There is one important thing that we Protestants ought to learn from our Catholic friends. Many Protestants go to church just to hear a sermon, and if the preacher is in bad form that morning, they feel disappointed, almost aggrieved, as if they had gone to the movies and the pictures happened to be poor.
Going to church ought not to be merely passive; to go and see if the minister can entertain us. It should be a community service, where the audience participates and where spiritual refreshment and stimulation may be obtained. If we go to church merely to hear a popular preacher, then we might as well stay at home and read a popular book. The feeling of actual participation is the supreme need of the Protestant church today; not more clever preachers, but a genuine hunger in the congregation for spiritual nourishment.
XXXII
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM
I am often called an optimist, and so I am; but perhaps not in the popular meaning of the word. When a worldly wise man calls a person an optimist, he usually regards him with intellectual contempt, just as the elaborate courtesy toward women in the age of chivalry thinly disguised a cynically sensual attitude. Optimism is associated in many minds either with ignorance of life or mental inferiority; and when certain persons call others optimists, look out for them!
Thus recent definitions of the optimist illustrate the superior attitude of the pessimist: “An optimist is a fool unfamiliar with the facts.” “An optimist is one who falls out of a fourth-story window, and as he goes by the third story, he says, ‘So far, so good.’” “An optimist is one who at night makes lemonade out of the lemons that have been handed to him all day.” “A pessimist is one who lives with an optimist.”
Now the familiarly unpleasant back-slapping cheerio person, with a genius for the inopportune, is not necessarily an optimist. He is a nuisance. He was well known and dreaded like a pestilence among the ancient Jews. See the Book of Proverbs, 27:14, “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him,” and 25:29, “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.”
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A man who attempts to console another by making light of his troubles or by pretending that things are otherwise than what they obviously are will not get very far. One might as well pretend in January that it is June. You cannot get rid of obstacles by ignoring them any more than you can solve problems by forgetting them. Nor can you console sufferers by reminding them of the woes of others or by inopportunely emphasising other things.
If a man slips on an orange peel that some moron has left on the pavement and breaks his leg, you will not help him by saying, “Yesterday a man fell here and broke his neck.” If a manifold father loses one of his sons by a motor accident, you can’t help him by saying, “Cheer up! You’ve got three sons left.”
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” These terrible words were spoken not by a peevish invalid or by a bankrupt, but by the Light of the World. He always and everywhere recognised the forces of evil and never pretended that life was all sunshine. Religion does not pretend that everything is easy and comfortable, for religion is not meant to fill our minds with illusions but rather with fortitude. Our Lord came into the world to show us how to bear the burden of life cheerfully and bravely; life is not easy, but His yoke is.