is
a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to
open one. God leads with a light rein, giving us our head. Jesus spoke in
parables because these stories have a way of shifting responsibility from
the narrator to the hearer. Christians have to listen to the world as well
as to the Word—to science, to history, to what reason and our own
experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by
ignoring truths found elsewhere.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
The
Bible knows nothing of a moral majority. It assumes that the individual
conscience, as opposed to the mass mind, best reflects the universal
conscience of humankind. And the Bible insists that a prophetic minority
always has more to say to a nation than any majority, Silent, Moral, or
any other. As a matter of fact, majorities in the Bible generally end up
stoning the prophets, which suggests that democracies are based less on
the proven goodness of the people than on the proven evil of dictators.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Church
is where all hearts are one so that nothing else has to be one. Church is
where there’s such a climate of acceptance that each of us can be his or
her unique self. Church is where we learn to be free, strong, and mature
by sharing with one another our continued bondage, weakness, and
immaturity. Church is where we so love one another that it becomes
bearable to live as solitaries.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
What’s
the point of being Christian if you don’t also know that what God
withholds in the way of protection, he more than supplies in the form of
support. For the world breaks God’s heart, too. No pain our spirits
endure, no weakness that impairs our bodies, no grief that bows us low
fails to find its counterpart in God who, as we see, in Christ suffers
with and for us. “He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber or sleep.”
Sometimes I think it’s God’s pain, not God’s peace, that passes all
understanding. So come home to church, not for protection against all the
travails of this earth, but rather for all the support that heaven alone
can provide. Finally, come to leave. For we come to God’s house, to this
open house, to find love and to defeat hate, in order that the world
itself can become an open house.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
It’s
wrong for preachers on every issue to stand as if at Armaggedon battling
for the Lord. I know that tolerance is a tricky business. Some people
actually think that tolerance means being so broadminded that your brains
fall out. But I’m worried about growing intolerance in the church. I’m
worried that the virtue of moral indignation is becoming the vice of
moralism. Moralism is historically one of America’s great defects.
Moralism is intolerant of ambiguity, perceiving reality in extreme terms
of good and evil and regarding more sophisticated judgments as soft and
unworthy. The temptation to become moralistic is strong, for it is
emotionally satisfying to have enemies rather than problems. It is
emotionally satisfying to seek out culprits rather than flaws in the
system. God knows its emotionally satisfying to be righteous with that
righteousness that nourishes itself in the blood of sinners. But God also
knows that what is emotionally satisfying can also be spiritually
devastating.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
No two Shakespearean actors have ever sounded exactly alike,
and no two readers of the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution
of the United States, or of the sixty-six books of the Bible, will ever
understand those documents in exactly the same way. Let Protestant
fundamentalists claim, “The only safe interpreter of Scripture is
Scripture itself.” It’s a fine-sounding claim, but it is pride
masquerading as humility to believe that one can see so plainly revealed
the mind and will of God. Search for the truth we can and must, but own
it—never.
Fundamentalists are no different from the rest of us. Just as
often as do we, they use a Bible as the drunk uses a lamppost: for
support, not illumination. And consider this: perhaps God approves
the struggles of the human mind to try to interpret God’s designs. “The
unknown is the mind’s greatest need, and for it no one thinks to thank
God” (Emily Dickinson). So far from being a danger to it, difference of
opinion is an essential ingredient of religious life, just as difference
of opinion is no danger but an essential ingredient to a healthy political
life. So interpretation is not only inevitable; it’s desirable.
William Sloan Coffin, who died during Holy Week at the age of
81. Godspeed, Bill. We will miss you. |
|
Biblical inerrancy is not upheld in Scripture and belief in the inerrancy
of Scripture has nothing to do with salvation. Salvation is a matter of
repentance and of faith in Christ Jesus. There is no domino theory in
faith. Loss of one belief doesn’t lead automatically to the loss of a
second; it makes the second possible with greater integrity.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
It’s a
test of faith to grow old without resentment, free of defensiveness, to
lose power without an increase in self-pity. Remember that perfectionism
can apply to age as well as sin. If God can find something noble in the
ruins of a life ravaged by sin, how much more noble in Her sight are lives
when “crooked eclipses ‘gainst its glory fight, and time that gave both
now his gift confound.” (Shakespeare).
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Memory, properly used, is like a running broad jump: it takes you back
only to launch you further forward. And so the senior years ideally are
the formative years. Like Abraham, who at seventy-five sought a vision,
elders should look out and see and respond to the life that still needs to
be protected, affirmed, dignified. If they look back, it should be
primarily to remember, as did Abraham, who they were created to be—God’s
forgiven, cared-for, and caring co-creators of the universe.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
With
the severe limits that often accompany old age we are still free to
choose. In fact we are never free not to choose. We are human only by our
continued choices. I believe that in growing older we must carefully stake
out our growing limitations in order to recognize and savor our continuing
realm of freedom. Our choices may become increasingly fewer but even that
can be a good thing. Until a river finds its banks it hasn’t a prayer of
being anything but shallow. Or to change the image, old age is like a fire
threatening to destroy our home. It compels us to decide, “What do I value
most?”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
The
more we do God’s will, the less unfinished business we leave behind when
we die. If our lives exemplify personal charity and the pursuit of social
justice, then death will not be the enemy, but rather the friendly angel
leading us on to the One whose highest hope is to be able to say to each
and every one of us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter
into the joy of the Master.”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
What
in the very center of tragedy frees us for action, frees us also for
gratitude. Much of course we do not understand but all this is made
bearable by the little we do understand. “The Lord gave and the Lord has
taken away” does not mean God is directly responsible for every birth and
every death. (Anything that makes God’s love less than human love at its
best has to be questioned.) What it does mean is that before every birth
and after every death there is still God. He is the source and the ending,
the Alpha and Omega. And if we depend radically on him, then we are free
from dependent attachments to persons as to things, attachments through
whom we hope to have all our longings satisfied. This means that while
those we love are still alive we are free to give more than we take and
that after they die we do not have to hoard their memory but rather
cherish it gratefully, be nourished by it, and go on pouring out our love
to all living creatures. This is the meaning of “Let the dead bury the
dead;” let the dead bury the dead and not the living.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
With
the severe limits that often accompany old age we are still free to
choose. In fact we are never free not to choose. We are human only by our
continued choices. I believe that in growing older we must carefully stake
out our growing limitations in order to recognize and savor our continuing
realm of freedom. Our choices may become increasingly fewer but even that
can be a good thing. Until a river finds its banks it hasn’t a prayer of
being anything but shallow. Or to change the image, old age is like a fire
threatening to destroy our home. It compels us to decide, “What do I value
most?”
William Sloan Coffin |
|
Eternal life begins not at the end of time, nor even at the funeral home,
but right now; the death that comes is not the death that separates us
from God….The abyss of God’s love is deeper than the abyss of death. And
she who overcomes her fear of death lives as though death were a past and
not a future experience.
Paul
insists that “neither death nor life…can separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” If death, then, is no threat to our
relationship to God it should be no threat to anything. If we don’t know
what is beyond the grave, we do know who is beyond the grave. And Christ
resurrected links the two worlds, telling us that we really live only in
one. If, spiritually speaking, we die to ourselves and are resurrected in
Christ, before us lies only the physical counterpart of this spiritual
death. And physical death need not terrorize us, if fear of the unknown
and fear of final condemnation lie behind, not before us.
William Sloan Coffin |
|
There
is a Zen paradox whereby we may lack everything yet want for nothing. The
reason is that peace, that is, deep inner peace, comes not with meeting
our desires but in releasing ourselves from their power. I find such peace
is increasingly mine. It’s not that I’m withdrawing from the world, only
that I am present in a different way. I’m less intentional than “attentional.”
I’m more and more attentive to family and friends and to nature’s beauty.
Although still outraged by callous behavior, particularly in high places,
I feel more often serene, grateful for God’s gift of life. For the
compassions that fail not, I find myself saying daily to my loving Maker,
“I can no other answer make than thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks.”
William Sloan Coffin |
| |
|
