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Neville Goddard 6-1-1970
SELF ABANDONMENT
Week after week, as I take this platform, I know what I want to say. It is
merely finding out how to say it so that it is intelligible, for we are dealing
with a mystery. It’s not something you can spell out and say, “Now this is
it.”
It’s peculiar, the most fantastic mystery in the world. To me, to
experience Scripture, to experience God’s plan of salvation, is my
interpretation of the whole purpose of life. That is what I firmly believe. I
firmly believe that the roots of our 'being' are rooted in God, and God unfolds
Himself creatively in us.
When I make that statement, I put myself on the side of that which is being
transformed, say, a man. For metamorphosis is the theme of the Bible. That
is the complete transformation of man into God. When I make a statement as
I have just made it, it seems that this is man, you and I are the man, being
transformed by a means other than ourselves, and I don’t mean that at all.
But man is so conditioned to believe he is a little worm that you approach it
from that angle. You and I are the God transforming man into our image, into our likeness.
But then, if I said that to a large crowd, the curtain would come down and
they wouldn’t hear one word I had to say beyond that. But you and I took the
plunge. We were the “sons of God,” together making God, for the word God
is a plural word. The word is Elohim.
“In the beginning God.” That word is Elohim; it is plural. And “God said,
Let us make man in our image.” The same word is Elohim. It’s a compound
unity, one made up of others.
We are told in Deuteronomy that “He has set bonds to the peoples according
to the number of the sons of God.” No child can be born unless God
occupies that little temple. These are the gods that came down. You and I are
the gods that came down. We are transforming these identities, these men
and women with which we are identified, into our likeness rather than
being transformed by something other than ourselves. We are the gods that
came down; and when we awake we are the gods spoken of in the very
beginning.
“In the beginning God” 'Elohim', plural, the gods – “created the
heavens and the earth,” like creating a theater for the display of its might and
its creative powers. And then the God said, “Let us make man in our image”;
so we came down and clothed ourselves in these garments.
We aren’t pretending. We completely abandon ourselves to these garments.
The secret is self-abandonment. Never would you have made anything had
you not loved it, – never! We so loved it; and so, having loved it, we commit
ourselves to the object of our love and actually become it. Self-commission
is the secret.
Now we are told, “Be imitators of God as beloved children”; in this world
we have forgotten who we are. Now comes the revelation: “Be imitators of
God as beloved children.” Just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, now imitate that.
But on this level, I feel myself Neville. But I know from experience, I am
The One that became Neville, to transform this identity into my own Being,
the Being that was, that has no beginning; and there was a plan that I set
forth within myself when I buried myself in this being called “Neville.” This
is true of every one in the world.
Now listen to this carefully. It is the first chapter of Ephesians. I am just
quoting four verses; you’ll find them within the first ten verses; so I have
omitted just a few because they are not necessary for what I want to get over.
“God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world . . . He destined us
in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His
will,” “He destined us in love ... through Jesus Christ, according to the
purpose of His will, ... which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness
of time.” (Ephesians 1: 4, 5, 9, 10)
You listen to it carefully. Go home and you read it, in the first chapter within
the first, I think it is the 4th, 5th, 9th and 10th verses of Ephesians.
“God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” So, we see that
the salvation of man is not an afterthought of the Creator. It is prior to this
historical process. Long before this was animated and became history –
human history, this decision was made. So, our fitness is the consequence,
not the condition, of His choice.
So here, as Neville, I, the true Being, chose “Neville.” I am going to
“play” Neville. You chose the being that you’ve chosen and we came down
into this and animated it, this historical process. We are the gods who made
the decision. We are identifying ourselves with these garments; we are
transforming these into ourselves.
Now that is something that the world shuns against. They abhor it; because
they do not realize that man, the man, can do nothing to save himself.
There is not a thing that man as a man can do. It is the God who is buried
within man who does it. As we are told in the letter to the Philippians: “He”,
meaning God, “who started the good work in you will bring it to
completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” The “day of Jesus Christ” is the
unveiling of this plan in you, for Jesus Christ is in you.
“Christ in you is the hope of glory.” Were he not in you, then you would be a dead, dead body
forever and forever; but the gods came down, and it takes all the gods, called
“the sons of God,” to form God. The One became fragmented into the many.
One fell containing all. He chose us in Him before the foundation of the
world. Do you get it? Before there was a world, we were. We are the gods.
We are in the One Being that is known in Scripture as God; and we came
down for one purpose: to expand our own creativity, and we do it by actually
burying ourselves in humanity.
Now, Crucifixion is either a demonstration of the most horrible failure in the
world or the greatest success in the world. It has been proven that the seed
that fell, which is called the Word of God and the Word of God is God, and
that is God Himself.
“In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word
was God.”
The Word was the seed that fell into humanity. That is called the Crucifixion.
Well, it rose, and it continues to rise, because all the sons will rise. None will
fail. If one failed, you would have to leave every one behind and go in
search of the one, because the one that is missing completes the One, the
“one body, the one spirit, the one Lord, the one God and Father of all.”
So night after night as I take the platform, I know exactly what I want to say,
and my problem is how to say it so as to be intelligible, to be understood by
those who hear me. For man has been conditioned to believe that he is a silly
little thing in the world who has sinned; and having sinned, now he must
make all kinds of penance to redeem himself. Man cannot redeem himself. It
is God who comes down; and by His crucifixion, which is the burial in man,
God now demonstrates His creative power, that He can “die” and rise again.
So, He “dies” in man.
“I am crucified with Christ,” said Paul. “Nevertheless I live, yet not I but
Christ who lives in me; And the life I now live in the flesh I live by reason of
the faith that I have in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for
me.”
So that Son of God is in you. You say, “I am,” that’s He. That is the Son of
God. But you so loved the object to whom you gave yourself that you
abandon yourself completely and empty yourself of your Divinity, and just
buried yourself in the object of your love; and you are going to transform it
into your Self, who is God.
Then when you transform it, you are the same God, only you have expanded
beyond that moment in Eternity when you ventured into this experiment,
becoming your own creation.
So in the world of Caesar, “be imitators of God as beloved children.” Just as
Christ loved us, and gave himself to us, now imitate that So, are you in
love with money? There’s nothing wrong with it. Are you in love with fame?
There’s nothing wrong with it. Are you in love with physical health?
Nothing wrong with that! But, be in love with it. If you are in love with it,
you must do the same thing that God did in the beginning, and you are that
God of whom I speak who so loved the object that is you when you see it
reflected that He abandoned Himself. No restraint. A complete abandonment
of Self to the object of its love! For if there is no object of the love, no
beloved, what is love?
There must be a beloved to demonstrate love, and so you have an object – your emanation, which
is nothing more than your “wife,” – not your physical wife, – the body is your emanation. That’s your
wife “till the sleep of death is over.”
And you so loved it; you are going to transform it into the most beautiful,
perfect thing in the world, which is just like you, who is perfect.
So, “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should
be holy and blameless before Him.” That’s what we are told. So, He chose
me.
Well, who is “He”? I am He; but to become me, He has to forget that I
am He, and He thinks He is Neville. He has to. He chose me “in Him before
the foundation of the world”; but now, I am The One who forgot and became
Neville.
When I awake, I know I was “before the foundation of the world.” But now I
bring Neville with me, and now I have one more aspect of my protean being.
I have another being I’ll redeem. I fell in love with it and brought it back;
and now I am the protean being, that I can see others, and let the others see
me as Neville. So, they see me as Neville. But do they really see me? They
see me as Neville when they see me clothed in Power, clothed in Wisdom, or
maybe clothed in Love: and they will see me because I so loved that that I
gave my Self to it, and raised it to the level of my own Being prior to
coming down into it and burying my Self within it.
So, when I try night after night to tell it, I hesitate because I wonder if this is
as clear as I can make it. I know what I want to say, but how to say it so that
it is understood, that it is intelligible? Because you have got to go through all
the preconceived misconceptions that man has concerning Scripture. And so
I say, to experience Scripture, to experience God’s plan of salvation, is really
the whole purpose of life.
But while we are here, we can be anything we want to be; and the Being
within us, who is our true Being, allows it and will go [through] the part
with us and play everything. But I am speaking to the God in you, the God
in Scripture, whose name is Elohim, or Jehovah, or the Lord Jesus Christ.
That’s the same Being who is buried in you. He is actually buried in you.
And that Being will rise.
“Teach me, O Lord. Teach me, O Holy Spirit, the testimony of Jesus that I
may actually comprehend wondrous things out of the Divine Law. Teach me,
O Holy Spirit.”
Well, tell the story of the God who became man that man may become God.
And then we are told the story in a very simple way, for:
“Truth embodied in a tale
Will enter in at lowly doors.”
[Tennyson]
So you tell it as the simplest tale imaginable. Right from the beginning you
tell the story.
“Truth embodied in a tale
Shall enter in at lowly doors.”
So, Mother would take me on her knee and tell me the story of Jesus. He had
no father; but he did one day claim he was the Father. Well, she didn’t
understand that, and neither did I. He had no father, but he claimed he was
the Father! “I and my Father are one.”
Then she told me that he had a miraculous birth. It was not like any birth in
the world, something different; and then she told me that he said that unless
we are born in a similar manner, for he said, “I am from above,” that he
was “born from above”; and “unless you are born from above, you cannot
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Then he also said that the most perfect man
born of woman was John the Baptist, and yet the least in the Kingdom is
greater than John the Baptist; therefore John the Baptist cannot be in the
Kingdom of Heaven if the least is greater than he!
No matter how little it becomes, the least is greater and he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Mother did not understand that, any more than I did when she told me.
Then she told me that David “in the spirit” called him “my Lord.” She didn’t
understand that, and neither did I. And then she told me that he identified
himself as the Son of Man and then likened the Son of Man to a fiery
serpent; and that unless the Son of Man is lifted up in the same manner in
which the fiery serpent was lifted up, he cannot enter the Kingdom of
Heaven.
Then she told me that when he was baptized, a dove descended upon him
and remained upon him, and the outer man knew. That outer man was called
John, and he knew because it was revealed to him the one on whom the dove
descended and remained was the Son of God – the one that came down from
Heaven, for “No man can ascend into heaven except the one who came
down from Heaven, the Son of Man.”
All this was a mystery, but a lovely story that excited the child mind; and so
you carried it with you. This is something that is all within you. And then
comes this shocking suddenness. When you least expected it, it all happened
in you.
We go back to Ephesians. “He set it forth as a plan in Christ for the fullness
of time.” He set it forth in Christ. In Christ? Yes, and Christ is in you! God
Himself descended into man, and He set forth His plan of redemption in
Christ. So, in Christ it is in man. It has, now, to unfold in man. So, it
unfolded in me, and I realized that “I am He” who came down, for no one
can go up unless he first came down. Well, having gone up in the fiery
serpent manner, then I must have been the one who descended.
But when I went up, I went up without the loss of the identity of Neville; so
I came down and redeemed a being called Neville.
You come down and so identify yourself with the being that you believe
yourself to be that when you go up you take that which you have redeemed
with you. You present it to your brothers, for they are all waiting for the
presentation of your act of faith. For faith is complete self-commission.
I cannot commit myself to that which I do not love. So God is Love. So, I
loved it, and then agreed with all of us to commit myself to that; and then I
committed myself to it, and lost all consciousness of the Being that I really
am in my self-commission to the object of my love.
And then I went through “hell,” as we all do. But as Paul said, “I consider
the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing with the glory that is
to be revealed in us.” What glory? The only glory is the glory of God; so the
cry of one who has accomplished the job is this, in the 17th [chapter] of
John: “I have accomplished the work Thou gavest me to do. Now glorify
Thou myself. Glorify Thou me with Thine own Self.” Glorify me with your
own Self. “Return unto me the glory that was mine, the glory that I had with
Thee before that the world was.”
So, bring it in now, the glory that I gave up in my self-commission to the
object of my love. Now let it return. So, I brought back, individualized, a
garment I can wear in Eternity. It was “dead,” and I, like the seed that fell
into the ground and died, revealing the great secret, the mystery of life
through death, so, I “died.” I died when I became this [indicating the
physical body], and then suffered all the hell of the world.
And then the pattern, which I contained, unfolded within me. So, He has
made manifest unto me the mystery of His will according to His purpose
which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time. So, He set it
forth in Christ as the plan. Well, that plan is Jesus Christ buried in man. It’s a
pattern, so, the pattern Man.
How to tell the world that Jesus Christ is the pattern of salvation buried in
man, when man has been taught to believe that Jesus Christ is a little man
who walked two thousand years ago? And then disappeared, having told the
story, to return again into this world physically that physical eyes would see
him as coming from without; that’s what the world has been told. But that is
the
“Truth . . . embodied in a tale,
That it may enter in at lowly doors,”
For if you were told it as I’ve told it tonight, the world couldn’t take it. They
would be shocked beyond measure to hear what you have heard tonight.
They would not accept it. They believe in some little external savior that
came two thousand years ago, and who promised to return; and the great
teachers of today, “great” in the sense of numbers but not in understanding
– are looking for him to come from without.
He can’t come from without, because He is buried within us. He can only
come when He awakens within us. That pattern is the pattern in a seed. But
this is God’s Seed, the Word of God, buried in man. It unfolds within man;
and when it unfolds within man, everything said of Jesus Christ, the
individual in whom it unfolds experiences it in the first-person, singular,
present-tense experience. Then he knows who God is.
He always was God, who emptied Himself and took upon Himself the form
of man; “and being found in the form of man, he became obedient unto
death, even death upon the Cross” of man, and was made in that state a
slave. But in the end, he fulfills his purpose, and then he is given a name that
is above all names; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and
every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of all.
Well, who is that Jesus? He is in you. So, when you actually fulfill and
accomplish the job that you took upon yourself, you bear the name of Jesus.
There is only one Lord. We all return, scattered as we are we return as the
one Lord, the one God, the one Father of all: “one body, one spirit,” – not
many; and yet without loss of identity.
If I could take you with me into the actual experience, coming through two
mornings ago – Here I am. On the surface of my being I know exactly what I
am doing, and I am Spirit! And here is this whole vast world, and the world
is “dead,” just dead. But I cannot move it unless I come down into it.
I come down into it. But now with the memory of having been “born from
above,” having come down into it, I can change it. Prior to being “born from
above,” you lose all consciousness of the Being that you are that came from
above, and you come back night after night in the “garment,” and you are
simply one more of the crowd, lost. But now, after the “birth from above,”
after you begin to grow in stature in the favor of the gods who preceded
you in the same, similar “birth,” memory now remains, for you come
back in the morning from your union with the brothers. And you come back
and you see it for what it is. It’s all “dead.”
But now you do not lose the consciousness, as you did prior to the “birth
from above.” So you come down. You can change it if you so desire. But
why change it?
Listen to these words that came from Blake when Blake departed this world.
But Blake was “born from above” long before he departed this world. So, in
a book called “Looking at Modern Paintings,” there is a chapter on Max
Beckman, considered a great modern artist of modern paintings. He said he
met Blake in this super-terrestrial world, and there was this giant of a man,
like a supernatural being, and he waved greetings to him, and he said to me:
“Fall back. Have confidence in objects. Do not let yourself
be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered
and correct, and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection.
Follow this path, and you will attain from your own ego an
ever-deeper perception of the eternal beauties of creation. You will
also attain an ever-increasing release from all that which now seems
to you so sad and terrible.”
The whole thing is ordered. The whole thing leads towards the perfection
that you determined to bring about when you emptied yourself of God and
actually became the being that you are today. And you will awake from it all,
and you will return to the glory that was yours “before that the world was,”
only magnified beyond what it was by reason of your venture into this world
of “death.”
This was the limit of contraction. The limit of opacity and you took it upon
yourself. Now there is no limit to the expansion, to the translucence that
you bring back. So, we all are returning to the Being that we were “before
that the world was.” So when we read: “He chose us in Him before the
foundation of the world,” we were the 'gods.' We were the “sons of God”
that collectively make God.
So, that wonderful confession of the Hebrew faith is the greatest confession
in the world:
“Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
Jehovah, which is simply “I AM”. Translated the Lord “Adonai”
the Lord; and here our God, that’s plural, “Elohim.’ We are the “gods”; but
together we are “Adonai” – One. So, it takes the One made up of many to fall
–the One God that is the confession, the Shema of Israel:
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
Never forget it. No little man, little picture, do you stand before and
worship. All this is “dead”; and men make idols of men. So he has money, or
he is a tyrant, like a Lenin; so they make a little icon of Lenin, and thousands
every day walk past this stupid little thing that is kept on display. And I read
Buckley’s statement today that was datelined “Leningrad.” It used to be St.
Petersburg. It was Peter’s Square, the same square. Now it is Leningrad, and
here is this little mummified thing; and a friend of his walking by the little
mummified thing had his hand in his pocket, and the guard in the most
impressive manner said, “Take your hand out of your pocket. You are
passing through holy ground. Here is the word made flesh, and he dwelt
among us.”
And the way he treated it was perfectly marvelous, the way he treated this
most stupid concept of worshipping this little thing that they had to pick up a
few years ago and rebuild, because time takes its toll and it was
disintegrating. And this is their little icon that they worship. *
* See L.A. Times article
I tell you, the only God in the world is you. There is no other god. One day
you will know it. One day He will unfold within you. Read the story
carefully, for when He unfolds within you, everything said of Him in
Scripture you are going to experience in the first-person, singular, present-
tense experience. And His only Son, which is only the personification of all
the experiences that you have ever had as man, so take all the experiences
of man and all that man could ever experience, and fuse it into a single
whole and personify that whole, and it comes out as David, the David of
Scripture, the great Psalmist. That’s David. He stands before you, and he
calls you, “my Lord.” He calls you, “my Father.”
That is the only Son of
God, which is a personification of the sum total of all the experiences of
humanity. So when you, playing the part that you are playing, have gone
through all the gamut that man is capable of experiencing, in the end, you
awake, and then the sum total of the experiences is fused and personified
and stands before you; and he is that glorious, beautiful lad David, and he
calls you, “my Father,” “my Lord.” And the drama is over as far as you are
concerned.
Then you join the brothers that you knew before the world was, and you
contemplate the world of death. You become one of those who, in great
Eternity contemplate death; and you too will say, “What seems to be is to
those to whom it seems to be, and is productive of the most dreadful
consequences to those to whom it seems to be, even of torments, despair and
eternal death. But Divine Mercy steps beyond and redeems you in the one
body, the Lord Jesus,” [from Jerusalem] – who is Jehovah.
“There is only one body, one spirit, one lord, one God and Father of all.”
So all are redeemed eventually, but the man, as a man can’t redeem himself.
It’s God in man that is doing the work. “He, who began the good work in
you, will bring it to completion at the unveiling in you of God” as you.
So my problem, night after night, is to find words to tell it. I know what I
want to say, but the problem is how to say it, how to say it that it is
understood, that it is intelligible, because you must always bear in mind that
you are facing an audience that may not be prepared for the shock, for it is a
shock to the human mind to tell them who they are. They would rather
depend on something external to themselves and pray to it; so they go to
church and light a candle, and they bow before some little man-made cross
or a man-made star and they do all these things on the outside; and no one
has confidence in himself, and the Self of man is God. That wonderful
human imagination of yours – that is the Eternal God.
So, tonight I say, our roots are in God; and God Himself unfolds Himself
within us. I could have said, “Our roots are in divine imagining, and Divine
Imagining unfolds Itself within us.” But it doesn’t matter. I personally like
the word “God,” but I do not put Him on the outside as something to
worship. The world will accept that better if I said “God” than if I said
“Divine Imagining.” So, I did not say it in the beginning of the lecture, I
now present it to you. But when you imagine, that’s God creating. And “all
things are possible to God.” So begin to imagine. That’s God, God-in-
action. But believe in the reality of the imaginal act.
So, you imagine yourself to be what reason denies and your senses deny; but imagine it.
God had to completely abandon Himself to the form of man to believe
Himself man. Do you know what that is? The Being that you really are? For
I tell you, when you come back after the “birth from above,” and find
yourself Spirit, I mean Spirit, but more real than anything in the whole vast
world all put together, but you are Spirit, and you are more real than any
object in space or all the objects in space.
But to come down prior to the birth is to forget yourself as Spirit. God is
Spirit, and you do it after this birth without loss of identity. That’s the lovely
part about it: when you come back into the world and pick up the garment
that is asleep on the bed, and quite normally bathe it and shave it and feed it
and do all the normal things with it, but you know it to be a garment. And
you know you’ve extracted from it a certain identity, which identity you take
back as Spirit, for the body is going to be put into the furnace and be
discarded. That will be simply reduced to the ash that it is, but you have
extracted from it a certain identity; and you take back into the Brotherhood
your accomplishment. You came down and died as a man, and now you go
back, bringing back the identity of the man that you wore through the ages.
You take it back! And you are all greeted in joy because you accomplished
that which you intended.
So, the Will of God will not turn back until He has executed and
accomplished the intents of His mind. In the latter days you understand it
perfectly, only in the latter days.
So, “the sufferings of the present age cannot be compared with the glory that
is to be revealed in us, for those whom He foreknew,” – and He foreknew all
of the sons – we are the sons. Regardless of your sex, we are the sons, for in
the Resurrection we are above the organization of sex. We are neither male
nor female. We are God. “And those whom He foreknew, He also
predestined; and those whom He predestined, He also called; and those
whom He called, He also justified, and those whom He justified. He also
glorified.” So, no matter what you have done as man, you will receive
justification – in other word divine acquittal – complete acquittal, no matter
what you have done. If you have played the part of a Hitler or a Stalin, or
any other monster, you will be acquitted.
On this level you want them all to suffer; but your brothers, knowing the part you played, they don’t want you
to suffer. They want you to awaken from the dream of being a Hitler, the
dream of being a Stalin, or any other horrible character in the world.
And so, when you come before Him, having been called, that is justification.
“Justification” in Scripture is nothing more than divine acquittal, and after
justification comes glorification, which is God’s gift of Himself to you. You
are then God the Father! And all the sons together form God the Father!
__________________
* LOS ANGELES TIMES
MONDAY, JUNE 1, 1970
Two Tombs in Russia: A Saddening Contrast
By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
LENINGRAD – Everybody knows that Russia is a land of paradoxes, but few have imagined how little
pains the Communists take to conceal them.
On the road to Zagorsk, the spiritual home of old Russia, you pass a splendid monument, a graceful,
gently-arched titanium bow tapering, 75 feet high, into a missile, the first to orbit the earth: a fine
commemoration of an extraordinary scientific achievement that required extraordinary resourses.
A few miles further down the same road you note that a central hydrant delivers the water to the
neighboring villagers. There is no running water 15 miles from the capital of the country that
orbited the first satellite.
At Zagorsk you visit the monastery of St. Sergius, the patron saint of Russia. Here is one of the three
surviving seminaries in the Soviet Union. For a while they were all shut down and then after the war,
eight were permitted to reopen. Khrushchev, in pursuit of moderation, cut them down to three. But the
abbot does not talk about such matters. They recently buried the Patriarch Aleksiy, at age 92. Many
thought him a fellow traveler for consenting to the long list of humiliations imposed on his church by
the Soviet government. But he presumably knew that protests would not avail him, and reflected that
martyrdom is inefficient in Russia. He lies in a little catacomb underneath one of the old sacred buildings,
with a few wilted flowers on his grave.
The grave I saw the day before was something else. So heavy is the continuing demand to see the tomb
of Lenin that the crowd stretches for two to three hours on a typical day. Honor guards keep the line
moving at a rate that permits over 2,000 people to slip by every hour.
In front of us were schoolgirls, tip-toeing down the stairway, their right hands frozen in salute. You
could almost hear their excited heartbeat. The guards hushed those who had not already been arrested by
the mystery and the silence.
My companion had his right hand in his pocket, and the guard brusquely told him to take it out – one does
not slouch toward Bethlehem.
All over Russia, the banners proclaiming Lenin’s 100th birthday have gone apocalyptic in some, “Lenin
lived. Lenin lived. Lenin will live.” (In the beginning was the Word...) Or “The Holy Lenin” appeared on
this earth in 1870. (The Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us ...)
We were now just a few steps away from the turn to the right which brings you in view of Lenin, who died
46 years ago, but is preserved for the pilgrims who file so reverently by his remains, exposed in a glass
coffin. Up you climb, a half dozen steps, and then over past Lenin’s feet, so that you stare directly down
at his face. How chancy it all is. When the Tsar was overthrown, Lenin was in Zurich, rubbing oil on his
balding pate, wondering whether modern, nonideological science would bring back his hair. Lenin was out of
luck. None of the sciences he invoked ever did anything for him.
In Leningrad, beautiful Leningrad, the Soviet government has transformed a cathedral into a permanent
museum of “religion and atheism.” It is a child’s garden of anti-religious graphic art, done under Lenin’s
rubric, “We seek the emancipation of the working people from the superstitions of religion.”
Pity the poor Russians. Imagine, St. Lenin as a substitute for St. Paul.
We went by an exhibit of torture instruments – “These,” our guide told us matter-of-factly, “were used by
the religious people during the Inquisition.”
“Are they,” I asked, “a part of the Lubianka collection?”
At first she smiled. But quickly she thought better of it. "That is not a funny joke,” she said. She is a
very sweet and scholarly lady, and I did not wish her to be hostage in surrogate ideological warfare,
so I said that I agreed with her, that no jokes about torture are funny. She said, spotting a copout,
“No, I don’t mean that jokes about torture aren’t funny, I mean jokes about what you said aren’t funny.”
I retreated, as travelers to the Soviet Union should. Sadly, believing as I do that all, all is lost to
any society that dishonors the King of Kings. But that is a personal prejudice, which in Russia only St.
Sergius and a few other subversives cherish; hoping as they do for a turn of events, in which connection
God would prove most useful.