From Neal A. Maxwell’s book “The Power is in Them. . .”(a quote from 1970)
Man is too provincial to fashion any new morality which is true morality. For just as atheism is too simple, man’s morality will always bear the stamp of his environment and the imprint of his particular problems; the response cannot be whole, because man is not whole in his perspective, in his experience, or in his love. He may make facsimiles, using the real morality as a model, but the flaws in his counterfeits are fatal and detectable for anyone who cares about the real thing.
In watching the old, good-natured but unsuccessful struggle to recall a face of fact, one is reminded that whole societies also seem to need to wait for the wheel of memory to come round again as they heedlessly repeat the errors and omissions of the past.
Robert Brustein has brought to our attention a quotation of Plato which seems to appropriate for our time in terms of how the adult generation can unintentionally do the youth a disservice by “throwing in” with them too quickly, too totally, or too carelessly, abandoning the adults’ authoritative insights or experience. It is the pattern of some professors of our time. Plato said:
“In such a state of society [a state of democratic anarchy], the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with them in word and deed; and the old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety(1); they are loathe to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the youth.”
We need whenever we talk about relevancy, to make allowance for at least some of the restlessness of young people—in and out of the Church—because of the fact that they are in a period of time when, as Bruno Bettleheim observes, youth are undergoing, to some extent, “the empty wait for real life.” This waiting can produce boredom, anxiety, and guilt. Yet constant involvement with the gospel in action at any age in life can reduce those very problems because the gospel is always relevant to our personal lives; it does not wait on the granting of a degree or the passing of a birthday to become germane(2).
The heightened quest for relevancy is no doubt a function of the seeming “human predicament” that has been underscored by the wave of existentialism(3) (produced by the events of our time) which has washed over us. Perhaps people a century ago asked themselves about the relevancy of the activities of their own lives. Chances are, with a few notable exceptions, they were too busy surviving, harvesting crops, coping with the challenges of life, etc., to be duly concerned. Some sense of history is very important, therefore, looking at this matter of relevancy. It is vital, too, to distinguish between the significance of saying, for instance, that an organization is irrelevant and saying its membership ought to be doing more. ~Neal A. Maxwell, For the Power is in Them (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970), 53-55 (continued. . .)
- gaiety- the state or quality of being lighthearted or cheerful.
- germane – relevant to a subject under consideration
- existentialism noun – a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.
