Letters from Norman…
by Norman Grubb

Dear Sarah

You’ve nicely caught me the day before I f ly, so I can send a line. Love, we evidently have fellowship because we are fellows in the same ship! I have always lived where you do! I’m never able to prove a thing and never will, because we are talking, whether it is phony or real, about another dimension—spirit beyond matter! My favourite Kierkegaard bases his great books, great favourites of mine, on unproveable faith—what he calls the “Absurdity of faith” and says there always will be suffering at the base of faith because nothing can be proved in a material third dimensional sense. As he says, we always walk on 60,000 fathoms of water!!

In my autobiography I describe how I went through this “atheist” stage long after I had been a missionary and servant and lover of God, and took a year away to regain my inner establishment, mainly through reading the Mystics—but I was brought back to an inner condition in which I always have that sense of inner union, with God and in Him with all; but, get down to brass tacks, I can’t prove a thing anymore than at the beginning! So at bottom I base my faith on the Father and Creator presented to me by Jesus as the only rational foundation to our universe. Either it is meaningless chaos (“fortuitous concourse of atoms”), or it has a firm other-love foundation, a product of a Person (because I anyhow know I am a person and there’s no higher that I can conceive of than persons), and a Person who is perfect because at the base of his manifested wisdom, is LOVE. So that again takes me back to the vast “gamble” that Jesus made. Was HE the anointed Christ? Nothing to go by except the Scriptures, the Dove and the Word from Heaven at His baptism and only He and John saw and heard those. Was it all phony? So He set out to proclaim another kind of kingdom (not of this world) based on self-giving love; and when the final crisis came that the top religionists of his age the Jews, denied and crucified Him, His faith persisted that He was speaking of a Spirit dimension, a Spirit-kingdom which would now appear within millions of humans who themselves would become love-humans by the consciousness of this same Spirit now in them! And He did it, and here we are. And still I say, and we say, there’s no sensible substitute for this, and indeed I don’t want a substitute to a God and kingdom of love. I have always said, when someone produces a more attractive God and Jesus than these, I will discard them for these others. And I know my joke—that there cannot be anything conceivable higher than a kingdom of love-people. And so finally I say that works in me. It does register in me as right and workable—and effective. So I continue my great gamble. I have put my money, my life, on that Horse in my Kentucky Derby!!

So that’s it, darling, and you are right, you and I must have much of the same make-up, so you have to go through your period of unemotionalism in your “flight of the alone to The Alone,” and in your feelings of being abstracted from the more vivid expression of our-your loved ones around you. You must just walk that, darling. I had my precious wife, she understood (though she regarded it as a kind of nervous breakdown which it wasn’t), so she could walk with me through it that year. I laugh and love to see, as I go on with your letter, that you, like me, in the end “can do no other,” like Luther. We are concerned, grabbed and there’s no getting out, and underneath we don’t want to get out! Get it clear, darling, there always will be that element of ultimate “suffering” that we live without proof.

So, love, I must leave it at that and we can dig together as well as love together at Hixton. So glad you will be there. As I wander round England these next seven weeks.

Norman