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“There is one”: Mystical Experience?

Before leaving the meetinghouse on Sunday, I visited the library and borrowed a Pendle Hill pamphlet, Confident Quakerism, by Ben Pink Dandelion. The pamphlet contains a section called “Six Stages of Early Quaker Experience,” and, given my current preoccupations, I wanted to see what Dandelion had to say about that. I discovered that he appears to accept the widespread belief that Quakerism finds its origin and center in a mystical experience reported by George Fox in his journal. I don’t mean to single out Dandelion’s pamphlet, which impresses with its open, confessional presentation, for criticism; its succinct presentation of the standard liberal reading of Fox, however, offers a springboard for re-examining the validity of that reading and its consequences for the spiritual lives of Friends today.

Following is the relevant section of Fox’s narrative. Interestingly, in the pamphlet Dandelion replaced the penultimate sentence, as well as the concluding clause of the preceding sentence, with an ellipsis; I have restored the omitted text, putting it in italics, below.

And when all my hopes in them [i.e., priests, preachers, and “those called the most experienced people”] and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, Oh! then I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even [i.e., namely] Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” And when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him all the glory. For all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have pre-eminence, who enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power. Thus when God doth work, who shall let [i.e., hinder] it? And this I knew experimentally.¹

Dandelion interprets that as “God breaks into Fox’s [everyday] life, in God’s own time.” “This,” he writes, “is a critical [i.e., essential?] experience of direct unmediated encounter with the Divine,”² and indeed that is how many of us have learned to read it. But is that really what Fox is relating? Considering his report critically and contextually, I think not.

As we have seen in the George Fox Series here, Fox had earlier fallen into a depression triggered by the manifest failure of Christianity to produce just, godly human beings — and to assure him of finding the strength to resist whatever temptations assailed him. After a period of isolation, he had begun to seek answers to that “condition” from various sorts of Christian teachers. All had failed him. But he knew that he had an alternative. In the same long paragraph of his journal (as edited by Ellwood), Fox tells us that

I found two thirsts in me; the one after the creatures, to have got help and strength there; and the other after the Lord the creator, and his son Jesus Christ; and I saw [that] all the world  [i.e., the creatures] could do me no good.³

When he acknowledged that his outward search had been futile, Fox realized that he would find power and wisdom only within, for Christ the power and wisdom of God⁴ dwells in his saints, and his saints are those who, as John 1:12 indicates, accept the Light that already shines inwardly by putting their faith in it alone. Fox had been tricked by the church into not realizing where his spiritual power — the power by which he was righteous — lay.

With that, another insight emerged: normative Christianity’s deceit and moral failure must be part of God’s plan. There must be a reason behind it all, a reason reflected in the inability of the “professors” to offer anything true and useful. That reason, Fox saw, was that truth cannot come from sinful beings: truth is not a teaching or doctrine but Christ himself, “the way, the truth, and the life.”⁵ Like Fox’s other “openings,” these seminal insights were interpretations and applications of scripture.

Fox reports the first insight’s emergence dramatically, writing that he heard a voice deliver it to him. (The hearing of a voice may not be the kind of experience that liberal Quakers hope to enjoy — or to base their spiritual lives upon. And yet we present it as just that.) Fox does not identify the source of the voice; it could even have been that of another human being, but it was likely the voice of his own mind, delivering a revelation that he felt was from God. In any case, he believed that the audition and the associated revelations were providential and correct. He “knew experimentally” that it was all true, for the insights, derived from the mutual illumination of life experience and scripture, had been proven through testing.⁶ George Fox had learned from hard experience that only the inward Light of Christ could lead and empower him.

He had sought spiritual power and wisdom from the representatives of Christianity, but they’d had none to give (although they believed and claimed that they had). Scripture says that Christ himself is the power and wisdom of God; clearly, those “professors” did not have Christ. They were false prophets, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Scripture also says that Christ dwells in saints but not in sinners: one of Fox’s favorite passages for argumentation was 2 Cor. 13:5: “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?” Although he had been “shut up in unbelief” when looking outward for the power of Christ, Fox was not reprobate: he reported early in his journal that he was not a sinner, and his reports about his later struggles imply that he did not succumb to temptation even then. Christ the power and wisdom of God dwelt in George Fox, but Fox had been looking in the wrong direction and so had not consciously known what he had been relying upon. That misguided seeking had now come to an end. Accepting the Light, Fox put his faith solely “into his name,” thus receiving “the power to be becoming the offspring of God.”⁷

What we see here, then, is not that “God breaks into Fox’s life, in God’s own time”: God is never absent from Fox’s life. What has broken in is insight, a mental product of the interplay between scripture and life. That, again, is typical of what Fox called his “openings.” Rather than a “direct unmediated encounter with the Divine,” Fox’s experience involves a change in thinking that is mediated through scripture. What he has experienced is not God himself but a redirection to the locus of God’s activity, turning him away from the impotence of religion’s outward God to the power and wisdom, the Christ, in his heart.

The Mystery of Iniquity Revealed

As we saw above, Fox’s insight has also shown him why Christianity denies that locus. He now understands that God permitted Christianity to fall into apostasy almost from the beginning, and that he did so in order that he may be glorified through Christ’s coming in the flesh of his saints, who would call themselves Friends, in the seventeenth century. This, too, Fox knows experimentally. His rhetorical question (omitted by Dandelion), “Thus when God doth work, who shall let it?” recalls, as noted in a previous post, 2 Thessalonians 2:1-10, the only place in the KJV’s Christian scriptures where “let” is used in the sense of “hinder” or “prevent.”

Now we beseech you … that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled … as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for [that day shall not come], except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. [Emphasis added.]

Fox believes that he has had insight into “the mystery of iniquity” (an important phrase in primitive Quakerism’s theology and agonistics): God has permitted apostate Christianity to flourish for many centuries through its evil means of imitation (“signs and lying wonders”) and oppression, but the time has come, as foretold in the scriptures, for that to end. Now, through the appearance of Christ in George Fox and the saints, the antichrist Christianity is to be unmasked and overthrown — “destroy[ed] with the brightness of his coming.”

Christianity is a demonic impostor, Christ the power of God lives in the saints, and there’s a providential reason why the former has eclipsed the latter for 1,600 years: that is the content of the revelation, mediated if not created by scripture and life experience, recounted by Fox in the “There is one” passage. The experience marks the death of Fox’s hopes in an outward Christ and religious system, the birth of his apocalyptic convictions (further discussion of which is beyond the scope of this post), and the beginning of his relying solely on the life, power, and wisdom of God in his heart. It does not mark the birth of a religion based on waiting for special experiences of God: to the contrary, it is a moment in the birth of a religion in which everyone has immediate access to God in all times and places.

What Then Are We Waiting Upon?

Again, what George Fox reports in the journal passage is not an unmediated experience of God but an insight into the nature of religion and the locus of spiritual power. That insight changed his orientation, focusing him on the salvific power and wisdom of God as reliably felt within⁸ — on “that which is known of God shining within.”⁹ Understood in this way, the passage can indeed be “foundational and central to Quakers worldwide today” (Dandelion). For what the passage teaches us is to reorient ourselves here and now, without waiting for a special divine “inbreaking,” to the godly power and wisdom already active within us.

“We cannot summon God up,” writes Dandelion, “but we can remain open and mindful so as not to miss those particular moments of intimate encounter.” But there is no need for us to summon God or even to wish that we could, nor to defer our spiritual life while waiting for what we perceive as discrete encounters with God, “for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”¹⁰ For us, as for George Fox, God is never absent: “That which is known of God is shining within them, for God manifests to them” (see note 9). “Is shining” — right now, wherever we are. Encountering God is not a matter of waiting and looking but of beholding.¹¹

When we do wait, as in worship, we wait not for the presence of God, which is already a reality, nor for a theophany or “mystical experience,” as if such a thing were necessary for our justification (that is, our living justly): we wait confidently (i.e., trustingly) upon the guiding and shaping work of the Light of love — that which is known of God-who-is-love¹² — which already shines in our hearts. “In the measure of the life of God [within you],” advises George Fox, “wait for wisdom from God, from whom it comes.”¹³ Waiting upon that in which we wait, we will not know disappointment, and our waiting is one with our living in the spirit in the present. In an exhortation to Friends, Fox wrote:

In that which convinced you [i.e., “convicted,” revealed the unacknowledged evil in, you], wait; that you may have that removed [which] you are convinced of. And, all my dear friends, dwell in the life, and love, and power, and wisdom of God, in unity one with another, and with God; and the peace and wisdom of God fill all your hearts, that nothing may rule in you but the life which stands in the Lord God.¹⁴

In one of my favorite passages from his writings, Fox described such waiting almost poetically in a letter to “the lady Claypool (so called)”:

Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts, and then thou wilt feel the principle of God to turn thy mind to the Lord, from whom life comes; whereby thou mayest receive his strength and power to allay all blusterings, storms, and tempests. […] Therefore be still awhile from thy own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires, and imaginations, and be stayed in the principle of God in thee, that it may raise thy mind up to God, and stay it upon God, and thou wilt find strength from him, and find him to be a God at hand, a present help in the time of trouble and of need. And thou being come to the principle of God, which hath been transgressed [by thee], it will keep thee humble; and [to] the humble God will teach his way, which is peace, and such he doth exalt. [...] Now as the principle of God in thee hath been transgressed, come to it …. Then thou wilt feel the power of God, which will bring nature into its course, and give thee to see the glory of the first body. There the wisdom of God will be received (which is Christ, by which all things were made and created) and thou be thereby preserved and ordered to God’s glory. There thou wilt come to receive and feel the physician of value, who clothes people in their right mind, whereby they may serve God and do his will.¹⁵

If, as Fox advises, we still our seeking, turn to the life of love within us, and wait faithfully in, and only in, our present “measure” of that life, we find the wisdom and power we need to live justly. Here is no waiting and hoping for mystical experience, but simply a trusting response to the love that is already at work within our hearts. “Thus when God doth work, who shall let it?”

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NOTES

[1].  George Fox, The Collected Works of George Fox, Vol. 1, p. 74 (1831/1990 edition), with punctuation slightly modified to accord with the version quoted by Pink Dandelion.

[2].  Ben Pink Dandelion, Confident Quakerism (Pendle Hill Pamphlet # 410). All quotations are from pages 10 and 11.

[3].  Fox, Works, Vol. 1, p. 75.

[4].  1 Cor. 1:24. The entire passage from 19 – 31 is instructive and could well have been in Fox’s mind at the time:

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence. But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: that, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

[5].  See John 14:6. Robert Barclay, whose theology differs somewhat from that of the young Fox, had this to say in his Apology for the True Christian Divinity (Quaker Heritage Press edition, 2002, p. 144):

Though the outward declaration of the Gospel be taken sometimes for the Gospel, yet it is but figuratively and by a metonymy. For, to speak properly, the Gospel is this inward power and life which preacheth glad tidings in the hearts of all men, offering salvation unto them, and seeking to redeem them from their iniquities, and therefore it is said to be preached in every creature under heaven: whereas there are many thousands of men and women to whom the outward Gospel was never preached.

[6].  Although we are sometimes told that Fox’s “experimentally” is simply equivalent to our modern “experientially,” I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Both “experiment” and “experience” date back to the mid-14^th century, and both come from Latin words which, while different, mean the same thing: a trial or test. It seems to me that Fox’s use of the word carries that connotation — which is not to say that it does not also include the common sense of “experience.” In any case, contemporary concepts of “experiential mysticism” carry connotations that I don’t think we can simply read back into Fox’s thought. Unfortunately, while Ellwood and Penn use the word in their introductions to Fox’s Journal, this is the Fox’s only direct use of it in his collected works. (He once quotes an opponent’s use of it in The Great Mystery.)

[7].  John 1:12, my translation.

[8].  In an epistle called “To Friends in the Ministry” (Works, Vol. 1, page 195), Fox wrote, “You, that know and feel the power, you feel the Cross of Christ, you feel the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.”

[9].  Romans 1:19, my translation. The verse is the source of the well-known Quaker phrase “that of God in every one.”

[10]. Acts 17:28a.

[11]. “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). On “beholding” as inward seeing, see the “Exploring Silence” series by Maggie Ross at
http://ravenwilderness.blogspot.com/.

[12]. 1 John 4:16b

[13]. Fox, Works, Vol. 2, p. 163.

[14]. Ibid., p. 214.

[15]. Fox, Works, Vol. 1, pp. 375-376.

The Revolutionary Meaning of “That of God” and “the Inner Light”

We saw in the first session that the phrases “the inner Light” and “that of God” can be traced back to scripture, to passages from the first chapter, or prologue, of John’s “gospel”¹ book and Paul’s letter to the Romans. We also mentioned that the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible, which George Fox and other early Friends would likely have known, unite the two images in a way that is significant for our understanding of early Quaker thought.

The phrase “that of God” comes from a passage in Paul (Romans 1:16-25) that can be read as a warning to those who practice external religion – that is (from the Quaker perspective), religion that locates the divine life and power outside of the human heart and therefore doesn’t revolutionize one’s life for the good. Those who turn from the life and power of God within them to the worship of a God conceived in the form of a creature – including, significantly, that of a human being – and who by professing their religion garner the esteem of others² are, says Paul, without excuse. Why? Because “that which can be known of God, namely his divine power [which we meet in John as the Logos] and nature [which, John’s first epistle tells us, is love], is shining³ within them.” Significantly, the Geneva Bible’s marginal note informs us that “within them” means “in their hearts.”

Paul’s passage has a number of connections with the prologue of John. First, the Logos, introduced in John’s text with explicit reference to the creation story of Genesis, is God’s creative power which brings the order of love to the chaos or disorder of both the external and internal universes, thereby creating a cosmos, a well-ordered whole. The reordering of the external world is, in the teaching of Jesus, begun but also still to come: “the time is coming and now is” (John 4:23). The re-ordering of the inner world of the self is known in the Christian and Quaker tradition as spiritual rebirth, and that, too, involves maturation to fullness, as in Ephesians 4:13: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ….” The hidden impulse toward godly order both outwardly and inwardly is the continuing work of the Logos.

Second, the Logos is shining within us (“in their hearts”). According to John, the divine Logos is “the Light that enlightens every one who comes into the world,” the Light which “shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” Here, the Geneva Bible’s notes make an explicit connection between John and Paul, even quoting Paul’s phrase, “they are without excuse.” Because the Logos, the power of God, shines or is manifest within us, there is no legitimate reason for us to look elsewhere for a source of spiritual life; indeed, there is no other source. Everything else is a dead imitation, what philosopher Alain Badiou might call a simulacrum,⁴ what the first Friends called apostate Christianity and even Antichrist, the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

“Logos” names that power which, when “accepted” or “received” (as John put it), begins to re-create us in the image of God – that image being Christ, “the eikon of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). That re-creation entails what Fox called our passing through the flaming sword, our being taken up here and now into the Paradise of innocence, into that life and power which is Christ. Passing through the turning, the revolution, of that sword, which cuts off the delusion of the self-absorption and self-reliance of which our simulacrum of religion is a symptom, we return to the prelapsarian state of living as the image of God, as the human form of “his divine power and nature.”

We see, then, that “that of God” is not a static thing, not something like a “part of God” or even a “supreme identity” (à la Alan Watts) in human beings, nor is it something that we can idealize or worship as an object. The phrase “that of God” refers, rather, to the Logos, the creative inner power that orders our lives and our world according to that love which is the nature of God. It begins our reordering by enlightening and guiding us: “that which can be known of God is shining within [us],” showing us our darkness (which we probably thought was light, our spiritual eye being accustomed to darkness) and how to walk out of it. In doing so, it changes who we are. That’s the revolution – or the beginning of the revolution – that begins our journey in Quaker spirituality.

This Revolution Begins at Home

Quakerism has had a number of phases, but even in its “quietist” periods it has been possessed of at least some revolutionary energy, resisting injustice and violence. Not unexpectedly, we find that the first generation was the most revolutionary. They had an apocalyptic sensibility that feels appropriate in these times. The theologically more conservative William Penn, looking back on their amazing accomplishments, noted that, “They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others. Their hearts were rent as well as their garments changed, and they knew the power and work of God upon them.” (Penn made a little pun there about changing clothes instead of tearing them: Quakers dressed plainly as a result of having experienced the rending of their hearts.) Penn was referring to a passage from the book of the prophet Joel:

Joel 2: (11b) …for the day of the LORD [is] great and very terrible; and who can abide it?  (12)  Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning:  (13)  And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.

First, they were changed; their hearts were opened, rent. Before anything else, they first answered – i.e., responded sincerely to – “that of God” in themselves. As we’ve seen, “that of God” refers to the same dynamic reality, the Logos, which is named by the phrase “the inner Light.” When we discern and accept the working of the Logos-Light in us, we receive, as John says (in a more literal translation), “the power to be becoming children of God.” Note that this teaching, which has echoes of the idea of maturation in Ephesians 4:13, may contradict the belief that all people already are the children of God: to be the child, the offspring, of a parent is to share the nature of that parent, and therefore the children of God are those who, by accepting and being transformed by the Light, have become, as Peter put it, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Here we can see that the change the Friends experienced was more radical – much deeper and more essential – than a change in values or beliefs: as we’ll see later, the internal change – revolution – at which Quakerism aims makes such things unnecessary.

From the first Friends’ perspective, there is nothing more crucial to the spiritual life than discerning and responding to the Light, to “that of God,” which is the living power, already available in us in some measure, of what the later Quaker John Woolman called “universal [i.e., nondiscriminating] love.” This event of encountering and responding to the power of love in the heart is the very beginning of the Quaker life, which is therefore a life that begins in revolution, in radical change. It is only when that encounter has begun to turn around, to turn upside-down, our normal way of experiencing and being in the world that we enter into the life of the spirit.

To accept the Light is initially to be “low and humble before” it, as Sally Bruyneel, author of a recent book on the theology of Margaret Fell,⁵ puts it. Ultimately, the Friends tell us, that results in one’s becoming centered in the Light as one’s self, such that, as George Fox liked to say, “Christ is not distinct from his saints.”⁶ Or as Paul put it, allowing for a distinction that is not a distinction, “I am crucified with Christ, yet nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of [emphasis added] the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”⁷ (Interestingly, George Fox did not fail to point out such use of the word “of”: if Christ and the saints are not distinct, then the faith by which the saints live is Christ’s faith, which perhaps is best understood as fidelity to God-who-is-love “even unto death on the cross” [Phil. 2:8].)

This transformation is obviously very different from holding a belief or ideal: to hold an ideal and then work to conform our actions to it is to remain essentially unchanged while living under the law, even if it be a new, improved law. Under law, we may lie to ourselves about how well we’re measuring up, become disheartened by our inability to obey completely, or settle for “doing as well as we can” – a kind of attempted bargaining with God which our Quaker ancestors would call “preaching up sin.” The Quaker tradition, along with the Christian scriptures on which it was based, offers us a way out of the hypocrisy and inevitable failure of life under law: a life of the freedom of the Spirit.

Such a life is one in which the moral impotence that struggled under law is turned – revolved, converted – into a life of spiritual power that has no need of law. In the new covenant, the law of love is “written” in our hearts (see Jer. 31:33), which means that the structure and nature of the heart is now godly; all of one’s actions partake of that divine nature. The experience of the first Friends (and I think we see here why we do them a dishonor to imagine that their appeal to experience guarantees the validity of our own subjective feelings and beliefs) was that they could and did live in and by the actual “life and power” of the God who is love.

Why We Need This Revolution

In the classic Quaker experience, the power to which we give such names as “that of God,” Logos, and inner Light is initially a hidden and oppressed power. As writers such as Nayler and Penington warned, this Light at first seems so small, weak, oppressed, despicable, and different from what we expect that, failing to recognize it for what it is, we disregard and even disdain it. We write it off; we marginalize it. And then we turn to something else, perhaps to the following of the gospel or the imitation of Christ; that is, we try to content ourselves with a simulacrum, an imitation. But that’s the betrayal, the apostasy, for which Paul says there is no excuse. And original Quakerism agrees with Paul completely on that.

The Logos is hidden and oppressed (“trampled” like the seed, which Jesus says is the “Word,” or Logos, planted in the heart – see Mark 4) because it is not what we’re looking for; in fact, it may be what we’re not looking for. It is a light which would show us things about ourselves and our world that perhaps we’d rather not see, and which would show us a path, the path of righteousness or justice, on which we’d really rather not walk. Therefore, neither accepted social discourse nor our “personal truth” recognizes it. As the myth of the Fall tells us, we have gone from innocence into a knowledge which, being self-centered, is harmfully incomplete and therefore ungodly.

To borrow, perhaps inappropriately, a saying from Jacques Derrida: “The temptation of knowing, the temptation of knowledge, is to believe not only that one knows what one knows (that wouldn’t be too serious), but also that one knows what knowledge is, that is, free, structurally, of belief or of faith….”⁸ When I encountered that statement, although Derrida had already said that he was not talking about “some original sin,” I was reminded that our knowledge rests on a world-view: in the traditional terms, it is the knowledge proper to the fallen state, the self-reliant, and “subsequently” also culture-reliant, knowledge for which Adam & Eve traded the Paradise of innocence and peace. It is knowledge that rests on what it does not acknowledge; shaped by an ungodly human logos, it is an incomplete kosmos, one that coheres by excluding what does not fit. Although it believes itself to be universal, our knowledge is established on ignorance (ignore-ance). But what is ignored, what is marginalized, remains true and integral to the reality of which our knowledge is a partial and distorted reflection. We repress that aspect of reality because we know subconsciously that its revelation will be revolutionary.

In other words, without even realizing it consciously, we resist the work of the Logos in every moment. Our belief that we know what’s good and true is naïve because we don’t and normally can’t take into account not only the limitations of knowledge but also the unconscious biases that foster the coherence of our worldview. (As we may learn from the story of the Fall, normal maturity can be seen as entailing loss. For example, a very young child can recognize sounds from a variety of languages, but that ability is diminished or lost by six months of age as she gains experience in her own language.⁹) Acting on the seemingly solid basis of our constricted (and constructed) knowledge, we make decisions which contribute to disorder in both the external and the internal worlds. Yet generally we are convinced that our disorder is order, even the divine order of love’s Logos.

That’s why, for example, the Quaker tradition teaches that a crucial criterion for whether a leading is genuine – from God rather than the fallen self, as the tradition would say – is that it is uncomfortable for us: the more we feel right about a leading, the less likely that leading is to be right for us. And conversely, the more resistance we feel to a leading, the more likely that leading is to be a motion of that love which is “that of God in [us].” Living in knowledge that is disordered, ungodly, divorced from the divine Logos, we can’t trust our own thoughts and feelings. And yet we cling to them, even exalt them.

We need a change in perspective – most likely, we need someone to answer what Quaker James Nayler called the crying of that of God in us – in order to see that what we thought was light is darkness, and that turning from that darkness to the divine Light, although contrary to the wisdom of “the world” and to our own deep fears, is a good thing, is the passage past the revolving sword into authentic spiritual life. It is the way in which, to borrow more terms from Alain Badiou, we move from being “individuals,” which for many of us means privileged but nonetheless interchangeable consumer-cogs in the machinery of an unjust world, to “subjects,” free human beings who have been grasped and radically changed by encounter with the power of universal love, in fidelity to which we now live.

Our Quaker tradition can help bring about that change: in answering that of God in us, it can open our eyes to the marginalized reality of the Christ-power in our hearts. That power, as we attend to it, begins to rend, to tear open, the closed world in which we have been living. Badiou says that, “A truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge.”¹⁰ What Badiou calls “a truth” is the irruption of an element of reality which has been repressed in order to make the system work smoothly for those who hold power in that system. It is the appearance of the nothingness, the “void,” which was implicit but not counted in the situation.

1 Cor. 1:(27)  But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;  (28)  And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:  (29) That no flesh should glory in his presence.  (30)  But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption:  (31) That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. [Emphasis added.]

“Things which are not”: including those who, like Lazarus starving outside the gate of the rich man (Luke 16:19-31), have been marginalized, made invisible, of no account – those who have been sacrificed to our worldview.

The little, unimportant people, the poor and the wretched, are the victims of the wicked, who feel that they are the darlings of their gods. The victims are the losers in our success-oriented society. The winners look down on them because, as opinion goes, ‘they haven’t made it.’ In every society, ancient, modern, or postmodern, we find these victims on the underside of the history of the powerful. But we have to seek them out; for people sitting in darkness cannot be seen. — Jürgen Moltmann¹¹

Revolution and Rebirth

Religious philosopher Richard Kearney, who coined the interesting word “anatheism” (by which he refers to religion “after God” or after theism), contrasts what he calls our “causal generation from the past,” which is to be born into a present that is continuous with our human history of injustice, to our “procreation from [God’s] future,” from the kingdom (which Jesus proclaimed and lived) of justice, mercy, and peace.¹² I think that the distinction points to the difference between living in the world of “what’s possible” according to human wisdom and living in the seemingly impossible world of divine love – impossible because our normal bias (which, we should be clear, may be a function of natural concern for self-preservation) marginalizes it as a potential lived reality.

Kearney notes the close etymological connection between “power” and “possibility”: they have the same root in Greek. He points to Luke’s story of the annunciation, in which the angel says to Mary, “The power (dunamis) of the Highest shall overshadow you … for with God, nothing shall be impossible (adunatesei)” (Luke 1:35-37). To be impossible is, etymologically, to have no power, but Paul taught that God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9) and that Christ emptied himself and became obedient even unto death (Phil. 2:8). To be born from the womb of God’s future is to embody the possibility of that future, as Jesus did, here and now – to make present what the world insists cannot be. That’s quite revolutionary. To bear witness to that presence by one’s life and words is to witness to that which is ignored and trampled by worldly knowledge. It is to be an often-unwelcome stranger in the world, one whose empathetic knowledge is deep, inclusive, prophetic, and threatening. But it is also to be one who, in responding to the call of divine love in her own heart, is able to answer that of God in others as well.

Discerning and responding to the cries of that Logos-Light which had been marginalized in us, we discern and respond to the cries of the powerless, marginalized beings around us – beings that, even if we previously had some awareness of their existence, we hadn’t really seen until now because, as Moltmann says, we can’t see people who exist in the dark. But now we see by a Light that shines in darkness. And as Christ the Logos said, whatever we do to his brothers and sisters – and every person is at least potentially that, for the Light “enlightens everyone who comes into the world” – we do to him. When we see and accept the marginalized Light, we see and accept marginalized beings: it’s one event. And so the inward revolution spreads outward in the praxis of love, in the prolepsis, the making present, of a divine future, as we walk the way to whatever measure of peace, justice, and mercy may be possible for us – a measure that can’t, as it were, be measured in advance.

Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light – The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” edited and with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. 404 pp. Image Doubleday, 2007. $14.99.

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, by Christopher Hitchens. 98 pp. Verso, 1995. $17.95.

“Eternity,” wrote William Blake, “is in love with the productions of time.” A Roman Catholic – especially one who was formed in the pre-conciliar Church of the early twentieth century, as was Mother Teresa – would surely agree with that, but she would not stop there. The Catholic sees time sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity. Time is itself the production of eternity, and eternity, like the Light shining in the darkness,^[1] is present within but not constrained by time. Time passes; the eternal is: “Jesus Christ, yesterday, and to day; and the same for ever.”^[2] And the Catholic Christ, the eternal creative Logos, is in love, in his divine-human way, with his productions in time – with human souls.

When the Logos takes flesh in Jesus Christ, and when Christ suffers torture and death in order to at-one the human with the divine, his act occurs in time and yet is not of  time. The agony of the eternal Christ, the Lamb slain from the beginning of the world,^[3] is eternal: his divine suffering is unending. Indeed, his very nature is kenotic, or self-emptying, love.^[4] Because his redemptive sacrifice is eternal, it can be effectively re-presented in the Mass,^[5] which makes him physically present with “the faithful,” who participate in his eternally-present kenosis when they are joined to him in self-sacrificial love.^[6]

Furthermore, as a member of Christ’s “mystical body,” the Catholic is privileged, like Paul, to “fill up” by her own suffering “those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ … for his body, which is the church”^[7] – as some who were educated by nuns, with their frequent advice to “offer up” our pains in union with the suffering of Jesus, will remember. Through the suffering that accompanies kenotic love, the Catholic Christian participates in “the ever-continued sacrificial activity of Christ in Heaven.”^[8] That may be heresy to Christians whose ideas about time and eternity differ, but it is at the heart of Catholic spirituality. The Catholic is called to carry her cross daily in union with the suffering Christ, sharing in his sacrifice and participating thereby in the salvation of souls. To be set aside, consecrated, to do nothing else is the calling of the Catholic “religious,” a person who lives under vows such as poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability; a person whose life is formally and conspicuously dedicated to the service of Christ in/as the Church.

It was to that exalted calling that 18-year-old Agnes Bojaxhiu, later to be known as Mother Teresa, was responding when she left her native Albania and traveled to Ireland in order to join the Loretto Sisters.^[9] In her letter of application to Loretto, Agnes expresses her “sincere desire [to] become a missionary sister, and work for Jesus who died for us all.” Other than to serve in India, she tells Mother Superior, Agnes wants nothing more than to “surrender myself completely to the good God’s disposal.” As a Catholic, she knows that such surrender is the embrace of a life of suffering in union with the eternally-wounded “Sacred Heart”^[10] of Christ.

Agnes’s application to the Loretto Sisters is one of many letters in Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light, a collection mostly of her private correspondence, much of which she had requested be destroyed, with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C.^[11] It was through the publication of Come Be My Light in 2007 that the world learned that Mother Teresa, known for her tireless work for the poor, her ready smile, and her seemingly unshakable faith, had almost continuously for about 50 years felt bereft of God and beset by doubt. Brian Kolodiejchuck wants to explain the apparent contradiction in acceptable hagiographical terms. In fact, it’s his job to do so.

Kolodiejchuck is hardly a disinterested editor and commentator: a priest of the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa, he is director of the Mother Teresa Center and the official postulator, or advocate, for the “cause” of her canonization as a saint in the Catholic Church. As postulator, a role no doubt made easier by John Paul II’s abolition of the ancient office of the “Devil’s advocate,” Kolodiejchuck presents Mother Teresa’s life and writings with the aim of proving her sanctity. And while the contents of her letters are challenging, given that the persistent spiritual dryness she describes can even take the form of loss of belief in God and heaven, he doesn’t fail to produce an edifying explanation.

As have others who’ve followed him, Kolodiejchuck offers the concept, made famous by the 16th-century Carmelite John of the Cross, of “the dark night of the soul,” an experience of spiritual purgation that precedes union with God, to account for Mother Teresa’s interior emptiness. However, because union with God early on was followed by the extraordinary duration of Teresa’s “night” of spiritual deprivation, he finds it necessary to stretch and ultimately redefine that concept. Following Mother Teresa herself, Kolodiejchuck will claim that Teresa’s “dark night” experience was uniquely redemptive rather than purgative: Christ was allowing her to share in his atoning suffering on the cross.

But the dark night concept, however creatively applied, is not the only possible explanation for Mother Teresa’s experience. A less hagiographical reading of her correspondence suggests other, less forced, explanatory frameworks. Perhaps the most comprehensive is this: the strong-willed Mother Teresa knew what she wanted and made sure that she got it, despite increasingly deep doubts about the truth of her faith. And what she wanted was sainthood as classically defined in the Catholic Church: the sacrifice of “everything” for Jesus and for the salvation of the souls he loves, a sacrifice recognized and applauded by God and Church.

Comments in the media about the book tend to give the impression that Mother Teresa’s spiritual difficulties began only after she had founded her new order, the Missionaries of Charity. That is understandable: there is little documentation from the time before she got the idea of the order, and Teresa herself states in a letter that her spiritual darkness began “in [19]49 or [19]50.” Certainly, too, the post-1950 difficulties are startling, afflicting as they do a religious figure who is increasingly famous worldwide as the tireless and deeply committed foundress of a religious order dedicated to serving “the poorest of the poor.” But a careful reading of Come Be My Light reveals that Teresa’s “difficulties against faith”^[12] began much earlier, only temporarily stopping when, significantly, Jesus began to speak to her in September of 1946.

Teresa’s later difficulties appear to be the exacerbation of her earlier doubts. It may be that her outwardly unshakable certitude about both her “vocation” (i.e., her “calling,” her career) and conservative Catholic ideology, as well as her framing of her doubt and aridity as a saint’s “dark night,” were aspects of a kind of compensatory reaction, a transformation of unacceptable feelings into their opposites. Doubting that Jesus existed, Teresa began to hear his voice, addressing her “with utmost tenderness”^[13] and asking that she perform a very specific and public service for him. But that intimacy with Jesus would be short-lived, and the doubts would return all too soon.

We don’t know exactly when the doubts began, whether they were present at the beginning of Teresa’s religious career or began after she entered Loretto. But doubting or not, Agnes Bojaxhiu was received into the Loretto Sisters community in 1928, and her request to be assigned to a mission school in Bengal was granted. She arrived in Calcutta in early January of 1929. On the way, aboard ship, she wrote a self-conscious poem, “Farewell,” some excerpts from which will give us the flavor of the sense of self and vocation to which she clung throughout her career.

… I am leaving old friends
Forsaking family and home
My heart draws me onward
To serve my Christ.

… Bravely standing on the deck
Joyful of mien,
Christ’s happy little one,
His new bride to be.

In her hand a cross of iron
On which her Savior hangs,
While her eager soul offers there
Its painful sacrifice.

O God, accept this sacrifice
As a sign of my love,
Help, please, Thy creature
To glorify Thy name!

… Fine and pure as summer dew,
Her soft warm tears begin to flow,
Sealing and sanctifying now
Her painful sacrifice.^[14]

Agnes, soon to become the bride of Christ through her religious vows, has already given herself to him in spirit and shares in his redemptive work. She is, therefore, not despite but because of the twice-mentioned “painful sacrifice,” “joyful of mien, happy”; indeed, she asserts that the sacrifice is offered eagerly. Moreover, it is offered on the same cross on which Christ hangs. She is on her way to “doing the same work which Jesus was doing when he was on earth.”^[15]

The paradox expressed in that “eagerly” captures the apparent mystery of Mother Teresa’s life: despite intense and almost continuous inner suffering, her interactions with others led people to believe – in context, of course, of her reputation – that she was a joyful person. But the mystery is dispelled if we recognize that the experience of simultaneous happiness and anguish of spirit was not only her lot but also her desire, a crucial part of the identity she chose for herself as a Catholic nun destined for sainthood in the mystical tradition of her namesake, the Carmelite saint Thérèse of Lisieux. As early as 1937, the year of her profession of lifelong vows, Mother Teresa wrote of a sister nun that “[Sister Gabriella] works beautifully for Jesus – the most important is that she knows how to suffer and at the same time how to laugh. That is the most important – to suffer and to laugh.” The letter concludes with this: “[E]verything is for Jesus, so … everything is beautiful, even though it is difficult.”^[16] Later she would write that

Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified [a good quality for a Catholic] person who[,] forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please God in all she does for souls [note souls and not people; that is significant]. Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity. A person who has this gift of cheerfulness very often reaches a great height of perfection. For God loves a cheerful giver [2 Cor. 9:7] and He takes close to His heart the religious [i.e., those who have taken vows and been formally consecrated to the service of God/Church] He loves.”^[17]

Teresa not only accepts suffering but embraces it as a sharing in the divine kenosis of Christ and as a gift of reparation to him. She is happy to suffer: the world can be brought to God and his salvation through suffering, salvation is itself effected by suffering, and her own redemptive suffering reduces Christ’s – for he grieves each time a soul is lost to hell through sin. For a Catholic such as Teresa, suffering (given by God along with the “grace” of embracing it in the right spirit) is a privilege, and intense, long-term suffering is a sign of special favor from God. Teresa will be privileged to hang on the cross in perpetual agony with Christ, sharing in his work of saving souls. He is her beloved: how could she do otherwise? And her complete self-surrender to God through suffering will raise her above the run-of-the-mill Catholic into the realm of sainthood. By means of such devices as voluntary suffering and a special, secret vow of total submission to God’s will – a will revealed not only mediately through superiors (to whom she had already vowed obedience) but also directly to her by Jesus – she will induce God, she thinks, to grant her that destiny.

If serving God by saving souls through suffering was the principal conscious desire of Teresa’s life, the controlling metaphor of her life was that of spiritual marriage: through her vows as a nun, she became the bride of Christ. And through her extraordinary private vow, made five years after her ritual marriage to Jesus, she would bind Christ even more closely to her. Explaining that “I wanted to give God something very beautiful,” she “made a vow to God, binding under mortal  sin,^[18] to give God anything that He may ask, ‘Not to refuse Him anything.’”^[19] Presumably, the vow, which was made with the permission of her spiritual advisor, was ratified by Christ/God. In effect, it says to God, “If I don’t do anything and everything that you want me to do in this world, you must abandon my soul to everlasting torment after death.” It also requires that God be quite clear about his wishes, as if Teresa might have known, at least subliminally, that Jesus would speak to her.

To this observer, it seems evident that the new vow was Teresa’s way of ensuring that, despite her earlier but still-binding vow of obedience to her religious superiors, she would be able to do what she wanted – felt led, as Quakers might say – to do. But it is evident, too, that she took the private vow quite seriously and at face value, expecting God to reciprocate. What Teresa expected in return for that vow is summarized in a statement she made to her nuns in 1959:

To give ourselves fully to God is a means of receiving God Himself. I for God and God for me. I live for God and give up my own self, and in this way induce God to live for me. Therefore to possess God we must allow Him to possess our soul.^[20]

Mother Teresa initially wanted nothing less from the transaction than the possession of God, and it appears that, for a while, she felt that she’d found a way to get and retain that. But by the time she made that statement in 1959, Teresa was learning the painful lesson that she was able neither to induce nor to possess her divine spouse. She had committed herself to giving Christ all that she could for a lifetime, but, contrary to her expectation, he did not return the gift. Like an emotionally abusive husband, he demanded her abject devotion and self-sacrificing service but then withdrew his love and companionship. I for God but God not for me. In large part, Come Be My Light is the story of Teresa’s attempt to cope with that perceived abandonment, which was evidently the return, in power, of her earlier doubts.

According to Teresa herself, speaking in letters that she wanted destroyed, Christ had been quite literally vocal, explicit, and insistent about his demand that she dedicate her life to saving souls of the poor, but after she had complied publicly and irrevocably, he spoke to her no more. Worse, he left her completely alone, withdrawing even the sense of his presence, leaving her to doubt his very existence and, therefore, the value of her life’s work. It seems that Teresa was paying the price of getting what she wanted most: even more than to enjoy Christ’s companionship, Teresa wanted to attain recognized sainthood by founding an order and by suffering for Jesus. When the “difficulties against faith” began to recur as the former goal was achieved, she was blessed with the ultimate torment for a life-long bride of Christ: divine spousal abandonment, the supreme test of love. Withstanding even that, she would prove that she could, as she said with patent if unconscious egotism, “love Him as He has never been loved before.”^[21] She would love him even if he did not exist.

[You may click here for Part Two of this review. Comments should be posted under Part 2 -- they have been disabled for Part 1.]

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NOTES FOR PART 1

A question arises: given that Teresa was already experiencing the loss of God long before 1959, how could she continue to teach her nuns as she did? And as that sense of loss continued and even worsened, so that Jesus was absent for her even from the Blessed Sacrament (the consecrated bread, believed to be the actual flesh and blood of Christ), how could she continue to present the public face of a hyper-committed, conservative, and holy Catholic? Initially, as we have noted, she could frame her experience as a classic dark night of the soul. Formed by Catholic spirituality, she knew that on her own she would never be able give all, to eliminate even the residue of self in her actions; God, therefore, in his special love for her, was purging her soul of self-attachment. In that belief, she could hope for a light at the end of that dark tunnel which had been described by St. Thérèse (whose saintly suffering included a spiritual night that ended with her early death from tuberculosis).

But Teresa was eventually able to say that she had “not been seeking self for sometime [sic] now,”^[1] yet the darkness did not dissipate. As the tunnel stretched across decades, she would need a different paradigm. With the assistance of a spiritual advisor, she found one: knowing that she could withstand the pain, Christ was permitting her to share the terrible but salvific experience of abandonment that he had cried out from the cross on Calvary, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”^[2] Her soul now pure, her suffering was no longer purgative; the pain had become, like Christ’s, fully redemptive. Every day, precisely through remaining faithful despite her sense of abandonment by God, Teresa was achieving her aim of saving souls. She was hanging on the cross with her God-forsaken Jesus. And so at every step, whatever the conceptual framing, the response of this faithful bride was to say “Yes!”

[M]y Jesus, You have done to me according to Your will [here Teresa echoes Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is in a sense the icon of the willing and long-suffering spouse of God – see, for example, Luke 1] –  and Jesus hear my prayer –  if this pleases You – if my pain and suffering – my darkness and separation gives You a drop of consolation – my own Jesus, do with me as You wish – [for] as long as you wish, without a single glance at my feelings and pain. I am Your own. – Imprint on my soul the life and sufferings of Your Heart. […] If my separation from You – brings others to You and in their love and company You find joy and pleasure – why Jesus, I am willing with all my heart to suffer … not only now – but for all eternity – if this was possible. Your happiness is all that I want. – For the rest please do not take the trouble – even if You see me faint with pain. […] I want to satiate Your Thirst with every single drop of blood that You can find in me. – Don’t allow me to do you wrong in any way – take from me the power of hurting You. […] I beg of You only one thing – please do not take the trouble to return soon. – I am ready to wait for You for all eternity. –  [signed] Your little one^[3]

Nuns-to-be in bridal gowns.

Here we see most clearly the essential, if not only childish but also masochistic, selfishness behind Mother Teresa’s career: she wanted to be special to Jesus, more so than his other brides, more so than the rest of the human race. Teresa wanted to be the greatest of saints. That desire would drive her to take a secret vow of total submission to God and to push, even harass, her ecclesiastical superiors – “Don’t delay, Your Grace, don’t put it off. Souls are being lost …. Do something about this before you leave, and let us take away from the Heart of Jesus His continual suffering”^[4] – until they permitted her to leave Loretto and work “among the poorest of the poor” with the goal of founding her own religious order. Why the poorest of the poor? Not completely, it turns out, because she feels human compassion for them: Teresa is interested in saving souls from hell, not persons from misery and pain. What motivates Teresa is solicitude less for the poor than for her lover, Jesus, who is not happy.

Teresa’s divine husband is displeased with the poor, not with the rich whose exploitive and hoarding behaviors perpetuate and exacerbate poverty, because the poor do not turn to him for succor in their suffering, do not offer their pain to him for the redemption of the world, do not love him. After a lifetime of misery and a painful death, the souls of the poor are being consigned to everlasting punishment in hell because they either did not know God or rejected him in anger about their lives, anger Teresa traces to a false – i.e., non-Catholic – understanding of suffering. And, believing that the situation causes pain for Jesus, she wants to alleviate “His longing, His suffering on account of these little children, on account of the poor dying in sin ….”^[5]

Teresa left Loretto to “serve” the poor from her desire to give something to Christ – to, as she repeated many times throughout her career, “satiate his thirst for souls.” When the eternal Christ on the cross says, “I thirst,” he means, believed Mother Teresa, that he thirsts for souls that are being lost for eternity – lost because there are no sisters to take Jesus to them, to be his light in the darkness of poverty and sin, to teach them to offer their pain to Jesus. “He spoke of His thirst – not for water – but for love, for sacrifice.”^[6] Teresa dedicated herself and her order not to helping the poor out of poverty but to helping Jesus – and thereby helping their own souls – by being with the poor as models, teaching them to accept and even embrace their suffering for Jesus’ sake. And she was richly rewarded, at first by Jesus’ loving companionship, and then, when the work had been established, by the opportunity to suffer cheerfully^[7] his abandonment of her. Her motivations can be seen in a 1947 transcript of the words that Jesus had spoken to her. Here is an excerpt:

The poor I want you to bring to Me – and the Sisters who would offer their lives as victims of My love – would bring … souls to Me. […] You have been always saying, “Do with me whatever You wish.” – Now I want to act – let Me do it – My little spouse – My own little one. – Do not fear – I shall be with you always. – You will suffer … but you are My own little spouse – the spouse of the Crucified Jesus – you will have to bear these torments on your heart. […] Refuse Me not. – Trust Me lovingly – trust Me blindly.^[8]

The Church has taught Teresa that Jesus thirsts for souls. And, while he makes no complaints about rich oppressors, he is pained by his rejection by the poor and oppressed. Teresa’s saintly work is, therefore, to deliver the souls of the poor to him, “to fight the devil and deprive him of the thousand little souls which he is destroying every day.”^[9] That is why, as Christopher Hitchens details in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, while patients in her facilities receive appallingly inadequate care in penurious “penitential” surroundings, Teresa travels around the world like a female John Paul II, receiving adulation, accepting and hoarding millions of dollars from well-known sociopaths and autocrats (Charles Keating, the Duvaliers) while helping to improve their images, and condemning the birth control and abortion services that could help alleviate the misery of the people she claims to serve. Teresa serves not the poor but the Catholic Church and its Christ – and her own overarching spiritual ambition.

According to the blurb from John Waters, The Missionary Position is “Hilariously mean.” In fact, it is neither: Hitchens has written a sobering and straightforward account of the dark side of Mother Teresa’s love for Jesus and souls and of her fidelity to Roman Catholic doctrine. Although he wrote his book about a dozen years before the publication of Come Be My Light, Hitchens saw clearly that Mother Teresa’s vocation was to do her utmost to advance the ideology and soul-saving mission of “the body of Christ,” the Catholic Church. If she felt compassion, and it appears from her letters that she did, this was the form her compassion, distorted by doctrine and institutional/peer pressure, took. (We Quakers, even of the liberal variety, may benefit from meditating on that phenomenon.) And that’s understandable, given that she was formed in the Catholic obsession with soul-saving from her earliest days. She would report that “From the age of 5½ years, – when I first received Him [she refers to her "First Communion," her first reception of bread transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ] – the love for souls has been within. – It grew with the years – until I came to India – with the hope of saving many souls.”^[10] When we recall that souls are saved through suffering, we can perhaps understand how a seed of love has produced thorns.

In a section called “Good Works and Heroic Virtues,” Hitchens documents a sad litany of such thorns. He begins by quoting a 1994 report by Lancet editor Dr. Robin Fox, who, visiting Teresa’s Calcutta home for the dying, was surprised to find that the nuns were making medical decisions based on minimal training and were providing “care” that could be considered cruel, especially given the large amounts of money that Mother Teresa had collected over the years but had chosen not to apply to the care of her clients. “Along with the neglect of diagnosis,” he wrote in The Lancet, “the lack of good analgesics marks Mother Teresa’s approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer.”^[11]

Our eyes thus opened, we are immediately exposed to an even more disturbing account, this one by former volunteer Mary Loudon, of the same Calcutta facility. Loudon’s first impression was of a concentration camp.

[A]ll the patients had shaved heads. No chairs anywhere … no garden, no yard even.  […] They’re not being given painkillers really beyond aspirin … for the sort of pain that goes with terminal cancer …. They didn’t have enough drips. The needles [were] used over and over and over and you could see some of the nuns rinsing needles under the cold water tap.^[12]

When Loudon asked a nun why they were not sterilizing the needles, she was told, “There’s no point. There’s no time.” Loudon also tells of a boy who was dying there because a “relatively simple kidney complaint” had worsened due to lack of antibiotics. The boy needed surgery, but the nuns refused to take him to hospital, lest they have to “do it for everybody,” as an angry American doctor who was trying to treat the boy told Loudon. And this, a level of “care” that is reminiscent of the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill against which the Quaker “moral treatment” approach was developed over two hundred years ago,^[13] is the norm in the premier facility of a modern religious organization flush with millions of dollars and directed by a saint?

Mother Teresa herself, Hitchens notes, was treated in the finest clinics and hospitals, yet her “poorest of the poor” – and her nuns – were kept in substandard conditions and given inadequate treatment in order to be joined to the suffering Christ in pain and poverty. With characteristic incisiveness, Hitchens writes that “The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”^[14] Mother Teresa put it very plainly herself, in a 1981 Anacostia speech quoted by Hitchens: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion [i.e., the salvific agony] of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of poor people.”^[15]

There’s much more in The Missionary Position, some of which, addressing topics such as Teresa’s assistance in image-management for wealthy criminals and despots, we have already alluded to. In addition, Hitchens notes Teresa’s failure to return $1,250,000 of stolen money, given to her by Charles Keating, when requested to do so by an Assistant District Attorney of Los Angeles; her vocal support for right-wing regimes; her equation of abortion with war; her preaching against birth control, with the cruelly absurd claim that “there can never be enough” babies for God, who “always provides” for them;^[16] the secret baptisms of dying Hindus and Muslims. But the essential point for our purposes here is that Hitchens, by focusing on the actual implementation of “the work,” exposes the truth of Mother Teresa’s career, a truth reflected in her private “dark night” as well: it’s all about gaining favor with God (if he exists!) and Church by serving up imaginary souls to her imaginary husband Jesus, who, in practice, subsists in the ideology (and in the priestly hierarchy, which operates in persona Christi) of the Roman Catholic Church.

It’s noteworthy that Jesus departed from Teresa, and no longer spoke his will to her, only after the founding of her Missionaries of Charity was assured. From one perspective, one might say that, having guided her to do what he wanted, and knowing that she would persevere despite all, Jesus had no further need of Mother Teresa and so moved on. From another, one might say that, having gotten her way by appealing to direct revelation from him, well along the road to sainthood and subliminally fearful of contradictory revelation from the same source – namely, her own subconscious mind – she could not risk having him speak to her any longer.

That is not to say that Teresa ever consciously broke faith with her heavenly husband, or that, having silenced him, she did not continue a one-way conversation. Even while doubting his existence, she spoke her doubts to him. Again from 1959, the following is an excerpt of a prayer Teresa offered to him, transcribed at the direction of her confessor:

They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God – they would go through all of that suffering if they had just a little hope of possessing God. – In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not wanting me – of God not being God – of God not really existing (Jesus, please forgive my blasphemies – I have been told to write everything). […] What do I labor for? If there be no God – there can be no soul. – If there is no soul then Jesus – You also are not true. […] I am afraid to write all of these terrible things that pass in my soul. – They must hurt You.^[17]

“Of God not being God”: of her God who demands human suffering being, perhaps, no more than an internalized construct of the Church, a way of making sense of a heartless world by divinizing pain and calling it love?

The “darkness,” the sisyphean struggle between fact and fiction, continued almost without interruption for the remainder of Teresa’s life. After many years of inner sorrow and spiritual aridity, and still beset by godlessness, she could nonetheless write in 1983:

Jesus is my God.
Jesus is my Spouse.
Jesus is my Life.
Jesus is my only Love.
Jesus is All in All.
Jesus is my Everything.
Jesus, I love with my whole heart, with my whole being.
I have given Him all, even my sins, and He has espoused me to
Himself in tenderness and love.
Now and for life I am the spouse of my Crucified Jesus.^[18]

In the end, the eternally suffering Jesus that had been implanted in the brain of a little girl in Albania was as real and necessary to the adult Teresa as was she herself, despite decades of almost continuous experience that he was a figment. For her, the conflict and contradiction were unresolvable; only exaggerated devotion and outward certainty carried her through. What she and others such as Kolodiejchuk frame as a mystical night of the soul was the experience of a continuous struggle to suppress irrepressible truth lest a life and a self built upon religious delusion fall apart. An almost heroic application of the Catholic myth of salvific suffering saved Teresa’s ambitions from being crushed by truth, but that salvation had a steep price: what could have been – and appeared to be – a beautiful life of compassionate service was instead just another insidious operation of superstition and oppression. The chalice may have sparkled on the outside, but a look inside told a different story.^[19]

Toward the end of Come Be My Light, Kolodiejchuk adduces testimonials from others to buttress his case that Mother Teresa was a selfless mystic who underwent a dark night of the soul that was perhaps unique in both nature and duration. Hitchens sees Teresa quite differently, as a relatively simple but egotistical woman who was willingly used by powerful people to support oppressive superstition and abusive power and wealth. Both marshal facts, if selectively, to support their cases. Perhaps they are both right; perhaps a saint, at least a canonical saint, is simply a person who consistently and fully lives a religious ideology. If so, Mother Teresa is a saint, but so are religiously-inspired suicide bombers. In any case, with postulator Kolodiejchuk’s very positive framing of her darkness and doubts, and his  avoidance of such practical aspects of her career as Hitchens covers, it seems a good bet (despite Hitchens’s submission of a negative evaluation to the Vatican) that Mother Teresa will eventually be canonized, probably sooner than later. However that turns out, it is likely that the lie will live on.

In the eyes of the world, Mother Teresa was a deeply compassionate person who dedicated her life to alleviating the suffering of the very poor. The hagiographic efforts of  her disciple and advocate, Brian Kolodiejchuk, are clearly intended to support that view. (Again, that’s his job.) Quakers should know better than to accept the perspective of the world, but in case we, too, are taken in, Christopher Hitchens does us the favor of providing evidence that the light of Christ which Teresa claimed to be for the poor, a light that maintains the grotesquely unjust status quo by congratulating oppressors while urging the poor to gratefully accept injustice and suffering as blessings, is not a light which we would wish to personify or be guided by. In doing so, he may also raise important questions for us regarding our belief in our own commitment to compassion, justice, and peace: if so, the (in)famous atheist has done us doubly good service. In any case, Hitchens has thrown open the lid of yet another whitened sepulcher. For that, we owe him our gratitude.

______________________________
NOTES FOR PART 2

The following is a rough transcription of the vocal ministry I offered yesterday at Homewood Friends Meeting. I spoke a few minutes after another Friend had spoken about our call to “spread integrity over the world.”

I am reminded that Jesus said, “I have come to cast fire over the earth, and how I would that it were already kindled!”¹

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has said that we are living in the end times of global capitalism, and that we — at least those of us who understand the ecological destruction and gross injustice of these times — tend to go through some of the classic stages of grief, from denial to anger to attempts at bargaining and perhaps to depression and passive resignation.² But we Quakers have another model: that of George Fox.

Fox believed that he was living in the end times of normative Christianity. (How I would that he had been right!) In his journal, he records passing through some of those same stages of grief over the condition of his world. But his grieving didn’t end in depression and resignation. When he mourned, he wept tears of fire; he was an exemplar of, in the memorable image of Anglican solitary Maggie Ross, “our willingness to use our tears to light the divine fire upon the earth.”³

Clearly, we do live in apocalyptic times, and many grieve, as I do each day, over the damage being done to the earth and its living beings by the excesses of capitalism. But we know from our Quaker tradition that such grief need not end in resigned depression — that if, like George Fox, we can overcome the temptation to withdrawal and despair, our tears can help kindle a fire of hope.

________________
NOTES

1. Luke 12:49.
2. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times. Žižek’s conclusion to that sequence, “Acceptance: the Cause Regained,” may be more optimistic (and perhaps not congenial to the Quaker sensibility): I have not finished reading the book. The information I was recalling yesterday is from an “editorial review” at amazon.com.
3. See the post “Autumn” (pub. October 06, 2011) at Voice in the Wilderness blog.

We know that Quakerism came into being as an intrinsically confrontational reaction against conventional Christianity in its various forms. Quakers acted against that Christianity for the sake of justice, justice denied by the churches with their “preaching up sin” and their doctrinal escape hatches such as “imputed justification.”¹ Christianity had long been a religion ordered to ends opposed by Jesus—and by anyone living in the spirit in which Jesus had lived, the spirit to which Quakers surrendered themselves. They recognized its condition as apostasy, defection, from its original life and truth.

Christianity, the Friends knew, had begun as the breaking into the status quo, into the world-system,² of something wholly other, something which was not only “not of this world” but which also, being just, constituted a radical critique and condemnation of the status quo in both the society and the individual. But the new movement had soon been subverted into its opposite. It became, and remains, a device by which injustice is rationalized, even sacralized, and the dark self-centeredness of human nature is excused by a malleable God who, even if sometimes angered by our misdeeds, forgives anyone who believes in his forgiveness.

Jesus had enacted a ministry of “answering that of God in every one,” i.e., of exposing and contradicting the injustice embedded in the religion-supported society, and in the hearts of individuals, of his time and place. The first Quakers did the same in their own day, confronting and overcoming evil, first within themselves and then in their world. “Primitive Christianity revived,” Quakerism irrupted into seventeenth-century England’s irreligious Christian milieu to disrupt its operation by insisting on honesty, justice, and mercy—and on a religion in which those virtues were crucial.

From that flowering of righteousness, we contemporary Friends have received a tradition rich in stories of spiritual power effective in the world, stories told in Quaker-Christian images such as “that of God,” “the inner light,” “continuing revelation.” Today, while we continue to speak them, we tend to invest those images with broader meanings, satisfied that we have translated the spiritual legacy of our ancestors into contemporary terms. For many of us, the first Quakers’ scripturally-shaped worldview seems irredeemably culture-bound, outdated, and maybe more than a little crazy.

So why study the words of the first Friends today? Why expound them as if they could be important for contemporary Quakerism? What’s the point?

There’s this: they offer us a challenge, one that a person desirous of a rigorously honest spiritual life may welcome. As we’ve seen, the first Quakers reacted against a religion that rationalized the unjust and hypocritical status quo. Studying their words and lives with open minds and hearts, we may come to question our own condition: do not we, too, use religion to make ourselves feel good (in both senses) while our manner of living supports the unjust system from which we benefit, even if we dissent on this or that issue (such as war or government aid to the poor)? Is it not possible that we are as hypocritical and harmful as the people whom the first Quakers angered by “answering that of God in them”—by echoing the cries of radical goodness in them to be freed from the unacknowledged darkness and evil in their hearts?

To be blunt: is it not almost always the “call to enjoyment”³ and not the call to justice to which we give ear? To take just one egregious example, let’s set aside the everyday and consider one special time: vacation. In a “developed” country such as the United States, where we casually consume a large percentage of the world’s resources, once or twice a year we like to take a vacation, to “go somewhere” and do something special, something that requires an even greater than normal expenditure of resources. Vacation is a time in which to enjoy ourselves as fully as possible, to have fun—to play. And many of us spend a relatively significant amount of resources on that special playtime. After all, we feel, we deserve it; we even need it. And what could be wrong with it?

Again, let’s focus on just one egregious example. While we’re using those resources for our vacation pleasures, we know—or could know, if we cared to inquire—that every day about 30,000 children die of starvation and preventable or treatable disease. And we know, if we think about it, that children don’t run out of food or get sick one morning and then die that afternoon: they suffer malnutrition, sickness, and pain for some time before their bodies are completely broken. In other words, it’s not that 30,000 suddenly sicken and die every day, but that such a huge number of little children are suffering continuously—from preventable and curable conditions—that the daily body count is in the tens of thousands.

We adults play; countless children cannot. We have excess resources, which we use to further enjoy our already luxurious lives; they have few or none, and therefore they live and die in misery and pain. It’s not inconceivable, is it, that instead of playing like spoiled children we could, adult-like, apply our over-abundant resources to saving the life, or at least to easing the pain, of one or two or ten or a hundred of them—even every day?

Well, yes, it is inconceivable. It is inconceivable because the structure of our worldview does not normally permit this question to come into consciousness, or, when it does slip past the ramparts, to be taken seriously. To care enough about unknown children that one breaks with social expectations and sacrifices customary pleasures is effectively unthinkable. And so, even if we give some money to a charity because we’re nice people, we don’t feel at all odd that many children are suffering and dying for lack of the resources that we’re spending on our play. To the contrary, especially when we’re happily using our own children’s resources and damaging their environment in the process of having our good time, to deprive ourselves of fun for the sake of the children of strangers—that would be very odd. And we don’t want to feel odd, particularly if it costs an annual trip to the islands (where, if all goes well, the poor will not be visible from a beach that has not yet succumbed to climate change or oil spills).

Is it lucky for us, then, that the ethical challenge of people like Jesus and the first Friends is issued in the language of religious mythology, of God and demons, heaven and hell, salvation and sin, so that we can rationalize dismissing the challenge along with the superstition? It seems so. But we do that only by closing our ears to the cry for justice harbored not only in their language but also in the depths of our own hearts. Otherwise, we could find that we’ve put things together backwards, that it’s not that the ethical call comes out of superstition but that the superstition is a more or less primitive incarnation of the heart’s reaction to injustice. We could find that those Quaker phrases we use, phrases like “that of God” and “the light in the conscience,” don’t mean that we can be nice people while enjoying our status in an unjust world-system, that they still point to a tiny, trampled yearning in our hearts for justice and mercy. We might even find that the nasty “original sin” idea harbors a truth: after all, can one really be a good person while withholding food and medical care from children so that one can have yet more fun? Or might such behavior point to a fundamental flaw, a root of real evil in us?

Will there be a “last judgment,” as described, for example, in Matthew 25? Probably not. But maybe Jesus was expressing a truth both timeless and urgent when he said that we who feast and play while the poor starve deserve unending torture. And maybe, as a George Fox can tell us, “nice” is the truly banal face of evil. But do we have ears to hear?

Do, then, even we spiritual descendants of Fox fail to to acknowledge and act on the reality of our self-loving into injustice? Is our attitude effectively something like this: “If the spirit of George Fox comes looking for us, tell him that we’re on vacation­—not sure when we’ll be back, but if it makes him feel better George can leave an anachronistic tract in the screen door before he goes”? If so, we’ve sold our heart’s treasure, Fox’s just and compassionate “Christ within,” and then left town to spend the silver on a good time, expecting that things will be back to normal when we return. And they will be, because, human nature being what it is and religion being one of our best defenses against truth and justice, the poor children we have always with us—even though they die by the tens of thousands every day.

Walking Cheerfully Over the Facts

As the new interim Webmaster for the Quaker Universalist Fellowship (QUF), I was updating that organization’s site when I noticed a quotation on the home page:

“Walk cheerfully over the earth answering to that of God in everyone.” — George Fox

That exhortation, although usually without the “to,” appears on other Web pages and blogs on the Internet, too, some of them belonging to Friends affiliated with QUF. I’ve also found it in other Quaker instructional materials; we’ll have occasion to make reference to one of those, a classic Pendle Hill pamphlet, later in this essay. Whatever the mode of publication, the saying is almost always carefully attributed to George Fox, the putative founder of Quakerism. Presumably, at least some readers will accept it as a central prescription of Quakerism, ponder its meaning, and attempt to put it into practice — trying, perhaps, to be amiable, conciliatory people who appeal to good will and honor a divine principle (whatever that might be) in every human being they meet.

It is certainly a rich and challenging exhortation; however, it’s not one that George Fox actually gave. It’s what is left of a statement that has been lifted from its original context in his writings and modified in a number of ways. As a result, it paints erroneous pictures of Fox’s teaching and the Quaker faith and practice from which it came.

Before restoring the fragment — mark (as Fox would say): fragment, not sentence — to its native setting, which is a kind of sermon called “An exhortation to Friends in the ministry” in Fox’s Journal,¹ we’ll review and repair the modifications in approximate order of importance. We’ll then be able to examine the statement in context and consider what Fox might have been saying to the Quaker ministers (that is, to Friends who devoted much of their time to spreading the Quaker message; the Quaker understanding of ministry is another topic I hope to discuss here in the future).

First, the original’s “every one” has become “everyone” — a very minor change, but one that can lead us away from the individual to the general or collective. Second, the word “to” has been inserted. “Answering to” has a different connotation than “answering.”

Third, Fox’s Journal has “world,” not “earth.” That may be significant. As students of the Bible will know, the term “world” in Christianity signifies the realm of evil and death in which unregenerate human beings exist, as in the very apposite saying of the Johannine Jesus:

“These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

The substitution of “earth” is understandable, because in the preceding sentence of the sermon Fox had referred to “all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come”; but apparently he used “world,” and, given his evident if implicit reference to the verse from John, Fox most likely had a reason for choosing that word instead of the other. (I like to think, too, that he enjoyed double-entendre.) In any case, when quoting a person or text, we — especially we who make a “testimony” of integrity — are not free to change words. Unqualified quotation marks mean, or should mean, “This is exactly what the person/text said.”

Fourth, and most important, the passage, as we have already noted, is not an independent sentence in the original. It is a fragment which, in being re-made into a stand-alone sentence, has been not only modified in other ways but also truncated from both ends. Here is a longer segment of the sentence with the beginning restored. (Note the ellipsis at the end: Fox wasn’t finished at “one.”)

“Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one ….”

Simply by restoring “Then you will come to,” we can see that the passage is not the exhortation it had seemed to be. Evidently, Fox was not urging us to “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one,” but to do something else which would result in our walking thus. What might that be?

An Exhortation — to What?

In working toward an answer, if only preliminary and brief, to that question, we will need to experience at least some of George Fox’s sermon from which the popular fragment has been lifted. Given the need for brevity in the blogging format, I will not reproduce all of that sermon here, but it is available at the Quaker Electronic Archive (link opens in a separate window). In order to obtain a much fuller context for the poor truncated thing with which we began, readers of this post may wish to read the sermon in its entirety there before continuing, but I will provide some extracts here.

In the power of life and wisdom, and [in the] dread of the Lord God of life, … dwell; that in the wisdom of God over all ye may be preserved, and be a terror to all the adversaries of God, and a dread, answering that of God in them all, spreading the truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding the deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life …. Spare no deceit. Lay the sword upon it; go over it. [...] Let them know the living God; for teachings, churches, worships must be thrown down with the power of the Lord God … for now is the mighty day of the Lord appeared, and the arrows of the Almighty gone forth; which shall stick in the hearts of the wicked. Now will I arise, saith the Lord God Almighty, to trample and thunder down deceit, which hath long reigned and stained the earth. [...] Proclaim the mighty day of the Lord of fire and sword, who will be worshipped in spirit and in truth; and keep in the life and power of the Lord God, that the inhabitants of the earth may tremble before you: that God’s power and majesty may be admired among hypocrites and heathen ….

The answer we begin to see in Fox’s sermon is likely to be uncongenial for many of us. The Quaker ministers are exhorted to live every moment in the power of the life and wisdom of God, and in the dread, and even terror, of God as well, thus being a dread and terror to others to whose lives, conduct, and religion the Quakers’ are a reproach. They are to “tread and trample all that is contrary” to truth — truth being the living spirit of Christ in human hearts — and “lay the sword upon” all deceit. (That’s a metaphorical sword: in this same sermon, Fox says, “Keep yourselves clear of the blood of all men, either by word or writing ….”) “[T]eachings, churches, worships must be thrown down with the power of the Lord God,” the power in which the Quakers live — “and who are in that [power], reign over it all.”

That last phrase is very significant. Fox asserts more than once that Quakers are “over all.” In context of themes that permeate his writings, we can read that as meaningful on a number of levels. Dwelling in the power that is Christ, the Friends are kept “above” “the world” in a moral and psychological sense, in being kept free from sin and above the occasions of sin;² they are also “over” the world, and over unregenerate human beings, in an ontological and even metaphysical sense, because they are one with Christ the judge and “sit with him in heavenly places.”³ In other words, Fox asserts Friends’ moral and spiritual superiority as well as the powers of judgment⁴ and spiritual dominion which inhere in that superiority. The Friends have been reborn in Christ and therefore have dominion over sin; that is, they are morally perfect. They are reminded to abide in that perfect life in Christ and thereby to “reign and rule with Christ … whose dominion is over all to the ends of the earth.” As they would before Christ the judge, “the inhabitants of the earth … tremble”⁵ before the Quakers, in whom they meet God’s judgment: the Day of the Lord is at hand.

Fox is clear that the job of the Quaker minister is to bring not peace but a sword. Elsewhere, he writes:

The ministers of Christ and the prophets of the Lord, who spoke his word, spoke in synagogues and in markets, in highways, and under the hedges, and upon the mountains, which disturbed the world, and all professors upon the earth [who] had the words of truth but were out of the life; and they disturbed the heathen that knew not God. [...] The ministers of Christ preached up perfection, and an overcoming of sin, and a being made free from sin ….⁶

Again, these are images that we, too, may find disturbing, even those of us who, unlike me, are Christian theists.

With that introduction, we look now at the section from which the popular statement is taken.

Bring all into the worship of God. Plough up the fallow ground. Thresh … that the seed, the wheat, may be gathered into the barn …. For the chaff is come upon the wheat by transgression [i.e., sin]. He that treads it out is out of transgression, fathoms transgression, puts a difference between the precious and the vile, can pick out the wheat from the tares, and gather into the garner; so brings to the lively hope the immortal soul, into God out of which it came. None worship God but who come to the principle of God, which they have transgressed. None are ploughed up but he who comes to the principle of God in him, that he hath transgressed. Then he doth service to God; then is the planting, watering, and increase from God. So the ministers of the spirit must minister to the spirit that is in prison, which hath been in captivity in every one; that with the spirit of Christ people may be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits, to serve him, and have unity with him, with the scriptures, and one with another. This is the word of the Lord God to you all, a charge to you all in the presence of the living God; be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your life and conduct may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you: then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour, and a blessing.

Although the conjunction of images such as trampling and walking cheerfully may be confusing, by this point in our enquiry Fox’s teaching should look quite different than it often appears in modern Quakerism. Fox’s words raise serious difficulties for the popular contemporary reading of “walk cheerfully over the world/earth, answering that of God in every one,” a reading epitomized by Howard Brinton’s anachronistic existentialist framing of it as an “instruction” for Friends to engage in “‘intersubjective dialogue’ or an ‘I-thou’ (rather than ‘I-it’) communication” with others.⁷ This is communication of a different order.

You may click here for Part Two of this post, in which we discuss in detail the terms ”cheerfully” and “answering that of God” and then draw some conclusions. Please note that your comments should be posted under Part Two — they have been disabled for Part One.

To Answer That of God

As we have seen, Fox admonishes the Quaker ministers to “be valiant for the truth upon earth; tread and trample upon all that is contrary” and to “be a terror to all the adversaries of God [in particular, "professing" Christians, especially ministers], and a dread ….” In practice, he says, that means “answering that of God in them all,” “awakening the witness, confounding the deceit, gathering [them] out of transgression into the life, [into] the [new] covenant of light and peace with God.”

Just over forty years ago, Lewis Benson published an essay called “‘That of God in Every Man’ — What Did George Fox Mean by It?”⁸ Writing a critique of that essay has been on my to-do list for a few years, and it must remain there for now. But I can state here my opinion that Benson was certainly correct in tracing “that of God in every one” to the first chapter of Romans.⁹ (I don’t think that’s the only scriptural referent in the phrase, but I do think it’s the principal one.¹⁰) Here are two spelling-updated renderings, the first from the King James Version and the second from the Geneva Bible, of verses 18 through 21 of Romans 1. I provide both because I think that Fox would have known both translations.

[18] For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; [19] Because that which may be known of God, is manifest in them, for God hath shewed it unto them. [20] For the invisible things of him from the Creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal Power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse: [21] Because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. (KJV)

Alternatively,

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness. [19] Forasmuch as that, which may be know[n] of God, is manifest in them: for God hath shewed it unto them. [20] For the invisible things of him, that is, his eternal power and Godhead, are seen by ye creation of the world, being considered in his works, to the intent that they should be without excuse: [21] Because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was full of darkness. (Geneva Bible, with, among its marginal notes, the phrase “in their hearts” after the word “in” in verse 19)

“That of God in every one” is, then, “that which can be known of God … manifest within them.” And, in the immediate context of Paul’s argument, what can be known of God in us is God’s power and divine nature; that is, “the power of life and wisdom” in which Fox exhorts the Friends to abide. The Quaker ministers, by their life and conduct, are to “answer,” respond to, the call of that divine power within others. The Day of the Lord, the day of judgment, being at hand, Fox proclaims in his sermon that

The call is now out of transgression[;] the spirit bids, come. The call is now from all false worships and gods, from all inventions and dead works, to serve the living God. The call is to repentance, to amendment of life, whereby righteousness may be brought forth, which shall go throughout the earth.

The Quaker knows that the same inner Christ who called her to acknowledge her sinfulness and who led her into his “life and power” and “out of transgression” is calling within the other. If, as is likely, the other person is not responding to that call, is “trampling” the promptings of Christ within; if, although given the opportunity to see the true nature of self and sin in the light, that person cannot give “the answer of a good conscience toward God”;¹¹ then through her manner of conducting herself, which includes her speech, the Christ-led Quaker responds as if on the other’s behalf, declaring the deceit and sin in which the other is living. The Friend’s manner of life and speech is a moral reproach, a mirror in which the other’s true condition is revealed as it is illuminated by the light of Christ. In that mirror, too, can be seen the the “seed,” the potentiality, of divine power in the other: the Quaker is a living testimony that salvation is a real and present possibility, and thus she points the other to the living Christ, “the way, the truth, and the life” within, the power that gives actual freedom from sinfulness. In that way, the Friends lead people out of the world, “out of captivity up to God.” (From that point on, “then is the planting, watering, and increase from God.”) Their ministry as parts of the body of Christ is to cooperate in “the work” of Christ within others by modeling, mirroring, challenging, and pointing.

If walking “over the world, answering that of God in every one” involves being “a terror … and a dread”¹² to the many who profess Christianity but do not live “in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars” (a statement which we’ve previously discussed here), if it means that “the inhabitants of the earth … tremble before you,” how is that done cheerfully?

To Be of Good Cheer

Sometimes, Friends have quoted a slightly longer, although usually still truncated, passage from Fox’s sermon. Some of us are familiar with this as an isolated instruction:

Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your life and conduct may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.

It’s a little longer, but, except that it does let us see that something leads up to “walk cheerfully,” it’s not much better. In this format, the passage may seem to invite us to provide our own version of what and how our “life and conduct” are to preach. But Fox has clearly described the what and the how in other parts of his sermon. I think that’s an especially important point, given that Friends, if not aware of the teaching in that sermon, may tend to reason backwards from what they imagine “walking cheerfully over the world” means to how and what their lives should preach. Regardless of which version we are more familiar with, then, it behooves us to examine the phrase “walk cheerfully” in its original context (and to remember as we do so that “walk cheerfully” is not, on its own, an instruction or exhortation).

We have already discussed the meaning of “world,” and we’ve noted that “world” and “cheerfully” are related in John 16:33: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” We can see that the terms find their meaning there in connection with “tribulation” — persecution and other forms of suffering. In exploring further, it may be helpful to look at a different translation of that verse: the following (with, again, updated spelling) is from the Geneva Bible, with which, as we’ve noted, Fox was likely familiar.

These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace: in the world ye shall have affliction, but be of good comfort: I have overcome the world.

Instead of the KJV’s “cheer,” the Geneva has “comfort.” And here is the Geneva’s marginal note on “that in me ye might have peace”: “That in me you might be thoroughly quieted. For by ‘peace’ is meant here that quiet state of mind which is completely contrary to disquietness and great sadness.”

In biblical usage, “cheerfully” is much richer and deeper than “in a good mood” or “amiably.” I know that Fox read some Greek, to the point of feeling able to dispute accepted translations of words and phrases, but I don’t know how well he read it. If, however, he had read John 16:33 in the Greek, he would have found that “be of good cheer” renders a single word, tharseite, which literally means “be ye couraging,” or “be ye having courage.” A clear example of that sense is Matthew 14:27, in which Jesus, walking on the storm-tossed water, says to the frightened disciples, “Be of good cheer [tharseite]; it is I; be not afraid.”

We should note, too, that Fox was fond of the Pauline saying, “God loves a cheerful giver,”¹³ and “cheerful” in that sense means willing; ungrudging; enthusiastic. A momentary substitution of these two senses may help us draw out connotations that Fox was likely to have had in mind: “Then you will come to walk enthusiastically and courageously over the world ….”

It seems to me that “walk cheerfully” most likely harbors the sense of a generous, bold, and courageous willingness to “go through the work” despite adversity, a willingness that is born of the deep joy and inner peace, persisting even in suffering, of living in the power and purity of Christ. And that exegesis is reinforced, I think, by the fact that at the end of his exhortation to the ministers Fox wrote of persecution: “Therefore ye that be chosen and faithful, who are with the Lamb, go through your work faithfully in the strength and power of the Lord, and be obedient to the power; for that will save you out of the hands of unreasonable men, and preserve you over the world to himself.” We also have such instruction as this from the Journal:

[I]f any brother in the light … be moved of the Lord to go to the priest or impropriator, to offer himself to lie in prison for his brother, and to lay down his life that his brother may be released, he may cheerfully do it, and thereby heap coals of fire upon the head of the adversary of God.¹⁴

Fox as Pattern and Example

A classic illustration of Fox’s Quaker ministry as described in the sermon is the anecdote¹⁵ that we discussed in Perfection and Pacifism. Fox, about to be released from prison, was offered a captaincy in the army. His reply:

I told them I knew from whence all wars arose, even [i.e., namely] from the lusts, according to James’s doctrine; and that I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.

But the others pressed him to accept the position.

They said, they offered it in love and kindness to me, because of my virtue [i.e., moral excellence]; and such like flattering words they used. But I told them, if that was their love and kindness, I trampled it under my feet.

Fox made that retort knowing the likely result, and indeed he was imprisoned, in a very unpleasant cell, for an additional six months. But I think there can be little doubt that, from his perspective, he had cheerfully answered that of God in them, not only by his words but also and especially by his willingness to suffer for the work of Christ.

Pondering that incident, we may feel some empathy with Samuel Butler, who described a Quaker as one who “believes he takes up the Cross in being cross to all Mankind.”¹⁶ But Fox would have believed that he was engaged in the saving ministry of the spirit of Christ, that in heaping “coals of fire upon the head of the adversary of God” he was “answering that of God in them.”

A Tentative Restatement and Conclusion

We are now far from the kind of message often derived from the popular misquotations. I’ll take a stab at summarizing Fox’s exhortation on the basis of our explorations:

Friends, live faithfully in the divine life and power within you. Know that in that pure life you reign spiritually over all with and in Christ. As ministers of and to the Christ-spirit in each and every person, go throughout the world, in joy and courage despite hardship and persecution, confronting false religion at every turn and answering, by your manner of acting and speaking and your willingness to suffer, that spirit’s call in others — challenging them to acknowledge their deep-seated evil and duplicity, to reject their ersatz religions, and to submit to the purifying and empowering light of Christ in their hearts so that they, too, may completely overcome sin and live, as you do, in his divine life and power here and now.

Except in an encounter with another saint, our “answering that of God” is the response of the realized Christ, the power of God-who-is-love, within us to the as yet unrealized, “transgressed” Christ within the other. And I say another saint in all seriousness: Fox’s exhortation to do that which brings us to “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one” (whether amiably or crossly) is first of all a call to moral perfection. As should be evident from our discussion here, according to traditional Quaker experience and teaching we cannot answer that of God in another until we have answered it in ourselves as fully as possible according to our “measure” (our current capacity, as it were: this is another traditional concept that I hope to explore here) — that is, until we have submitted to the exposing (“convicting” is the classic term), purifying, and guiding light within us so thoroughly that we are living saints; until we live, no longer we, but Christ lives in us. Until then, lest we fall into an unwitting, perhaps group-thought, hypocrisy, we should be quite focused on our own condition, keeping in mind that such admonitions as the following, which was written by James Nayler, another prominent Quaker founder, would likely have been directed toward at least some of us, who “plead for sin” and are facile at rationalizing our own self-centeredness and attachment to the values of the world.

[T]hat which is of God [within you] lies under [your sinfulness], in death and captivity, and bonds of iniquity, and so thou canst not have power, nor the promise, nor salvation … and so art not of the promised seed, but an enemy to it, and by thy lusts and pleasures and self-will art in Pharaoh’s state and nature, keeping the seed of God in the house of bondage, and dost not pity nor regard the cries thereof, which cries against thy pride and excess, envy and wrath, and all thy wickedness by which thou oppressest the seed of God in thee ….”¹⁷

The question of what we might make today of the Quaker call to sanctity and its ministry invites our exploration. I encourage Friends to hold Fox’s words in your minds and hearts “cheerfully” and generously, and not to give way to any impulse to write them off as irrelevant 17^th-century religious ranting. I am confident that, by informed and open-minded study, reflection, and discussion, we can find much more of value in the exhortation than might be apparent during initial shock at its alienness. In the meantime, as a people who have talked cheerfully over the earth, misquoting that of Fox to everyone — and perhaps distorted his thought in constructing a more or less new belief system under his name (a project, by the way, that probably can’t be legitimized by an acontextual use of the doctrine of continuing revelation) — it may be that we need someone or something to answer that of God in us. Approached with respectful, open (which is not to say uncritical) minds and humble hearts, the writings of our spiritual ancestors can offer us that kindness.

___________________

The pericope begins with Fox’s recollection that, as the time of his imprisonment neared its scheduled end, he was taken out into the marketplace where some “commissioners and soldiers” offered him a captaincy in the army. They urged him to “take up arms for the commonwealth against Charles Stuart.” Here is Fox’s account of his reply:

I told them I knew from whence all wars arose, even [i.e., namely] from the lusts, according to James’s doctrine; and that I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.

Fox was referring to the biblical letter attributed to an early Christian leader named James. It’s fair to say that James, as we will refer to both the epistle and its author, is one book of the Bible that many Protestants (including Martin Luther) might wish to omit from scripture, for James asserts that “faith without works is dead”,³ striking a blow at the popular Protestant doctrine of sola fide (salvation by faith alone). James insists — as does Jesus — that salvation requires a conversion of heart which issues in works of justice and mercy. In other words, James demands — as do the first Friends — a faith that brings real sanctification here and now. The possibility of a forensic “justification” such as that claimed by many Christians even today, an “on paper” salvation that does not enable us to overcome sin in this life, is denied by James. For that reason in particular, James was beloved of the first Friends.

Here is the relevant passage from the fourth chapter of the epistle:

[1] From whence [come] wars and fightings among you? [come they] not hence, [even] of your lusts that war in your members? [2] Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. [3] Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume [it] upon your lusts. [4] Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. [5] Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? [6] But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble. [7] Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. [8] Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.

As an aside, it’s interesting that Fox quoted that passage against what Friends would call “outward” fighting. By his usual method of translating biblical Greek, Fox could be expected to read the first verse as referring to inner conflict: the phrase the KJV translates as “wars and fightings” is followed by en humin, which we would expect Fox to render as “in you.” (When translating John 1:14, for example, Fox renders en as “in” rather than “among”: “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling in us.”) But here he allows what we might call an outward translation, even though it may not be unreasonable to translate the first verse as “From whence the fightings and strivings in [en] you, if not of your lusts that war in [en] your members?” Fox may have had such a reading in mind: he claims to know “from whence all wars arose” (emphasis added). If he did, he kept it to himself, focusing on a much more important objective at that moment; namely, the conversion of his listeners.

In his response, then, Fox was not only, or even primarily, refusing service in the military: more importantly, he was preaching, directing his hearers to look within and to acknowledge that their lives were driven by self-centered craving rather than led by the love that is God. He also offered them a way out of that craving and its violence: by implication, they were to understand that they, too, by heeding James’s call to “Submit yourselves … to God” and therefore becoming single-minded (that is, no longer internally divided by desires), could live “in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.”

That latter phrase is a very significant one for our understanding of Quakerism. Fox says that he lived “in the virtue of.” That is often misquoted by Friends, as if he said that he lived “in virtue of.” Is the article “the” really important? I think that it is. “In virtue of” may connote something like “in the light of” or “by authority of”; that could lead us to reify “that life and power that [takes] away the occasion of all wars” into a moral principle, some kind of belief. But Fox was not talking about living according to an abstract principle or belief; he was pointing to a new kind of existence resulting from a radical shift in the motivation that drives our lives. By definition, a virtue is a moral strength or excellence. “In the virtue of” denotes “in the moral strength of” or “in the moral excellence of”; that is, Fox was asserting that he lived in the moral excellence, or purity, of “that life and power that [takes] away the occasion of all wars.” He was saying that he lived, not as a normal human being, driven by self-centered desires and impulses, but as a redeemed, even divinized, being, animated by the inner life of God, which is love, and the power of that love consistently to do good and avoid evil. Fox was telling the “commissioners and soldiers” that he was living proof that sanctification is available here and now.

But at first his hearers didn’t understand at all. They continued to press him.

Yet they courted me to accept of their offer, and thought I did but compliment them. But I told them I was come into the covenant of peace, which was before wars and strifes were.

Fox continued to try to make his point. Knowing that he was speaking to Christians who believed that they lived under the New Covenant, he challenged them by averring that (as the scriptures teach) it is a covenant of peace, not of war. And he asserted that living in the New Covenant means living in the innocence, the moral perfection, in which Adam and Eve lived before the Fall. By that time perhaps, the others were beginning to think that Fox had an unusually exalted self-image; they then employed the tactic of playing up to that image.

They said, they offered it in love and kindness to me, because of my virtue [i.e., moral excellence]; and such like flattering words they used.

That sort of thing, of course, did not work with George Fox, who despised flattery as duplicity. With characteristic brusqueness, he told them so.

But I told them, if that was their love and kindness, I trampled it under my feet.

In Fox’s view, it was not an act of love or kindness to attempt to seduce him out of God’s Paradise of moral perfection into the normal human morass of cravings, envy, and murder — into the world of sin. And so the scene turned ugly.

Then their rage got up, and they said, ‘Take him away, jailer, and put him into the dungeon amongst the rogues and felons.’ So I was put into a lousy stinking place, without any bed, amongst thirty felons, where I was kept almost half a year….

Now that we know how the story ends, we can return to the beginning of the pericope in order to reflect further on what George Fox has to say to us.

I told them I knew from whence all wars arose, even from the lusts, according to James’s doctrine; and that I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.

Fox tells us that it is human lusts, natural cravings, that lead us to envy, conflict (internal and external), and killing. That seems to be his main concern. We should note that, although a negative implication about the spiritual state of his hearers is evident, Fox says nothing directly about anyone else. Nor, as we have seen, does he mention any moral principles. He does not argue, for example, that war is wrong because human life is sacred or because “there is that of God in everyone,” as Friends like to say today. Rather, he takes for granted that murder and war are evil, and, following James, traces that evil to desires and subsequent envy in the human heart. The condition of that heart is where Fox is focused.

Hinshaw has some helpful comments.

Most Quakers today who support pacifism maintain that all human life is sacred and that this is the reason we ought not to kill men, even at the command of a government. While this is a valid reason for our position, it is well for us to be clear that it is a modern emphasis and is not found to any significant degree in early Quaker thought. In fact, although Quakers later came to a more absolute position, in the first ten years or so of Quakerism there was not a clear testimony on the matter of taking human life because of the sacredness of such life as the creation of God. Yet they quite generally refused to fight. The apparent inconsistency is explained when we see that it was the violence, the hate, the selfishness inevitably involved in fighting that bothered them. Fox was perhaps even more concerned with what violence did to the one who used it than he was with the results of the violence on the person against whom it was directed.⁴

Hinshaw seems to say that Fox and other first Friends rejected participation in war because of what it might do to their souls. Fox — who elsewhere in the Journal has already spoken of a state even better than that of prelapsarian Adam and Eve, a state of oneness with Christ from which no falling is possible — has given implicit evidence of concern for what soldiering means for the souls of others. But he has also made clear that a principal reason for Friends’ refusal of military service (when they did refuse, for some did not) was that war was no longer a possibility for them. Serving in the army is not an option for one who is unable — not because of moral constraints, but by nature — to contend with others with intent to harm. And Quakers were people who, according to the “measure” or capacity of each, had received and become centered in a new nature, the nature of God.

Again, the character of the original Quaker rejection of war, as presented in our pericope from Fox’s Journal, may seem alien, even to us contemporary Friends. George Fox rejects military service not so much because war is wrong for moral, philosophical, or even empathetic reasons, but because, his selfish human nature having given way to the divine nature, he is not subject to the cravings that lead to war, the “lusts” that cause war not only to occur but to seem to make sense. Further, the nature or “life and power” which animates him is unable to fight and kill because it is divine love, that perfect love which, as Jesus taught,⁵ cares for the just and the unjust alike: George Fox lives, yet not George Fox, but Christ lives in him.⁶ In other words, Fox rejects military service and participation in war not because he is a pacifist but because he is a saint.

And that brings us back to the centrality of moral perfection in the religion of first Friends. George Fox and other Friends believed and taught that perfection, sainthood, actual freedom from sin, is available to everyone here and now. That’s a very difficult doctrine for us to understand, much less accept, in these times. But the doctrine of perfection was at the core of original Quakerism, and it is a doctrine that can be understood in a way that makes moral perfection relevant and attainable today. I plan to explore that understanding in future posts.