The Moral Effort

In our last motivational, we quoted the progressive Christian Leo Tolstoy as saying that we all can wake up to a real, happy, and peaceful life, as it exists in our consciences (God’s Kingdom within), if we just make the moral effort. That was easy for him to say. While Tolstoy might have inspired Martin Luther King and Gandhi with such words, few of us think we are capable of the moral effort of a Gandhi or MLK. Can’t we all just slide into Heaven by just accepting Jesus Christ as our savior?

Well, that would be nice. But as we talk about in The Lord’s Prayer for Daily Life, Jesus never preached that kind lesson. He told us that we must carry our own crosses¹ and seek to become as perfect as God in Heaven². This, unfortunately, requires a little moral effort on our part.

But we don’t have to get all intimidated by the situation. Moral effort is a lot like will power in that once we break it down, and see it just as a small series of individual choices (the things we choose to do and not to do each day), it becomes a whole lot easier to master. The issue here is not becoming a saint, but summoning the moral courage to make one right choice at this one moment in time. As they say, a thousand mile journey begins with a single step.

Moral effort is also made easier when we begin to reduce the clutter–in other words, removing all those things that are often nothing more than background noise to the soundtrack of our lives. This is especially true today, when computers, iPhones, and Blackberries serve up an endless stream of chatter to fill the empty spaces of our minutes and hours, but do little to bring clarity to our moral efforts: to those progressive Christian efforts which require both solitude and reflection, as well as the silence to ask the question, :In what way is what I am about do or say going to benefit others?”

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The Living Hour’s SBNR motivational series combines history, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religion to help bring about new perspectives on Progressive Christianity and spirituality. Sign up by entering your email address into the “Opening the Small Gate” box in the right corner of this web page.

1. Calling the people and his disciples to him, Jesus said: “If anyone wishes to walk in my steps, let them renounce self, take up their cross, and follow me. Mark -8:34 [↩]
2. “You, then, must become perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” – Matthew 5:48 [↩]

Leo Tolstoy & The Kingdom of God is Within You

The great Russian author Leo Tolstoy is a monumental figure in the world of literature. His epic novel War and Peace is unrivaled in its breadth and scope. But Tolstoy was more than just a fiction writer. He was a keen observer of the human condition and arguably the most progressive Christian in Russia during the 19th and early 20th century. His later writings on the Christian faith influenced spiritual progressives in the both the West and the East, including famous figures such as Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

Leo Tolstoy’s most influential work on Progressive Christian faith is The Kingdom of God is Within You. The following passage is a one of the book’s most eloquent statements on modern Christian life, as equally true today as when Tolstoy wrote it:

Everyone today who has assimilated Christian principles involuntarily into their conscience, finds themselves in precisely the position of someone who is asleep, and who dreams that they are obliged to do something which even in their dreams they know they shouldn’t do. They know this in the depths of their conscience, and all the same they seem unable to change their position; they cannot stop and cease doing what they ought not do. And just as in a dream, their position becoming more and more painful, it at last reaches a pitch of such intensity that they sometimes begin to doubt the reality of what is passing and make a moral effort to shake off the nightmare that is oppressing them.

This is the condition of the average person in our Christian society. They feel that everything they do themselves and that is done around them is something absurd, hideous, impossible, and opposed to their conscience; they feel that their position is becoming more and more unendurable and reaching a crisis of intensity.

It is not possible that we modern people, with a Christian sense of human dignity and equality permeating us soul and body, with our need for peaceful association and unity between nations, should really go on living in such a way that every joy, every gratification we have is bought by the sufferings, by the lives of our neighbors, and moreover, that we should be every instant within a hair’s-breadth of falling on one another, nation against nation, like wild beasts, mercilessly destroying other people’s lives and labor, only because some benighted politician or ruler says or writes some stupidity to another equally benighted politician or ruler.

It is impossible. Yet everyone of our day sees that this is so and awaits the calamity. And the situation becomes more and more insupportable.

And as the person who is dreaming does not believe that what appears to them can be truly the reality and tries to wake up to the actual real world again, so the average person today cannot in the bottom of their heart believe that the awful position in which they are placed and which is growing worse and worse can be the reality, and tries to wake up to a true, real life, as it exists in their conscience.

Just as the dreamer needs only to make a moral effort and ask themselves, “Isn’t it a dream?” and the situation which seemed to them so hopeless will instantly disappear, revealing a peaceful and happy reality, so the men and women of the modern world need only make a moral effort to doubt the reality presented to them by their own hypocrisy and the general hypocrisy around them, and to ask themselves, “Isn’t it all a delusion?” and they will at once, like the dreamer awakened, feel themselves transported from an imaginary and dreadful world to the true, calm, and happy reality.

To do this, we need not need accomplish great feats or exploits. We need only make a moral effort.

The Kingdom of God is Within you is available to read free online (here) or is available at The Living Hour’s Progressive Christian Bookstore.

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The Living Hour’s SBNR motivational series combines history, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religion to help bring about new perspectives on Progressive Christianity and spirituality. Sign up by entering your email address into the “Opening the Small Gate” box in the right corner of this web page.