Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2899

Text for Sunday, December 25, 1955, “The Weekly Calendar,” No.51, The Unitarian Church of All Souls, 80^th Street and Lexington Avenue, New York 21, NY. Walter Donald Kring, Minister. Heath’s daughter, Lucile MacCallum, sent this to Heath because it seemed to tie into his philosophy. This was the church Heath and family members attended when in New York City and where Heath’s friend, architect Arthur Holden, also attended.

December 25, 1955

Lying awake at night on the roof of his father’s house in Nazareth, looking up at the stars running in their appointed courses, he felt the marvelous precision of the stellar system as symbolical of the order that could be instituted in human affairs by establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. He felt the pain of the world and the secret inescapable urge which drives mankind with a beckoning spell to fulfillment and perfection. Stars, planets, landscapes, social systems, men moved before his mind’s eye towards a sure, appointed destiny. He called up before his mind’s eye the image of a strifeless world which the Prophets had passionately evoked before him, when men would act as brothers towards their fellows, and no man or nation would even think of causing hurt or damage to another man or nation. He saw his people Israel free and happy, liberated from the alien’s iron yoke. But the oppressor’s, too — for his love embraced the entire human race — he saw brought under the loving, fatherly sway of the theocracy of Israel’s God. He saw the possi­bility of an era of justice and righteousness, in which there would be no more tears and suffering as the result of hatred or oppression, and when no man would need to die without having experienced the goodness of God’s earth and God’s sun.

                              —Pierre Van Paassen