And one final reflection—again, one arising out of my experience of a restless, dreamy night with last night’s full moon. As I tossed and turned, I thought of a new year’s reflection written over a century ago on new year’s eve, several nights past the full moon as 1889 turned into 1890.The author of this reflection, Dr. Wilson R. Bachelor, was a brother of my great-great grandfather. I have come to know this figure from the past rather well, because I have a copy of a diary he kept from the time his family moved from Tennessee to Arkansas in 1870, up to his death in 1903. I also have copies of a scrapbook Wilson Bachelor kept for many years, into which he pasted both handwritten and published essays of his, along with news items, journal articles about world religions and medical issues, and so forth. And I have a number of letters he wrote to members of my family over the years.
From these and other sources, I have come to know this man as an interesting philosopher of the American frontier. He settled on what was still the rather wild western frontier of Arkansas when he moved his family here in 1870. His homeplace near the town of Ozark was not far south of Fort Smith, Arkansas’s gateway city to the wild west.
I imagine that he chose that part of the state because he was an ardent Republican who had been a Unionist in the Civil War. Though he lived in Hardin County in West Tennessee—a slaveholding part of the state that tended to the Confederate side—he took the side of the North and exiled himself and his family to Kentucky for part of the war, to protect the family from reprisals from neighbors of the other side. Following the war, the federal government made him physician in charge of the building of the national cemetery at Pittsburg Landing, near which he lived.
Dr. Bachelor’s diary is full of plaintive passages he wrote on cold winter days, when he sat alone in his study, longing for conversation with someone, anyone, about the topics that interested him: Shakespeare; Victor Hugo; Dickens; the scriptures of the world religions; the relationship between science and religion; free thought, with the questions that committed agnosticism raised about religion as a foundation for morality. He was one of those staunch late-19th century true believers in science. In his view, the hardshell fundamentalist religion he saw all around him on the frontier was impossible to swallow when one took its retrogressive views about science into consideration.
Wilson Bachelor’s rejection of the religious options of his time and place led him to be a religious seeker. His diary and scrapbook suggest that he read with surprising avidity and range in the holy books of the world religions. He appreciated their witness—their witness to values he held dear, such as truth, justice, and mercy. One of his diary entries notes with pleasure that he and his sole intellectual companion in the wilderness, a Dr. Graham for whom he named a daughter Pauline Graham Bachelor, had gone to Fort Smith to attend a Catholic liturgy. Both men appreciated the poetry and music of the Mass, though neither could accept the doctrines of Catholicism. Music was Dr. Bachelor's life blood. His diary is full of notes about evenings of music in which his children, most of whom played multiple instruments, and he sang and played music into the night.
Dr. Bachelor ended up a religious skeptic, someone who decided that it was impossible for human beings to know the ultimate truths many religions claimed to convey to their adherents. While he continued to value the religions of the world and their holy books for their moral witness, he publicly espoused free thought. And he found himself censured in his community for doing so.
The following essay is one he had published in some unknown newspaper as 1890 began, and clipped and saved in his scrapbook. It illustrates very well his belief that one can be a religious skeptic and remain a morally engaged human being. He entitled the piece “Come and Gone”:
The Old Year is passing away. The moon that has shined beautifully for several nights is now (midnight) obscured with wintry clouds. Everything looks sombre and sad. Perhaps it is as it should be, a fitting representation of the death of the Old Year.Though I haven't ended up in the same religious and philosophical position in which this relative from the past ended, I do take his point about religion. As the hounding of Roger Haight becaused of his christology that seeks point of contact with other world religions suggests, religion is capable of a hardening of boundaries that closes us off to the witness of religious traditions other than our own. And that closing off does not strengthen our moral commitments. Rather, it undermines those commitments.
My reflections are in keeping with the scene. I see a vast concourse of peoples of all ages from the smiling babe to the bent form of old age. The millionaire, the beggar, the dainty queen of wealth and beauty, the factory girl with hands hardened with toil. This procession, the Niagara of humanity, is moving on to the Silent Ocean of the future.
Brothers, sisters, we are not permitted to stand and gaze on the passing caravan. We are now already in the column. All going one way. We look behind us, still they come. We look before us, they disappear into the Ocean of Eternity. We will soon be there. The Buddhists say those who die are incarnated and live again in other bodies. The Christians say the good live in a celestial paradise, and the bad in darkness and despair. The Agnostic tells us he don’t know. But there is one thing we do know; we know we are now living.
Then with the New Year let us commence anew. Let us be better men and women than ever before. Let us work for right—and join hands in charity with everyone that loves and suffers. If we don’t all believe alike, let it not prevent us from doing our duty to our fellow man. Then with a determination to devote our lives to Justice, Kindness and Mercy, we welcome the New Year 1890.
So as the new year gets underway, I listen with a certain sympathy to the new year's thoughts of a relative of mine from the past, who also spent nights looking at the full moon. And thinking about God. And about justice, kindess, and mercy, and the claims those virtues make on our lives, regardless of what, of if, we believe.