By Father Leonidas Contos
Walt Whitman, one of our great modern American poets, suggests this inner conflict when he asserts: “There is more to me than is contained between my hat and my shoes!” One of the most celebrated experiments aimed at concentrating on the man between the hat and the shoes was conducted by another American, Henry David Thoreau, who died about a hundred years ago. Thoreau was what you might call a highly refined homespun philosopher, well-educated but not a great scholar. A phrase of his has a disconcerting timeliness: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” His experiment with life, his individual protest against its demands and encumbrances, is carefully chronicled in his best known book, Walden Pond, whose watchword was “Simplify! Simplify!” It is obvious Thoreau did not find “civilization” sufficiently simple.
I am sure this has a welcome ring for most of us, trying to maintain a sense of the wholeness of life as it seems to grow daily more complex and fragmented. Certainly we cannot all go off into the woods, as men took refuge in the desert in the first Christian centuries. What I think Thoreau was saying was that by exploring his own tiny self-contained world as thoroughly and intelligently as he could, he had come to a fuller understanding and a deeper appreciation of human life and its meaning. By being “anxious and troubled” about fewer things, he had been able to fix his attention on “the one thing that is needful”; had achieved that better perspective of life that does not induce mirages.
I have come to know a lot of people, and surely you have, who are “anxious and troubled about many things,” who out of all their anxiety and hard work have forced life to pay them dividends, sometimes very generous ones in terms of its goods and refinements and pleasures, but who never come within range of the “one thing” and are manifestly unhappy. Many never give up the battle, because the battle is all they have left, so they spend themselves, absurdly, recklessly, wastefully, until the end.
Everyone knows of the little town of Oberammergau, nestled among the breathlessly beautiful Bavarian mountains, where practically the whole population is involved in the dramatization of the life and Passion of Christ. Every ten years, for generations, the holy drama has been reenacted by the villagers. In the intervening years young and old are preoccupied with the building of scenery, the preparation of costumes, the perfection of roles, so much so that the whole company virtually lives the divine story. That is why the Oberammergau play retains its power to inspire.
A few years ago there came to the United States on a visit the man who had portrayed the Christus over a span of thirty years. In New York a well-known news reporter interviewed him, and among other things asked him his opinion of the great city. Quietly the man replied: “This city of yours naturally amazes me, but it also troubles me. You are in such a hurry. You worry so much. You seem to be seeking so many things that are not indispensable. In our town we have only a few things—a livelihood, the love of our own, our work, our faith—a few things, but they are enough.” Reported the newsman later, “It was as though I were hearing the true Christ speaking, saying, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful…’”
~Adapted from Leonidas Contos, In Season and Out of Season: A Collection of Sermons by Father Leonidas Contos
