Note: The following is an edited excerpt of a personal letter written by Harold Bock in the 1960s to friends and family. This essay explains the aims of a course of study that he and a fellow high-school teacher developed for high-school students in the 1960s using the Bill of Rights, the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, Pope John XXIII’s 1964 encyclical on establishing universal peace, Pacem in Terris, the Sermon on the Mount, and other sources. “We believe man’s highest aspirations are expressed in these ‘documents’ and that if this be true the purposes and functions of man’s social, political, economic, and religious institutions should be measured, evaluated, and judged by his greatest ethical concepts,” writes Harold in his introductory notes.
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, would that ye Knew upon what your future depends!” ―Jesus Christ
Healthy, emotionally secure persons enjoy the challenge of new experiences, of growing, maturing, learning new skills. The insecure person clings to what he has “like and enraged clam” (to use a David Cort phrase). His very insecurity prevents the rational evaluation so essential to growth and maturity. We therefore believe that satisfying a students’ need for safety, self-esteem, acceptance, respect, etc., may be more important than satisfying his need for “knowledge.” Furthermore, if a person or a nation is headed in the wrong direction, technical “knowledge” will only hasten disaster more efficiently and effectively. This is the human condition. The time, place, and characters have changed but Jesus’ lamentation of 1900 years ago is precisely the same.
To my knowledge J.C. never composed a manual for frustrated, distraught, world savers outlining the steps to a dependable future. I have no intention of correcting this oversight. Because we are inextricably bound by the things we believe, I want to wander among a few ideas for your cogitation and criticism. Ideas I have learned or had reinforced by the Sermon on the Mount (read The Sermon on the Mount: Key to Success in Life by Emmet Fox, which is still in print from HarperSanFrancisco). “If one’s mental states are right,” Fox says, “everything else must be right, too, whereas, nothing else can be right.” There is no such thing as something being “all right in theory but not in practice.” If theory and practice are incompatible, one or the other or both are in error. If a particular “practice” is right there has to be some sound theory supporting it. If some theory is sound there has to be some way of translating it into meaningful action. We should not suffer nonsense gladly. Inquiry into the nature of reality must remain open and we have no more business tolerating the lamentations of modern Pharisees and hypocrites than Jesus did in his day. As there is no such thing as an effect without a cause, there can be no such thing as some deplorable condition “just happening” or being explained away as destiny or God’s will. All of man’s works from philosophy to philanthropy, from the art to the atom bomb, are the product of his creative mind. We may be victims of history but we are not its prisoners.
“As man thinketh in his heart (sub-conscious mind) so is he” (and so are all his affairs.) Man’s greatest possession is his power to choose, to fashion the basic concepts upon which his life is founded. We tend to materialize whatever we focus our mind upon. This is the law. If our inner thoughts are healthy, life takes on a rosy glow even though we are immersed in a sea of troubles. If we are worried, frustrated, insecure, and fearful, we reap all the benefits of psychosomatic illnesses even though we are immersed in a sea of wealth, gadgets, national defense, secret police, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), etc. Absolutely nothing can protect the “fearful heart.” To paraphrase Job: All that he fears will come upon him. All of this is not to say that people with healthy minds always “win” and never die. Everybody dies and by the standards of a sick society, mentally healthy people are often abject failures. But the victory over self-immolating fear is one of the first steps toward any genuine attempt to cope with life and conflict. As Aldous Huxley says in Ends and Means (1937), “The most nearly free individuals have always been those who combined virtue with insight.” So, the problem is: How do we free our minds of “the great possessions” which made the rich young ruler “go away sorrowing”? “How do we go about encouraging love and diminishing hate,” as Karl Menninger puts it? If the key to our physical, social, political, and economic well-being is in the thoughts we think, the great possessions that keep us out of the “Kingdom” are our fears, hates, and attitudes toward people and things, our clinging to myths and outmoded methods of meeting life situations, our apathy and comfortable escapes from involvement. In short, our failure to “hunger and thirst after righteousness” (right thinking). “ Where your treasury is, there will your heart be also.” “If thine be single, the whole body shall be full of light.” Translated according to Emmet Fox: “Whatever you give your attention to, is the thing that governs your life.” If our own life would be full of light and our world full of blessings of peace, then we must focus our attention upon those common values and aspirations of mankind which produce peace and light. There are three ideas in Pacem in Terris which had special significance for me and which I would like to pass along. First, “The right of every man to life is correlative with a duty to preserve it.” It dawned on me that not just life but every right carries of correlative obligation to preserve it and that one of the marks of our age is the case with which we divorced rights from responsibilities. In paragraph 30 John writes “Those who claim they are own rights, yet altogether forget or neglect to carry out their respective duties, are people who build with one hand and destroy with the other.” Second, “If civil authorities legislate for or allow anything that is contrary to [the moral] order, and therefore contrary to the will of God, neither are the laws made nor the authorizations granted can be binding on the consciences of the citizens, since we must obey God rather than man.” (What was it good Germans were saying about draft-card burners in 1936?) And the third idea is that there has to be a dynamic relationship between belief and action if life is to be meaningful. To claim that everyone “has the right to security in cases of sickness, inability to work, widowhood, old age, unemployment…” while deliberately supporting or pursuing policies which deny security is to engage in self-defeating contradiction, which for most of us has become almost a habit. By this time there is a message which should be coming through: Faulty thinking, which is at the root of man’s earthly condition, destroys the faulty thinker. Wars, for example, cannot be supported and fought without some appeal to patriotism. But what is war if it is not a mutual contract between the people and “the enemy” to destroy that self-same patria that both hold dear? The more total the war the more total the destruction of the human and natural resources (the patria) of all who are involved. Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” but I give unto you a new commandment: Dredge the whole stinking, muddy concept of “the enemy” out of your head, and so live your life that people whose intrinsic natures have been damaged by whatever causes are provided the opportunity to learn to love again, so that both they and we may become worthy members of the human race. Lastly, it is not love of anyone or anything that permits us to support or condone the insane policies of men like Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara. To love them, or the myriad nations and peoples around the world affected and afflicted by their policies, or ourselves, would require that they be impeached immediately. It is not love of anyone or anything to permit anyone to ride roughshod over his fellowman. Both he and they need are active compassion. Man is born in protest, he lives in protest, and he dies in protest. Certainly those of us who live in a land “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” can protest iniquity by loving both the just and the unjust. But it ain’t that easy!
O Jerusalem
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