O Teacher

On the day of your feast — the feast of your Passion, then your glory — your voice rang in my ear, and I believed in you.

I believed in you calling to a brotherhood all-embracing, in which there is no difference between green and white and black, giving as your example the compassionate Samaritan; that is because I have seen that our world has not been set right by much learning, nor by art, nor by wealth — rather, as the years and the generations passed, all of it appeared vanity and a grasping at the wind. For the brotherhood you proclaimed on the day you said, love your neighbor as yourself — and when you were asked, and who is my neighbor? you gave the parable of the compassionate Samaritan — this brotherhood is all that we need.

I believed in your teachings calling to austerity: your food a loaf bought from the nearest village, or ears of wheat you rub in your own hands... You walk from village to village on foot, you sleep in the open with a stone for your pillow; you live by your spirit so as to raise that spirit above this trifling veil called a body... I believed in your austerity, O Teacher, because I have seen that as long as we have lived for the sake of our bodies, providing them pleasure in all its kinds, the more these bodies were glutted with pleasures the more our spirits dried up and withered, and we became nearer to the animals than to you.

I believed in you wishing for us a faith like the faith of children — "unless you become like these little ones, you shall never enter the kingdom of heaven." I looked out over the generations that have rolled by, and I saw us on the day we abandoned our faith, the faith of children — the day the creature stood upon the threshold of science and imagined he had understood everything, and wished to touch heaven with his finger before he would believe — the day we turned philosophers we became wretched unbelievers.

I believed in you, great in your love: even the publican — you invite yourself to his house to be his guest; and the adulteress, whom people disdain to speak with — you sit with her at the well of Samaria and speak to her of the salvation of her soul; and the thief — even the thief on the cross had his share of your love. It is as if I hear you, O Teacher, saying to man: My son, I know that you are a sinner, wretched, weighed down with iniquities; and yet I love you — I love you so that you in turn may love your brother, and so delight in the grace of love and taste its beauty.

I believed in you, O Nazarene — I believed in greatness born in a manger, in philosophy springing from the lips of a carpenter, in tender lawgiving flowing from a heart that never beat except with loftiness and forgiveness. I believed in you because many before you spoke; but the one who spoke, and practiced, and lived according to what he taught — that one is you, O great Nazarene.

I believed in your teachings; so whisper them no longer as a whisper in my ear — the clamor of life has dulled my hearing, the misery of life has covered over all my thinking, and the pleasures of life have distracted me from you. Let your voice peal in my ear, that it may reach my heart, so that I may understand the human brotherhood you wanted me to understand, and the sublime love you pictured for me, which is all my world needs, and the forgiveness and the austerity by which the earth becomes a piece of your heaven.

Let your voice peal in my ear, that I may be as you would have me, O Teacher!

Issue Five — Year Eight — May 1952