We take pleasure in presenting The Art of Living, in cooperation with the National Council of the Churches of Christ. Our speaker today is Dr. Theodore Parker Farris, Rector of the Trinity Church of Boston. Today's topic: The Water Levels of Life.

Dr. Farris:

Not long after I had become the Rector of Trinity Church in Boston, the Senior Warden gave me a list of committees and the names of the men who served on them. The first one, as you might imagine, was the Finance Committee, then there was the Budget Committee, the Buildings and Grounds Committee, the Nominating Committee, the Long Range Planning Committee, the Camp Committee, many others, and by the end of the list was the Committee in Charge of Water Levels. I was on familiar ground until I got to that point.

I had been the minister of one other church before I went to Boston and I knew something about the committees needed to run a church. I said to one of the men, "What in the world is the Committee in Charge of Water Levels?" He said, "The place where the church stands is called the Back Bay." I knew that, of course. It was once a real bay and where we now stand was water.

About the middle of the 19th century, the Bostonians had the imagination and the ingenuity to fill in the bay. It was an enormous undertaking. All the city around Trinity Church is made land and the water is only a few feet under the sidewalk. Trinity Church was built in 1877 and it rests on 4,500 wooden piles. You know as well as I know that wood doesn't rot so long as it's kept in water. Once let the air get to it and thats the end of the wood. The Committee in Charge of Water Levels, therefore, is responsible for seeing that the water is kept at a level high enough to protect the piles and keep them from rotting. In the cellar of the church there are wells, they look like manholes. And every week someone takes the reading of the water level.

There have been times when the water level has gone down. When the new buildings around Copley Square were being built, water had to be pumped out of the area so that the concrete barge on which the new buildings stand could be built. So water had to be pumped back into the foundations of Trinity Church to keep the water level high enough to protect the old wooden piles. The Committee watches the water level. This, as you may guess, is an allegory, not a parable but an allegory. The wooden piles are the foundations upon which our society is built, the water is the moral and spiritual environment which keep the foundations from rotting. If the level of our moral and spiritual life falls below a certain point, the foundations of our society will begin to crumble and will eventually fall.

My question is if we could take readings of these water levels, the water levels of our moral and spiritual life, what would they be? There isn't any possible way of doing it, of course, so your guess is as good as mine. But I have a feeling that the level at the present moment is too low for safety.

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Our schools are long on technical training and short, by and large, on the basic discipline which gives a person not only an education but a character. Whatever you want to call it, it is the stuff a man is made of which makes him able to face situations he has to meet in life. Our schools are well-prepared to give him an education which provides him with a certain amount of knowledge, but not often those basic disciplines which help him build a mature character so he can handle well whatever happens to him.

Sometimes our hospitals are long on scientific research, but short on the human approach to the patient.

Our business houses are long on promotion and public relations. They can create an image to their liking of almost anything, but too often they are short on what we call integrity. They can create an image, but they seldom ask seriously what the image is about or whether it is true, or whether it really represents what they are trying to sell. They are long on expense accounts and short on accountability.

Perhaps I am biased about this, as perhaps it is because I don't see enough people. But it seems to be increasingly plain that there are fewer and fewer people who rejoice in making something well just for the sake of making it. In other words, once again, we are long on cleverness, but short on craftsmanship.

If this is anything like a fair reading of the present water level, if you agree that the water level is too low for comfort, what can we do about it? How can we raise those water levels? I know my own temptation when I think about these things is to say, "What can I do, only one person, to resist such a tide as this? I am helpless." But I know from history and from my own experience that a relatively few people can do a great deal indirectly, if not directly. When I stop to think about it I know that I can do a great deal more than I am likely to think I can.

Never underestimate the power of a woman, someone once said. Never doubt the power of one determined, dedicated individual. One of the people I follow closely is Herbert Butterfield, Professor of History at Cambridge University in England. He is a Methodist layman and all his writing must be read in the light of his Christian faith. In his book, Christianity, Diplomacy and War, he writes this:

"A comparatively small number of communists possessing initially no measurable degree of power achieved in the thirty years after 1917 such a transformation of the globe as has rarely been equaled in magnitude or in thoroughness or in extent they achieved far more than all the armies of the Kaiser and the Tsar or the British and Austrian and Hungarian empires and of the United States put together." 

All those people who are driven to pessimism and paralysis by the ideal that nothing can be affected on this earth save by numbers and powers may take comfort therefore from this exhilarating example. And then comes this line:

"Given the required intensity and intenseness, a comparatively few Christians could alter the course of history as powerfully as the communists have done." 

It is worth remembering, especially when you feel hopelessly outnumbered, that many of the great things in the world have been started by relatively few people.

You know how many people came over on the Mayflower? Since this was one of the breeding grounds of the democratic experiment, it is worth knowing how many people were involved in that chapter of its story. There were about 100. And how many signed the Mayflower Compact? 41.

I don't know whether you have had any experience with Alcoholic's Anonymous, but you must have heard about it. That group has saved more individuals from one particular branch of hell than any other group I know. Do you know how it started? One man started it. Bill Wilson. Of course, there were many influences in his life all converging together at one strategic point, but one man started the movement that has saved thousands from alcoholic hell.

One other thing I know is that if the level of our moral and spiritual life is raised, it will be done by people who are not trying to do it. That may not make much sense to you at the moment, but if you stop to think about it you will see, I think, that the people who have often made the biggest dent on the world for good have invariably been engaged in doing something else. Most historians would say that John Wesley saved England from a violent industrial revolution. He didn't have any idea that he was doing it. He was drawing people to the mercy seat. Saint Paul, historians say, changed the course of Western Europe. He didn't have any ideal he was doing it. He was going up and down the civilized world preaching Christ crucified.

In the long run, the people who lift the level of this world are the ones who have their eyes on something beyond the immediate thing. They are not the reformers, they are not the do-gooders, almost never. They are the people who are lit by a light from another world which shines without their knowing it. And they do, or often quite unconsciously, something that changes the climate of the world they live in. Again, I quote Herbert Butterfield, "The profoundest effects in our civilization have been produced by people who were not thinking of effecting the course of human affairs at the mundane level. They have come as unanticipated byproducts of lives that have really been intent on spiritual things. "

What do you think about all of this? What do you think about the water level of your own life? What do you think about your influence and what it is on the lives of people around you? Do you care whether our society stands or falls? Perhaps you don't. But I think you do. Will you make yourself a "Committee of One" to do something with yourself so that wherever you go there may be a chance that the level of life is lifted, imperceptibly perhaps, but lifted nonetheless?

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