The Religion of the Broken-Hearted

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

* * *

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.

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.”

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.

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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.

The Heart of Quakerism

I want to speak about the heart of Quakerism. In order to do that, I must speak about Jesus, Christ, God. I am not a theist. So when I speak in those terms, I’m not pushing a standard Christian, or even theistic, belief agenda; I’m using the religious metaphors of our tradition to point to the heart of our identity as Friends. That heart is a very specific, ongoing experience that is, as Quakers have insisted from the very first, available to believers and nonbelievers alike, an experience that is, in fact, as our ancestors pointed out repeatedly, very often blocked by religious belief. So I’m not talking at all about belief, or what normally passes for belief, but about the experience of transformation, of having our fundamental ways of thinking and feeling be “turned around” — converted — from the normal, commonsense “wisdom of the world” to the foolish wisdom of the spirit of Christ.

If the question then is “how do we know what we mean by ‘the spirit of Christ’?” then the otherwise meaningless slogan is correct: Jesus is the answer. The spirit of Christ is the spirit that animated Jesus, that is shown to us in his life and death and teachings.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus, “the visible form of the invisible God” who is love, announced the coming of the Kingdom of God, the wisdom of which is not of this world. What does that image, “Kingdom of God,” mean? The evangelist Luke has Jesus define the Kingdom clearly, at the very outset of his ministry, in words borrowed from Isaiah, a great prophet of social justice: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor….” He continues, but I think it’s highly significant that the very first phrase Jesus uses to describe the new order, the Kingdom of God, is “good news for the poor.” That’s the agenda of the spirit of Christ in nutshell: “good news for the poor.”

And what would be good news for the poor, except that those of us who have more than enough would learn to share much more than we do now, so that justice would be realized? In another place, Jesus tells the story of two men. One, well off, relaxes comfortably in his spacious home every evening, enjoying his plentiful and delicious dinner, perhaps planning his postprandial pleasures while he eats; the other, the poor man Lazarus, lies just on the other side of the well-off man’s locked gate, bleeding and starving to death, hoping for crumbs from the other’s table — as if human beings can survive on crumbs, as if we well-off should consider ourselves generous if we give our crumbs to the poor. If you don’t know the rest of the story, you can find it in the same Gospel of Luke (and read George Fox’s “sermon” on it here): briefly, it graphically illustrates just what Jesus thought of that well-off man and those like him, who use the rationalizations of accepted worldly wisdom to justify their pleasures while the poor lie bleeding at their gates.

[T]he Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor, healing for the broken-hearted, freedom for the imprisoned, sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed: to preach the year of the Lord’s favor.

“The year of the Lord’s favor” is the Jubilee year, the year in which the commonsense, private-property economic rules of society are set aside for the sake of justice, a year in which land is taken back from those who have hoarded it, slaves are freed, and debts are forgiven. In the Kingdom of God, the Jubilee year is now. Justice, healing, liberation, vision: the agenda of the spirit of Christ.

So we’re talking about a man who put the poor first, who fed the hungry when he could, healed the sick when he could, associated with sinners and outcasts, insisted that we care for the just and the unjust alike, openly challenged religious people whose religion is a mask for unacknowledged self-centeredness and aggression, turned on their heads the commonsense rules of conventional morality — which always favor those who have and hoard wealth and power — and was therefore tortured to death. But he passed on his vision of the Kingdom, and he passed on the Spirit of Christ, and he became the key to our realizing that Kingdom and Spirit in our lives.

Some sixteen hundred years later, our ancestors, too, were tortured, sometimes to death, because they dared to assert their right and their obligation to be possessed of and by the Spirit that was in Jesus — the spirit that gives and then gives more, that forgives and then forgives more; that willingly sacrifices for justice, for love of the other, and that calls on all of us to do the same, to open our hearts to the suffering of the world and to be moved to action.

They, in their turn, passed that Spirit on to us. And they handed down to us this institution called Quakerism, all of the accomplishments of which come out of that transformation of individual hearts. They gave us our unique forms of meeting: for worship in silence, and for making decisions in the Spirit of Christ — both expressions of the unique gift which Quakerism offers the world. And these forms of gathering together have deep and serious purpose and meaning: the crucifixion of the “natural” person, the raising of the spiritual Christ in our hearts, and the manifestation of that spirit in and among us and, through us, in the world.

I’ve been told that Quaker meeting is a place where all opinions are respected and can get a hearing, and that Quaker decision-making is a process of arriving at truth through attending to each person’s expressed opinion. Our ancestors, however, tell us that the only place personal opinions have within the meetinghouse walls is on the cross, as we courageously allow them to be crucified by love so that the spirit of Christ, which they have been trampling and trying to destroy while telling us they’re doing the opposite, can be raised in us. As the first Friends read Paul, “if Christ be not raised [in us], then our faith is in vain.” Our faith, our coming together, our going out into the world under the name of Quaker: all vanity unless we allow our worldly wisdom to die in silence so that the spirit of love can be raised in our hearts, can break open our hearts and make us new — unless we help each other set aside our cherished opinions and ways of seeing the world in order that we may, as Paul said, “have the mind of Christ,” that we may be brought into one mind, one heart, one body.

That is not easy. The logic of the Kingdom of God is illogic to the natural mind; the agenda of God seems to be madness. But I ask myself which is more of madness: an open life of giving and forgiving, filled with the joy and pain of love, or a life centered on the smallness of self, a life that closes its heart to Lazarus at my gate. Certainly, the life of love is very difficult and costly. But I can only echo Paul, who said that “Our present sufferings I count as nothing compared to the glory that us now unfolding within us.” Our ancestors taught that each of us has a measure, more or less of the divine glory of love within us. May we be faithful to that measure, help it grow, and help each other in that process.

———-
The little essay above is reprinted, with minor changes, from the current section of my journal, where it was originally published in April of 2008. I post it here in order to offer it to a new readers and to permit comments and discussion. — G.A.