Christmas During the Great War Monday, Dec 21 2009

Harrison Court
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts
February 3, 1918

Lt. Edwin Paul Dudley
26th Engineering Division
United States Army
Verdun, France

Dear Eddie:

As I sit by my residence house window this morning, I wept as I read your letter of Christmas Day.  As the sun breaks across  North Boston, it is so quiet. I can only imagine the horror and destruction you are witnessing in Verdun. I grieve that you are fighting for my liberty while I celebrate my 28th birthday engrossed in the archaic language of theology.  The deferral allowing me to stay in college now seems like weak excuse. I have such remorse to be in the States while your every move places you in harm’s way.

I thank you for your courage and I love you for the patriot you are.
Our days together at Trinity United Methodist Church in Fort Madison were the best years of my life.  We had no cares excepts the farm chores.  Dad said that we would never grow up to be anything special when we acted so irresponsibly in town. You dreamed of driving trains like your dad; I dreamed of becoming a lawyer like Clarence Darrow.  We never needed a wristwatch because the trains were so consistent in their daily runs.

Where did our dreams go?  You spent a decade with the Santa Fe Railroad before you left for war. I got your letter before they shipped you out from Hoboken last fall.  You could have knocked me over with a feather. I thought you were safe out in Colorado. Now you assemble rails for Uncle Sam to keep his troops moving.  It does not seem possible that time has passed so quickly. We grew up in an era of peace; it seemed it would never end.

Eddie, when I finished at Iowa Wesleyan (IW) and married Edna Ruth, in 1912, I still planned to go into law.  It was the youngsters I served in the Mount Pleasant Methodist church who stirred up my call to seminary. I believe God’s call for me is as a religious educator. Edna Ruth grew up in Cheshire County, New Hampshire and wanted to be close to her parents. I finished my seminary degree last year at the Boston University School of Theology but have stayed on as a graduate assistant.  We live in campus housing and I serve a church in Newburyport, Mass.  It is a gracious congregation who love the Lord and serve faithfully.

Your letters weave an upbeat tale of a macabre adventure in the European war. I do not believe I remember you ever being discouraged. Still, I sense from your letters how you grieve for the thousands of individuals you help transport into war on the rail lines you build and the dying soldiers you transport back. It seems that all the Boston Globe reports are the missteps of General Petain and the death of Teddy Roosevelt’s son Quenten. However, these events bring the reality of war to folks on the home front.

In the midst of injuries and death from mustard gas, you must ask: Where is God in all this?  Why are the finest young persons in the world suffering in the cold, French winters eating horsemeat and black bread?  Why do people of faith attempt to settle their disagreements in battle?  How can I find serenity in the midst of world disorder?
Edna has been using the language skills she obtained at I.W. translating copies of Le Monde for editors at the Globe. They write about events of the war. Lately, she has been bringing home some extra money, working for an undergraduate B.U. religion professor.  She is translating some war dairies written by a Jesuit priest serving in French Army near you in Coblenz. His name is Teilhard de Chardin.  (I believe his first name is Pierre and his last name is Teilhard. He is from Chardin.)

I am not sure why a young Jesuit priest stirs my Wesleyan senses so much. In the midst of the gruesome news in the Globe and  New York Times, I believe it is his cosmic sense of connection to God in all the disorderliness of war. Teilhard writes from the trenches of war:

“Just as, when I turn my mind and reason to things that lie outside of me, I have no right to disassociate myself from their destiny, so I cannot, in my personal being, escape from the divine, whose dominating power I can see growing ever more supreme wherever I look…I cannot, Lord, evade such massive power I can only yield to it in a blissful surrender.”

The gift Teilhard possesses is the serenity of God disclosed through Jesus Christ, the mediator. This peace that transcends the horror of the battlefield that may be useful for you.  The discipline of transcending beyond the war gives you the ability to set your circumstances aside to focus on a loving God.  While the world around us is chaotic, we can find serenity in God.  The world cannot change but we can, Eddie.

You and I debated how Christ fit into our theocentric world. We believed that others, good people who influenced our lives, could be saved without looking to Christ.  Perhaps they can. God is sovereign and can act far beyond the arena in which we have knowledge. We do know from Scripture that we can come to God, one way, through Christ. Only a sovereign God knows if another path exists.

The faith we have is to find God through Christ. Teilhard said he could not think of a single “diaphany” that caused him to be reborn in Christ.  Of course he was a priest so he must have had some call to religious belief. Yet, he writes in his dairies of a mystical experience he had of an image or likeness (Edna Ruth had difficulty making a precise translation) of Christ offering his heart on the wall of a church where he had gone to pray. Even the fuzzy drawing of the face of Jesus Christ that hung on Miss Muncey’s wall at Trinity church can guide, and perhaps sustain, our faith.  Sustaining your faith in God, day to day, will allow you to get through the war.  Then from a distance of time and space, we can make sense of these struggles.

We know the word of God through the face of Christ. In the Epistles, Paul said: “For God who said, ‘Let there be light in the darkness,’ has made us understand that it is the brightness of his glory that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor 4:6, KJV) Scholars are perplexed about where those exact words appear in the Hebrew Bible. Was Paul thinking of Genesis 1:3 (“…Let there be light”) or Psalms 112:4 (“Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness…”) or the prophesy of Isaiah 9:2 (“The people  that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they dwell in the land of the shadow of death upon them hath the light shined.”)?

You can be confident that those things disclosed to human beings about God come from the transformation of Christ.  Eddie, I think you like to call it morphology but that is not a very reverential term for our Lord and Savior!  Teilhard uses the term “Christic.”  In the midst of the battlefields of France, God Almighty shapes human affairs and the incarnate Word is personified through Jesus Christ.  Will you indulge me so I can impress you with my new knowledge of Greek.  We need no noetic (noetikos) enlightenment.  God speaks equally to me with my book learning as to you with your knowledge of the real world helping to build a railroad.

Eddie, you and I can have diaphanous moments. Can you recall the wonderful hymns we sang in Trinity church.  I cannot send you music. I hope, through your mind’s ear, you will be able to hear the remarkable praises to God that Charles Wesley wrote.

Oh for a thousand tongues to sing
my great Redeemer’s praise,
the glories of my God and King
the triumphs of his grace.

My gracious Master and my God
assist me to proclaim
to spread through all the earth abroad
the honors of thy name.

Jesus! The name that charms our fears
that bids our sorrow cease;
‘tis music in the sinner’s ears,
‘tis life and health, and peace.

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
he sets the prisoners free;
his blood can make the foulest clean;
his blood availed for me.

He speaks, and listening to his voice,
new life the dead receive;
the mournful, broken hearts rejoice,
the humble poor believe.

In Christ, your head, you then shall know,
shall feel your sins forgiven,
anticipate your heaven below,In Christ, your head, you then shall know,
shall feel your sins forgiven,
anticipate your heaven below,
and own that love in heaven.

My great and distant friend, how I long to reach out and touch you with a word of encouragement as you carry out your noble tasks. You have always had a passion for life. It is that human trait John and Charles Wesley called zeal. Teilhard calls it zeste. “This is one more proof that truth has appeared only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.” (Teilhard)

Edna Ruth and I pray for you daily.  We pray for your safety.  We pray for your mission to help the European people to be free.  We pray for an outpouring of God’s grace in your life.

Unequivocally,

Ed Bartlett

The soldier, Edwin Paul Dudley, was my grandfather.  Edward Randolph Bartlett was his best friend from their childhood in Fort Madison, Iowa.  Gramps spent nearly five decades with the Santa Fe Railroad and retired in a senior management position in 1956.  In retirement, he typed a 300 page autobiography for each of his three grandsons. Much of the background material was gleaned from that unpublished book. Edward Bartlett received a D.D. from the University of Chicago (1933) and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University (1936).  He was an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.  He was a professor of Old Testament and religious education (1924-1947) and dean (1941-47) at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. From 1947 until his death in 1952, Dr. Bartlett was president of Iliff Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.  Gramps was a pallbearer at his funeral.

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Albert’s and Obama’s Peace Prize Monday, Dec 14 2009

President Obama singled out Albert Schweitzer as a man deserving the Nobel Peace Prize. Albert sent someone else to pick up his prize because he could not leave his jungle hospital. He delivered his Nobel lecture in the auditorium at Oslo University a year after receiving the award. His words were directed at the nations of the world who developed nuclear weapons, especially the United States because the dropped bombs on Japan to end World War Two. “…We must concede to each nation the right to stand ready to defend itself with the terrible weapons now at its disposal.” But he said that the nations who possessed nuclear weapons should adopt an ethical mentality and a humanitarian ideal.

Albert said,”The idea that the reign of peace must come one day has been given expression by a number of peoples who have attained a certain level of civilization. In Palestine it appeared for the first time in the words of the prophet Amos in the eighth century B.C., and it continues to live in the Jewish and Christian religions as the belief in the Kingdom of God. It figures in the doctrine taught by the great Chinese thinkers: Confucius and Lao-tse in the sixth century B.C., Mi-tse in the fifth, and Meng-tse in the fourth. It reappears in Tolstoy and in other contemporary European thinkers. People have labeled it a utopia. But the situation today is such that it must become reality in one way or another; otherwise mankind will perish.”

What would Albert say to President Obama today? Most like he would tell him to get out of Afghanistan.  However, he would also be very apprehensive about the insecurity of nuclear weapons held by Pakistan. He would never forget reverence for human life.

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Teilhard and the United Nations Thursday, Oct 15 2009

The United Nations recognized Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as an agent of world peace. On September 20-21, 1983 in conjunction with the opening with the 38th meeting of the UN General Assembly, an internal colloquium assembled to honor Pierre human and cosmic thought. Secretary General H.E. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar praised the his “universal, humanitarian and spiritual thinking.” The UN honored one of their own, undersecretary Robert Muller, who wrote several books using Pierre’s philosophy on global spirituality including the Noosphere (Greek “Noos”, spiritual intellect) which is the best of his many neologisms. In his book Vision of the Past, Pierre defined noosphere as the “thinking envelope of the biosphere,” and “the conscious unity of the souls.” Late in his life, Pierre wrote in his final book, The Heart of the Matter, that the noosphere was “the very Soul of the Earth.” Muller and the members of the UN believed that the success of peace in the world is a by shaping a global spirituality. Muller outlined those principles in two of his own books, Most of All They Taught Me Happiness and New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality (where he listed Five Teilhardian Enlightenments).

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Nobel Peace Prize 1952-2009 Saturday, Oct 10 2009

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. “The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” Albert Schweitzer won the Peace Prize in 1952. Albert first talked of his concerns about the use of nuclear bombs in a letter to the London Daily Herald on the April 14, 1954. Albert did not get to Oslo to accept his Prize until November 4, 1954. In his acceptance address that November, he lectured the world about the danger of atomic weapons. “The superman has progressed to the stage where, thanks to a device designed for the purpose, he can use the energy released by the combustion of a given combination of chemical products. This enables him to employ a much more effective projectile and to propel it over far greater distances. However, the superman suffers from a fatal flaw. He has failed to rise to the level of superhuman reason which should match that of his superhuman strength. He requires such reason to put this vast power to solely reasonable and useful ends and not to destructive and murderous ones. Because he lacks it, the conquests of science and technology become a mortal danger to him rather than a blessing.” Albert did not stop there. He continued to be a voice against nuclear proliferation in the world. He wrote a letter to President Eisenhower on January 10, 1957 and said, “We both share the conviction that humanity must find a way to control the weapons which now menace the very existence of life on earth. May it be given to us both to see the day when the world’s people will realize that the fate of all humanity is now at stake, and that it is urgently necessary to make bold decisions that can deal adequately with the agonizing situation in which the world finds itself.” On April 24, 1957 and again on again in April 1958 Albert issued a public statement “Peace or Atomic War” on Radio Oslo begging the United States and Soviet Russia to stop testing hydrogen bombs. Albert had been nominated thirty-two times for the Prize between 1930 and 1952. Obama won on his FIRST nomination!  In 2009, Obama and Albert carries the same dire messages about the threat of nuclear weapons in the world.

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Search for the Historic Jesus Monday, Sep 28 2009

In his book The Quest for the Historic Jesus, Albert Schweitzer came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ lived as a human being in history but Jesus expected the end of time. Albert encouraged readers to come their own conclusions about the nature and life of Jesus from their unique life experiences. The controversy that surrounded Albert (and still surround scholars today) is similar to the way religious scholars today view the fiction of The Da Vinci Code. The intellectual community discussed and disputed elements of Albert’s theories about a historic Jesus. History and the personality of Jesus were the crux of Schweitzer’s investigations.

Albert published The Quest for the Historic Jesus when he was thirty-one years old, writing a liberal argument that contradicted many prominent scholars and theologians. Today with the volume of information on the Internet, The Quest for the Historic Jesus might not see the light of day. In the early part of the twentieth century, scholars did not ignore Albert’s liberal theology questioning the history of Jesus. Although he did not question Jesus’ divinity, in The Quest of the Historic Jesus, he said “we only get a Life of Jesus with yawning gaps. How are these gaps filled? These are really no other means of arriving at the order and inner connection of the facts of the life of Jesus than making and testing the hypothesis.” Nothing in the Holy Bible was written when Jesus lived. That abundance of knowledge left by twentieth century Germans and French scholars is priceless today. The book caused controversy that overshadowed Albert’s work as a humanitarian and dogged him until his death in 1965.

With his profound doubts, some people thought that Albert was a Christian humanist. He looked at the world and saw good and evil, right and wrong as interventions by humans based on human experiences. They felt that his ethics were situational. However, Albert believed in the spiritual Christ. He questioned the authenticity of the Bible as a document and rejected the miracles of Jesus (as well as the Immaculate Conception and the resurrection) but he saw God in nature. He decided to remain a Christian even though he saw the religious establishment as flawed. He thought he could preach his own convictions and live a good life. In that way, he was like most searching Christians who has doubts but chooses to live righteous lives.

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Teilhard’s Mystic Science Sunday, Sep 13 2009

The Catholic Encyclopedia defines mysticism as “a religious tendency and desire of the human soul towards an intimate union with the Divinity…. This contemplation, according to Mysticism, is not based on a merely analogical knowledge of the Infinite, but as a direct and immediate intuition of the Infinite.” Pierre understood that there was constant conflict between the secular and the religious world. Jesuits studied science so there was antagonism with Church doctrine. In his book Human Energy, he called it the “unhappy war between science and religion…. a struggle between two rivals mysticisms for the mastery of the human heart.”(177) For Pierre, science was an integral part of mysticism, the “Science of Sciences,” “the great science and the great art, the only power capable of synthesizing the riches accumulated by other forms of human activity.” In Letters from a Traveler, Pierre says, “the mystical vibration is inseparable from the scientific vibration.” During the Great War, Pierre found a mystical God in the cosmos and the battlefields of France.

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Catholic orthodoxy Saturday, Aug 29 2009

The Roman Catholic Church refused permission for Pierre to publish anything except technical scientific papers during his lifetime. After his death, his estate printed his books. The church had no control. In June 1962 the Vatican Holy Office issued a Monitum (just prior to the opening of Vatican II) saying that Teilhard’s writings “abound in ambiguous statements concerning matters of philosophy and theology, and serious errors, that offend Catholic doctrine.” The Holy See did not elaborate. Donald P. Gray, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College spoke at Marist College in 2005 on the fiftieth anniversary of Teilhard’s death. He said that the condemnation would have been much worse except that the same year Father Henri de Lubac wrote his book The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (Le Pensée religieuse du Père Teilhard de Chardin). The censors of the book ordered that the book not be reprinted. The first printing was tripled and sent to the warehouse so copies would always be available for posterity. “In his spiritual writings Père Teilhard was always more concerned to define an interior attitude than to lay bare the dogmatic foundations. They do, indeed emerge in many of his writings and are given prominence, but they are not the object of a study in any way comparable to that we find in The Phenomenon of Man or Le Milieu Divin.

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Sacred Heart of Jesus Monday, Aug 17 2009

All the prayer books in the house of Teilhard de Chardin had a fleur-de-lis on the cover. While the children learned from an English or German governess, Madame Teilhard taught them about the Sacred Heart of Jesus. According to http://www.thesacredheart.com/ Christ chose Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), Visitandine of the monastery at Paray-le Monial in France, to reveal the desires of His Heart and to confide the task of inspiring new life to the devotion. There is nothing to indicate that this epiphany had been known to anyone prior to the revelations. There were many encounters with Jesus. The appearance was especially vivid! They occurred on the feast of Saint John when Jesus permitted Margaret Mary to rest her head upon His Heart and then disclosed to her the wonders of His love, telling her that He desired to make them known to all mankind and to spread His goodness to the world. He had chosen her for this work. Historians believe this happened on December 27, 1673. Jesus appeared radiant with love and asked for a devotion of love through frequent Communion beginning with Communion on the First Friday of the month and the observance of the Holy Hour probably during June and July 1674. That known as the “great apparition” which took place during the octave of Corpus Christi (probably June 16, 1675). Jesus purportedly said, “Behold the Heart that has so loved men, instead of gratitude I receive from the greater part of mankind only ingratitude” and asked her for a feast of reparation of the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, bidding Father de la Colombière (then superior of the small Jesuit house at Paray) for a new devotion especially confided to the religious of the Visitation and the Jesuit priests. The death of Margaret Mary, 17 October 1690 did not dampen the enthusiasm of the people. A short account of her life published by Father Croiset in 1691, as an appendix to his book “De la Dévotion au Sacré Cœur” served only to increase it. In spite of all sorts of obstacles, and of the slowness of the Vatican to recognize what happened at Paray-le Monial, which in 1693 imparted indulgences to the Confraternities of the Sacred Heart (and in 1697 granted the feast to the Visitandines with the Mass of the Five Wounds), the Pope refused a feast common to all. Later there was a special Mass and Office as devotion spread, particularly in religious communities. The Marseilles plague in 1720 furnished perhaps the first occasion for a solemn consecration and public worship outside of religious communities. Other cities of the South followed the example of Marseilles. In 1726, it was deemed advisable once more to importune Rome for a feast with a Mass and Office of its own. However, in 1729 Rome again refused. However, in 1765, it finally yielded and that same year, at the request of the queen, the feast was received quasi officially by the episcopate of France. In 1856 Pope Pius IX extended the feast to the universal Church under the rite of double major. In 1889, it was raised by the Church to the double rite of first class. The acts of consecration and of reparation were everywhere introduced together with the devotion. Since about 1850 groups, congregations and States have consecrated themselves to the Sacred Heart. In 1875 this consecration was made throughout the Catholic world. Still the pope did not wish to take the initiative or to intervene. On 11 June 1899, by order of Leo XIII and with the formula prescribed by him, all mankind was solemnly consecrated to the Sacred Heart. The idea of this act, which Leo XIII called “the great act” of his pontificate, had been proposed to him by a religious of the Good Shepherd from Oporto (Portugal) who said that she had received it from Christ Himself. She was a member of the Drost-zu-Vischering family, and known in religion as Sister Mary of the Divine Heart. She died on the feast of the Sacred Heart, two days before the consecration, which had been deferred to the following Sunday. While alluding to these great public manifestations those who are blessed by the Sacred Heart of Jesus must not omit referring to the intimate life of the devotion in souls, to the practices connected with it, and to the works and associations of which it was the very life. Moreover, they must not overlook the social character that it has assumed particularly of late years. The Catholics of France, especially, cling to the Sacred Heart as one of their strongest hopes of ennoblement and salvation. For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, it created hope every day of his life.

 

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki Thursday, Aug 6 2009

On this date August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima Japan. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945. From his hospital at Lambaréné, these deaths terrified Albert. He knew that it ended World War II but also violated his covenant of reverence for life. In 1957, he issued a worldwide public appeal, “A Declaration of Conscience.” In it he said, “That radioactive elements created by us are found in nature is an astounding event in the history of the earth and of the human race. To fail to consider its importance and its consequences would be a folly for which humanity would have to pay a terrible price. We are committing a folly in thoughtlessness. It must not happen that we do not pull ourselves together before it is too late. We must muster the insight, the seriousness, and the courage to leave folly and to face reality.” Albert published a book Peace or Atomic War? which remains as relevant and compelling today as it was 51 years ago, given President Obama’s efforts at proliferation of nuclear weapons today.

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Civil rights movement Monday, Jul 27 2009

The ‘tête à tête encounters between blacks and whites in modern society has become only a little bit smoother in the era since Barack Obama became president. That one achievement has not healed wounds that festered for a lifetime. The arrest of African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates in his own home brought to bear how easy it is for a new storm to brew. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21gates.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=henry%20louis%20gates&st=cse 

Albert Schweitzer became interested in race relations when he was a little boy. He was drawn to the plight of the Black man in far-flung nations of the world. In the village square at Colmar in Alsase he visited a monument built by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi to a famous French Admiral Bruat. Part of the sculpture was an oversized, reclining Negro figure that intrigued Albert because it resembled a noble, suffering motif of a man from Africa. “His face, with its sad, thoughtful expression, spoke to me of the misery of the Dark Continent.” This encounter first occurred when Albert was ten years old. It made a profound influence on his life and his biographers say that he decided as a young boy to dedicate his life to making life better for Africans.

Albert visited the statue in Colmar hundreds of times. When his sister Louisa married Monsieur Jules Ehretmann and lived in Colmar, Albert visited the statue often as an adult. In James Bentley’s biography of Schweitzer, he says that “Each time, he purposely went to brood over Bartholdo’s statue, in order, as he put it to be ’tête à tête with my negro.’”

Later, Albert recalled of his face-to-face encounter with the Negro, “If record could be made of all that has happened between white and the colored races, some of the pages—referring to recent as well as to earlier times–would be turned over unread, because their contents would be too horrible for the reader.” http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/07/24/us/politics/1247463625698/obama-on-gates-s-arrest.html

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