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.

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.

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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.

Light, Right, and Unity

A discussion at the “One Quaker Take” blog has reminded me of another bit of vocal ministry, this one from October of 1992, that I transcribed into my journal after delivery. The message, like some others of mine from that period, is theistic in tone: in those days, I felt free more often to use theopoetic language without explaining myself, especially in my home meeting where I was well known. The message was given some minutes after a ministering Friend had asserted, as I understood him, that those who are led by the Light must oppose abortion. Considering his experience, mine, and others’, I saw that obedience to the guidance of the Christ-light of love is no guarantee that we are right or that we will agree, even on crucial issues, with others who are also obedient to that light. I know that that’s a heretical view in Quakerism, but—here’s an irony—it’s what the light of love led me to as I opened in empathy. It became evident to me that, even when we sincerely discern and respond to the promptings of love in our hearts, we can have no assurance that we’re right. We can always challenge and help ourselves and each other to clearer vision, but life is messy and morally ambiguous, and our vision, no matter how sharp and broad, is quite limited. The whole eludes us; we can judge with certainty neither self nor other. Who is absolutely right? That’s not for us to know.

In this exceedingly dark world, the light of Christ is as a candle for our all-too-finite vision—beautiful, bright, strong, and pure, but only a candle. It seems, then, that wisdom is not in seeing and judging but in walking, and walking gently, in our measure of light, always aware that any measure is finite and relative, and always open to being changed, even when we’re convinced that we’re right, as love’s fragile light expands our horizons while yet illuminating our limits. (Is that not included in our doctrine of “continuing revelation”?) Walking gently—and yes, even cheerfully—in our measure, we walk no longer in certainty but in the faith and hope of love. That’s probably as right as we can be, the postmodern perfection of the saints. Walking thus, even while disagreeing about this or that seemingly essential issue, we are, each and all and none the less, members of the one body of Christ.

Here’s that vocal ministry from 1992:

One day during Yearly Meeting in August, there was a brief but heavy rainstorm. Later, in the gloaming, I walked the damp brick paths that crossed the campus in Chambersburg, past flowers flecked with rain in the evening’s hush, and, as darkness fell, lay across a wooden swing suspended from a small tree. The tree stood near the dimly-lit doorway of a building some distance from the activities of Yearly Meeting, and there, sheltered from the sight of others, I spontaneously set thinking aside and gave myself over to feeling. I was soon immersed in seemingly contradictory feelings: sorrow and happiness; confusion and clarity; a deep longing for love more powerful than I’d ever known, and gratitude, with its implication of satisfaction, for the love with which I am blessed. As I lay there in that condition, a drop from the day’s rain fell from a leaf onto my face, and I remember that I smiled broadly and, still without thinking, felt in that pure experience a pro­found peace and serenity.

I hadn’t thought much about that experience until this morn­ing. The image that has come to me is that it was as if all of those paradoxical states I was feeling then—states that I often would prefer to think of as coming into me from outside, but which I recognize as actually being integral elements of who I am—had been distilled into a single tear, a tear that also seemed to come to me from outside, as a gift from a God who is Other, but which certainly came from within me as well. And as I thought about this, the question arose: if God’s tear was on my face, then from whose eye, really, had it been released? And immediately I recalled Meister Eckhart’s saying, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

I believe that I have been led to a way—not the only way, of course, but a useful way—of understanding worship as that transforming event in which, whether in the darkness of solitude or, even more beautifully, in our gathered community, we give up our thoughts and opinions and lay ourselves open to feeling the heart of the universe weeping for joy and sorrow in our own hearts, such that we may say, after Eckhart, that the heart with which we love God is the same heart with which God loves us. I am convinced that in this inner unity of love, despite the diversity and seeming contradiction of our choices when seen from the outside, there can be no conflict between our wills and the will of God.

“That of God” Means No Excuses — A Quaker Interpretation of Romans 1:16-25

Welcome, Friends, to an experiment in reading and thinking; to the inspirited play of Quaker theopoetics; to a paralogy of a Paul, two Georges, and thee.

The popular Quaker phrase “that of God in every one” has its source in a passage in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. Although the first Friends were familiar with apostates’ tendentious translations developed from the Textus Receptus, the Friends’ hermeneutic, or principle of biblical interpretation, allowed them to enter into the spirit of the passage and to understand it as referring not to outward signs of God in the world but to the power of the light of Christ present within them. I find that by using the NA26/27 Greek text, with interlinear English and a variety of reference materials, I can provide a rendering of the passage that conveys Quaker thinking and experience quite effectively.

I’ll also offer two brief commentaries, each from a different Quaker perspective: one (verse-based) from the traditional, and one from the universalist/postmodern.

The passage is Romans 1:16-25.

[16] For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God unto saving for all who have faith in it, to the Jew first and even to the Greek, [17] and because God’s justice is being revealed in that power, from faith into faithfulness, according to what has been written: ‘the just shall live by faithfulness.’

[18] For God’s indignation is being disclosed from heaven over all ungodliness and injustice of human beings who are restraining the truth in injustice, [19] because that which is known of God is shining within them, for God makes manifest to them. [20] For, apart from what is perceived in the ordering of the world for the created things, that which is unseen of him — his eternal power and divine nature [i.e., love*] — is being discerned, and thus they are without excuse [21] inasmuch as, not recognizing God as God, they give glory or thanks but are already idolatrous in their thinking; thus their unwise heart is darkened.

[22] Professing to be wise, they are made fools, [23] and they change the glory of the incorruptible God in a likeness of an image of a corruptible human being, and flying things, and four-footed beasts, and reptiles. [24] Thus God also surrendered them into uncleanness in the desires of their hearts, to despising their bodies within themselves — [25] those who alter the truth of God in the falsehood, and are venerated, and worship the created things above the creator, who is blessed in the ages. Amen.

* * *

A brief, more traditional Quaker commentary:

16, 17. The gospel is the power of God. Christ is the power of God (1 Cor. 1:24). Both are the power of God, whose nature is love.* Therefore, gospel = Christ = power of love, the one salvific power for everyone. Those who trust in that power and are faithful to it reveal in their lives the justice of God. (Based on Paul’s reference to Habakkuk 2:4 — “… for the just shall live by faithfulness [emunah]” — I am interpreting Paul’s phrase “ek pistews eis pistin” as a play on words.)

18. In the working of the light of Christ in the heart, God’s rejection of injustice is revealed, and, as we have seen, power is given to overcome injustice and become just (justified). Those who are “restraining the truth in injustice” are the false teachers, Antichrist, who will be discussed in verses 21 through 25. Some of them will teach the ungodly doctrine of “imputed justification”; all of them will divert people’s attention from the power of love in the heart to images of created things.

19-20. That which can be known of God by human beings is the power of love in the heart: we know God directly, immediately, only in that power. Even if we can deduce God’s existence from the order of the world, we can directly know God’s nature (and thus know the true God), “that which is unseen of him,” only as the power of love within. Everyone has that power — the light enlightens everyone — and so there is no excuse for not knowing God in the power here and now; i.e., no excuse for being unloving, unjust, idolatrous.

21-23. Those who do not trust in the light of love nor recognize it as the power of God will offer worship and thanksgiving, thinking that they are doing the right thing, but in fact they are worshiping idols, whether their deluded minds and hearts have imagined God with the characteristics of a human being or an animal of some sort. Genesis 1:26 says, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”: but they reverse the divine creation, which was done through Christ the Logos, by making God in the human image; therefore, they are the Antichrist. And in 1 Cor. 15:52, Paul says, “… the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed”: thus they also reverse the divine re-creation, which is also done through Christ, by exchanging the glory of God, which is Christ in them, for something corruptible. Their identity as Antichrist is twice confirmed.

24. Given that their hearts are in thrall to an imaginary idol-God, their desires become increasingly disordered, and they dishonor or despise their own bodies within themselves — which may well be a reference not simply to unjust or unsafe behaviors but to dishonoring the spiritual body of Christ within, “the hidden man of the heart”: “But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price” (1 Peter 3:4).

25. Such people may think and speak about God and Christ, but they are altering the gospel, attempting to make it a matter of words rather than the power of God in the heart — this is “the falsehood,” the teaching of Antichrist, the attempt to justify themselves and their way of life by choosing words over the self-sacrificing power of love within. Although they think of themselves, and are venerated by others, as holy, in fact they are idolaters, thieves using the language of religion, “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” And because they could know God in the power of love in their hearts but will not open themselves to that power, even though they feel its pull, they have no excuse.

A briefer, universalist/postmodern Quaker commentary:

Whether we are theists or not, if we are faithful to our Quaker tradition then we are united in the faith and experience that the phrase “that of God in every one” points to the power of love in the heart. We are united in the faith and experience that it is by the light of love that we see the delusion, idolatry, and injustice in ourselves; that it is by the same light of love that we see the just person we could be; and that it is by the power of love that we become that just person, that our hearts and lives are “justified” (i.e., made just) according to the ever-growing “measure” of love in us each day.

Our practices and testimonies develop from that faith and experience. We worship in silence not because we are simply calming ourselves or want to think clearly about things but because we are opening ourselves to feel the “unseen” searching, guiding, and empowering work of love in our hearts — an experience that, as Paul tells us, is inaccessible if we are not focused on love’s light and power of justice within. We live honestly, simply, and peacefully, and we conduct our business in unity, not because we believe that we should or that other people have divinity in them, but because love leads us to do so, leads us to live justly, leads us to allow it to express itself in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Despite our diversity of beliefs, which love teaches us to hold loosely lest we fall into some form of idolatry, we are one in being people whom love has claimed.

In the emptiness of our own self-centered hearts as much as in the suffering of the world, love calls to us. We have no excuse for not opening ourselves to its transforming power within us, and we need no excuse for doing so: love is its own justification — and ours.

———-
* Isaac Penington (“Concerning the Seed of God, or the Seed of the Kingdom”): “As God is love, so the seed that is born of him partakes of his love. There is no enmity in it, and no enmity or ill-will springs from it. This is it that makes it so natural to the children of God to love; because they are born of that seed which came from the God of love, whose nature is love.” See 1 John 4.

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.

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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.

Worship, Nontheism, & Convergence

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.” (Acts 2:1)

In seventeen years of online discussions with other Quakers, I have found that Friends who hold belief in the personal God of Western tradition may have a difficult time understanding even the possibility of worship for a nontheist. Their assumption seems to be that Quaker worship is, like other forms of worship, an act of reverence toward an object of worship, and that therefore a person who does not believe in God has no divine object and cannot worship. If the assumption were correct, then the conclusion — that nontheist Quakers do not actually engage in Quaker worship — might follow. But the assumption is erroneous. It does not reflect the unique Quaker understanding of worship as taught, for example, by George Fox.

We can read about George Fox’s understanding of worship in various places in his collected Works. But grasping it is difficult, because we tend to approach Fox’s words with unrecognized preconceptions about his meaning. It’s easy to forget the fact that Fox and other Friends, convinced that everything that had come between the apostles and them had been cunning distortions of the Antichrist, completely re-defined Christianity. Those distortions, which continue to shape almost all of Christian thought, color our interpretation of both Fox and scripture in ways that we fail to see. And so we are quite confident that we read Fox and the scriptures aright (as he might say), and we don’t realize that our confidence is blind.

But even to justify that assertion, much less to explicate Quaker worship from the writings of Fox and other primitive Friends, would require quite a bit of space (and time). So I’ll just wade in now and define Quaker worship as succinctly as I can, assisted by a couple of passages from an epistle by George Fox. If anyone feels that I am in error, we can examine the primitive texts together. I can say, however, that I have studied those texts sufficiently to be confident of the fidelity of my definition. I do my best to apply the testimony of integrity to my explications of historic Quakerism. And I am a realist who avoids anachronism; I don’t pretend, for example, that primitive Quakerism was somehow not theistic.

I said above that it is erroneous to assume that Quaker worship is, like other forms of worship, an act of reverence toward an object of worship. But if it is not that, then what is it? Simply put, Quaker worship, modeled on, among other passages, the biblical story of Pentecost, is “silent waiting upon God.” That’s a very different thing.

Before letting George Fox speak to us about silent waiting, I want to help nontheists as well as theists to hear him — and to hear each other. Because, as 1 John 4 asserts, God is love and love is God, and because, as Paul asserts, Christ is “the image [in whom we are made; see Gen. 1:27] of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), we can define worship in a way that speaks to theists and nontheists by simply substituting the word “love” for “God” and “Christ” in the source texts. That substitution has been made (except when the meaning would not be clear, or when mythological agency is attributed) in the following passages from Fox.*

And this is to all that would learn silent waiting upon [love] and silent meeting; for none shall ever come to [love] … but as they do come to that of [love] in them, the light which [love] hath enlightened them withal; and that is it which must guide everyone’s mind up to [love], and to wait upon [love] to receive the spirit from [love], and the spirit leads to wait upon [love] in silence, and to receive from [love].

Other than waiting patiently and trustingly for the working of love in our hearts, then, we perform no action in Quaker worship. Our worship is essentially passive. Therefore there is no object toward which our worship is directed, toward which we proffer reverence. We’re simply waiting to feel the motions of love directing our lives. Thus do we avoid the error of attempting to objectify, to reify, God. And thus do we, if we are theists, avoid the error of secretly thinking that we are pleasing God by the work of worship.

Such worship is proper for Friends because Quakerism is about leaving behind all “types and figures” — i.e., words and mental images (which “are spoken to the carnal part of man”**) — and entering the “substance,” which Fox said is Christ — i.e., love. So there is no need for one to be a theist in order to join in Quaker worship, because silent waiting upon love’s working in the heart is the whole of it.

Keep to that of [love] in you, when you are still from your own thoughts and imaginations, and desires and counsels of your own hearts, and motions, and will; when you stand single from all these, waiting upon [love], your strength is renewed; he that waits upon [love], feels his shepherd, and he shall not want: and that which is of [love] in every one, is that which brings them together to wait upon [love], which brings them to unity, which joins their hearts together up to [love]. … [F]or the light is the door, the light is the power, that doth enlighten every man that cometh into the world, that all through the light might believe, and he that believeth is entered into his rest [i.e., sabbath], hath ceased from his own works as God did from his [after creating the world], and he hath the witness in himself. And he that is born of [love] overcometh the world, he does not make haste: he knows a silent meeting and waiting upon [love]; and knows that … Christ ([love's] covenant of peace, of light with [love] and man) they must come into; then all flesh must be silent before [love]; so the life of [love] comes to guide.

We talk about being “convergent Friends,” yet even in our converging we continue to push each other away, breaking the body of love with words, dividing the “substance” by “types and figures.” George Fox has something to say about that, too, in the same epistle:

And you that think yourselves above the world … giving names one to another, throwing dirt one to another, where the enmity is … and they that do so, mock one another; and here is the generation of mockers, out of the life, and out of the light, and every one striving for mastery and lordship and authority one over another: but it shall not be so with you who are children of light, disciples of [love], not of this world, whose kingdom is not of this world, and who come out of strife, come into peace.

The shared, traditional understanding of Quaker worship as silent waiting upon and submission to the working of love in the heart can and should be the point of real convergence for all Friends.

This time, dear reader, I leave the word substitutions to you:

[A]nd all people, know the mind of Christ (which none can but who come to the light he hath enlightened them withal), that you may come to be of one mind, heart and soul; and all people wait to receive the spirit of Christ Jesus, which if you have not, you are none of his; and all people come to live in the power of godliness … and you will come to live in the gospel [which, as Fox often reminded us, is the power of God-who-is-love].

———-
Notes:
* Except as indicated below, all passages from George Fox are adapted, as described in the text, from “An Epistle to All People on the Earth,” which begins on page 119 of Vol. 4 of the 1831 edition of Works. For a classic primitive Quaker statement on love as the nature of God, see Isaac Penington’s Concerning Love.
** Fox, Works Vol. 4, p. 34