8/9/59

What Do You Make Of It?

Scripture: Psalm 84

Text: Psalm 84: 6; “Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well.”

There is a verse in the 84th Psalm that describes the kind of person that all of us needs to be: “Passing through the valley of Baca [or Valley of Weeping] make it a well [or place of springs].” Here the psalmist is saying that when a person who trusts God and has a real experience of Divine resource, finds himself in a difficult or forbidding or ominous place, [Baca or the valley of weeping] he can do more than just get through it; he can create something worth while out of it --- a well, or a place of springs.

Palestine itself is illustration of the meaning in this phrase of the Psalm. All life there centers around springs and watering places. The country tends to be desert-like. The thoughtful and loving care by the Jewish people developed it into a land of promise, of vineyards and milk and honey. Those people were vanquished, and scattered all over the earth, and Palestine, to considerable degree, reverted to unproductive desert. Now the land is caused to bloom again, as Jewish descendants, with all the scientific, archaeological, and loving zeal of desperate enthusiasm, bring old sites again into production. Careful development of precious water helps.

If a place is allowed to be desert, with no grass, shrubs, trees to encourage moisture, there is nothing to be condensed into moisture when the weather does change; hence no rain. But the life of the land, and the moisture of the air are dependent on each other. And the tillers of Palestinian soil are careful to make every bit of water from springs or underground sources count in the production of life. Knowing this, the old Psalmist was saying that there are souls who, by God’s grace, are learning how to win the very best out of the worst.

This is a capacity that we need now, as do the people of every time and place. We have lived to see human nature at its worst in the cruel inhumanity of man to man. All-out warfare emphasized the horrors that mankind can invent and perpetrate. One national order set out to exterminate Jews, literally; and then to subdue or eliminate others who stood in the way. We who resented that power, and found ourselves on the other side of armed conflict know that massive bombing of whole populations was deemed necessary to win survival. And so liquid fire was rained on whole communities. And, finally, nuclear bombs were used, by our forces, to wipe out whole cities -- men, women, and children; the old and young; Christians along with all others. Since the conflicts of World War II and the Korean conflict have come to an armistice-like halt, our world still teeters on the edge of the holocaust.

Meanwhile crimes of inconsiderate violence increase in the wake of the conflict. And some crack up under the strain. Others learn new lessons they never knew before.

One man’s war experience illustrates some of what can happen in war, or in peace. He was an American medical officer in charge of an army hospital unit at Manila when the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii plunged our nation into war. In an amazingly short time he found himself a prisoner of war as the forces of Japan swept south in Asia and threatened the whole world around the Pacific ocean. For a while he was left in charge of his hospital unit. Then the enemy closed it and he was shipped, with other prisoners, to another island and then to Manchuria for the duration of the war.

Other American prisoners of war followed. One enemy ship was loaded with 1600 of them. By that time Japanese shipping was under American attack. The prison ship, identified as such from air or sea, was hit repeatedly. Battle conditions and other cruelties took a heavy toll of the men as they were shipped to first one place and then another. Only about 200 of the 1600 who began the trip from the Philippines, finally arrived in Manchuria. A high percentage of those 200 American prisoners were seriously damaged for life. Not only physically broken, but in many cases mentally broken by what they had seen and survived.

But this medical officer remarked that some of those surviving men seemed to have the capacity to find what poor best they could out of their experience, and were able to reconstruct a livable world out of their environment. Those were the few fortunates who not only survived the terror, but found ways toward hope of a better world.

That extreme experience only illustrates, all too vividly, what happens to people in less violent tragedy and reverses. Some crack up, and come out of it worse for the experience. Others have strength called out within them which they did not know they had. They emerge from hard and bitter experiences wiser and better persons because of the way they have met the testing! Which group are we going to belong to?

In ordinary life, it becomes clear to anyone who watches people closely that, not so much what happens to a man woman, but the way he or she takes it and does with it, makes the character.

I suppose that one should be able to count on at least this to start with: that every decent person has a desire not to be among those who merely drag through a crisis or go to pieces under its stress. Every decent person wants to be among those who creatively make something out of it -- the good and the bad experiences alike. All decent folk would like to come through the crises of living better and wiser folk -- not broken or beaten, but the more capable because of their hard learning.

More than 40 years ago, during World War I, an outstanding British chaplain was Studdert Kennedy. It was while he was meeting the crisis of his time, that he described the Last Judgment as he thought of it. He said that he expected that when he should stand before the final judgment seat, God would ask of him just one question: “Well, what did you make of it?” That is: “What did you make of that life into which I put you on earth?”

Let us concern ourselves, for a little while now, with this inquiry: What causes some people to come out worse, and some to come out better from the hard testing experiences of life? What are the qualities of mind and character that enable a man, passing through the “valley of weeping,” to make it a “place of springs” --- a well of living resource?

1) For one thing, though some people live through their disasters with an attitude of stoic endurance, others are waked up by it, intellectually and spiritually stimulated, so that they learn things they never saw before.

Everybody knows that negative attitude of endurance. And some of it is essential, for the quality of endurance can be a noble virtue! However, by itself alone, it can become dull and stolid, turning to self-pity. If one lives long enough on this frame of mind he is bound to become a casualty.

Our admiration goes out to the person who is waked up by his crises, intellectually and spiritually, discovering things which he has never seen before, becoming something better than he ever was before. Of course, temperament which is not altogether within our control may have something to do with it. A medal was given to a soldier who, when everything went wrong in the thick of battle in Italy, took matters in his own hands. He waged what the communiqués called a “one-man war,” performing incredible exploits. When he was later asked how in the world he was able to do it, he replied, “I just got mad.” That was his temperament. And his “getting mad” was not a matter of flying to pieces in a fit of destructive temper, but a waking up to the possibilities of a desperate situation.

But even those of us ordinary folk who do not have the unusual temperament can have something to say as to whether we join the company of the dour, who merely get by, or the company of those who are intellectually and spiritually aroused to think and do what was never in our scope before.

Domestic battles, after the occasional pattern of Hoople manor, sometimes result in someone getting hurt. Several years ago, newspapers told of a woman, chased by an angry husband, who jumped clean over a 7-foot fence! I hope you do not ask that feat of me; but even that incident says something to us. For an evil situation can be one of the most stimulating experiences one ever meets!

To return to our first thesis then: man has no business to merely endure hardships or testing. He and his world are better off when he comes alive with learning from his critical experiences --- “who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well.”

2) Deeper yet runs the difference between those who are made worse, and those who are made better, by times of crisis. Some become emotionally infected by hatreds and passions, swamped by bitterness and prejudice. Others are enlarged in their vision to take in the unity and interdependence of all mankind and the common dependence on God.

Glance at the lives of two men who read their Bibles: Whittier, the Quaker poet, and Whistler, the painter. What did they get out of the Bible? Says Whittier:

“The starry pages promise-lit

With Christ’s Evangel over-writ.”

But Whistler did not get that from the Bible. He was a capable man in his way, but he was a stormy and bitter controversialist. His verbal attacks on his critics, and even his former friends, are as harsh and ill-tempered as one may well find in the English language. He once described the Bible as “That splendid mine of invective.”

If even the Bible can be to one man “that splendid mine of invective,” how much more can some of the more depressing experiences of living. One of the tragedies of warfare is that it has increased, in some people, the spirit of hatred, vengefulness, national and racial prejudice. And this emotional desert perpetuates itself like the Sahara.

But one’s admiration goes out to those who bring hope out of bitterness, and devotion that takes in all humanity. In Israel’s bitterest time -- that of the Babylonian exile -- there emerged in the person of Isaiah an example of the saving life. We Christians need to catch his spirit! Out of an embittered time, he translated his people’s experience into world-envisioning hope. For it was as though he heard God saying to him: “I will give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation to the end of the earth.” [Acts 13: 47].

3) Deeper yet runs the difference between those who come out of their crises worse and those who come out better. Some have their courage peter out while others lay hold on deeper levels of power, tap the underground stream of spiritual reserve, depend upon God’s sustaining grace. Even in ordinary life this constitutes a difference between persons. We all start with comparatively easy demands. But sooner or later we run into more severe experiences - some of them difficult, tragic, perilous. Those who have learned to call upon the Grace of God know a powerful extra resource for their need.

Watch the way it carries someone. There was Abraham Lincoln, born in poverty, early bereft of mother, educated with great difficulty and determination, cruelly disappointed in love, financially a failure more than once, defeated in early election bids for office. Were he living today there might be good help available to encourage him; some person or group could have given him books, writing equipment, a college scholarship, help for his poverty-stricken family. Yet the thing that made him over from a potential failure into one of the admirable powers of human history was his ability to lay hold on help beyond himself. His burdens became heavier and heavier. Tragedy deepened all about him. Difficulties were terrific. But all of this called out power in him. And he sought power beyond himself, so that, passing through a long valley of weeping, he made it a place of springs.

A man’s religious faith ought to mean this to him -- strength for his crises, coming in like the tide. The experience of available spiritual power from beyond ourselves is central in all religion. Man’s experience with it is too universal to be denied. Life need not defeat us; we do not need to crack up; we do not have to become resigned to our troubles even when we have to bear them. We can make something out of them!

There are two ways we can take the burdens of life. We can alibi with them -- make them excuses for our failure to achieve. Or we can use them to build a character, and a world about us.

[Sign seen from a railroad train, in Chester PA: “What Chester makes, makes Chester”].

What we makes, makes us! We can make the valley of Baca a well, a place of springs, by creative use of our troubles; by laying hold on creative, redeeming grace. Tragedy, disappointment, bereavement lead to doubt. But they also lead to strength for those who will make something out of them.

The old British chaplain Kennedy was right. Each one of us will be answerable at judgment to at least one great question: “What did you make of it?”

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, August 9, 1959 (Union Service).