Samuel H. Miller - "Basic Simplicities" (October 31, 1965)

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-	Generally, it is our custom,	0:32
	particularly in university chapels	0:36
	to speak of the difficulty of being Christian in our day	0:41
	in such a way as to lay the major blame	0:48
	on either a decadent church,	0:52
	which has not sustained us in our Christian faith	0:56
	or upon those subtle complexities	1:04
	of a sophisticated theology,	1:08
	which it is difficult to attain to,	1:11
	or per chance the strange historic impotence	1:15
	of those symbols which once supported the Christian faith	1:21
	in the mystery of the world, but no longer do so.	1:26
	All these conditions may indeed affect us	1:32
	and make it difficult to be Christian in the 20th century.	1:38
	But I rather surmise that in back of these	1:44
	and underneath of them,	1:49
	there may occur certain simple difficulties,	1:51
	which are much more radical and much more revolutionary.	1:57
	I should like this morning to deal	2:05
	with a very simple situation.	2:07
	Namely, how do we handle experience?	2:10
	What do we do with it, if anything.	2:18
	When we turn to the great thinkers of the world,	2:24
	Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe,	2:30
	we're confronted almost immediately	2:36
	with a remarkable simplicity,	2:40
	a simplicity that is somewhat deceptive however	2:46
	for it is not easily plumbed,	2:51
	nor even exhaustible.	2:56
	Even so when we turn to Jesus,	3:00
	we come immediately in the presence of the parables,	3:05
	simple, easy to read	3:12
	thoroughly memorable,	3:18
	and yet, over and over again,	3:23
	one returns to them with the unexpected surprise	3:27
	of new dimensions of truth and meaning	3:32
	when one thinks he has plumbed them to the very bottom,	3:38
	there are still depths beyond	3:43
	when one thinks he has understood their references to life.	3:48
	One confronts unexpected references to their wisdom	3:53
	that one had not known before.	4:02
	This inexhaustibility of the parable	4:06
	is a continual fascination,	4:12
	somewhat like the mountains in their grand simplicity	4:14
	or the sea in its greatness,	4:20
	which remains forever the same.	4:24
	And yet with remarkable changeableness	4:27
	eludes any standard normative definition,	4:33
	but continually sustains our imagination	4:41
	and thrusts it further and further	4:46
	into new aspects and modes of our perception.	4:51
	These parables of Jesus,	4:57
	of which the parable of the sower is but one example	4:58
	are like mirrors.	5:03
	Unless you hold them up to your own experience,	5:05
	you see nothing.	5:10
	Or what you see is very little	5:12
	for the parable is not referring	5:16
	to some kind of an objective corelative in the world,	5:19
	but to some mystery in the heart of man,	5:24
	which requires a renewal of the imagination,	5:28
	a continuing humility	5:33
	that allows one to put down alongside the parable	5:35
	one's own mortal life.	5:39
	It is a very bold parable,	5:44
	a sower went forth to saw.	5:47
	God is like a farmer	5:52
	out of the common places one grasps at divinity.	5:56
	God is like a farmer with wide and generous hand	6:05
	who streams the furrows of time	6:11
	of night and day with events and circumstances of our life.	6:13
	And some of these seeds fall on very poor ground	6:20
	and others on good ground	6:26
	in such strange and moving simplicities	6:31
	Jesus moves beyond all the complexities	6:36
	of sophisticated theology	6:40
	to those inner insights that seem to be perennial	6:43
	and sustaining for men always and everywhere.	6:47
	How realistic he is,	6:52
	the seeds that fall from the hand of God,	6:58
	fall on rocky soil, on thorny soil,	7:02
	on traffic ridden soil.	7:08
	Three out of every four seeds	7:11
	that fall from the hand of God	7:13
	never come to anything.	7:15
	They are good seeds.	7:18
	They are fertile.	7:21
	They have the possibilities of meaning.	7:23
	And yet in spite of this vitality,	7:26
	they are not fulfilled	7:31
	three out of every four experiences in our life	7:34
	I suppose we must say are wasted.	7:38
	They happen, but we do nothing with them.	7:43
	There is an interesting story told of Henry James,	7:49
	who at lunch in one day sat beside a lady	7:53
	who began to tell him about the sale at auction	7:58
	of one of the magnificent estates of England.	8:02
	And as Henry James began to think	8:07
	of this extraordinary event,	8:09
	which would scatter to the four winds of chance,	8:13
	the accumulated heritage of many generations	8:18
	in which discrimination and wealth had brought together	8:23
	one of the most superb collections of art	8:27
	and had created a home with the enrichment of the ages.	8:31
	He tried to get together in his own mind,	8:37
	a picture of this situation only to have the lady beside him	8:40
	continue to chatter about other matters.	8:48
	And in his journal,	8:51
	he wrote " Would God that she could have kept quiet	8:53
	until I could get my hands on this idea and get it rooted."	8:58
	All of our life is like that	9:06
	it is filled with distraction and with frenzy,	9:10
	with torment and with tumult.	9:15
	If somehow people would be quiet.	9:21
	If we could sit down a moment,	9:26
	if we could take what had happened to us	9:29
	and hold it quietly,	9:32
	meditatively, reflectively in our hearts,	9:34
	if we could have pushed away all the traffic of restlessness	9:39
	and provided a hospitable soil.	9:45
	If it could have been tilled	9:49
	so as to be ready for the seed,	9:51
	if somehow we could only learn that that event,	9:54
	however small or commonplace could be grasped	9:58
	by the imagination	10:03
	held until at last, the roots had gone down	10:05
	into the depths of our imagination	10:10
	and begun to fulfill itself in meaning and significance.	10:12
	Unfortunately,	10:19
	we are distracted by distraction from distraction.	10:21
	We are written with haste and obsessed with a frenzy	10:26
	that will not let us rest.	10:31
	We are thrust across the surface of life at terrific speed	10:34
	and waste our time.	10:39
	Indeed kill our time with meetings	10:41
	and activities in which there are no meaning	10:48
	until at last,	10:55
	the seed that was sawn falls on rocky ground,	10:56
	thorny soil, traffic ridden hearts and mind.	11:02
	Some years ago I said to Dr.Woodworth at Harvard	11:10
	that I was singularly impressed as many have been.	11:18
	And over and over again,	11:22
	with that mighty motif that occurs	11:24
	in the "Ninth Symphony" of Beethoven	11:26
	and how incredible and heavenly it was,	11:31
	how magical as if it came by revelation	11:36
	rather than the anguish of a mortal man.	11:40
	And he smiled at me and said,	11:46
	"but you must know that that motif occurs earlier."	11:50
	And I said, "I'm sorry, I'm ignorant about it.	11:57
	Where does it occur earlier?"	12:02
	Then he said, "as nearly as I can find out,	12:04
	it occurs in eighteen places,	12:07
	beginning with the earliest work of Beethoven."	12:12
	This is the way in which life gathers depth.	12:18
	This is the way in which a great man handles experience.	12:25
	It is not enough for Beethoven to take the first seed	12:30
	that fell upon the soil and to shape it.	12:35
	But even in that first time,	12:40
	however noble and grand it was,	12:43
	it was the greatness of Beethoven	12:47
	recognized that relatively this was a failure	12:50
	compared to that, which it might become.	12:54
	And so year after year, decade after decade	12:58
	in agony and difficulty,	13:03
	he's shaped and wrestled with this recalcitrant material,	13:06
	until at last, instead of being a mediocre success,	13:13
	it became the revelation of sound and music	13:18
	of glory and grandeur that man had never heard before.	13:22
	Reality is not merely what happens.	13:28
	Reality is what a man does to add the insight,	13:36
	perceptiveness, reflection and understanding of his soul	13:41
	to what has happened.	13:46
	What has happened is so small a portion of what ought to be	13:50
	that it never comes to be,	13:57
	unless I mind knows what to do with it.	13:59
	The seed takes more than sowing	14:03
	experience takes more than living.	14:07
	When a thing happens,	14:13
	there ought to be clear soil and reflectiveness	14:16
	and understanding	14:22
	and such care in the rain and the sun	14:26
	in all the weathers of the world	14:31
	in the eliciting of strength and power,	14:33
	goodness and beauty from this event	14:38
	that at last it may be fulfilled in all its inexhaustible	14:41
	and eternal character.	14:47
	I suspect that the reason why psychiatrists are so busy	14:51
	in our world is simply that most of us never understand	14:55
	what has happened to us before we rush madly	15:01
	to the next experience and fill our days and nights	15:05
	with so many events	15:10
	that they become deeply tangled	15:12
	and only the man of extreme patience	15:16
	and extraordinary skill who can let us talk	15:21
	and ramble for hours on end at a very high cost	15:26
	is able to get back to the meaning of the things	15:32
	we have buried in our forgetful and haste ridden lives.	15:35
	The problem of being a Christian is not in the calculus	15:45
	of the subtlest theology we can achieve	15:53
	by rational thought.	15:57
	The difficulty of being Christian	16:00
	is the rather inexhaustible simplicity	16:03
	of trying to handle the events of our mortal life	16:07
	in such a way that they shall bear their fruit.	16:11
	Some 30 fold, some 60, some a hundred.	16:14
	The daughter of Leo Tolstoy tells an extraordinary story	16:23
	of his sitting after breakfast and reflecting,	16:31
	I suppose, in good American fashion,	16:36
	we should have said that he wasn't doing anything.	16:38
	For the hardest work in the world is simply	16:44
	this interior exercise of the imagination,	16:48
	which seeks to work upon the raw material	16:52
	of human experience and find out what it means	16:56
	that particular morning Leo Tolstoy	17:00
	had a Turkish dressing gown on,	17:06
	and as he sat, seemingly idle,	17:12
	his hand ran down the collar of it,	17:17
	where there was some needlework.	17:20
	And as his thumb and finger felt the needle work	17:24
	his mind turned to the work of women in the world.	17:30
	This exquisite piece of needlework	17:38
	was a seed of commonplace and rather minor size,	17:42
	but it fell upon a fertile imagination,	17:51
	which began to conjure up	17:54
	the life and mystery a womankind.	17:58
	A world into which man scarcely enters	18:05
	in its profounder subtleties and significances.	18:14
	And as Tolstoy thought of womankind,	18:21
	of her work, her labor in the world, her skills,	18:24
	her heart and wisdom, her affections and agonies.	18:30
	There was born bit by bit	18:36
	the basis for "Anna Karenina".	18:43
	The classic novel of the life of woman.	18:48
	It wasn't much, a bit of needlework,	18:54
	but in the mind of Tolstoy, it flourished,	18:59
	it flourished magnificently.	19:03
	It deepened its roots, its prying into a vast tree.	19:06
	It covered all the relationships of the world.	19:12
	It became cosmic in its dimension.	19:15
	It became the very ground of the tragic nature	19:19
	of life among mortals.	19:24
	One of the interesting journals of Bonhoeffer,	19:29
	he asks the simple question of pathos.	19:33
	Why is it, he said that in the life of Martin Luther,	19:37
	he talks over and over again about the thunder storm	19:43
	that shook his soul early in his life.	19:48
	Year after year and decade after decade,	19:52
	that thunderstorm reappears and sustains	19:55
	and supports new meanings and significances	20:00
	to the expanding social responsibility of the reformer,	20:03
	Martin Luther	20:08
	and then Bonhoeffer said,	20:10
	"But last night in our prison, we had an air raid.	20:12
	There was destruction all about	20:17
	men face death momentarily,	20:20
	but 10 minutes after it was over,	20:27
	we went to bed, slept well	20:30
	and this morning we have forgotten all about it."	20:33
	The difficulty of being Christian is simply the difference	20:40
	between paying attention to life, holding it,	20:47
	nurturing it, exploring it, reflecting upon it	20:55
	until at last what happens as a grain of mustard seed	21:05
	grows into a vast tree in which all the birds of the air,	21:12
	all the events of history,	21:18
	all the many leveled activities of man,	21:20
	the arts and the scientists, all things come together,	21:23
	life and death, night and day	21:27
	and reflect their mystery in this event.	21:31
	A sower went forth to sow	21:38
	he will be sowing today, and tomorrow and the day after.	21:42
	And most of the scenes good though they are,	21:49
	will be wasted on man,	21:57
	who is a great waster of sorrows and of joys	22:02
	of life and of death, of wars and of knowledge.	22:07
	But here and there a seed, a circumstance, a commonplace	22:15
	will fall upon the hospitable soil	22:24
	and it will grow and it will bear fruit,	22:31
	30 fold, 60 fold, a hundred fold	22:35
	and fill the air with song and joy and peace.	22:40
	Let us pray.	22:46
	All mighty and everlasting God	23:04
	let the plow share of thy stern mercy break	23:08
	the complacent ground of our souls	23:12
	until the soil is ready for the thy coming.	23:16
	Let the broad hand of thy providence	23:23
	strew the soil with seed of circumstance,	23:25
	which we shall welcome with hope.	23:30
	And in thy time, grant us a harvest of hours and of life	23:35
	wherein the labor and suffering of our hearts	23:42
	shall be fruitful with eternal grain.	23:44
	And now may the love of God, the father,	23:51
	the grace of Jesus Christ, his son, our savior,	23:54
	and the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit	23:58
	rest and abide with you both now and forevermore.	24:01
	Amen.	24:07

Item Info

Title:

Samuel H. Miller - "Basic Simplicities" (October 31, 1965)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4z03395k

Date:

October 31, 1965

Speaker:

Miller, Samuel H.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0311
ref5827_0s3
uachapelsermaud
duke:628073
dcrau002309
ark:/87924/r4z03395k
e6dfec4e-372c-4550-9901-f3e75f2b37e7

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Samuel H. Miller - "Basic Simplicities" (October 31, 1965)

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