Al-Huda
Foundation, NJ U. S. A
the Message Continues ... 5/98
Newsletter for October 2009
Article 1 - Article 2 - Article 3 - Article 4 - Article 5 - Article 6 - Article 7 - Article 8 - Article 9 - Article 10 - Article 11 - Article 12
What Makes Me Feel Big
J. Frank Dobie
-
USA
Broadcast during the 1950s
“My mind is big when I look at you and talk to you,” Chief Eagle
of the Pawnees said to George Bird Grinnell when, after years of
absence, that noble writer appeared at his friend’s tepee.
It is very difficult in drawing up a credo to be severely honest
about one’s self, to avoid all traditional cant. We actually
believe in what we value most. Outside of the realms of
carnality and property, which men appearing in public generally
pretend not to notice, I believe in and draw nourishment from
whatever makes me feel big.
I believe in a Supreme Power, unknowable and impersonal, whose
handiwork the soul-enlarging firmament declares. However, I
believe in questionings, doubting, searching's, skepticism, and
I discredit credulity or blind faith. The progress of man is
based on disbelief of the commonly accepted. The noblest minds
and natures of human history have thought and sung, lived and
died, trying to budge the status quo towards a larger and fuller
status.
I am sustained by a belief in evolution—the increasing purpose
of life in which the rational is, with geological slowness,
evolving out of the irrational. To believe that goodness and
wisdom and righteousness, in Garden of Eden perfection, lie
somewhere far ahead instead of farther and farther behind, gives
me hope and somewhat explains existence. This is a long view. I
do not pretend that it is a view always present in me. It does
raise me when I have it, however.
I feel no resentment so strongly as that against forces which
make men and women afraid to speak out forthrightly. The noblest
satisfaction I have is in witnessing the up movement of
suppressed individuals and people. I make no pretense to having
rid myself of all prejudices, but at times when I have
discovered myself freed from certain prejudices, I have felt
rare exhilaration.
For me, the beautiful resides in the physical, but it is
spiritual. I have never heard a sermon as spiritual in either
phrase or fact as, “Waters on a starry night are beautiful and
free.” No hymn lifts my heart higher than the morning call of
the bobwhite or the long fluting cry of sandhill cranes out of
the sky at dusk. I have never smelled incense in a church as
refining to the spirit as a spring breeze laden with aroma from
a field of bluebonnets.
Not all hard truths are beautiful, but beauty is truth. It
incorporates love and is incorporated by love. It is the goal of
all great art. Its presence everywhere makes it free to all. It
is not so abstract as justice, but beauty and intellectual
freedom and justice, all incorporating truth and goodness, are
constant sustainers to my mind and spirit.
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