TO BE, OR NOT TO BE
‘To be, or
not to be’, are the opening words of what must be the most famous soliloquy of
all. The struggle to be who we are, and not what we would like to appear to be,
is the greatest challenge. Only one
person fulfilled it and he was baptised in the Jordan by John a long time ago.
The speech goes on, ‘conscience makes cowards of us all.’ We know we fail ‘to
be’ and this is the great sorrow of being human – something so powerfully
expressed centuries ago in the Cloud of
Unknowing.
Conscience
never gives up, even if it seems suffocated by layers of opposition. A stream
finding its way down the mountain serves as a parable. It rushes on only to be
blocked by a rock or a mound. Angrily,
it finds its way round or through. At
other times it disappears in wetland or bog or is held in a pool. But, one way or another, it reaches the sea. Conscience will not give up even if its owner
does.
The little
known story of the Scholl siblings and their friends, who opposed Hitler when
he was at the height of his power in the Second World War, is one story of the
triumph of conscience.[1] They were all students in Munich and had
watched the advance of Nazism in Germany with growing unease. They read Augustine and Newman. They
discussed in their rooms and in their expeditions to the mountains. Finally, they acted. Secretly they produced a series of leaflets
denouncing Hitler and his regime and posted them all over the country. Eventually they were caught, tried and
condemned to death. Sophie Scholl was 21
and her brother, Hans, 24. They went to
the guillotine calmly, even defiantly.
Sophie said to the judge, ‘You know the war is lost. Why can’t you have
the courage to face it?’
The struggle
to live according to one’s conscience is the struggle between external and
internal authority. The former imposes
the laws of the state, the pressure of our peers and the trends of our culture.
The latter sifts all these with an inner personal authority answerable to no
one but the person him or herself. At least that is the hope. The reality is more complex as awareness of
inner authority and, what is more, the strength to live by it, is rare. So we
end up with a compromised world where the battle ‘to be’ is often lost by
default; people prefer ‘not to be.’
So Jesus
stands alone in the Jordan with an uncomprehending crowd looking on.
13 January 2019 The Baptism of
Jesus
Isaiah 40:1…11 Titus
2:11…3:7 Luke
3:15…22
[1] Conscience before Conformity, Hans and
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Resistance in Nazi Germany, Paul
Shrimpton, Gracewing, 2018
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