Waldo Beach - "A Tender Conscience" (September 30, 1962)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
(gentle music) | 0:08 | |
- | There's a phrase in the writings of the Puritans | 0:19 |
which occurs again and again | 0:24 | |
to describe a quality of character, | 0:28 | |
highly prized among our fathers and forefathers. | 0:32 | |
The phrase is a tender conscience. | 0:38 | |
Now, I suppose this term | 0:43 | |
doesn't cut much ice with us, | 0:46 | |
operators and climbers as we are | 0:49 | |
in this gothic organizational jungle, | 0:52 | |
social butterflies and lounge lizards. | 0:58 | |
Indeed, the image we have of the whole Puritan type | 1:03 | |
is quite uninviting. | 1:06 | |
He looks like a tightlaced and sniveling killjoy | 1:09 | |
with a conscious dead set | 1:14 | |
against anybody having any fun, including himself, | 1:15 | |
or against anybody ever taking a moral holiday. | 1:21 | |
But a second and closer look at the Puritan | 1:27 | |
would reveal, I think, | 1:30 | |
that the Puritan character and the Puritan age | 1:32 | |
had something of profound worth, | 1:37 | |
which today's operator lacks. | 1:41 | |
And it's this quality of a tender conscience. | 1:45 | |
As a matter of fact, the education, or miseducation | 1:50 | |
of conscience is one of the main things taking place | 1:55 | |
in all of us here, whether we know or like it or not. | 1:58 | |
Between the lines of the formal education going on, | 2:05 | |
all the pounding in of facts and data, | 2:10 | |
conjugations and constellations, | 2:15 | |
beneath all the running about | 2:20 | |
and getting to meetings and small talk, | 2:21 | |
there is another process of moral education | 2:25 | |
silently taking place, | 2:28 | |
subtle shifts in valuations | 2:32 | |
as the social scientists might call it, | 2:36 | |
or simply conscience, | 2:41 | |
knowhow about right and wrong. | 2:44 | |
Things are happening to our consciences all over the place, | 2:48 | |
daily anesthetizing or sensitizing them. | 2:54 | |
And what happens to your conscience at Duke, | 2:59 | |
is really of larger moment | 3:04 | |
than what happens to your mind, | 3:07 | |
what happens in your technical | 3:11 | |
and factual acquisition of knowledge. | 3:13 | |
Now, if I should ask you, | 3:21 | |
as say a junior or senior sitting there, | 3:24 | |
to reflect a moment on what's happened to your conscience | 3:30 | |
since you arrived two or three years ago, | 3:35 | |
you might conclude a little wistfully | 3:41 | |
that it's not in such good shape. | 3:45 | |
That in growing up you've undergone some kind of sea change | 3:49 | |
in your view of right and wrong. | 3:55 | |
As a freshman, you arrived saying, | 4:00 | |
"I may not know all the fine points of microbiology | 4:05 | |
or counterpoint, but at least I know the difference | 4:10 | |
between right and wrong." | 4:14 | |
You brought a little list, taught at home and church. | 4:17 | |
There are six wrong things | 4:23 | |
that nice people don't do | 4:25 | |
and six right things that they do do. | 4:26 | |
But shortly you found that your morally-tidy universe | 4:31 | |
got all shook up, and your conscience got confused. | 4:37 | |
Slogging along somewhere in the gray February smog | 4:44 | |
of sophomore-itis, | 4:49 | |
You realized that as far as your conscience is concerned, | 4:52 | |
there are differences of opinion | 4:57 | |
about right and wrong | 5:00 | |
that some people do, and some people don't. | 5:02 | |
And that it maybe after all a relative matter, | 5:07 | |
that perhaps the best rule of conscience is tolerance, | 5:12 | |
compromise, live and let live. | 5:18 | |
You shifted to the conscience of the operator. | 5:24 | |
And now you may have slid into junior or senior year | 5:30 | |
with a dismal conclusion that your conscience | 5:36 | |
is not after all, the voice of God | 5:38 | |
telling you the right thing to do. | 5:41 | |
But only the cerebral vestige of our ancestors' alarms, | 5:46 | |
or just a spasm of the diaphragm, | 5:52 | |
a super ego clamped down over the id, | 5:56 | |
seriously cramping your style. | 6:00 | |
Now such a growth as this in the education of conscience | 6:06 | |
is usual, normal and healthy. | 6:10 | |
Its movement out from a simple, naive, childish, | 6:17 | |
moral sense, which thinks legalistically | 6:23 | |
in black and white terms, | 6:27 | |
in neat and absolute divisions | 6:30 | |
of right and wrong actions, | 6:32 | |
and of righteous and wicked people, | 6:35 | |
into the wisdom of relativity. | 6:40 | |
But a person of a really mature conscience | 6:45 | |
doesn't stop there. | 6:47 | |
He'll push beyond this naive relativism of the operator | 6:51 | |
to a real sophistication. | 6:58 | |
The awareness that within the relativities of choice, | 7:02 | |
there is a better and a worse. | 7:07 | |
And that it's absolutely demanded of him | 7:10 | |
that he choose the relatively better way. | 7:13 | |
A genuinely-tender conscience, | 7:19 | |
is one schooled in the habit of close decision, | 7:24 | |
among conflicting goods | 7:29 | |
to decide for the better good. | 7:32 | |
Choices of conscience are hard, | 7:38 | |
exactly because it must decide, | 7:42 | |
not between a clear good | 7:44 | |
and a clear bad, but among competing goods. | 7:48 | |
And a sensitive conscience, | 7:57 | |
which is not really an instinct | 8:00 | |
which flashes automatically green or red, | 8:03 | |
is a habit slowly acquired of moral discernment, | 8:09 | |
which chooses within the mixture | 8:15 | |
the road that it must take. | 8:18 | |
The purity of such a conscience however, | 8:21 | |
is not the purity of innocence, | 8:25 | |
which runs home to mother in the face of moral ambiguity, | 8:28 | |
but the purity of obedience, | 8:34 | |
which has a sense of the better over the worse, | 8:37 | |
and is unswerving in its allegiance to that better | 8:41 | |
as the form on earth | 8:47 | |
of absolute obedience to its Lord. | 8:50 | |
Now, how might we describe this quality | 8:56 | |
of a tender conscience in Puritan thought? | 9:01 | |
Or say in the makeup of the Quaker greats, | 9:08 | |
who I suppose among Christians in history, | 9:13 | |
stand out in their possession | 9:17 | |
of this rare and precious quality. | 9:19 | |
Read John Woolman's Journal sometime | 9:24 | |
for a record of a tender conscience. | 9:28 | |
A careful dissection | 9:34 | |
into the anatomy of conscience would reveal, | 9:37 | |
I think there are certain qualities | 9:39 | |
at two levels, or two dimensions. | 9:42 | |
On the horizontal level, | 9:48 | |
that is of person to other persons, | 9:50 | |
the tender conscience is sensitive | 9:55 | |
to human needs and rights. | 9:57 | |
It's simply the quality of considerateness or consideration. | 10:01 | |
In every action, there is a kind of instinctive alertness | 10:08 | |
to the human equation | 10:12 | |
and a choice of action that serves the good of others. | 10:16 | |
Such tenderness towards the good of persons, | 10:20 | |
their needs, their rights, | 10:23 | |
appears in a apparently paradoxical form. | 10:26 | |
On the one side, it shows up | 10:33 | |
in simple courtesy and respect, | 10:35 | |
the habit of treating ones whole universe | 10:41 | |
of nature, of property, of people | 10:44 | |
with a delicate regard. | 10:49 | |
For example, in between classes, | 10:53 | |
there are some | 10:57 | |
who tear out of Gray Building over here, | 10:59 | |
headed for Student Union | 11:02 | |
by simply cutting across the lawns in front of the chapel. | 11:06 | |
And there are others who use the walks | 11:11 | |
by kind of reflex action. | 11:13 | |
And this is a mark of conscience. | 11:17 | |
Last year, we had a character in these parts, | 11:22 | |
a pyromaniac, who delighted in burning up | 11:25 | |
the bulletin boards, notices and all | 11:29 | |
in the middle of the night. | 11:32 | |
He was notably lacking in a tender conscience. | 11:35 | |
There are some inmates of West, | 11:41 | |
who come in late Saturday night considerably, | 11:46 | |
with some decent respect for the rest of the dorm. | 11:51 | |
There are others, brawlers and night crawlers, | 11:56 | |
unspeakable characters who delight | 12:02 | |
in disrupting the whole place, | 12:06 | |
with carousing at 3:00 am, in song and word, | 12:09 | |
in language that could be called Biblical, | 12:16 | |
but hardly tender. | 12:20 | |
(audience laughing) | 12:22 | |
This is a built-in quality, lacking among them, | 12:29 | |
and present in others of courtesy, | 12:34 | |
of a conscience tender toward the needs of neighbor. | 12:38 | |
And that quality is what makes the traffic | 12:42 | |
of our common life in this community | 12:45 | |
packed in tight as we are, possible, livable. | 12:48 | |
But here comes the paradox. | 12:56 | |
A tender conscience is not a soft conscience. | 12:59 | |
It knows when to bend and when to stiffen. | 13:04 | |
The same alertness to human need | 13:09 | |
which prompts the easy courtesy of tolerance, | 13:12 | |
also prompts stubborn protests | 13:17 | |
when human needs or rights are being denied | 13:21 | |
by some structure of custom or law. | 13:25 | |
And here, the person of conscience | 13:31 | |
may prove a difficult | 13:32 | |
and embarrassing character to have around. | 13:36 | |
The rest of us, going our customary ways of complacency | 13:41 | |
with consciences dulled by inertia or habit, | 13:49 | |
are awakened by his word of reminder and rebuke. | 13:55 | |
And we're annoyed by him. | 14:01 | |
He digs in his heels at some point and says, | 14:04 | |
"Look, I know everybody does it, | 14:07 | |
and has been doing it for years, but it's wrong, | 14:11 | |
and somebody has to say so." | 14:17 | |
Such a tender conscience to human rights | 14:21 | |
has led many Duke students to picket downtown, | 14:24 | |
to boycott stores, restaurants, movies | 14:30 | |
that are racially discriminatory. | 14:35 | |
It has led other Duke students, | 14:39 | |
along with protestors on many campuses, | 14:42 | |
to participate in protests against nuclear testing. | 14:46 | |
Whatever the rights and wrongs in the mixtures here, | 14:53 | |
these persons are conscientious objectors, | 14:57 | |
simply out of a moral sense | 15:03 | |
that a monstrous damage to persons is being done | 15:05 | |
and should be protested. | 15:10 | |
These students represent what you might call | 15:13 | |
the new Puritan. | 15:18 | |
Not the old Puritan, fussy about moral trifle, | 15:20 | |
but the new Puritan, | 15:25 | |
who is alert to large social issues, | 15:27 | |
and willing to take a stand in obedience | 15:31 | |
to his inner moral sense and scruple. | 15:33 | |
And his presence among us | 15:40 | |
has a saving remnant, | 15:43 | |
is to me a heartening sign | 15:46 | |
that we have turned some kind of corner | 15:48 | |
from the beat generation, the silent generation, | 15:50 | |
the cautious generation. | 15:55 | |
And yet he is a minority always, | 15:59 | |
and in a sense, a troubler in Israel, | 16:06 | |
a disturber of the peace. | 16:09 | |
And sometimes this is the peace of his family, | 16:12 | |
sometimes of his friends, sometimes of the Dean's office. | 16:16 | |
So here it is in a curious way, | 16:24 | |
out of a single-hearted passion for human rights, | 16:27 | |
the student of tender conscience will be at once | 16:32 | |
through courtesy, the keeper of the true peace of community, | 16:35 | |
and through obedience to principle, | 16:40 | |
a breaker of the peace of community, | 16:43 | |
where that peace is false and hides human injustice. | 16:47 | |
Still thinking on this horizontal dimension of existence, | 16:55 | |
one can see another quality, | 16:59 | |
or pair of qualities | 17:02 | |
in a tender conscience. | 17:05 | |
It's both a suffering conscience | 17:08 | |
and an easy conscience. | 17:12 | |
It suffers because it is alert to the world's hurt, | 17:16 | |
to the tragedies of suffering | 17:21 | |
that go on in the dark places of the earth. | 17:24 | |
A tender conscience is the ability | 17:29 | |
to read statistics with compassion, | 17:32 | |
as Bishop Gore once spoke of Christian love, | 17:36 | |
to feel the pain of despair | 17:41 | |
for the victims of cruelty. | 17:46 | |
I can sit at my desk and read that, quote, | 17:51 | |
"In New York City, | 17:57 | |
babies still have their throats ripped by sewer rats. | 17:59 | |
There are places where 10 or more people live in a coal bin. | 18:05 | |
There are women who have to sell themselves, | 18:10 | |
and pimps and pushers and junkies and kids | 18:14 | |
wise to the ways of the streets at nine years," end quote. | 18:17 | |
If I have any kind of tender conscience, | 18:26 | |
it should be stabbed broad awake | 18:28 | |
by this sheer sociological data. | 18:32 | |
A sensitive conscience suffers | 18:37 | |
with the Vietnam peasants, | 18:40 | |
whose hut and farm patches burned by gorilla fighters | 18:44 | |
with the negro boy, at the point when he becomes aware | 18:50 | |
of the ceilings put upon his life by his culture, | 18:54 | |
or with those who are now sitting numb and taut | 19:01 | |
in the waiting rooms of the Duke Hospital | 19:07 | |
while some precious life hangs in the balance. | 19:12 | |
Yet it would be unbearable | 19:20 | |
if a conscience were so sensitized | 19:24 | |
to all the human pain going on, | 19:26 | |
that it tried to suffer with it. | 19:29 | |
It would be overwhelmed. | 19:31 | |
And there is another quality | 19:34 | |
which sustains a tender conscience, | 19:38 | |
and keeps it from despair or cynicism, | 19:40 | |
makes it even easy, serene. | 19:46 | |
And that is an awareness of grace within tragedy, | 19:52 | |
that human evils and wrong can be mitigated, | 19:57 | |
that ceilings can be lifted, | 20:02 | |
that the city's dark streets can be brightened, | 20:05 | |
that there are resources of healing and peace | 20:10 | |
to be pitched against the destructive and the demonic. | 20:13 | |
And the conscience which knows this grace | 20:21 | |
can suffer, it must suffer. | 20:25 | |
But it can also be easy, | 20:29 | |
because it chooses to serve these forces | 20:32 | |
of grace and renewal. | 20:35 | |
This past summer, | 20:40 | |
some of you had experiences which may confirm | 20:43 | |
this double aspect of a suffering and a easy conscience. | 20:47 | |
Far from this pretty country club | 20:54 | |
you encountered squalor and filth and bleak misery. | 20:58 | |
But I trust you were saved | 21:06 | |
from helplessness and bitterness about it all | 21:07 | |
by the awareness that there is an area of moral maneuver | 21:11 | |
given by God, the Redeemer | 21:16 | |
that something can be done about it. | 21:21 | |
And that when you | 21:24 | |
feel the weight of the world's tragedy, | 21:28 | |
you also feel the lift | 21:33 | |
that comes with an assumed responsibility | 21:35 | |
to side with light against darkness, | 21:41 | |
and to become an agent of reconciliation. | 21:43 | |
These represent the qualities | 21:49 | |
of conscience tender along a social plane. | 21:51 | |
But there's a vertical dimension tool | 21:58 | |
which makes the conscience of the Christian | 22:01 | |
more than just a humanitarian one. | 22:05 | |
For along the vertical plane | 22:09 | |
the conscience, which is tender | 22:12 | |
is alert to a transcendent voice. | 22:16 | |
It feels responsible to serve human need, | 22:19 | |
because its ultimate responsibility, or accountability, | 22:23 | |
is to a Lord of the conscience above humanity. | 22:29 | |
Indeed the roots of its social sensitivity | 22:35 | |
lie here in the cultivation | 22:37 | |
of this vertical relation, | 22:41 | |
this ability to hear what, | 22:45 | |
and to march to what Thoreau spoke of | 22:48 | |
as "the beat of a different drummer." | 22:52 | |
Perhaps now one can begin to see the relationship | 22:59 | |
between worship and moral sensitivity | 23:03 | |
on this campus. | 23:09 | |
The disciplines of worship | 23:11 | |
provide the point where we get our moral bearings. | 23:14 | |
The whole fancy business here, | 23:20 | |
and acted at this moment, | 23:25 | |
this service of worship, | 23:28 | |
all of its architecture and dress, | 23:31 | |
the words spoken and sung, | 23:35 | |
are intended to celebrate the deity of God, | 23:39 | |
the majestic holiness of the Lord of the universe. | 23:45 | |
It is a point where we come to stand | 23:51 | |
in the presence of the one who sets | 23:53 | |
the moral terms of our existence, | 23:56 | |
who each day confronts us | 24:00 | |
with the ultimate options of life and good, | 24:01 | |
death and evil. | 24:06 | |
To come here to worship, | 24:10 | |
or to any other altar on this campus, | 24:13 | |
public or private, is to step away for the moment, | 24:16 | |
from all the moral ambiguity, | 24:23 | |
all the tangles of our common life and decision, | 24:26 | |
and come into the presence | 24:30 | |
of the purity of absolute holiness, | 24:32 | |
wherefrom then we derive a moral meridian, | 24:36 | |
from which to measure our choices of conscience. | 24:43 | |
Or to change the figure, | 24:50 | |
our general moral existence is like the jumble of sound | 24:53 | |
of the orchestra warming up. | 24:58 | |
To worship is to hear a clear A, | 25:02 | |
sounding in the cacophony | 25:07 | |
from which then we get our harmonic bearings, | 25:11 | |
from which the music that follows takes on order and sense. | 25:16 | |
Because it has an absolute point | 25:22 | |
from which dissonance and harmony both are measured. | 25:25 | |
This opening time of year | 25:32 | |
is a time for the setting of sights. | 25:35 | |
I would propose that one aim to consider for yourself | 25:42 | |
is the cultivation in your career here | 25:47 | |
of a tender conscience. | 25:52 | |
Not as though it were number nine | 25:56 | |
on a list of things to do this week, | 25:58 | |
along with two book reports. | 26:01 | |
But in between the lines of all the things to do, | 26:04 | |
to nurture a sensitivity vertically, | 26:09 | |
to the transcendent source of moral obligation, | 26:14 | |
and a sensitivity horizontally to human need, | 26:18 | |
and to match one's gifts and talents to serve that need | 26:24 | |
in an era which needs tenderness of conscience | 26:31 | |
more desperately than it needs | 26:36 | |
technical knowledge and bulldozers. | 26:38 | |
And such education of conscience | 26:43 | |
will bring by grace, as its byproduct, | 26:48 | |
a sense of point in the whole confusion, | 26:54 | |
and something of the joy of God's salvation. | 27:01 | |
Amen. Let us pray. | 27:10 | |
Oh thou holy one of Israel, | 27:20 | |
who does set before us life and good, | 27:27 | |
death and evil, | 27:30 | |
and who hast given us the dreadful freedom of choice, | 27:35 | |
grant us in all our doubts and uncertainties | 27:43 | |
the grace to ask what thou wouldst have us to do, | 27:47 | |
that the spirit of wisdom may save us | 27:53 | |
from all false choices, | 27:56 | |
and that in thy light, we may see light, | 28:00 | |
and in thy straight path, | 28:05 | |
may not stumble. | 28:08 | |
Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, | 28:11 | |
the love of God and the Communion of the Holy Spirit | 28:16 | |
be with you all. | 28:22 | |
(gentle music) | 28:25 |