3 | Sacred Ground
Buber’s simple thoughts stream from the page into the understanding
It was a monsoon of spiritual and intellectual ferment. My traditional faith, nurtured in a praying and pious Indian Christian home in which I was the son and grandson of pastors, would not do well in a seminary culture given to open dialogue and driven by the quest for learning. The pictures on the walls of our home in Ferozepore, the strong arms of the Good Shepherd reaching over the cliff’s edge to save the lamb, the tearful Christ with the crown of thorns knocking on the door, Christ in Gethsemane, were incongruous with the books and the music in my room. John Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, produced by the student theater group, further expanded my horizons and told me I was a self very much in the making.
In this creative atmosphere of crosscurrents the big question insinuated itself upon me like Leviathan suddenly appearing beside the ship. I was reading it in books. It was written in the walls of modernity and carried on the winds of the times, even printed in the fire of the human chest and the fog of theology. It was the question of the magi, as I was to learn later, in W.B. Yeats’ poem of 1914: Unconvinced by Calvary, the pale unsatisfied ones probe the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. It was the quest of The Other Wise Man in Henry Van Dyke’s classic story. Artaban misses his meeting in Borsippa with the magi of scripture because he stops in the dark grove of date palms in Babylon to heal a dying Hebrew. The story has the hero come up empty in his stated search for the One whose star he had seen in Persia, but there is yet the deeper hunger for the true meaning of his long journey. This hidden and obscure troubledness brings him over the years to wounded beings who stand in need of healing, protection, and freedom.
In particular it was the simple little paperback I and Thou by the theologian Martin Buber that left me with a not yet recognized quarrel with the systematic theology I was studying. It had just been published in English and was already beginning to cause ripples in American thought. Buber had no grand system to promulgate or protect. His simple thoughts streamed from the page into the understanding and the cells of the body, no need to cast about for proof.
The book focuses on the relationship signified by the words I and Thou, which when spoken engage the whole being, not just the intellect or emotion. What is the I without the Thou? Just an isolated, desolate reed shaken by the wind. Its voice is never heard. It is unvisited, vacant, autistic. But the I and its Thou in their interaction experience integrity, fullness, and power as living beings. Their voices project irresistibly to the four corners of the café. They are the cynosure of all eyes and ears.
I and Thou are also contrasted by Buber with I and It. The I and It relationship is not spoken with the whole being. Buber gives the example of a tree. It is beautiful, you are lost in its warm autumn glow, and your response is sensuous and spontaneous and whole. Your I and Thou relation with the tree is direct and immediate. The tree is a subject, a living being speaking to you in its own language of colors and lines. But this very Thou, Buber warns, must become an object and lose its property of being a subject. Your relation to it will inevitably become an I-It relation.
You leave that place near the stone bridge, now enchanted, and walk down the trail beside the river, thinking back about the tree. The memory lingers with its yellow dust. You think, How the fallen leaves made such a perfect circle beneath the tree. You remember, Did not my heart burn within me as I stood beside that tree? Did not that place become a sacred ground, and the tree a burning bush that was not consumed? You muse, How every living being has a body, an age, a spring, an autumn. And as you walk between the river and the carpet of wildflowers you wonder, How life is even more beautiful and precious in its vulnerability and evanescence.
But now you have drifted into your head in relation to that tree. Though your thoughts still glow in its luminous splendor, the tree is now a mere object in those thoughts. Furthermore, the world is expanding to be larger than that single tree. New entities appear that become for you a Thou. A wooden footbridge crossing the river comes into view and occupies the mind.
Even at that young age I could tell that Buber’s work constituted a momentous breakthrough in the area of religion. I and Thou contained a treasure chest of implications which I could at most intuit then. For one thing, I took from it what was still a crude understanding of Truth in the big, capitalized sense as a sort of guide. Our ideas are True in the big sense insofar as they are transparent of their I and Thou ground of being. To the extent that they lose contact with ground control, they lose their Truth. Our theology classes in seminary were so academic, straying so far down the street from their reason for being, that they often left us cold, unsatisfied, uncertain as to their Truth.
Buber was raised in a home in which the primary relationship, namely the I and Thou, between his mother and father was broken. In his autobiographical writings he says that his nanny’s words about his mother, “No, she will never come back,” cleaved to his heart. He must have pondered the gendered nature of I and Thou, having read almost certainly the pioneering study of Ludwig Feuerbach on that subject.
It is possible that he even distanced himself unconsciously from I and Thou. He writes of the silence of the workers when he delivered lectures on religion in the folk-school. The silence became painfully clear by the third evening. One worker came and explained that they were not allowed to speak, and would Professor Buber be willing to meet with them the next evening at a different venue? He did go to the agreed place, and an older person challenged him about God. Suddenly the atmosphere was strained, and Buber’s arguments backed the man into a corner.
Again there was silence. In that second silence Buber came to confront the tragic primal fact. He had presented in his lectures merely the I-It God of the philosophers, depriving the workers of the Eternal Thou. In particular, he had not been truly present as Thou for this man. His ego had gotten the better of him, and now it was late in the day.
4 | Market Street
If you’re young, take a chance if you love her
Buber regretted his comportment toward the workers, having left them not with the Eternal Thou, but with the philosophers’ God of the intellect. In 1933 after he was dismissed from the university, he continued to be present in Germany for his people instead of leaving for Palestine. In the face of the boycott, the deprivation of civil service jobs, the Reich Citizenship Law, and the lengthening shadows of harassment and horror, he continued to counsel and console.
Though I could not connect the dots all around and beyond the sky, I intuited the singular truth of Buber’s message. I possessed it, I grew into it as I had grown into my father’s New York City suits as a teenager. It was not clear to me how exactly the Eternal Thou, God, fit into the I and Thou scheme of things. This nagged at me. The best I could do was to say that particular I and Thou relationships are in some sense perhaps sacred ground, and that a particular Thou is related in some murky sense to the Eternal Thou. The God question was turning out to be the big and momentous question quite early in my life.
Did I see the face of the Eternal Thou in the face of Paul and Mary Bodine? A short and stocky freshman, soft-spoken but articulate, Paul was carrying a full academic load. He did not have a full scholarship as I did. He delivered newspapers on the narrow streets winding up and down the hills in the foggy mornings, and he came to class tired, not having read his assignments. His background was conservative too, and we talked when we could. Paul and Mary took the trouble to have me over for dinner in their small rented house on one of the hills.
My visit was an intimate look into their life. She was pale and very pretty, with a round face. Hugely pregnant too, and shy, blushing easily. We spoke of her Salvation Army background and their courtship, and we noted that she wore no lipstick. It is sad that we lost touch so soon as the academic years progressed, as often students do. I have treasured them like old photographs in my heart for a long, long time. Were they reflections in a metaphysical pond of the Eternal Thou? This question, in truth, was not yet