381 - The Everlasting Arms

The Everlasting Arms

Those who are familiar with the late nineteenth century gospel song based on the text from Deuteronomy 33:27 know how the church rafters can rattle with the refrain:

Leaning, leaning,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.

It is a song of praise, comfort, and assurance. Not sophisticated enough, musically or verbally, for most mainline hymnals, the words of the text, "the eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms," are well-known and often cited in various liturgical contexts as well as in personal affirmations that whatever may happen, we are protected and safe because of the Almighty's sustaining power and presence.

I

But what of those who have no such assurance or conviction? They are the ones Harry Emerson Fosdick once described as having "no invisible means of support." Whether defiant atheist or unsure agnostic, "the everlasting arms" seems improbable and more a matter of whistling-in-the-dark than of stark reality. Let two recent personal experiences illustrate the point.

A "senior citizen" of my acquaintance lost her husband not long ago to inoperable cancer. They both knew that all was not well, and they had lived a long and happy life together. But when the inevitable end came, she was unprepared and for several weeks became a virtual recluse. Aware of my religious associations, she felt compelled to explain why there was no funeral or memorial service. A dozen family members, including a son and a daughter, met at her apartment for a picnic, of all things, and as a tribute to the patriarch who had meant much to all of them.

"We grew up in a church where we once lived," she explained, "but when the children married and left the nest, we felt we didn't need the church anymore." Asked to write a few words that the gathered group could read together, I struggled with a simple eulogy without any religious reference, closing with the lines from Robert Louis Steven-

382 - The Everlasting Arms

son, which were hardly appropriate but the only thing I could think of on such short notice:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig my grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:
"Here he lies where he longed to be;
Here is the sailor, home from sea
And the hunter home from the hill."

My friend is trying to put the pieces of her broken life back together, but what struck me at the time was the pathos of a person desperately in need of what she had once known, that "underneath are the everlasting arms."

II

The second example relates to a man who is losing his wife to Alzheimer's and all its unpredictable but certain symptoms. Growing up in a small mid-Western town, his parents frequently invited the minister for Sunday noon dinner, the most important meal of the week in those far-away days. But in later years, he had outgrown his rural church associations and became a well-to-do business executive in a metropolitan center.

Now he is faced with a crisis made more poignant because of another crisis some years ago when his wife stood by him when he needed all the help he could get. She supported him with her " everlasting arms," so to speak, but what she had once meant for him, he now realizes he must be for her.

He confided in me one day and said he knew that the world and everything in it were created and didn't just happen by chance, but that was as far as he could go. He hinted that he would like to talk with me sometime, and I agreed even though I don't know what I'd say, except for one thing.

My friend in recent years and since retirement devotes long hours every day in a local hospital as a volunteer courier taking patients from here to there. I think he could begin to build on his volunteer contribution as well as on his uncomplaining devotion to his wife. He doesn't know it, but it could be that Matthew's words apply in a special way to my friend, "as you did it to one of the least of these...."

He is not yet ready to speak of God, but my guess is that he would understand the lines of Minie Louise Haskins which George VI of England read as a New Year's message during the darkest days of WWII:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied: "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way."

383 - The Everlasting Arms

III

These examples, especially the second, may remind us of the episode in the New Testament where the father of a boy with "a dumb spirit" (convulsions, epilepsy, or whatever) begs Jesus to heal his only son who is in danger of self-destruction. When Jesus tells him that "all things are possible to him who believes," the father blurts out the familiar plea-" I believe, help my unbelief' (Mark 9:14-27).

There are, as the late Halford E. Luccock noted, several ways to interpret this text. It could mean "Change my unbelief into belief"; or "Help my lack of faith"; or "Help me in spite of my inadequate faith"; or "Help me even in my unbelief."

Faith and doubt are often regarded as mutually exclusive, and there is a type of assertive faith among us today that disallows doubt in any form. In an article to appear in a future issue of THEOLOGY TODAY by Rebecca Propst on what she calls the "avoidant personality," a case study of a disturbed school teacher is analyzed at some length. The teacher is having all sorts of personal and emotional problems making her life miserable because she is also a devout Christian. The "avoidant" aspect of her personality cannot accept the possibility of personal pain and suffering simply because to be a Christian, in her view and as she has been taught, means always to be joyful and carefree.

But the Bible surely is on the side of presenting faith and doubt as coexisting, with doubt sometimes in the ascendancy and sometimes faith-and both in the same person, at the same time. Many of the Psalms and the Book of Job would be good examples in the Hebrew Scriptures, and Jesus' "cry of dereliction" from the cross and Paul's "thorn in the flesh" come to mind as characteristic of the Christian gospel.

IV

Back to "leaning on the everlasting arms." The third verse of the song begins with the words "What have I to dread, what have I to fear?" That is the bold rhetorical question of faith. But in other hymns we can voice "the rising doubt, the rebel sigh" as we plead to "take the dimness of my soul away," and that is the equally bold confession of doubt.

John A. Mackay, the founder of THEOLOGY TODAY, studied with Miguel de Unamuno (d. 1936) when Mackay was a graduate student in Spain. He applauded Unamuno's "tragic sense of life" for which he felt rapport as a Celt from the Scottish Highlands. One of Unamuno's aphorisms related faith and doubt as necessary for each other:

La vida es duda,
y la fe sin la duda
es solo muerte.

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(Life is doubt,
and faith without doubt
is nothing but death).

It is a paradoxical view that many would today find congenial and helpful, on the way to awareness that "underneath are the everlasting arms. "

Hugh T. Kerr