THE WALLS OF JERICHO

"But Shine did not repeat what Todd Bruce said from this point on. Enough to admit that you 'd been in a church, without further confessing a genuine interest in the meaning of a sermon--especially if the meaning was a little too deep for you anyhow. "Bruce spoke quietly, without show but with impassioned conviction ; and though many of his hearers no more grasped his message than did Shine, there was none who felt the same when Bruce ended as when he began. His honesty and sincerity were contagious and the very defects in his imperfect analogy revealed a convincing absence of artifice, a contempt for trifling disparities , an impressive disregard of minor obstacles in conveying a major idea . "'Many a man laughs,' said he, his voice penetrating like his eyes, 'at the preposterousness of this Hebrew fairy-tale. Some of you perhaps are laughing now. For your sake I am going to say something that a minister of the Gospel is not expected to say. I am going to say this: that I don't care the least bit whether this thing ever happened or not. To us it does not matter. Consider it a Jewish legend, a parable of Paradise, if you will, a myth , without any basis of factual truth. Even so, the spiritual value of the story looms and remains tremendous. "'You, my friend, are Joshua. You have advanced through a life of battle. Your enemies have fallen before you. On you march till a certain day that sooner or later comes to us all. And then you find yourself face to face with a solid blank wall--a wall beyond which lies the only goal that matters-- the land of promise. "'Do you know what that goal is? Is it the knowledge of a man's own self. Do you know what that blank wall is ? It is the self-illusion which circumstance has thrown around a man's own self. And so he thinks himself a giant when in reality he is a child, or considers himself a weakling when truly he is strong, or more often judges himself the one or the other when he is actually both . There are still subtler contrasts: he may consider himself irreligious when he at heart is devout . Atheists and agnostics--this may be heresy, but it's true--are likely to be most profoundly religious of all men, and clergymen, with whom all is so routine, the least. A man may think he is black when he is white; boast that he is evil and merciless and hard when all this is but a crust, shielding and hiding a spirit that is kindly, compassionate, and gentle; may pledge himself to a religion when he is by nature a pagan, thus robbing himself and his generation of all that might have come out of honest self-expression. "'There is no better advice, I think, than that of the ruffian on the street , whose motto is 'Don't kid yourself.' But we can't help kidding ourselves sometimes, and we almost always kid ourselves about our Self. And what is our Self, our knowledge of ourself, if not Jericho--chief city of every man's spiritual Canaan? And how can we strip off the illusion and take possession of our own soul save by battle? No man knows himself till he comes to an impasse; to some strange set of conditions that reveals to him his ignorance of the workings of his spirit; to some disrupting impact that shatters the wall of self-illusion . This, I believe, is the greatest spiritual battle of a man's life, the battle with his own idea of himself.... "'Self-revelation is the supreme experience, the chief victory, of a man's life. In all the realm of the spirit, in all of the Canaan of the soul, no conquest yields a greater reward. "'I urge you therefore to besiege yourselves; to take honest counsel with the little fraction of God, of Truth, that dwells in us all. To follow the counsel of that Truth and beset the wall of self-deception. So will towering illusion tumble. So will you straightway enter triumphant into the promised land.'" P. 182-187, THE WALLS OF JERICHO by Rudolph Fisher (1928)