The School of Charity. Evelyn Underhill
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holiness beneath disconcerting and hostile appearances with an equable and purified sight; with something of the large, disinterested Charity of God.
To stand alongside the generous Creative Love, maker of all things visible and invisible (including those we do not like) and see them with the eyes of the Artist-Lover is the secret of sanctity. St. Francis did this with a singular perfection; but we know the price that he paid. So too that rapt and patient lover of all life, Charles Darwin, with his great, self-forgetful interest in the humblest and tiniest forms of life—not because they were useful to him, but for their own sakes—fulfilled one part of our Christian duty far better than many Christians do. It is a part of the life of prayer, which is our small attempt to live the life of Charity, to consider the whole creation with a deep and selfless reverence; enter into its wonder, and find in it the mysterious intimations of the Father of Life, maker of all things, Creative Love.
This loving reverence for life is not to stop short even at the microbe and the worm. It must be extended to ourselves, and the qualities, tendencies and powers which God has implanted or brought forth in us. We have to discriminate between our natural passions, which are a true part of His creative material, and the way we handle them, which is left to us. It is no proof of spirituality to discredit the fiery energies which He has implanted in the natural order, and in which we all share. All genuine re-ordering of character must be based on an adoring faith in the maker of our wonderful psycho-physical machine, and humble acceptance of its capacities and limitations. If it is not running right, the fault is not with the original design; but with our oiling and timing and ill-conceived adjustments, our poor attempts to keep it clean and give it the right mixture, and our pessimistic feeling that it is hard lines to have inherited the family tourer, with all its unfortunate peculiarities, whilst others seem to be making the journey in a well-sprung six-cylinder saloon.
If we do not acquire this habit of looking at the complex natural world, including our natural selves, with eyes cleansed by prayer and brought into focus by humility—if we attempt to judge it from our own point of view, without a loving movement of the mind towards the Creator of all this splendour, this intricate web of life—then how easy it is to get lost in it, and lose all sense of its mysterious beauty; because we mistake our small self-interested conclusions, our vulgar utilitarianism, for the truth. Like the Scottish student who was asked for an essay on elephants, we at once write at the top of the paper “The Elephant, its Economic Possibilities”; without the slightest suspicion that this attitude towards the rich mystery of life is both blasphemous and absurd. For we have been shown the heavenly vision of the whole natural order, no less than the spiritual order, rising, growing and falling within the Holy Presence of God, supported and accompanied by the Creative Charity: and what is called the “Practice of the Presence of God,” when we think of it in this fashion, calls for a very high level of loving admiration, self-oblivion, gentleness and faith—a certain child-like loyalty and humble awe, in the darkest moments as well as the best.
All this reminds us of the span and the depth which is required of a full Christian life of prayer. For one part of prayer associates us with that creative and supporting Love, and requires us to give ourselves as open channels through which it can be poured out on all life ; and the other part of prayer keeps us in humble awareness of our own complete dependence, plastic to the pressure of the moulding Charity. When we consider our situation like this, we realize that the very best we are likely to achieve in the world of prayer will be a small part in a mighty symphony ; not a peculiarly interesting duet. When our devotional life seems to us to have become a duet, we should listen more carefully. Then we shall hear a greater music, within which that little melody of ours can find its place.
This truth of the deep unity of creation links us with our lesser relations, and with our greater relations too. It makes us the members of a family, a social order, so rich and various that we can never exhaust its possibilities. “My little sisters, the birds,” said St. Francis. “I am thy fellow-slave,” said the great angel of the Apocalypse to the seer. We are all serving on one Staff. Our careful pickings and choosings, acceptances and exclusions, likes and dislikes, race prejudice, class prejudice, and all the rest, look rather silly within the glow of that One God, in Whom all live and move and have their being; and the graduated splendour of that creation which is the work of His paternal Love. The Creed shows up human pride for the imbecility it is, and convinces us that realism is the same thing as humility. It insists upon our own utter dependence on the constant, varied, unseen Creative Love; and the narrow span of our understanding of our fellow-creatures—how slight is the material we have for passing judgment on them—because our understanding is no wider than our charity.
And now we come down to the more painful consideration of all that this demands from us, if our inner and outer life are to match our belief about Reality; and only when this has happened will Christianity conquer the world, harmonizing all things visible and invisible because both are received and loved as the works of One God. There are still far too many Christians in whose souls a sound-proof partition has been erected between the oratory and the kitchen: sometimes between the oratory and the study too. But the creative action of the Spirit penetrates the whole of life, and is felt by us in all sorts of ways. If our idea of that creative action is so restricted that we fail to recognize it working within the homely necessities and opportunities of our visible life, we may well suspect the quality of those invisible experiences to which we like to give spiritual status. “I found Him very easily among the pots and pans,” said St. Teresa. “The duties of my position take precedence of everything else,” said Elizabeth Leseur; pinned down by those duties to a life which was a constant check on the devotional practices she loved. She recognized the totality of God’s creative action, penetrating and controlling the whole web of life.
A genuine inner life must make us more and more sensitive to that moulding power, working upon His creation at every level, not at one alone: and especially to the constant small but expert touches, felt in and through very homely events, upon those half-made, unsteady souls which are each the subject of His detailed care. A real artist will give as much time and trouble to a miniature two inches square, as to the fresco on the Cathedral wall. The true splendour and heart-searching beauty of the Divine Charity is not seen in those cosmic energies which dazzle and confound us; but in the transcendent power which stoops to an intimate and cherishing love, the grave and steadfast Divine action, sometimes painful and sometimes gentle, on the small unfinished soul. It is an unflickering belief in this, through times of suffering and conflict, apathy and desperation, in a life filled with prosaic duties and often empty of all sense of God, that the Creed demands of all who dare recite it.
We are so busy rushing about, so immersed in what we call practical things, that we seldom pause to realize the mysterious truth of our situation: how little we know that really matters, how completely our modern knowledge leaves the deeps of our existence unexplored. We are inclined to leave all that out. But the Creed will not let us leave the mystery out. Christ never left it out. His teaching has a deep recurrent note of awe, a solemn sense of God and the profound mysteries of God: His abrupt creative entrance into every human life, coming to us, touching us, changing us in every crisis, grief, shock, sacrifice, flashing up on life’s horizon like lightning just when we had settled down on the natural level, and casting over the landscape a light we had never dreamed of before. The whole teaching of Christ hinges on the deep mystery and awful significance of our existence; and God, as the supreme and ever-present factor in every situation, from the tiniest to the most universal. The span of His understanding goes from the lilies of the field to the most terrible movements of history. He takes in all the darkness and anxiety of our situation, whether social or personal; and within and beyond all, He finds the creative action of God, the one Reality, the one Life, working with a steadfast and unalterable love, sometimes by the direct action of circumstance and sometimes secretly within each soul in prayer. And this creative action, so hidden and so penetrating, is the one thing that matters in human life.
Jesus chose, as the most perfect image of that action, the working of yeast in dough. The leavening of meal must have seemed to ancient men a profound mystery, and yet something on which they could always depend. Just so does the supernatural enter our natural life, working in the hiddenness, forcing the new life into every corner and making the dough expand. If the dough were endowed with consciousness, it would not feel very comfortable