The Religion of the Broken-Hearted

The following is developed from vocal ministry offered at Homewood Meeting on 2/12/2012.

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There’s an old cartoon that, as I recall, depicts a smooth, wide, level path on which smiling people, some holding hands, walk toward an idyllic scene. A sign next to the path identifies it as “The Road to Heaven.” That’s on one side of the cartoon panel: on the other side, a man struggles to scale a steep, bare mountainside. He reaches for handholds, clings to roots.¹ He looks tired but determined. We get the idea that, though his feet may often slip, he will continue despite the cost. There’s a sign on that mountainside, too: it says “The Quaker Road to Heaven.”

Why should the Quaker way be so difficult? And, given that our path evidently goes in a different direction from the other, what and where is the Quaker heaven?

A religion of the New Covenant, Quakerism is a religion of the heart — the broken heart. We enter the New Covenant when our heart is changed. One biblical passage that is read as a prophecy of that event is Ezekiel 11:19:

I will give them one heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.

That may sound like a promise of a spiritual heart transplant, but I’ve always conceived it in a somewhat different image, one informed by the knowledge that “that which can be known of God,” namely love’s “power and divine nature,” is in our heart.² It seems to me that, in a natural reaction to our harsh world, we wrap our in heart a hard, stony covering. But that protective carapace must be broken apart if the living heart is to be revealed and flourish. Our spiritual life begins when we allow our heart to be broken by the suffering, the plight, of the world.

That’s beautifully reflected in one of my favorite scripture passages, one that I’ve quoted here before, from Odes of Solomon 11:

My heart was cloven and its flower appeared,
and grace sprang up in it, and fruit from the Lord,
for the highest one split me with his holy spirit,
exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love.

His breaking of my heart was my salvation,
and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth….³

When our heart is opened by God-who-is-love, we are exposed to our own pain and to that of others, and we naturally want to close it again, to reseal the shell as quickly as possible. But if, as the early Quaker Isaac Penington suggested, we allow the wound to remain open while we wait in faith, we find that a flower of life, beauty, and hope for the future springs up in us. And as love conquers fear, the flower is multiplied: from the tiny seed, from “that of God” which had been dormant in the darkness of the armored heart, grows a field of flowers, a blossoming on the longing earth of the “Kingdom” of justice, mercy, and peace. With the odist we then can say

I became like the land which blossoms and rejoices in its fruits:
And the Lord was like the sun shining on the face of the land;
He lightened my eyes, and my face received the dew,
And my soul was refreshed by his fragrance;

To be thus is to abide in the blessedness of Paradise,⁴ despite the continuing pain and sorrow of life in this world.

And he carried me to his Paradise,
Where I knew joy and worshiped his glory.

Blessed are they who are planted in Paradise,
Who grow in the growth of your trees
And have changed from darkness to light.⁵

As we are “changed from darkness to light” and yet remain, so pain and sorrow, too, remain but are transfigured. We do not transcend them,⁶ do not leave them behind, but we no longer attempt to deny or repress them. We allow ourselves to see them in a new light, as opening us into deep humanity, into the life of the God known only in our participation in the kenosis, the self-emptying, which is the divine nature.

And so we begin the ascent by allowing the reality of life and love to break our heart. We begin in faith and hope, trusting that, however others may travel, this difficult climb is the way to the Kingdom of God. This is the way that is marked for us, the path that leads us into the Paradise of innocence in this life so that, our open heart manifesting love’s power and nature, we shine divine light into the darkness of our infinitely suffering world.

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NOTES

[1] I am reminded of, or am conflating the cartoon with, the Zen story of a man clinging to a vine on a cliff wall: see “Of Smiles, Secrets, Strawberries, Sunyata.” I saw the cartoon long ago and am unable to separate memory and imagination at this point.

[2] See Romans 1:19-20. The Geneva Bible’s note on verse 19 tells us that the locus of that manifestation is “in [our] hearts”: online at The Reformed Reader. As always, I am using God-language on the basis of the identification of the nature of God with the universalizing love that manifests itself in justice, mercy, and peace: see 1 John 4.

[3] Verses 1-3. This rendering is mostly from the translation by Willis Barnstone in The Other Bible, p. 273, with minor modifications based on the translation by J. Rendel Harris in The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden, pp. 125-126.

[4] George Fox also spoke of being taken up into Paradise. This passage, remarkably similar in part to the Ode, is from his Journal:

“Now was I come up in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I was come up to the state of Adam, which he was in before he fell. … But I was immediately taken up in spirit, to see into another or more steadfast state than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall.”

[5] This and the previous block are verses 11-16 in, again, a combination of translations.

[6] Thanks to Maggie Ross for reminding me of the importance of the difference between “transcend” and “transfigure”; see her Voice in the Wilderness blog.

Questioning Quakerism as Mysticism

[Revisions: 2/5/2012 and 2/27/2012]

Thanks to thoughtful questions from a Friend during a presentation on this topic, I have changed the title and revised the first part of these notes in hopes of clarifying the context in which I was working when writing them — namely, the doctrine, which we received over half a century ago from Howard Brinton, that Quakerism has been from the first a religion of Neoplatonic-type mysticism. The notes were written as part of my preparation for presentations at Homewood and Little Falls Friends Meetings under the title “Mysticism, Experience, and Quakerism.” This post begins with an examination of the content and the meaning, for him and for us, of George Fox’s famous “There is one, even Christ Jesus” experience.

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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 — particularly in context of the Neoplatonic presentation of early Quaker experience in Howard Brinton’s ever-popular Friends for 300 Years. Dandelion’s phrase is very close to being a quotation of Brinton’s definition of mystical experience as “inward, immediate experience of the divine” on page xii of that book.³

But is Fox’s narrative a report of such an experience — is it a report, in other words, not simply of receiving an insight from God, but, as Brinton described Quaker experience, of “apprehending the inner Unity which exists beyond time and space, One as contrasted with the multiplicity recognized by the senses”?⁴ That is, is it a report of a monistic “mystical experience” as those have been popularly conceived at least since William James? Considering Fox’s words critically and contextually, I think not. Further, I argue that (whether or not we choose to categorize Fox’s report as relating some kind of mystical experience in the form of an audition) the textual evidence indicates that Fox experienced an opening into insight — insight mediated, as it were, through language, particularly scripture.

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.⁵

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 God⁶ 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.”⁷ 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.⁸ 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 the reprobate: 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: in fact, 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.”⁹

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, for Christ the power and wisdom of God is present, if only as a tiny seed, in everyone — “unless ye be reprobates.”

What Then Are We Waiting Upon?

Again, what George Fox reports in the journal passage is not an unmediated mystical experience 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 within¹⁰ — on “that which is known of God shining within.”¹¹ 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.”¹² 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.¹³

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-love¹⁴ — 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.”¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁶

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]. Howard H. Brinton, Friends for 300 Years (1952). Brinton, who defines Quakerism as “group mysticism” in the book, defines mysticism itself as “a religion based on the spiritual search for an inward, immediate experience of the divine” [page xii; emphasis added]. He later explains what he believes was the mysticism of the primitive Quakers in markedly Neoplatonic terms, apparently reading the Friends’ references to “substance” and “figure” or “shadow” as Platonic rather than biblical.

[4]. Brinton, op. cit., p. 21.

[5]. Fox, Works, Vol. 1, p. 75.

[6]. 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.

[7]. 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.

[8]. 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.)

[9]. John 1:12, my translation.

[10]. 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.”

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

[12]. Acts 17:28a.

[13]. “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/.

[14]. 1 John 4:16b

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

[16]. Ibid., p. 375.

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

From Silence to Peace: A Brief Guide to Quaker Logos Spirituality — via Mother Teresa

Greater love than this no one has, that one bestows one’s soul upon those whom one loves. — John 15:13 (close translation, following Tyndale)

I recently came across a captivating instruction from Mother Teresa of Calcutta which, interpreted from a classic Quaker perspective, can serve as a compact description of the Quaker way that I call “Logos spirituality.” In unpacking Mother Teresa’s statement from that perspective, I will focus on the practical implications of the theistic imagery, leaving any further “translation” to the reader. Here are her words:

The fruit of silence is prayer,
The fruit of prayer is faith,
The fruit of faith is love,
The fruit of love is service,
The fruit of service is peace.¹

Although one might expect a Catholic to begin with faith as the prerequisite for the spiritual life, Mother Teresa begins with silence. Silence here not only precedes faith but is two steps prior to it in a causal sequence; it is the very first step on the path that leads us to peace. That view is quite congenial with the Quaker experience: silent worship is for us the gateway to spiritual life.

Spiritual silence, as we Friends know it, is not simply the absence of sound. Nor, although this, too, may be a component, is it simply the absence of thought. It is, in our tradition, silence of the human will. Because the will is the self-assertion of our fundamentally self-centered world-view, spiritual silence is the stilling of the human logos, the normal human way of making sense of the world. It is the stillness in which the divine Logos, the Word of God, may speak. Such silence, says Mother Teresa, leads to prayer. And prayer leads to faith.

“Faith” is generally considered to be synonymous with “belief,” and one who understands prayer in the usual way may assume that prayer presupposes belief. But here we are told that prayer begets faith. How can that be? How can one pray to a God in whom one does not yet have faith? A Quaker view of prayer and faith can illuminate that.

The standard model of prayer in Christianity is the Lord’s Prayer. Taught by Jesus to his disciples, it comprises words of praise and supplication (along with some embedded paraenesis, or moral exhortation). It is the prayer of a human being to a God who is already the object of belief. But the Lord’s Prayer was taught to the disciples before the day of Pentecost, before they received the holy Spirit.² Post-Pentecost, prayer is worship “in spirit and in truth”;³ that is, the Spirit of Truth prays within us in “inarticulate groanings.”⁴ Prayer is no longer a matter of the human will flattering and beseeching the divine will: it is the wordless speech, the Logos, of that divine will within us. To hear that speech, we need silence, including the silence of beliefs, which are but signs, “figures,” of the reality. The experience of spiritually “hearing” the Logos leads to faith as Friends understand it. In order to explore that experience here, we’ll begin, so to speak, at the beginning.

In the very first words of the Bible, God, speaking that creative Logos, introduces order into chaos and light into darkness, order and light that he recognizes as “good,” as like himself.

In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth. And the earth became chaos and emptiness, and darkness over the faces of the abyss. And the spirit of Elohim vibrates over the faces of the waters, and Elohim says, “It shall become light,” and it is becoming light. And Elohim is seeing that the light [is] good, and Elohim is dividing between the light and the darkness.⁵

The initial phrase of that passage, “in the beginning,” is twice repeated in the prologue of the Christian narrative book of John, which is sometimes known as the “Quaker scripture.”

In the beginning was the Logos, the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and nothing has come into being without him.⁶

John goes on to say of the Logos that

In him was life, and that life was the light of the human race. And the light is shining in darkness, and the darkness grasped it not.⁷

That life is the divine nature, which, as John tells us in his first epistle, is love. John says that the love which is the Logos of God is a light shining in our (postlapsarian) darkness, although our darkness does not understand it, cannot grasp or control it. But the important thing is not to attempt to grasp it, but simply to accept it.

It was the true light which is enlightening every human being coming into the cosmos. He was in the cosmos, and the cosmos came to be through him, and the cosmos did not know him. He came into his own, and his own did not accept him. But to as many as accepted him, to those putting trust in his name, he gives the power of becoming offspring of God …. And the Word was made flesh and made his dwelling place in us. And we see his glory, glory as of an only-begotten beside a father, full of grace and truth.⁸

The world-creating and ordering power that proceeds from and is love lives within us, is the life that makes divine order of our chaos, the light that breaks through our darkness, the day star that rises in our hearts when we stop trying to understand or control it and simply allow it to shine and to speak its prayer, to speak itself, in us. And in that Pentecost-like experience of the Spirit of love in us, faith is born.

Faith, then, as the fruit of the inward prayer of the Spirit, is not belief (an ally of the human logos) so much as trust in and fidelity to the inarticulate Word that speaks in our silence. When we feel the Spirit praying within us, lifting up the deepest need of our hearts, which is to love as God loves, we are moved to “trust in his name” — and, in the Quaker tradition, “name” means “power”⁹ — and begin to allow the divine Logos to displace the human logos and re-order our world. From that trusting surrender develops identification with love itself: as self-will is continually stilled in faith, we become one with the Logos, “partakers of the divine nature,”¹⁰ “the offspring of God.” Therefore, “the fruit of faith is love.” United with divine love through trust in the Word within us, we are the body of Christ in the present world; as Mother Teresa would say, we “let him live in us [and] through us in the world”¹¹ so completely that when people look at us they see only Christ.¹²

And “the fruit of love is service.” Many of us know the old joke about the newcomer to Quaker worship who, after sitting through half an hour of silence, whispers to the Friend next to her on the bench, “When does the service begin?” The Friend’s reply is “When we leave this room after worship.” For us, worship is not “the service”: Quaker worship is the inwardly sacramental¹³ experience that moves us to and equips us for service. In worship, we undergo the transforming process of entering into pure silence of the human logos and will; of allowing the Spirit of love to utter our deepest spiritual need and to groan within us in solidarity with the world’s suffering; of accepting our oneness with the suffering and, therefore, the glory of Christ the Logos; of giving our flesh and blood over to be inhabited by that Logos. Thus, taking on “the mind of Christ”,¹⁴ we are “partakers of the divine nature,” which is kenotic, self-emptying, love. That love speaks the creative, right-ordering Word out of silence into the darkness and chaos of our world, giving itself to its beloved in and through us.

When we are at one with that kenotic love which naturally expresses itself in service, we are at peace. Inwardly, we are at peace with ourselves, united with the deepest need and desire of our hearts. Outwardly, we are at peace with others, loving them by working to understand them and to alleviate, as much as is possible, their suffering. Loving others in their actuality and not in order to gratify our own wills, we are detached from results, incapable of becoming hatred even if love costs us everything: “so far as it depends on [us], living in peace with all.”¹⁵

Mother Teresa’s instruction outlines for us a path, beginning in the spiritual poverty of pure silence, that takes us out of the world of self-centeredness and contention into a new world of love and service. Surrendering our normal human logos and enfleshing the divine Word of love, we live in that new world, as sign and sacrifice of peace, within the old. This is a path that Friends have walked from the beginning. If we sometimes need a reminder of where our way lies, we can be grateful to Mother Teresa for her succinct summary.

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NOTES

[1] Kolodiejchuk, Brian, M.C., Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light — The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” (New York: Image Books, 2007), page 315.

[2] See Acts 2:1.

[3] John 4:24.

[4] Romans 8:26.

[5] Genesis 1:1-4. Scriptural translations in this essay are close — i.e., nearly literal — renderings.

[6] John 1:1-3.

[7] John 1:4-5. In context of these lines from John, two fragments from “the weeping philosopher” Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) are very interesting: “Though this Logos is true forever, humans are as unable to comprehend it when they first hear it as before they have heard it at all. For although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, humans seem as if they had no experience of them …. But other humans know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.” And “… although the Logos is common, the many live as if they had wisdom of their own.” (Heraclitus, Fragments DK B1 and B2.) The Stoics would later elaborate the concept. In addition, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, used “logos” to translate “word,” as in “the word of the Lord.” John seems to have woven those threads into something new: the identification of the Logos with Christ.

[8] John 1:9-12, 14. The more literal translation accords well with the Quaker experience, as George Fox initially made us aware.

[9] For example, James Nayler (d. 1660): “[T]he name of Christ consists not of letters and syllables, but in righteousness, mercy and judgment, &c., which name none can know but by the [L]ight of the [W]orld ….”

[10] 2 Peter 1:4.

[11] Kolodiejchuk, page 275.

[12] Mother Teresa spoke in such terms on a number of occasions. See, for example, Kolodiejchuk, page 294.

[13] Silent Quaker worship is sacramental in that we can experience therein spiritual baptism — the death of the human logos — and communion — union with the divine Logos.

[14] See Philippians 2:5.

[15] Romans 12:18.

The Sacrament of Peace

This post is dedicated to Quaker House, which courageously says “YES to the troops, NO to the wars.”^*

 

Moloch the vast stone of war! — Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

 

Abraham takes a sharp knife, some rope, and his son Isaac, the hope of God’s promise for the future, up the mountain. Isaac carries wood for a fire, asking where the sacrificial victim might be. The answer he gets is no answer: “trust my God.” At the sacred place, Abraham makes an altar of stone, binds Isaac, and prepares the kindling. He will offer his son to him who will be known as the Lord God of Armies. That Lord, Moloch, demands it.

Abraham is about to slit Isaac’s throat when he hears the call of an angel of God: “Do not sacrifice your son!” His raised arm is stayed in grateful surprise. God provides a ram, a substitute, for the slaughter, and Isaac is spared. The promise, the future, is saved.

But the Lord God of Armies requires human life, and so the sacrifice of other sons continues. In response, God offers the ultimate substitute. “I give you my own flesh and blood as the lamb to be slain,” he says. “Slaughter my son, the seed of the promise; take the life of my being. Spare your children. Let this my sacrifice be once and for all.” The world accepts his offer; it pierces his flesh and pours his blood upon the mount, not understanding that they were to become its life and nourishment. And when the body has been sealed in the earth, the world turns and, in obedience to its Lord, begins again to bind its children for sacrifice. The Lord God of Armies laughs as God weeps.

The children, carrying the burden that will burn their bodies, follow their parents, as did Isaac, in trust. Bound by their parents’ beliefs, unable to resist, they will do, finally, what they are told: the Lord requires it. The slaughter, it seems, will never end. Even divine intervention seems powerless to stop it.

But the light of hope does shine, if dimly. The promise that was killed and buried is risen in human hearts. Those hearts cherish sons and daughters above gods, plead for them, protect them as best they can, even offer themselves as lambs in their place. And, however hopeless it seems, they – we – never lose hope, never stop working to end war, to bring down Moloch from his throne and to raise up this world into the Kingdom of Heaven.

For we, too, are sons and daughters, the only-begotten seed of the promise, the Lamb of God among Moloch’s wolves. The blood of Christ flowing in our veins, we are the angels who cry out to stay the hand of blood sacrifice. We cannot be or do otherwise: love leads and moves us, our light and life. The first-fruits of the divine sacrifice, the body of Christ, the sacrament of peace, the spirit of a new world, we stand before Moloch a sign of contradiction, the sign of the cross. We live and die in faith, hope, and love.

It may seem that we are fools, that the raising of Christ in us is delusion, the hope of peace an empty dream. But we know firsthand that human life and death are given meaning and power, redeemed from the merely animal, in their consecration to love. And we know the power of love to create peace within and among us. Whatever the world is led to do, we are faithful to that power. It is our light, Christ in us the hope of glory, which we dare not, cannot, cover. It is, God help us, who we are.

__________
* This post is not intended to represent the views of Quaker House; the ideas expressed here are solely the author’s.

Text and Antitext

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. — Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Sometimes we speak of those whom society neglects or rejects as being “marginalized.” It’s a revealing term. The margin is, of course, the area outside of the text. To be marginalized is to be written out of the text, out of the common narrative. It is to be subtracted, or excluded from the outset; to be relegated to the periphery; to be defined as an inessential footnote, even a meaningless mark. One may be noticed, but only as an adjunct to or distraction from the text, always and only in context of the narrative. Because the text, the narrative, defines reality for a society – not only explicitly, but, more importantly, in an implicit and therefore pervasive and immensely powerful way – to be marginalized is, effectively, to be made unreal.

Like the Ancient of Days in Blake’s wonderful illustration, the common narrative, that which we hold together, takes a compass to the face of the deep, to the surface of what looks like primal chaos. With that compass, it circumscribes, from infinite possibilities, a more manageable set. All outside the circle is declared void; all within is arranged in patterns or subsets, named, assigned to categories of meaning. We who are created by and absorbed in the narrative call this circumscribed set “the world,” “the universe.” We believe that the circle is somehow all-encompassing, that its area comprises all of “what is.” We believe so because the narrative, of necessity, tells us so.

The narrative is, after all, our Father God. What he has included, we include; what he has marginalized, we marginalize: otherwise, we could find ourselves in the primal chaos. And so we who are on the inside gratefully accept the circumscription of his compass. We thank our God for enclosing us within the circle of meaning. And if we should see a crack in the wall that surrounds us, we automatically repair it, because living inside the circumference of what we hold together is how we “hold it together” in the face of chaos.

But sometimes we encounter one who calls all of that into question, someone who bears the name of Christ. He is not a reviser of narratives, nor is he the bringer of a new, competing text: he is himself the Anti-narrative, the Antitext. If we attend to him, we soon sense that he will break the circle beyond repair. So we turn away, tame him into objects and images, or replace him with a narrative-friendly dead ringer (Antichrist, a.k.a. religion and spirituality), because we are instinctively afraid. For we know that the text, in creating and sustaining the universe, creates and sustains us. If this new man destroys the narrative, we will no longer know names and places. Chaos will claim us. We will perish.

But we cannot wholly avoid him. Even if we succeed in blocking his presence in our hearts, his words won’t pass away. And although those words have been woven into the common narrative and thus rendered popularly impotent, they still harbor a ray of light, a spark of power. Now and then, some of us are curious about what his light might reveal as it filters weakly through cracks in our enclosure. Venturing trust in his wisdom and power, we stop patching the cracks awhile, and they widen. And when in his brightening light we see and feel the oppressive nature of our constructed, constricted universe, we are open to his offer of hope for a real world without walls, without margins – a world beyond the text.

Paradoxically, then, he raises us out of the text by means of words. According to our scriptures, Jesus the Antitext relied on story as a primary teaching tool. He used narrative against itself – that is, not to take a stand in one place or another within the circle, but to deconstruct the circle itself and thereby to bring down the walls, indeed the entire world, in which we and our marginalized exist. A case in point is his story of the rich man and Lazarus. It goes something like this.

The rich man lives in a gated estate, surrounded by a wall. He has everything he could want and more, including a social subnarrative that not only justifies his manner of life but praises him for it, even decrees it a sign of divine election. Just outside his gate, relegated to the margin of the text, lies the beggar Lazarus, bleeding and starving. The rich man, who never leaves the estate, knows that someone is suffering out there. But that anonymous someone is beyond the pale, outside of the narrative that both creates and justifies his condition; ironically, the wretch’s failure to be included confirms the narrative’s determination that his reality is defective. The rich man feasts with a good conscience. Although I believe that I, being morally superior, would occasionally toss a piece of bread over the fence, he doesn’t do even that. Lazarus dies and is carried away by his kind; as is usual in our world, justice is relegated to the (marginal) hereafter. Life goes on.

For millions or billions of people who hear that story, life within the narrative does indeed go on. Where else could life take place? But for some, those for whom it serves as a visitation of judgment here and now, the story breaks the narrative world apart, revealing that its life is death. As the story goes on to make clear, Lazarus, socially marginalized but spiritually innocent, dies in and into life; the rich man, socially accepted and admired but spiritually guilty, lives in and into death. Ultimately, implies Jesus, turning the common narrative upside down in a Zen-like trope, Lazarus is real and the rich man is not.

When we Friends sit down together for worship, we form a smaller circle within the narrative circle. Comfortable there, we may be tempted to celebrate the place we’ve staked out, which seems morally superior to others, within the universe of the text. But sometimes, allowing the text to subside into silence, we hear the weak cry of Christ’s Lazarus who lies bleeding at our gate, and our hearts begin to crack, to break open. It is then that the light shines in, the light known to the world as Christ. It is then that, if we can find the courage to stop making repairs, the power of the light will widen the cracks and shake the foundations until the wall begins to come down. Waiting through that awful experience in faith, in trust, we enter the sacramental heart of Quaker worship. Our world and our identities having been deconstructed by the light, crucified by the power of love, we are buried with Christ in spiritual baptism. Living now in Christ, no longer in the text, we are “raised a spiritual body,” formed and fed not by words but by the silent life and power of God-who-is-love. In this new being, which no words can wall in, we know experientially the truth of the apostle Paul’s observation that “the text is of killing, but the spirit makes alive.”

When there is no text, there is no margin. No one is encompassed within, and no one is written out. In the life and freedom of Christ the power of love, all are included.

On Extended Wings

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. — Thomas Merton¹

On a Sunday almost twenty years ago, I traveled to New Jersey for the funeral service of a friend who had been something of a father figure for me. On the way, I stopped in Mount Holly for worship with Friends. As it happened, worship was held that day in the house in which the “Quaker saint” John Woolman had lived. After the meeting for worship, I would tour the house and read some passages by Woolman, noting that the phrase “living deeply” appeared more than once in the brief selections I’d found. From then on, that phrase would color my understanding of Quaker practice.

Even more significant, though, was my experience of worship there. As we sat together in a small room, the sincerity and depth of the silent worship lifted me up. And when another visiting Friend spoke of seeing a rare hawk soar over his home in Delaware, I was touched by his love and concern for the natural world. I had joined the Friends in Mount Holly in sadness, but in waiting with them upon the spirit of love, and in hearing words spoken from the heart of another, I was strengthened, even enabled to soar above the “ocean of darkness and death.”² I was put in mind of a poetic passage from the Book of Isaiah.

They who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength renewed; they shall mount up on wings, as eagles; they shall run and not stumble; they shall walk and not falter.³

Sitting in worship this morning with the gentle Friends of Little Falls Meeting, I thought back to days when, forgetting the lesson of Mount Holly and the “they” of Isaiah, I had experienced myself as a lone eagle, propelling myself upward, toward the light, on powerful wings. But time has a way of dispelling delusion. I am much older now: winging heavenward, even with help, is beyond me; on mere feet I falter. Retiring from full time work, I stumble into an uncertain but certainly briefer future as I struggle daily with frailties of body and soul. Observing those memories in the familiar peace of the meetinghouse today, I understood that I am a different person now, and that I need a different kind of poetry. And I smiled as an appropriate passage came to me, lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”⁴

And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

No soaring eagle now, I am an anonymous old bird among the many flocks of pigeons – “rats of the air,” I’ve heard them called – known as “baby boomers,” my existence increasingly a burden to others, my vanishing traces ambiguous, my trajectory drawn “downward to darkness.”

But if these wings, weary yet still extended with the strength of worship, carry me downward now at evening, I can speak only of change, not of loss or gain. For soaring toward the sun is beautiful, but one must descend to go deep, and darkness need not be deprivation: after all, darkness is where the light shines. It may be that the darkness into which I sink is, in Merton’s words, “blazing with the invisible light of heaven.”

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.⁵

The emptiness of me is the name of God, written in the void of my heart. And the name of God is Love. Descending into the darkness of spiritual poverty, I may vanish into the hidden spark of love that is “in everybody” – not the isolated glory of a soaring eagle, but the pure and invisible “glory of God” shining in the nothingness that, in essence, we all are.

However I may be known to the world⁶ within and without, Love is my true identity. Sinking into darkness, I sing my Nunc dimittis. Love is my name.

——————————-
NOTES

1. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 60.
2. George Fox, Journal, p. 80 in Vol. I of his Works.
3. Isaiah 40:31.
4. “Sunday Morning” is in the public domain and can be read in its entirety at Wikisource.
5. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 158.
6. Friends sometimes signed in such a way; e.g., “Given forth by me, whom am known to men by the name of MARMADUKE STEVENSON, but have a new name given me, which the world knowns not of, written in the book of life.” (Stevenson, one of the “Boston martyrs,” was hanged in 1659 “for conscience sake”: for being a Quaker. The execution date, October 27, is now International Religious Freedom Day.)

For the original journal entry about my experience at Mount Holly, scroll down to “March 24, 1991 – Homewood Friends Meeting” after clicking here.

Eye Hath Not Seen

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. — 1 Cor. 2:9

[I]n the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. — John Steinbeck¹

Every subject is guilty of all the good he did not do. — Alex Ling (on Badiou)²

Hope, not violence, drives human progress. – Andrea Riccardi³

In anticipation of the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War’s beginning, National Public Radio recently presented a feature about “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”⁴ I heard the program on a Sunday evening, a few hours after participating in Quaker worship during which the messages had focused on simplicity of life. When I heard the hymn’s first lines,

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword ….

“How I wish it were so!” was all that I could say.

Of course, I wasn’t wishing for the coming of a Christian army, much less for that of a cosmic cowboy riding on a cloud while trumpets blare. I heard and felt the lines from an informed Quaker perspective, a perspective in which biblical drama depicts inner events. And, as the first Friends often did, I framed the idea of a divine advent in the context of Paul’s “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”⁵ In this inglorious world of oppression, a world ruled by genteel parasitic sociopaths who seize and hoard the resources that all beings need to survive, subjecting their countless victims to unspeakable misery and early death, that’s the resplendent, this-world-ending coming of the Lord that I long for. Not Dies Irae, the day of ultimate violence, but day after day of courageous and peaceful witness and work for human-heartedness — the living light of liberation illumining, transforming, and leading us in this dark world of social-Darwinist domination.

“Christ in you.” Does that mean that an imaginary friend resides somewhere inside me, dispensing comfort and validation? Not from the Quaker perspective. Quakerism began as a thorough re-visioning and re-creation of Christianity, a resurrection of an ancient radical movement made possible by a radical reinterpretation of scripture. And the Quaker reinterpretation involved a redefinition, from the roots up, of essential Christian concepts and terms. In his writings, George Fox frequently tells us exactly how he is redefining — from his perspective, reclaiming the original meanings of — the basic Christian vocabulary. Even the name “Christ” has a meaning for Fox and Quakerism that is very different from that given it by Christianity (a fact we should remember when we think of Fox’s famous “there is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”). For the first Friends, the following signifiers, among others, all have the same signified:

Christ, Jesus, the cross, the gospel, new testament/covenant, light, life, truth, that of God.⁶

Often quoting the apostle Paul,⁷ Fox tells us specifically and repeatedly in his writings that all such words and phrases point to the same dynamic reality, effectively known in its working in the heart: the power of God.⁸ For Quakerism, all of religion is distilled into this one evental reality: that human beings actively partake of the power of God.⁹

That leads us, of course, into further definition. (Readers of previous discussions here will know where I’m going.) To begin, what does “God” signify? The first epistle of the apostle John states unequivocally that “God is love.” Not has, but is. (Thus Quaker Isaac Penington, for example, joins many traditional Christian thinkers in asserting that love is the nature, the essential being, of God.¹⁰) And we know that, in the context of the Christian scriptures,¹¹ love refers to agápē; namely, that disinterested love which, as Jesus taught, actively and “blindly” brings justice — the justice that provides the basic needs for survival — to all, regardless of their characteristics and behavior.¹² God, says scripture, is that agápē-love. And God’s power, as Paul tells us,¹³ is seen in weakness, in the loving which, as the Quaker James Nayler wrote, “takes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with contention.”¹⁴ The power of God is, then, the nonviolent working of love which makes justice a reality. As we’ve seen, that power is “that which can be known of God in [us].”¹⁵ It is what the first Friends meant by “Christ.” To know Christ is, for Quakers, to know — to partake of, to live in and by — that power. “I told them that I lived in that life and power which takes away the occasion of all wars.”¹⁶

“Christ [the power of agápē] in you.” And in me. “I live now, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”¹⁷ That power’s becoming incarnate in human beings is the glorious coming of Christ. Our being able honestly to “confess that Christ is come in [our] flesh”¹⁸ is the confession that brings salvation — salvation not of an immortal human soul, even if such a thing were to exist beyond fantasy,¹⁹ but of the world. And not after death, but now, while it is needed by actually existing beings. As we learn from Paul, the whole creation longs for the manifestation of the children of God, longs to be able to sing that the Logos, the creative and redeeming power of love, “was made flesh and dwelt in us” — as, George Fox noted, the scripture actually says.²⁰

And that is the “glory of the coming of the Lord” which my eyes and heart long to see: the parousia-advent of the spiritual Christ flashing illumination from his “terrible swift sword,” the sword of Paradise that cuts down the socially-sanctioned selfishness which leads some of us to exalt ourselves by humbling, even murdering en masse, our fellow beings. What can I do to participate more fully in that parousia, that glorious coming-in-power? Can I shake free of the impotent, self-focused spirituality that the self-anointed powers-that-be have sold us, so that “the glory of the coming of the Lord” becomes not merely a hope but a present reality as I am “changed into [Christ's] image from glory to glory”?²¹ Can I find the courage to surrender to the Christ-spirit of justice in my heart, the spirit that leads me to risk changing myself and the world under the guidance and by the power of agápē?

At this moment, I don’t know how that courage and I will find each other. I do know that it’s all too easy, and even rewarding, for me to repress the rising of compassion and justice, the resurrection of Christ, in my heart. It’s easy and rewarding for me to distract myself from the pain of those who are much more oppressed than I, those who are brutally trampled by the wealthy but are in some ways beaten down by me as well — not only by my relatively comfortable, resource-​heavy “lifestyle” but even more by my compartmentalization and complacency. When I trample the oppressed, I trample Christ, and in so doing I cripple my own heart: this, scripture and Quakerism tell me, is when the coming of Christ means judgment rather than glory.²²

But judgment means that Christ — the power of love — is already risen in me; “he” is the light that shows me the suffering of the world, the voice that calls me to answer, to respond to that suffering.²³ Now that Christ has begun to reveal himself in me, I cannot escape love’s judgment. But love’s present power and call also awaken hope. “Christ in you, the hope of glory”: hope for my own guilty heart; hope against hope for the broken hearts of the oppressed and the hard gilt hearts of the oppressors. Hope even for the worst oppressors: while many sociopaths may be incapable of becoming moral, their brains lacking the capacity for empathy, it may be that (riffing on Matthew 19:12),

[T]here are some moral eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb, and there are some … which were made moral eunuchs of men, and there be some which have made themselves moral eunuchs for the kingdom of Mammon’s sake.

Hope suggests that at least some of the wealthy, although seduced by security, luxury, and power, have not yet thoroughly killed the spirit of agápē in their well-defended, dissociated hearts.²⁵ It may be that, if we are pure and brave enough, we can “answer that of God” even in some of those unfortunate oppressors. And if we can’t convert their hearts, then at least, working together in the solidarity of the spirit of agápē, we can find a nonviolent way to restrain them, as we would with any person whose mental disorder manifests as violence. “That’s what the war of love [i.e., the Lamb's War] is for.”²⁴

If, then, the Christ-spirit — that of God — within me speaks judgment, it speaks hopefully of possibilities as well, perhaps even the possibility of the impossible.²⁶ “For with God, all things are possible”:²⁷ perhaps the hard hearts of wealthy people can be softened by the spirit of compassion; perhaps even my angry and frightened heart can be changed by that spirit. Can I allow the holy spirit of agápē to give me the courage and the clarity of vision to significantly reduce my complicity in this civility-veneered brutality, this system of anti-Christ under which much of humanity, and much of what we call “nature,” struggles, suffers, and dies? Can I allow that spirit to raise me up “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,”²⁸ to increasingly make my life a sacrifice of salvation for the oppressed world? Can I join with others who are doing the same, working as part of the body of Christ for the increase of justice? It is only then that I will be able to say:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!

————

NOTES

1. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 477 (Chapter 25).
2. Alex Ling, “Keeping the Faith: On Being Good And How Not To Be Evil” – a review of Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil in Cosmos and History in The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 1-2, 2006. Ling is paraphrasing Voltaire as a way of summarizing Alain Badiou’s ethic.
3. Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, in “Faiths Key to Peaceful World,” Catholic News Service, 10/2010.
4. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” words by Julia Ward Howe, 1862.
5. Col. 1:27b
6. See George Fox’s epistles, Vol. 7 and Vol. 8 of his Works.
7. See, for example, 1 Cor. 1:24 and Rom. 1:16.
8. See Rom. 1:19.
9. 1 Jn. 4:16.
10. See, for example, Penington’s “Concerning Love.”
11. Note that Quakerism, again following Paul, cannot use the phrase “New Testament” to refer to scriptures – see 2 Cor. 3:6: “[God] also made us sufficient ministrants of a new covenant, not of writing [grammatos], but of spirit; for the letter is of killing, and the spirit makes alive.”
12. See Matt. 5.
13. See, for example, 2 Cor. 12:9: “for [God's] power is perfected in weakness.”
14. James Nayler’s final statement. See the full statement here.
15. Rom. 1:19.
16. George Fox’s Journal, p. 113 of the Works, Vol. 1. Note the use of the singular verb form: life and power are one.
17. Gal. 2:20.
18. See 1 Jn. 4:2. See also my 8/29/09 blog post.
19. “And dost not thou speak of a human soul, an earthly soul, and is earthly, immortal?” George Fox, “The Great Mystery,” Works, Vol. 3, p. 181.
20. See Rom. 8:22, Jn.1:14, and George Fox, “Some scriptures corrupted by the translators,” Works, Vol. 3, p. 582.
21. 2 Cor. 3:18.
22. See Matt. 25:31-46.
23. See, for example, George Fox’s Journal in Works, Vol. 1, p. 289: “Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.” Also, p. 381: “Now is that made manifest, unto which all must answer, and appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”
24. “The war of love”: Justin Hayward, “Question” (song performed by the Moody Blues). The Lamb’s War: early Quaker phrase taken from the book of Revelation. See, for example, James Nayler, “The Lamb’s War”: “And as they war not against men’s persons, so their weapons are not carnal, nor hurtful to any of the creation; for the Lamb comes not to destroy men’s lives, nor the work of God, and therefore at his appearance in his subjects, he puts spiritual weapons into their hearts and hands: their armor is the light, their sword the Spirit of the Father and the Son; their shield is faith and patience; their paths are prepared with the gospel of peace and good will towards all the creation of God.”
25. See Barclay’s Apology, The Fifth and Sixth Propositions, §XII: “So that many men may outlive this day [of visitation by God], after which there may be no possibility of salvation to them, and God justly suffers them to be hardened, as a just punishment of their unbelief, and even raises them up as instruments of wrath, and makes them a scourge one against another.” Available at QHP.
26. See John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God.
27. Matt. 19:26.
28. Eph. 4:13b.

The Turning of the Wheel (2): Buddhism and Quakerism

In my post of 4/24/10, I recalled Albert Schweitzer’s image of Jesus’ failed attempt to stop the turning wheel of history. In this post, I continue with reflections on the phrase “turning of the wheel,” comparing Buddhist uses of the phrase to an interesting use of it in an early Quaker essay in order to highlight an important difference between Quakerism and Buddhism.

Two prominent uses of the turning wheel image in Buddhism are samsara and dharma.

The Wheel of Samsara
The wheel of samsara represents the cycle of life and death (or births and deaths), the seemingly endless round of suffering in which beings are trapped. (See the “Interactive Wheel of Samsara.”) In a way, this image reminds me of Schweitzer ‘s unyielding wheel of history that crushed Jesus. But whereas Jesus attempted to block the wheel’s motion, believing that his divine Father would stop it, the Buddha offered a means for individuals to live as if the wheel were not turning. The Buddha would free human beings not by attempting to stop the wheel of samsara directly, but by setting in motion another wheel, the turning of which would cancel, for those who were ready, the motion of samsara. That other wheel is the dharma (usually translated as “law” or “doctrine”).

The Wheel of Dharma
By preaching the wisdom he had discovered under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha is said to have turned the wheel of the dharma—to have set in motion the transmission of the saving teaching. By turning the wheel of dharma, he would counter the turning of samsara for those who could understand his teaching and put its prescriptions into practice. As the Buddha’s original doctrine developed over the centuries and new forms of Buddhism evolved, the dharma wheel (dharmacakra) would be said to be turned a number of times again, although the validity of later turnings would be disputed by adherents of the original doctrine. But the important point for us here is that for Buddhism the turning of the spiritual wheel, that which is offered as the means of stopping the worldly wheel of suffering, is a presentation of doctrine—one that includes practical methods of realizing the truth of the doctrine, but a presentation of doctrine nonetheless. That contrasts sharply with the Quaker approach, which proposes neither doctrine nor method as the means of salvation.

The Wheel of Love
Anyone acquainted with Buddhism would likely be surprised, as I was, to encounter the image of the salvific turning of the wheel in the writings of the early Quaker Isaac Penington (d. 1679). But Penington’s characteristically Quaker usage of the image illustrates a fundamental difference between Buddhism and Quakerism. For Quakerism, the saving “turning of the wheel” is not teaching or even practice, but something of a different order altogether. Here’s a brief excerpt from Penington’s Some of the Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Glanced At (1663, full passage on pp. 342-343 of Vol. 2 of his Works, emphasis added):

So that if I should yet speak further of … meekness, tenderness, humility, mercy, gentleness, patience, long-suffering, contentedness, [etc.] (all which I had much rather should be read in [Christ’s] book, even in the living book of the eternal Word, than in my writings), I should but speak further of [Christ’s] nature brought up, manifested, and displaying itself in and through the creatures, by his turning the wheel of his life in their hearts.

At first glance, it may seem that Penington, with his references to reading and books, is in fact speaking of a doctrine or teaching that can be written and transmitted. But the book in which he wants us to read virtues is, as he puts it, “the living book of the eternal Word.” That book is read and understood not by being grasped by the eyes and the thinking mind but, as we will see in the full passage below, by being “felt”—for that “book” is the living Christ, the new covenant written not in letters but in spirit, in the heart. (See Jeremiah 31:33-34 and 2 Cor. 3:6.) The virtues listed at the beginning of the excerpt are not qualities to be learned about and subsequently imitated or practiced; they are the presence and action in us of the nature, the very life, of Christ. The Quaker “turning of the wheel” by which we counteract the wheel of suffering in history is the movement, the activity, of the life of Christ within us. And Christ being, as we have noted many times here, the human face of the God who is love, it is in the activity of love—”his turning of the wheel of his life in [our] hearts”—that we find our salvation.

The Buddhist seeks to cancel the effects of samsara by right understanding and practice. Many of us, especially we who are not theists, find that more appealing than the traditional Quaker approach, which, as we see in the full passage from Penington, is a matter of obedience.

Quest. What is obedience?

Ans. It is the subjection of the soul to the law of the Spirit; which subjection floweth from, and is strengthened by, love. To wait to know the mind of God, and perform his will in every thing, through the virtue of the principle of life revealed within, this is the obedience of faith. This is the obedience of the seed, conveyed into the creature by the seed, and it is made partaker of the seed. He is the son who naturally doth the will; he is the faithful witness who testifies concerning the will; yea, and he is the choice servant also.

Mark how every thing in the kingdom, every spiritual thing, refers to Christ, and centres in him. His nature, his virtue, his presence, his power, makes up all. Indeed he is all in all to a believer, only variously manifested and opened in the heart by the Spirit. He is the volume of the whole book, every leaf and line whereof speaks of him, and writes out him in some or other of his sweet and beautiful lineaments. So that if I should yet speak further of other things, as of meekness, tenderness, humility, mercy, gentleness, patience, long-suffering, contentedness, &. (all which I had much rather should be read in his book, even in the living book of the eternal Word, than in my writings), I should but speak further of his nature brought up, manifested, and displaying itself in and through the creatures, by his turning the wheel of his life in their hearts [emphasis added]. But my spirit hasteneth from words, therefore can I not but cut short and pass over these openings in me, that neither my own soul nor others may fix or stay upon words concerning the thing, but may sink in spirit into the feeling of the life itself, and may learn what it is to enjoy it there, and to be comprehended of it, and cease striving to know or comprehend concerning it [emphasis added]. And then I am sure he that hath a taste of this cannot but be willing to sell all the knowledge that can be held in the creaturely vessel, for that knowledge which is living, and is laid up in that treasury, into which the thief and corrupter can by no means steal or break….

But we need not be put off by the theistic imagery of traditional Quakerism, which has always been a very practical religion. The practical Quaker seeks “living” knowledge, which is, in context of the Quaker reading of the Christian tradition, the actual life of love in the heart. In Penington’s theopoetic image, Christ turns the wheel of his love within, and that ongoing experience is “all in all to a believer,” for it is in that turning that Christ is known as the power of love, and it is in our turning inward to that power, and being turned by it, that we are liberated from the wheel of worldly necessity.

Nor need we hesitate for fear that “obedience” or “surrender” might mean subservience to a religious authority or doctrine. On the contrary, it is through surrender to the living love within and among us that we find freedom, the freedom of one who has ceased to resist the light and life in her heart. For the turning of the wheel of love is metanoia, conversion, the turning-around of the mind and heart, the radical change that is our heart’s deepest desire, the new birth into spiritual life. As turning wheels carry us to new places, provide means and power for getting work done, even—in the Ptolemaic system—order the cosmos, so does the turning or activity of the Christ-love in our hearts transform us, empower us, and set us in truthful relation to the universe. And, again, it is love itself, not we, that turns the wheel of salvation, for love is alive in us; we have only to surrender to that love whose beauty and power we already feel, if only faintly, moving within us. The Quaker needs no authority, doctrine, or practice and, in fact, sees them as hindrances; for the Friend, surrender to love is all that is needed, for love is “all in all.”

Saving Selving

An untitled sonnet by the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889) expresses insights that are essential to both the Catholic and the Quaker experience:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

It is the nature of kingfishers to “catch fire” when they fly, as it is the nature of dragonflies to “draw flame” as light flashes from their wings. And it is the nature of stones to ring out their nature as they tumble down wells, striking the stony sides of the ring that is the well. So, too, an instrument’s string or a bell’s “bow,” or curved shape, naturally “finds tongue to fling out broad its name”—to speak and proclaim what it is. Likewise, each human being “selves,” or “goes itself,” “deals out that being indoors each one dwells”—that is, each of us inevitably expresses that in which we live, that which lives in us, that which we are. What we do bespeaks—is—what, who, and why we are. “What I do is me: for that I came.”

In the sonnet’s second section, Hopkins succinctly asserts an insight that is prominent in primitive Quaker thought as well, if never so well expressed: “the just man justices.” (Just as he earlier used “selves,” so Hopkins now uses “justices” as a verb.) Here, in an honesty that refutes and refuses the Protestant dodge of “imputed righteousness,” the poet, like the primitive Quakers and consistent with his Catholic tradition, recognizes and insists that a “justified” person is one who lives justly, one who lives justice. The just person “keeps grace,” abiding in the “sanctifying grace” which is, in Catholic theology, the life of God-who-is-love in the human soul. And thus the just one, “all his goings graces,” goes gracefully “over the world, answering that of God in every one” (George Fox). Expressing his nature, he is justice and grace for others, because he “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—Christ.”

For Christ, the Word-in-flesh, the expression of the nature of God, is the crucified yet saving seed of love which is raised in us when, recognizing in the shadow of death that but for that seed we are nothing, we cease our often unconscious but always desperate striving to keep it buried under a built-up self. When the normal human delusion of self gives way to faith in love, then the seed, which according to scripture is innumerable yet one, comes into its own as the true self, the real nature, of each of us: “for Christ plays in ten thousand places.” To “act in God’s eye what in God’s eye [we are]—Christ” is, as inspired writers have told us since ancient times, the meaning of faith. Faith in Christ-in-us is the activation, the real-ization, of the truth that there is more to our lives than the emptiness of self and death, that our lives are the life of Christ as, in brief but beautiful fire, we fly in him, which is to allow him to fly in us, “To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

As dragonflies flash flame and bells sing their essence, so we spontaneously speak the Word—the spirit of love which is the divine nature in us—in the grace of our comings and goings in justice: Christ “Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his….” I am reminded of a passage, sung by the Virtues but appropriate as well to the just, in Hildegard von Bingen’s “Ordo Virtutem,” which was composed about 725 years before Hopkins wrote his sonnet:

Verbum dei clarescit in forma hominis,
Et ideo fulgemus cum illo,
Edificantes membra sui pulcri corporis.

The Word of God shines bright in human form,
And thus we shine with him,
Building up the limbs of his beautiful body.

—————
Thanks to Frank Seeburger, on whose blog Trauma and Philosophy I found a reference to the Hopkins poem along with help in understanding the rich but difficult work of Jean-Luc Nancy. And thanks to Desmond Egan for his helpful “‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’. . . — analysis of Imagery and a Suggestion.”

The thumbnail image below is a reduced-size detail from a photo of a kingfisher by Ravi Vaidyanathan; you can click it to see the original at Wikipedia Commons.

A Quaker Christmas Message

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars.

…

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings.

Those are the first and last stanzas of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “Christ Climbed Down.”¹ Ferlinghetti’s understanding of a particular (and peculiar) dogma may have been off — the “Immaculate Conception” doctrine refers to the conception of Mary, not to that of Jesus Christ — but that’s not the worst of his heterodoxies, at least from some broadly accepted Christian perspectives. For many Christians, the implication that the more important birth of Christ is that which he awaits “in the darkest night of everybody’s anonymous soul” is something one might expect to hear from an incorrigible heretic — from, say, a Quaker.

Our Quaker tradition reads stories in scripture as pointers to inward events. In a Quaker reading of the annunciation narrative,² each of us is an anonymous Mary, in whose dark heart-womb the seed Christ lives. Christ, the image (eikon) of God-who-is-love,³ the seed promised to Abraham,⁴ is the promise, or “principle,” of divine life waiting within us to be born and to re-create our hearts and souls by imparting to us its own life. But, as Isaac Penington has warned us, that living seed is easily missed or rejected.

For though this principle be all life, yet it is at first but as a seed, and the appearance of the Lord in it is but as in a seed; very little, low, weak, hard to be discerned, easy to be overlooked and despised, and some greater and more undeniable appearance expected.⁵

We don’t recognize the seed because we don’t expect to find the deepest and most powerful truth of our lives in something small and frail, almost invisible, apparently worthless and even undesirable if glimpsed or felt. Our expectation is that the experience of the presence of God will be affirming, uplifting, powerful, awe-inspiring. But this tiny, wretched, seemingly powerless seed of sacrificial love? Not what we’re looking for.

Yet in our inner darkness the seed continues to live and move, the “secret virtue [i.e., hidden power for good] and stirring of the life in [the] heart.”⁶ And when at last the seed is found and recognized; when, understanding what it is and what it offers, we respond with our “Fiat voluntas tua,” allowing it to be born and to grow in us: then is the coming of God in human form, the coming of Christ in the flesh — in our flesh. Then is the coming of God in power,⁷ “the very craziest of Second Comings.”

It is the seed of God, and it is the very nature of God [i.e., love: see Penington's "Concerning Love"]; and [a person] in whom it springs, and who is gathered into it, born of it, and one with it, partakes of the divine nature. Peter speaks of the great and precious promises, whereby the saints are made partakers of the divine nature. All the promises are to the seed of promise, to Christ the Son of God, to the seed of God, to the heirs of life and salvation in Christ; and they are all fulfilled to them, and enjoyed by them, who are ingrafted into, and one with Christ, the seed; which cannot be, but by the grace, by the truth, by the light, life, Spirit, and power, which he sows in the heart; which are not many things, but all contained and comprehended in the one seed.⁸

Earlier generations of Quakers, perhaps more attuned than we are to that living inward promise, refused to erect “rootless Christmas trees,” symbols of spiritual rootlessness resulting from our ignoring or despising the life of sacrificial love flickering weakly in the dark depths of our hearts. And of course they refused to erect crosses and crèches, which divert our gaze from the living icon of love, the inner Christ, to physical and conceptual idols.⁹ As Jean-Luc Marion tells us, the idol stops our gaze at itself, occluding the horizon, and then, mirror-like, returns our gaze to us in a spiritual narcissism; but the icon inverts that process: in the icon, the invisible “opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to summon them to its depth.”¹⁰ Christ, the seed of love in the heart, is “the icon of the invisible God.”¹¹ Through that icon, the invisible power and nature of God¹² engage us and transform us unto what we behold.

And so we Friends direct our attention not outward to an idol-symbol but inward to the living icon, the seed of God, within — to the small stirring of love in our hearts. By feeling and responding to the movement of that life in our spiritual wombs, we dispose ourselves to become Theotokos, the God-bearer, and thereby to be re-created in the divine image — a true “immaculate conception.” May our Advent, the season in which we can only acknowledge our longing for the saving birth of love, come swiftly to its end: may Christ take flesh in us today. May this be the Christmas Day on which we say,

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year.

_______
NOTES
1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958), 69-70.
2. Luke 1:26-38.
3. Colossians 1:15 (see note 11, below); 1 John.
4. Galatians 3:16.
5. Isaac Penington, “Concerning God’s Seeking Out His Israel” (1663).
6. Isaac Penington, “To All Such That Complain That They Want Power” (1661).
7. See Mark 9:1.
8. Isaac Penington, “The Seed of God and of His Kingdom” (undated).
9. “Idol”: “A form or appearance visible but without substance” — Merriam-Webster Online.
10. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 19. Here, from page 21, is Marion’s translation of “an astonishing sequence from Saint Paul,” 2 Corinthians 3:18: “We all, with face unveiled and revealed [anakekalummeno prosopo], serving as optical mirror to reflect [katoptrizomenoi] the glory of the Lord, we are transformed in and according to his icon [eikona], passing from glory to glory, according to the spirit of the Lord.”
11. Colossians 1:15: “Hos estin eikon tou theo tou aoratou.”
12. See Romans 1:20.