Happy Pentecost!
If a man
should set out to go through the Bible, pausing and making a meditation
wherever he found material, his attention would be caught without fail, I
think, by the second verse of it. “Earth was still an empty waste, and darkness
hung over the deep; but already, over its waters, stirred the breath of God.”
Creation still in the melting-pot, so that we have nothing for our composition
of place except a formless sea of undifferentiated matter; dark, not by some
effect of shadow, but with that primal darkness that reigned before light was
made. And over this inert mass, like the mist that steals up from a pool at
evening, God’s breath his Spirit, was at work. Already it was his plan to educe
from this chaos the cosmos he had resolved to make, passing up through its
gradual stages till it culminated in the creation of Man.
Deep in
your nature and mine lies just such a chaos of undifferentiated matter, of
undeveloped possibilities. Psychology calls it the unconscious. It is a great
lumber-room, stocked from our past history. Habits and propensities are there,
for good and evil; memories, some easily recaptured, some tucked away in the
background; unreasoning fears and antipathies; illogical associations, which
link this past experience with that; primitive impulses, which shun the light,
and seek to disguise themselves by a smoke-screen of reasoning; inherited
aptitudes, sometimes quite unexpected. Out of this welter of conditions and
tendencies the life of action is built up, yours and mine. And still, as at the
dawn of creation, the Holy Spirit moves over those troubled waters, waiting to
educe from them, with the cooperation of our wills, the entire life of the
Christian.
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