Thomas Kelly: Some New Insights

Thomas Kelly: Some New Insights

Quaker Religious Thought

Volume 85 Article 2

1-1-1995

Thomas Kelly: Some New Insights

T Canby Jones 

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Hermann Lotze thomas kelly

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THOMAS KELLY: SOME NEW

INSIGHTS

 T. CANBY JONES

O God, thou art my God, early will I seek thee;

my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee

in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is,

To see thy power and thy glory, as I have seen thee

in the sanctuary.

Because thy lovingkindness is better than life,

my lips shall praise thee.

Thus will I bless thee while I live; I will lift up

my hands in thy name.

My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness,

and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips,

When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate

on thee in the night watches.

Because thou hast been my help, therefore, in the shadow

of thy wings will I rejoice. (Psalm 63:1-7 KJV)

I VIVIDLY REMEMBER HEARING THESE WORDS burst forth from the lips of

Thomas R. Kelly, both in meetings for worship and in the student

group that met in his home. In two recent gatherings we have sought

to recapture and understand more fully that thirst for God’s presence

which consumed Thomas Kelly both in his life and in his writings.

The first gathering was entitled “Renewing the Spirit of Community: Centennial Colloquium on the Life and Work of Thomas Kelly.”

This colloquium was held June 4-6, 1993, at the Thomas R. Kelly

Religious Center of Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio, on the

one-hundredth anniversary of Kelly’s birth. Ron Rembert, associate

6 • T. CANBY JONES

professor of religion and philosophy at Wilmington College, planned,

hosted, and found funding for this centennial event. Funding was

provided by the Ohio Humanities Council.

This issue of Quaker Religious Thought contains the four major

papers delivered at that gathering. E. Glenn Hinson, professor of spirituality, worship, and church history at Baptist Theological Seminary,

Richmond, Virginia, opened with the keynote address on “The Impact of Thomas Kelly on American Religious Life.” The following day

Elaine Prevallet, Roman Catholic sister of Loretto and director of Knobs

Haven Retreat Center, Nerinx, Kentucky, presented a paper on “A

Testament of Devotion: A Personal Response.” She was followed by

Howard R. Macy, professor of religion and biblical studies at George

Fox College, Newberg, Oregon, with a paper entitled “Thomas Kelly:

At Home in the Blessed Community.” The final paper included in this

issue is a study of Kelly’s religious background and development by his

son, Richard Macy Kelly, director of the AIDS program for the Baltimore (MD) City Health Department and author of Thomas Kelly, A

Biography. His paper is called “New Lights and Inner Light.” Thomas Kelly’s daughter, Lois Kelly Stabler, was also present and delighted

us with reminiscences of her father and her mother, Lael Macy Kelly.

The second gathering in which we gained new insights into Thomas Kelly and his message occurred at Quaker Hill Conference Center, Richmond, Indiana, April 15-16, 1994. It was a workshop called

to take a fresh look at Kelly’s life and commitment as revealed through

his sermons. Manuscripts of hese sermons, written between 1919 and

1934, were found by Ron Rembert in the Haverford College Quaker

Collection. The title of the workshop was “Love Held Him There,” a

phrase from the most striking of Kelly’s sermons. The sermon was

built around the quotation from Catherine of Siena, “For nails could

not have held the God-man to the Cross, had not love held him there.”

In what follows I will discuss things learned about Thomas Kelly’s

life, character, and thought, both from the 1993 Colloquium and the

1994 Workshop. I should mention that Josh Brown, pastor of West

Richmond (Indiana) Friends Meeting, with my help, is preparing a

series of twenty-five Kelly sermons for publication in the near future.

We turn now to consideration of the new insights about Thomas Kelly

gained from the two gatherings, with special emphasis upon those papers that appear in this issue of Quaker Religious Thought.

SOME NEW INSIGHTS • 7

Glenn Hinson stresses that after thirty years of teaching seminary

courses on spirituality and Christian devotion Kelly’s A Testament of

Devotion ranks among the best of the Christian classics. In fact, it has

done more to change lives among his students than any other. He

thinks that Kelly speaks to our condition so effectively because of his

simple and yet profound approach to a life of unreserved commitment

to the immediate presence of God in our midst. In spite of the “turmoil and fitfulness of our time-torn lives,” Kelly affirms, “God can be

found!” Elaine Prevallet agrees with Hinson, that Thomas Kelly reaches

our hearts because he speaks as an “authentic.” Not a person ready to

share “knowledge about religious phenomena and experience,” Kelly

communicates direct acquaintance with and the immediate experience

of practicing God’s presence. Howard Macy joins Prevallet and Hinson

in stressing the centrality of experiencing and living in “the Beloved,

or Blessed, Community” to the realization in us of “God-enthralled

lives.” Kelly expresses it: “We know that these souls are with us,

lifting their lives and ours continuously to God....It is as if…we were

within them and they were within us. Their strength, given to them

by God, becomes our strength, and our joy, given to us by God, becomes their joy. In confidence and love we live together in Him.”1

Prevallet highlights the integration of inward and the outward as a

very important characteristic of Kelly’s life and message. She stresses

the creative interplay between the depths of our lives, in which we live

in constant communion with God, and the external involvement with

human needs, which we find so exhausting. She emphasizes with Kelly

that it is at “the deep level of prayer and divine attendance…that the

real business of life is determined.” The implication is clear. Social

concerns, no matter how altruistic, will not “move mountains” unless

they originate in a life of continual prayer. Prevallet is also thankful for

Kelly’s wisdom in saying, “We cannot die on every cross, nor are we

expected to.” God shapes specific tasks, fitted to our capacities and

talents, for us to carry out. The rest we leave to others.

Howard Macy drives home Kelly’s Quaker use of the Scriptures.

Hungrily we read the Scriptures “to find new friends for the soul,”

Kelly says. We hunger to live in the same life and power in which the

prophets and apostles lived. They, through the medium of Scripture,

become our spiritual guides and mentors. Macy expresses it in an

unforgettable sentence. “So we read the Bible, then, to be joined to

part of the Blessed Community and feel our way back to the Source,

8 • T. CANBY JONES

so that the same ‘Living Spring’ may bubble up within us.” We find

the same kind of fellowship with the saints through the ages since

Scripture.

From Richard M. Kelly’s “New Lights and Inner Light” we learn

much of the religious background of Thomas R. Kelly and his forebears. Contrary to the conviction of Thomas Kelly’s mother, Madora

Kersey Kelly, that the Kelly ancestors were Scotch-Irish Quakers, Richard Kelly demonstrates that the Kelly family of the Schooley community near Londonderry, Ohio, were “New Light Presbyterians” or

“Christians” later known as “Disciples” or “Church of Christ.” They

were converted to Quakerism by the preaching of Quaker evangelists

in 1868. Richard Kelly thinks that the mainline Protestant element of

his father’s faith derives from that Presbyterian background and is a

major reason for the appeal of Kelly’s message to a wide spectrum of

people. A second important element of his father’s faith—and its appeal—was the evangelical holiness Quakerism in which he was reared.

A third element in that wide appeal was his deep acquaintance with the

mystical and inward prayer life of the Christian tradition, first introduced to Thomas Kelly by Rufus M. Jones at Haverford College.

A fourth element in Thomas Kelly’s wide appeal Richard Kelly traces

to his father’s two trips to Germany. Tom and Lael Kelly were sent

first to Berlin by the American Friends Service Committee, to found a

Friends Center there as a follow-up to a Quaker child-feeding in Germany during the years following the First World War. This writer believes that the German experience added a cosmic dimension to Thomas Kelly’s experience of Christ, and opened him to cosmic truths in

the world’s great religions and philosophies. In his second visit, to

Nazi Germany, in the summer of 1938, Thomas Kelly was so overwhelmed by the oppression and suffering of the German Jews, Quakers, and other Christians with whom he met that he felt “ploughed

into the furrows of the world’s sufferings.” He also learned from their

heroic courage what it means “to rise radiant in the sacrament of pain.”

From Lois Kelly Stabler, Thomas Kelly’s daughter, as well as from

his son Richard, we learned many foibles of Kelly’s character, some

positive and some negative. For example, his condescension toward

the restrictive evangelicalism, provincialism, and low scholarly standards of the midwestern United States where he had been reared, was

very pronounced. Also, as his son insists, Thomas Kelly was an intellectual elitist at that time. Richard Kelly also reports that his mother,

Lael Kelly, with some amusement worried whether there would be

SOME NEW INSIGHTS • 9

“enough Ph.D.’s” in their Brightwater, Maine, vacation community

to satisfy her husband! On a more positive note, as Douglas Steere

makes clear in his biographical memoir prefacing A Testament of Devotion, throughout all of Thomas Kelly’s adult life, with the exception

of the last three years, Kelly had a driving ambition to become a recognized philosopher in the academic world. On the really positive side,

laughter and joy in living were outstanding characteristics of Kelly.

This included the freedom to laugh at himself. This same happy atmosphere prevailed in the Kelly home and family. Lael Kelly, a person of

great warmth and strength in her own right, contributed much to that

happy atmosphere.

Lois Stabler pointed out the two best things that happened to her

father. The first was his marriage to her mother, Lael Macy Kelly. The

second “best” thing to happen was his blanking out at his Ph.D. oral

exam at Harvard in 1937. This scholarly disaster suddenly and gloriously freed Thomas Kelly to become the totally spiritual person he had

in the depths of his being longed to become. Thereafter new spiritual

power and authenticity flowed from his words and reached new depths

in the hearts of eager audiences.

---

At my suggestion following the Colloquium, Ron Rembert made a study of both Kelly doctoral theses. 

The first one, at Hartford Seminary in 1924, was entitled 

“The Place of Value-Judgments in the Philosophy of Hermann Lotze.” 

The second one, at Harvard in 1937, was entitled 

“Explanation and Reality in the Philosophy of Emile Meyerson.” 

At the Quaker Hill Workshop in 1994 Ron Rembert

reported that the Harvard thesis on Meyerson was exceedingly technical and did not reflect the fresh cosmic vision and concern we associate with Kelly. 

By contrast the 1924 thesis on Lotze does so, he said.

Rembert selected for emphasis the most striking quotation he found

from the Lotze thesis. 

“It is a fundamental thought in Lotze’s mind

that reconciliations are more nearly the truth about reality than conflicts. He is deeply convinced at the start that a harmonious relation

does exist, and so seeks to vindicate his faith.” 

We spent considerable

time at the workshop thinking out the implications of this statement.2

An important facet of Thomas Kelly’s concern which deserves further study, and which we did not focus on in our 1993 colloquium or

our 1994 workshop, is Kelly’s deep interest in East Asian and South

Asian philosophy and religion. 

He took advantage of his time of teaching in Hawaii to steep himself in Chinese and Indian philosophy and as

a result developed a course in each of these fields to teach at Haverford

College. 

Several of Thomas Kelly’s sermons before the trip to Hawaii

also reflect this concern.

To Thomas Kelly the cosmic Light of Christ, which so fully suffused his life and thought, knows no cultural limits. Beyond its Middle

Eastern origins and West European cultural expressions this Light is

found shining in some form in the lives of all persons in all cultures.

Perhaps the most important outcome of both gatherings, the

Colloquium and the Workshop, in the opinion of this writer, was the

characterization of Thomas Kelly as an “evangelical mystic.” 

This writer

has never heard of anyone so characterized before. In his paper, Richard Kelly clearly demonstrates that his father never lost the evangelical

fervor of his youth, even though it came to be expressed in more cosmic terms. In our Quaker Hill Workshop we became convinced that

the sermons of Thomas Kelly (1919-34), which we were studying,

never lost that call to complete commitment to God we associate with

A Testament of Devotion. The fact that his most moving sermon is

based on a text from a medieval saint and mystic, Catherine, only confirms this judgment. Furthermore, Glenn Hinson sees Thomas Kelly

as having recaptured mainstream Quaker spirituality, and he considers

that present day Quakers neglect him at their peril.

Is “evangelical mystics” what Thomas Kelly is challenging all of us

to become? Savor the following essays and decide for yourself.

Strained, Breathless, and Hurried: Learning from the Life of Thomas R. Kelly - Friends Journal

Strained, Breathless, and Hurried: Learning from the Life of Thomas R. Kelly - Friends Journal

Strained, Breathless, and Hurried: Learning from the Life of Thomas R. Kelly

May 1, 2011

By Chad Thralls

The breakneck pace of our over-scheduled lives often serves as an obstacle to the cultivation of spiritual wisdom. For some, the lessons of the spiritual life are learned the hard way. The life of Quaker writer Thomas R. Kelly demonstrates that those lessons, while transformative, can come at a steep price. In the end, the wisdom Kelly gained was not what he originally sought, and the suffering that facilitated it was devastating to him and to his family.

Thomas Kelly (1893-1941) eloquently describes the stress and anxiety many of us feel today in the final chapter of his spiritual classic, A Testament of Devotion. He writes, "The problem we face today needs very little introduction. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk, and before we know it we are bowed down with burdens, crushed under committees, strained, breathless, and hurried, panting through a never-ending program of appointments."

Kelly wrote of this kind of life from experience. The strain he put himself through stemmed from his passionate desire to make a name for himself as a scholar. Kelly finished his PhD in philosophy at Hartford Theological Seminary in 1924 and began his teaching career at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, the next year. Though he grew up in the Midwest, he desperately wanted to find a position that to him carried more prestige. To make himself more attractive to potential employers, he started a second PhD. This time he sought out the finest Philosophy department in the world and enrolled at Harvard University. While studying at Harvard, he served as a visiting professor at Wellesley College in 1931-32. Though he hoped his study at Harvard and experience at Wellesley would yield a teaching position in the East for the fall of 1932, the Depression was on and no suitable opportunities arose. This forced him to return to Earlham, and as Douglas Steere reports, this retreat back to the Midwest "almost crushed" him. In the spring of 1935, he was offered a position at University of Hawaii. He found the opportunity to teach in Hawaii an attractive one because it would allow him to teach and conduct research on the philosophies of China and India. It felt like progress.

In the spring of 1936, Thomas Kelly’s wish was granted. Haverford College in Philadelphia invited him to join the faculty of their Philosophy department, yet he had not reached his goal of teaching at a prestigious Eastern college unscathed. As he spent the summers of 1932-1934 in libraries working on his Harvard dissertation, his health deteriorated; kidney stones, nervous exhaustion, depression, and a severe sinus condition plagued him at various times in the mid-1930s. Steere notes that during the spring semester of 1935, Kelly "got out of bed only to go to his classes and returned at once to rest again." In February 1936, he had surgery to correct a sinus condition that was exacerbated by the humidity in Hawaii. On top of his exhaustion, he and his family accumulated significant debt by moving across the country four times in 11 years.

After several years of hard work, Kelly paid to have his Harvard dissertation published in the summer of 1937. Though he had secured an attractive job and added a technical philosophical monograph to his CV, he still wanted the second PhD, perhaps feeling that a Harvard degree would grant him the scholarly prestige he sought for so long.

Then, at the very moment that would have validated all of his hard work, tragedy struck. During his oral exams in the fall of 1937, he had an anxiety attack. His mind went blank— just as it had at the defense of his first dissertation at Hartford. While he was given another chance at Hartford, this second time he would not be so fortunate. The Harvard committee, which included Alfred North Whitehead, failed him partly out of concern for his health, and informed him he would not be given a second chance to defend his dissertation. Kelly was devastated and sank to such a low place his wife worried that he might try to take his own life.

Though he provides no personal account of what happened after his crushing failure, by January a definite change was apparent in his writing and lecturing. His biographer writes that in November or December of 1937 he was "shaken by the experience of Presence— something that I did not seek, but that sought me." As Kelly hit rock bottom, he realized that he could not reach perfection and completeness through his ability and intense drive for success. His essay, titled "The Eternal Now" in A Testament of Devotion, is his attempt to explain the experience of the presence of God. He writes more personally in a letter to his wife from Germany the following summer: "In the midst of the work here this summer has come an increased sense of being laid hold on by a Power, a gentle, loving, but awful Power. And it makes one know the reality of God at work in the world. And it takes away the old self-seeking, self-centered self, from which selfishness I have laid heavy burdens on you, dear one." Later in the same letter, he writes, "I seem at last to be given peace. It is amazing."

Kelly articulated the anxiety and strain of modern life so well because he lived it. In "The Simplification of Life," the final chapter of A Testament of Devotion, he describes how his feverish existence was transformed into a life of "peace and joy and serenity." In this essay, he insists that the number of distractions in our environment is not the cause of the complexity of our lives. He confesses that he brought his intensity with him to Hawaii. Even in that idyllic environment, Kelly could not let go of his habit of trying to do too much.

The solution to the habit of trying to "do it all" is not found in isolating ourselves from our responsibilities in the world. The problem is a lack of integration in our lives. Kelly compares the voices within that pull us in multiple directions to a variety of selves that simultaneously reside within us. As Kelly describes it, "There is the civic self, the parental self, the financial self, the religious self, the society self, the professional self, the literary self." To make matters worse, the various selves within us are not interested in cooperating. Each of them shouts as loudly as it can when decision-time comes. Instead of integrating the various voices, Kelly claims that we generally make a quick choice that does not satisfy them all. Thus, instead of our decisions focusing us on what we need to do, we wear ourselves out trying to fulfill the desires of each one of the voices.

The remedy that Kelly offers to our unintegrated lives is not a simplification of environment but a life lived from the center. For Kelly, the Spirit speaks to us from our deepest center. God speaks through the heart. The key to a life without strain or tension is attending to the Spirit of God within us and submitting to the guidance we receive. This is the "simplification of life" to which the title of his essay refers. Kelly attests that when we take the many activities that currently seem important to us down into this center, a revaluation of priorities occurs.

Living an integrated life of peace and serenity from the divine center of the self is not easy. It entails falling in love with God in a much deeper way. It means making God’s plans for our lives the determining factor for action rather than our own will. It means being able to say no to some of the important things we are called on to do. For Kelly, learning to say no is not a means of retreating from the responsibilities of life. It reflects a passionate desire to center one’s life on the leadings of God. As he writes, "We cannot die on every cross, nor are we expected to."

Kelly learned from hard experience the toll that pushing one’s self to the limit can take. Though his life was changed through a profound mystical experience, the damage had been done; Kelly died of a heart attack at age 47. Because of his radical transformation, however, he provides us with a beautiful witness to a life lived from the center. Kelly assures us that God "never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness." He shows us that a life of peace can be ours if we attend to God at the center of ourselves and yield to the Spirit’s leading.

Spiritual wisdom came at a steep price for Thomas Kelly. He did not take up the practice of surrendering to the Spirit willingly. After his crushing defeat at Harvard he sank to his lowest point, and from there he was forced to examine his goals and drive for perfection. When he could no longer avoid looking at his failure, when he abandoned his own striving, God became more real to him than ever before. In the end, God gave him the gift of peace that he was searching for in all the wrong places.

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Chad Thralls

Chad Thralls is currently a visiting professor of Christian Spirituality at Fordham University's Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. A Presbyterian with a soft spot for Quaker authors Rufus Jones, Thomas Kelly, and Douglas Steere, he was awarded a Gest Fellowship from Haverford Library Special Collections to conduct research on Thomas Kelly. He can be reached at chadthralls@ yahoo.com.

Reality Of The Spiritual World: Kelly, Thomas R. pdf link

Reality Of The Spiritual World: Kelly, Thomas R.: 9781163138175: Amazon.com: Books

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Reality Of The Spiritual World Paperback – September 10, 2010
by Thomas R. Kelly (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 13 ratings


This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

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Neale Povey
5.0 out of 5 stars Words of a ProphetReviewed in the United States on October 13, 2020
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His life is a statement of God’s deep infusion into full existence. His words flow as a medicine into my tortured psyche, releasing deception and grief - fraught world and selfish ideation. Cool water, no taint whatsoever. I read it again and again.

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Ralph Lawrence
5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Document by a Great ManReviewed in the United States on March 3, 2016
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This short treatise by Thomas Kelly is one of the classics of the 20th century. I have known about this author for many years, and know that the world lost a great person with his death at far too young of an age. His words speak as much today as they did more than 75 years ago.

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Marlene Oaks
5.0 out of 5 stars His Experience Nestles with MineReviewed in the United States on December 7, 2018
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I first read his words many decades ago. He helped me understand my own experiences with/in Spirit. I am grateful to read his last teachings in this book.

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Capricorn
5.0 out of 5 stars A Deeper LifeReviewed in the United States on July 10, 2018
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Kelly always speaks to me as I try to wend my way through our chaotic world.

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F. J. Potter
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting analysis of the spiritual life by a Christ-centered QuakerReviewed in the United States on August 14, 2011

Thomas Kelly was a Quaker educator who taught at Wilmington College, Earlham College, Wellesley College, the University of Hawaii, and, at the time of his untimely death in 1941, was a professor at Haverford College. Kelly was author of two books, "A Testament of Devotion" and "The Eternal Promise."

In the winter of 1940-1941, Thomas Kelly gave a series of four lectures at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center near Philadelphia. The fourth lecture was less than a week before his fatal heart attack. After his death, the notes for his lectures were assembled into this slim volume, with some editing to accomodate the written word as compared to the spoken lecture.

The Reality of the Spiritual World was published by Pendle Hill as Pamphlet 21. The pamphlet is available for absolutely free download at pendlehill.org, in two PDF formats, including as a printable pamphlet (two pamphlet pages per printed page) and as a single page per printed page. The text can be copied and pasted and is totally legible, without facscimile marks or defects.

021Kelly_final.p65

PENDLE HILL PAMPHLET 21

Reality Of The Spiritual World

Thomas R. Kelly

The four lectures are presented as sections in Reality of the Spiritual World: 

"God," "The Spiritual World," "Prayer," and "Fellowship." 

Each section is presented logically and with intellect, yet also with passion. These are no dry professorial comments, they represent a Christ-centered perspective of the Quaker belief that there is that of God in everyone, that God is accessable, and that we can experience God ourselves, each of us, in our own way. 

Through our personal experience we will achieve an inner peace that passes all understanding. The work, written during the Second World War, achieves a timelessness that can speak to us today.

Kelly had been an evangelical Christian in his youth, but his travels and life experience broadened his perspective and made him realize that what he knew as an inner Christ can be experienced by anyone, including non-Christians, through personal contact with the God Within.

I highly recommend this pamphlet, and suggest that you obtain it for free from Pendle Hill, the original publisher, who (as mentioned above) makes it available for free to anyone. If you find that it speaks to your condition, consider reading Kelly's other books, which are essentially collections of essays.

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Old Ben
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth a try for any Quaker.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2017

A very inspiring work for everyone for whom it speaks to their condition. A totally involved Quaker with some very unorthodox beliefs but whose enthusiasm swept me along. One of those people I would much like to have met.

Thomas Kelly: A Biography: Kelly, Richard M (1966) Internet Archive

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Thomas Kelly: A Biography: Kelly, Richard M.: Amazon.com: Books




Thomas Kelly: A Biography Hardcover – January 1, 1966
by Richard M. Kelly (Author)
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper & Row; 1st edition (January 1, 1966)

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M'Collie
5.0 out of 5 stars This is an excellent biography of one of the 20th century mysticsReviewed in the United States on May 4, 2015
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This is an excellent biography of one of the 20th century mystics; the author (son of Thomas Kelly) has drawn on his father's letters and other writings to produce an inspiring book that enriches the reading of Thomas Kelly's Testament of Devotion.

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===

 Thomas Kelly: A Biography. By Richard M. Kelly. New York: Harper & Row. 1966. 125 pages. $3.75. 

I have been acquainted with this book since it was only a concern in the mind of Dick Kelly in 1957, while he was still a Haverford undergraduate. I am delighted with the finished product. 

Having experienced a conversion experience himself while a student at Westtown, Richard Kelly's main purpose in writing a biography of his father was to document the cataclysmic religious experience Thomas Kelly went through in the late months of 1937 and the early months of 1938. 

Evidence for this change is given in Douglas Steere's introduction to A Testament of Devotion, but all too briefly. 

Since it was my privilege to know Thomas Kelly intimately as a student and as a member of a cell-worship group in his home, I have been very much helped by this biography, precisely because I knew only the "new" Tom Kelly.

 I first met him on religious retreat in April 1938, as the crucial months drew to a close. Tom's scholarly image of himself had been shattered by a great failure, thus opening the way for him to become the authentic prophet of holy obedience, to which these pages bear witness. 

Long selections of his letters home from Nazi Germany in the summer of 1938 are the high point of this book. One short selection will give you a taste: 

I spent the evening at Karlsruhe talking of the life, which ... is a translation of love into deed. And afterward they said, 'How amazing to hear such talk!' . . . But I am convinced that it stül speaks, when it is genuine. . . . This world . . . strips off all but the genuine. It has to be genuine to stand up in this world of flame. And Quakers have no business here, or anywhere, unless they are genuine. But if the reality of the Divine Life is in any person, there is a living message and everybody . . . can read it . .1 see it as an aspect of the Incarnation. The Life of God must be actualized in men, in life, in lives. And in such lives there is born the way of Redemption (p. 101). 

It is amazing to reflect that Thomas R. Kelly, the apostle of total commitment, actually said on the morning of the day on which he was to die of a heart attack, "This will be the greatest day of my life!" 

Those eager to learn more of Thomas Kelly won't want to miss this book. 

Wilmington CollegeT. Canbt Jones ...

====

Thomas Kelly: A Biography. By RICHARD M. KELLY. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. 125 pages. $3.75.

The Journal of Religion, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), pp. 170-171

The one book authored by a Quaker in the first half of this century that is most likely to be read by future generations is Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion. Many readers of that remarkable collection of essays and speeches have wished to know more about the author as a person. To meet this interest his son has produced this biography. Judging from this work it appears that Thomas Kelly was in no striking way remarkable during his rather brief lifetime. During much of it he was disturbed and unhappy, changing his occu­pation frequently. He is portrayed as having had an almost adolescent sense of humor even in his later years and as suffering at other times from bitterness and depression. At the time of his greatest disappointment, when it seemed possible that he might take refuge in either self-destruction or insanity, he passed through a remarkable radical transformation of character as the result of a deeply shaking religious experience. He reported afterward that God had become a living experience for him, sensed as an "Awful Power" within. In the light of this experience he lived his last four years serenely from his new-found cen­ter, speaking and writing on religious themes with certainty and conviction, as readers of his Testament testify.

Richard Kelly puts his story directly and without attempt either to explain or apologize for his father. Yet the reader will find himself puzzled by the portrayal, curious to know what were the psychological and spiritual springs of this contradictory man's life, what were his real motivations prior to his great experience, why he placed so great an emphasis upon scholarly attainment, and whether he was truly a mystic. To these and related questions no answer is offered. It would have enhanced the value of this interesting work considerably if they had been at least considered, since the value of a biography lies not only or even primarily in its recital of events but even more in its interpretation of its subject.

J. CALVIN KEENE

St. Lawrence University

Thought for the Week: Jennifer Kavanagh re-reads Thomas Kelly | The Friend

Thought for the Week: Jennifer Kavanagh re-reads Thomas Kelly | The Friend

Thought for the Week: Jennifer Kavanagh re-reads Thomas Kelly

6 Jan 2022 | by Jennifer Kavanagh

‘It is in the power of community that we can most effectively express our faith.’‘Does our discomfort stem from some level of recognition?’ | Photo: Thomas R. Kelly, in 1914

I have been re-reading the American Quaker, Thomas Kelly. Not the much-loved A Testament of Devotion but the less familiar The Eternal Promise, a series of essays written between 1936 and 1940. Writing in a world on the edge and in the early days of war, Kelly knew well what it is to live in hard times. Even if his language isn’t always ours, I feel that much of what he writes about community, activism and, above all, spiritual renewal, has a strong resonance for Friends today.

Kelly is clear-eyed and uncompromising in what he says about the urgent need for spiritual renewal. He does not hold back in his criticism not only of the external religiousness of some churchgoers but of the attitude of modern Quakers. He considers that too many of us are ‘respectable, complacent, comfortable’, ‘paled-out remnants’ of the fire that kindled early Friends. He considers that many of us ‘have become as mildly and conventionally religious as were the tepid church members of three centuries ago against whose flaccid mediocrity George Fox flung himself’. Ouch! Does our discomfort stem from some level of recognition?

And this relates too to our activism, which he fears has become too secular – is not sufficiently rooted in our spiritual lives. Yes, we may be passionate in our activism but where is our passion for the ground of our action, the ground of our being?

Kelly is not asking us to retreat from the world – far from it. As a very active Quaker, serving on the American Friends Service Committee, he was acutely aware of the devastation in a war-torn world. It is to engage with that suffering that he asks us to go within, to rededicate our lives. ‘Attend to the Eternal that He may recreate you and sow you deep into the furrows of the world’s suffering.’

And it is in the power of community that we can most effectively express our faith. Kelly mourns the day when ‘the fellowship of the early Children of the Light gave way to membership in the Society of Friends’, And now that we have become not only the Society of Friends (tellingly, we usually drop the word ‘Religious’) but charities subject to ever-increasing layers of secularised bureaucracy, his concerns ring an uncomfortably loud bell. How I welcome our current movement towards a simpler Society! I hope that will mean not only a stripping away of unnecessary procedures, but what I consider the real meaning of simplicity: a focus on what matters, on our spiritual lives, on our rootedness in the Divine.

As we move into another year and consider how we can adjust to current conditions and our own hard times, maybe what we need, Friends, individually and collectively, is a spiritual renewal.

LA Quaker: "Transformative Quakers"--my latest book--focuses on three amazing California Quakers

LA Quaker: "Transformative Quakers"--my latest book--focuses on three amazing California Quakers

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

"Transformative Quakers"--my latest book--focuses on three amazing California Quakers

Transformative Friends

I am pleased that my latest book, Transformative Quakers, is now available online. It consists of biographies of three remarkable California Quakers--William Lovett, Robert Vogel, and Josephine Duveneck--who made a difference in the world, working for peace, helping the poor, and caring for children and youth.You can order this book through Amazon. https://www.createspace.com/4832073

The book is an outgrowth of a series of lectures called “Transformative Friends” that was started by Brian Vura-Weis at Pacific Yearly Meeting (PYM). Over the years, Transformative Friends lectures have focused on notable Quakers such as William Penn, Elizabeth Fry, John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Kelly and Howard Brinton. This booklet focuses on Quakers closer to home.

In 2013, Pacific Yearly Meeting established a “Bob Vogel Fund” to help fund youth projects. This fund came from the Pacific Friends Outreach Society (PFOS), of which Bill Lovett was a founding member. It therefore seemed appropriate to honor these two Friends who cared deeply about young people and Quaker education. Josephine Duveneck also cared deeply about young people and organized many youth activities at Hidden Villa Ranch in Palo Alto. It seemed fitting to include her in this volume, especially since Quakers from the very beginning have recognized the importance of women called to prophetic ministry. Peace and justice cannot be achieved without men and women at all levels of society working together.

Bill Lovett has been a beloved and respected member of the Pacific Yearly Meeting since coming to California with his family in 1965. A birth-right Friend whose family became Quakers in the time of William Penn, Bill was born in 1923 in Fallsington, a small rural Quaker community in Pennsylvania not far from the Delaware River. He has been a passionate pacifist all his life and served time in prison during World War II because of his uncompromising commitment to conscientious objection. Bill refused to seek CO status as a Quaker because he wanted CO status to be extended to non-religious people of conscience.  Bill became involved in helping low-income farmworkers in the Central Valley build affordable homes through Self-Help Enterprises, a precursor to Habitat for Humanity. He and his wife Beth helped to found Visalia Meeting and built its beautiful meetinghouse in a lot near their farm. In the latter years of his life, Bill became involved in efforts to establish a permanent site where Pacific Yearly Meeting could hold its annual session. This cause attracted many young Friends who became acquainted with the Lovetts through Quaker Oaks farm. When the permanent site project was no longer deemed feasible, its funds were turned over to PYM to be used for its fledgling Youth Service Program.

I came to know Bill through the Youth Service Program that I helped to start for Southern California Quarterly Meeting and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). In 1994, I took a youth group to the Central Valley to do a project with Self-Help Enterprises and we stayed at the Visalia Meetinghouse. There Bill shared with us his amazing story, much to the delight of our young volunteers. I must add that when my wife Jill heard Bill’s story at a PYM gathering, she was so impressed she insisted we stop off in Visalia and record it. The afternoon we spent with the Lovetts at Quaker Oaks Farm was not only an unforgettable experience, it was also the genesis of this booklet!

Like Bill, Robert Vogel (1917-1998) was a conscientious objector during WW II. Born in Rochester, NY, Bob became a Quaker during grad school and spent three years in a Civilian Public Service (CPS) camp rather than join the military. There he began working for the AFSC—an organization that he served faithfully for over forty years. Bob moved to Pasadena with his wife Etta and lived there for the rest of his life. During his years as AFSC staff, he worked on peace education and traveled through the world visiting and supporting Quaker work in China, Japan, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Soviet Union—as well as visiting Friends throughout the United States. He built bridges not only with America’s “enemies,” but also between different branches of Quakers: he was a true ambassador for peace. He also worked on local issues, moving into a low-income, multicultural area of Pasadena, serving on the Pasadena Healthy Start Program, the LA County Children’s Planning Council, and the ACLU. In addition, he and his wife raised a family of four children: Janice, David, Jonathan, and Russell. Jonathan Vogel-Borne followed in his father’s footsteps, worked for the Friends Meeting in Cambridge, served for many years as yearly meeting secretary of New England Yearly Meeting, and is currently giving the keynote address at Pacific Yearly Meeting’s 2014 annual session. Thanks to Jonathan, I was given permission to publish excerpts from Bob’s unpublished memoir in this booklet.

I first became acquainted with Bob when I moved to California and had scruples about signing a loyalty oath after landing a teaching position at El Camino College in 1989. He gave the support and materials I needed to explain to the dean why, as a Quaker, I could not sign such an oath in good conscience. As I came to know Bob, my respect and admiration for him grew. My most memorable experience occurred when I was helping to start the youth program in Southern California. During a somewhat contentious meeting, Bob calmly stood up and spoke with deep feeling about the need to support youth programs. As he spoke, he put his hands on my shoulders and I felt a surge of energy course through my body that I can only describe as the Holy Spirit. At that moment I felt confident that the youth program would be approved and succeed, and it did. I knew that Bob was truly a man in touch with the Spirit, as his life and writings clearly testify.

Josephine Duveneck (1891-1978) came from a well-to-do Boston family and had a deep concern for social justice, peace and young people. In a memorial address (July 8, 1978) Paul Seaver, a history professor at Stanford University, wrote: “Josephine Duveneck joined Palo Alto Meeting in 1937 and on several occasions served as Clerk of Meeting for a total of nine years. She was largely responsible for the fact that our present meeting house is located in one of the few interracial neighborhoods in Palo Alto. Her contributions to Friends’ concerns were manifold and manifest: let me just mention her work with Japanese Americans, interned during World War II, and with Native Americans, which led to the Indian Program of the AFSC’s Northern California office...” Seaver goes on to point out that many of the children of Palo Alto Meeting spent time during the formative years at Hidden Villa, a ranch that the Duvenecks turned into a summer camp and retreat center. As the Los Altos Historical Society notes, “Hidden Villa became a center for social, educational, environmental, and humanitarian activities. In summer it was a youth camp, to which the Duvenecks brought minority and disadvantaged children, and minority counselors, which given the mostly white demographics of the San Francisco Peninsula, was particularly unusual and innovative. It had the first youth hostel on the Pacific Slope. World War II refugees and Japanese-American victims of the World War II ‘relocation’—internment—were released to Hidden Villa. Gatherings included church outings, interracial parties, and fundraisings. Minority groups were welcome. The hostel accommodated a Moslem group which met to instruct children in Moslem faith and rituals. Native Americans met for dancing and feasts.”

I read Josephine’s spiritual autobiography just prior to becoming editor of Friends Bulletin in 1996, and it was a profoundly moving experience. I felt led to write something about Josephine so I toured Hidden Villa with her daughter Elizabeth Duveneck Dana. Exploring this ranch was an unforgettable experience. In Hidden Villa Josephine’s spirit lives on, in its natural habitat: the California landscape, with its cattle and rolling hills and trails winding through bay laurel, live oak and chapparal—the land virtually untouched from the days it was inhabited by the Ohlone Indians.  I am glad I finally have an opportunity to lift up the example of a Quaker who loved the land, and loved people,  and found a balance between activism and spirituality. As Paul Seaver wrote, “As long as [Josephine’s] memory remains green among us, we will possess an enlarged vision of the potentialities of our common humanity and of the work God calls us to do in our time.”

Peace, justice and young people—these are the concerns that link these three Transformative Friends. May their lives inspire and challenge us to be transformed, and to transform others, through the Spirit of Love and Truth.

At the end of this booklet is a section containing “queries”—open-ended questions—designed to help you think more deeply about the lessons you can learn from the lives of these Friends. I hope you will share this booklet with others, start study groups, and reflect upon important queries, such as, What are you being called to do with your life? What inspires you to make a difference in the world? What brings you deep and lasting joy? How is your life speaking?

 

“Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.” –George Fox, 1656.

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999).

 

[[Jerry R. Flora: Searching for an Adequate Life

Jerry R. Flora: Searching for an Adequate Life

SPIRITUALITY TODAY
Spring 1990, Vol.42 No. 1, pp.

Jerry R. Flora:
     Searching for an Adequate Life:
                       The Devotional Theology of Thomas R. Kelly

The mystical teaching of Quaker theologian Thomas Kelly continues to enrich and inspire a new generation of readers searching for a meaningful life in a world veering towards chaos.

Jerry R. Flora earned the doctorate in theology from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and since 1972 has been Professor of New Testament Theology at Ashland (Ohio) Theological Seminary. Prior to that he was a parish minister in Ohio, Indiana, and Washington, D.C.

ON the morning of January 17, 1941, a college professor in eastern Pennsylvania exclaimed to his wife, "Today will be the greatest day of my life."(1) He had just written to the religion editor at Harper and Brothers, accepting an invitation to speak with him in New York about a small book ,on devotional practice. The firm of Harper was definitely interested in the kind of fresh material this writer could produce. That evening, while drying the dinner dishes, he slumped to the floor with a massive coronary arrest and died almost instantly.

The writer was Thomas Raymond Kelly, professor of philosophy at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia, considered to be the elite among Quaker colleges of America. Kelly had taught there for nearly five years, succeeding D. Elton Trueblood when the latter became chaplain at Stanford University. Forty seven years old at the time of his unexpected death, Kelly was a seminary graduate and a philosopher of unusually broad preparation. He was also coming to be known as a devotional writer of considerable freshness and power.

Three months after Kelly's death, Douglas Steere, his colleague in the philosophy department, submitted to Harper and Brothers five of his friend's devotional essays prefaced by a biographical memoir. That slender volume, A Testament of Devotion, has remained in print since 1941 and has been acclaimed by thoughtful readers of varying theological persuasions.

Thomas Kelly belonged to a succession of American Quakers who were philosophers by profession. Rufus M. Jones (1863-1948) mentored Kelly throughout the years of his pilgrimage and outlived his protege. Elton Trueblood (b. 1900) edited one of the Friends' magazines which introduced Kelly's writings to the public. Twenty-five years later Trueblood commented, "The sense of excitement, when Thomas Kelly:s essays began to come to the editorial desk, is still vivid." (2) Douglas Steere (b. 1901), Rhodes scholar and faculty colleague, compiled the volume which became known as A Testament of Devotion. The purpose of this article is to recount the outlines of Kelly's life, describe the contents of his devotional theology, and offer a summary analysis of it.

A QUAKER YOUTH

Thomas Raymond Kelly was born in 1893, a child of the Quaker faith as it was found at that time in south-central Ohio. This rnidwestern variety of the Society of Friends had come under the influence of the evangelical revivals that characterized the nineteenth century in the American middle West. Even now, Friends in Ohio are often nearly indistinguishable from other low-church or free-church Protestants. Kelly, born into that environment, lost his father at the age of four, after which his mother moved the family to Wilmington, Ohio. Her intention was that by living there her children could have the advantage of higher education at Wilmington College, a small Quaker school in that town.

Young Kelly grew up with both a perfectionistic streak and a sense of the joy of living. He was remembered for his impishness, his practical jokes, his daredevil motorcycle riding, later his skills as carpenter and sheet-metal worker, and finally his warm, open laughter. One friend wrote of him, "He laughed with the rich hearty abandon of wind and sun upon the open prairie. I have never heard richer, heartier laughter than his" (TD 7)(3)At the same time his life was marked by what has been termed "a passionate and determined quest for adequacy" (TD 1) in both scholarship and Christian devotion.

SCHOLAR AND TEACHER

Always interested in science, Kelly graduated from Wilmington College in 1913 with a chemistry major. He went the next year to Haverford College for additional study, there falling under the spell of Rufus M. Jones, the distinguished professor of philosophy. With Jones came also exposure to the more mystical side of the Friends movement, preserved better on the eastern seaboard than in Ohio. 

That change of focus was accompanied by a never-ending interest in the Far East, which led him to Hartford Theological Seminary to prepare for missionary service. 

World War I erupted in Europe, and, in true Quaker fashion, Kelly volunteered for civilian service overseas. He spent a year in England, working first with the YMCA, then with German prisoners of war because of his knowledge of their language.

Returning to the States, he finished seminary and married Lael Macy, daughter of a New England Congregational manse. Their twenty-one years of marriage were marked by frequent moves for him to study or teach, nagging financial problems which followed on this, and numerous physical ailments, some of which were undoubtedly stress-related.(4)

After their marriage he returned to Wilmington College, where he taught for two years (1919-21), 

went back to Hartford, completing a doctorate in philosophy (1924), and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. 

Dr. and Mrs. Kelly then spent a year in Berlin, working with the American Friends Service Committee in the reconstruction following Germany's war defeat.

Upon their return to the United States, Kelly was unable to find a position on the east coast and was forced to become a professor at Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana. By this time he had come to dislike the Midwest, feeling that it did not have the intellectual stimulus of the East, and he went through a period of rebellion against the thinking and spirituality of his evangelical Ohio origins. 

In 1930 Kelly returned to New England to begin a second doctorate in philosophy, this time at Harvard University. Through the early and mid-thirties he labored at that while teaching first at Wellesley College (1931-32) and then again at Earlham (1932-35). 

This was the middle of the Great Depression, and Kelly's decision to return to Earlham was painful because it meant once more the Midwest that he had come to despise. Yet there were no other positions open to him until 1935 when he was able to move to the University of Hawaii to teach and to pursue advanced research in Eastern philosophies.

His long-awaited opportunity called in 1936, when Haverford College invited him to follow D. Elton Trueblood in a chair of philosophy. He brought to this new work not only his massive academic preparation, including the near-completed second doctorate at Harvard, but also his love for the eastern seaboard and all that it represented for him both intellectually and spiritually. 

In 1937 his dissertation was published, receiving very favorable reviews. Like the thesis for his first doctorate, it studied the thought of a scientist who turned philosopher -- a pilgrimage quite similar to that of Kelly himself. But the Harvard Ph.D. was not yet his, needing only the oral defense of the now-published dissertation.

BREAKDOWN AND BREAKTHROUGH

So in the autumn of 1937 Thomas Kelly traveled north to Cambridge to sit for his orals, and there he lived out the nightmare of every Ph.D. candidate: he lost his memory. Since his mid-twenties, Kelly, always an intense individual, had experienced occasional "woozy spells." as he called them. This sometimes occurred under great stress, as in 1924 at the defense of his first dissertation. The committee at Hartford had patiently worked with him, his confidence and recall returned, and he gave a brilliant defense of his research. But the Harvard faculty was not sympathetic when Kelly went blank in 1937 trying to defend the dissertation he had written for them. They not only failed him on the defense, they also informed him that he would never be allowed a second chance.

In the days that followed, friends offered what help they could but nothing seemed to avail. His son continues the story: 

"There is no exact record of what happened in the following weeks, but it is certain that sometime during the months of November or December, 1937, a change was wrought within the very foundation of his soul. He described it as being'shaken by the experience of Presence -- something that I did not seek, but that sought me ....' Stripped of his defenses and human self justification, he found, for the first time, a readiness to accept the outright gift of God's Love, and he responded with unlimited commitment to that leading.(5) His teaching colleague Douglas Steere, who spent uncounted hours walking Kelly through his grief, later wrote of his healing:

"He moved toward adequacy. A fissure in him seemed to close, cliffs caved in and filled up a chasm, and what was divided grew together within him. Science, scholarship, method remained good, but in a new setting" (TD 18). "...out of it seemed to come a whole new life orientation. What took place no one will ever know; but old walls caved in, the fierce academic ambition receded, and a new abandoned kind of fulfillment made its appearance."(6)

This life-changing experience showed through in two public lectures that Kelly prepared shortly afterward, lectures which he said wrote themselves. He then sailed for Germany in the summer of 1938, culminating three years of planning, in order to minister as he was able to the Friends in that country before Hitler closed it off from the rest of Europe. He came home, the last person off the ship, shaken by the suffering he had witnessed in Germany but buttressed by new experiences of divine love able to meet that agony. His friends recalled that for weeks afterward he said over and over, "I have been literally melted down by the love of God!" (TD 21).

Such first-hand acquaintance with reality, both human and divine, continued to be the trademark of his speaking and writing in the little more than two years which remained. Seventeen addresses and lectures appeared in the period following Kelly's failure until his sudden death in January, 1941. As people heard him speak and studied his writings, they detected a note of authenticity that was attractive and powerful. It was that note which led the religious books editor of Harper and Brothers to invite him to submit a manuscript for publication. Twenty-five years after A Testament of Devotion was posthumously published, his son Richard released Thomas Kelly: A Biography and The Eternal Promise, which contains the remainder of the essays and addresses.

JUDGMENT AND DOCTRINE

The worth of Thomas Kelly's legacy has been noted by such authors as D. Elton Trueblood (7) and Richard J. Foster. (8) Church historian E. Glenn Hinson of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has, for many years, offered classes in devotional literature on his campus. In his opinion, "Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion... is a contemporary classic... a wonderfully edifying collection of essays which, not surprisingly, my students in courses on devotional classics have repeatedly selected as their favorite."(9)

We move now to consider the devotional theology of Thomas R. Kelly.

Searching for an adequate life was the long-range goal of his short earthly existence. He began with the assumption of God's real being and activity, and moved ahead to assert that our great need is to experience God as active in the world at large and within human hearts particularly. God is more than nature, more than compassionate service, more than Scripture, and the claims of God must be upheld against all forms of mediocrity. This requires careful scholarship without rationalism and immediate experience without quietism.

The call to immediacy sounds again and again through his writings, no matter the period of his life in which they were composed. God is the Life, the Light, the Center of all things, and is to be sought within and experienced within. As Kelly described it, "...God Himself is active, is dynamic, is here, is brooding over us all, is prompting and instructing us within, in amazing immediacy. This is not something to believe, it is something to experience, in the solemn, sacred depths of our beings" (EP 90).

This historic Quaker note is heard in the words Kelly mailed off on the morning of his last day: 

"Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return .... It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst .... And He is within us all" (TD 29).

Kelly has less to say about humanity and sin than about God and divine reality. As he sees it, the West has been mistaken in thinking that our problems are basically external and environmental. The real roots of human problems lie buried within, whence they manifest themselves in behavior that is distracted, fragmented, and therefore destructive. As individuals, "We are trying to be several selves at once, without all our selves being organized by a single, mastering Life within us" (TD 114). According to him, we might be diagnosed as spiritually schizophrenic. Each person possesses by nature a demonic element and also an unformed Christ within. The Church has been too quick to identify the demonic as true human nature while rejecting or forgetting the Christ within (EP 40f.).

Kelly holds that there are many seekers after truth and life in our day, at least as many as in the days of George Fox. And how is the search for God to be carried on? Kelly is clear in positing that the initiative in human salvation comes from God -- "God the initiator;" as he put it, "God the aggressor, God the seeker, God the stirrer into life, God the ground of our obedience, God the giver of the power to become children of God" (TD 52). This theme he reiterates several times in his essays (TD 29, 41, 51f., 97,124). It is important to note that, in keeping with the Quaker emphasis, he believes God does not initiate the application of salvation from outside human experience. Rather, the true Light that enlightens every one in the world is already within by virtue of their creation (cf. John 1:9):

Did you start the search for Him? He started you on the search for Him, and lovingly, anxiously, tenderly guides you to Himself. You knock on heaven's gate, because He has already been standing at the door and knocking within you, disquieting you and calling you to arise and seek your Father's house. It is as St. Augustine says: He was within, and we mistakenly sought Him without. It isn't a matter of believing in the Inner Light, it is a matter of yielding your lives to Him (EP 105; cf. 19f., 22, 59, 101, 115).

The claims of this initiating God are totalitarian, and the human response to them can be nothing less than "true decidedness of life orientation... thoroughly, wholly, in every department and without reserve" (EP 16). "He asks all, but He gives all" (TD 50). It is important for Kelly that Christian faith-commitment not be misunderstood as an emotional high or an ecstatic experience. For him the obedience of the will is central and crucial. "Let us be quite clear," he writes,

that mystical exaltation is not essential to religious dedication and to every occurrence of religious worship. Many a [person] professes to be without a shred of mystical elevation, yet is fundamentally a heaven-dedicated soul .... The crux of religious living lies in the will, not in transient and variable states. Where the will to will God's will is present, there is a child of God (EP 87f., quoted also in TD 24f.).

Like Saint Augustine one asks not for greater certainty of God but only for more steadfastness in Him (TD 57).

DISCIPLESHIP AND WORSHIP

The total life-dedication which issues in holy obedience will have the purity of God as its mastering passion. 

"I would plead for holy lives, such as arise out of fellowship with Him, lives not secular and boisterously worldly in backslapping camaraderie, in the effort to make religion appealing to the [person] who wants a little religion, but not too much. But lives that are like those of the disciples, of whom it was said, 'They took notice of them, that they had been with Jesus."' (EP 113f.). 

On this basis Kelly criticized the Society of Friends of his day for a cooling down, a shrinking back, a delicacy not found either in Scripture or in their founders. It was, he said, an invasion of secularity into the church (EP 112f., 116f.). 

"Even the Quaker preaching upon the immediacy of Divine Presence, for which there is no substitute in religious learnedness or endeavor, even this preaching has been a thing for many Quakers to believe in, not a gateway into the experience of God Himself" (EP 111).

One shape that this life takes is that of worship and prayer, whether public or private:

An invariable element in the experience of Now is that of unspeakable and exquisite joy, peace, serene release. A new song is put into our mouths .... But the main point is not that a new song is put into our mouths; the point is that a new song is put into our mouths. We sing, yet not we, but the Eternal sings in us ...(TD 97f.).

We re-read the poets and the saints, and... the Scriptures, with no thought of pious exercise, but in order to find more friends for the soul .... Particularly does devotional literature become illuminated, for the Imitation of Christ, and Augustine's Confessions, and Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of God speak the language of the souls who live at the Center (TD 82).

The topics of Church and world drew out of Kelly some of his most eloquent writing. "When we are drowned in the overwhelming seas of the love of God," he wrote,

we find ourselves in a new and particular relation to a few of our fellows. The relation is so surprising and so rich that we despair of finding a word glorious enough and weighty enough to name it. The word Fellowship is discovered, but the word is pale and thin in comparison with... the experience which it would designate. For a new kind of life-sharing and of love has arisen of which we had had only dim hints before (TD 77).

Kelly took very seriously the biblical concept of koinonia:

The disclosure of God normally brings the disclosure of the Fellowship. We don't create it deliberately; we find it and we find ourselves increasingly within it as we find ourselves increasingly within Him. It is the holy matrix of 'the communion of the saints; the body of Christ which is His church .... Yet can one be surprised at being at home? (TD 80f.).

For Kelly it is important that this "new and particular relation" does not result in escape from the world or in retreat from its suffering. Instead, "the experience of divine Presence contains within it not only a sense of being energized from a heavenly Beyond; it contains also a sense of being energized toward an earthly world" (EP 25f.).

We are torn loose from earthly attachments and ambitions contemptus mundi. And we are quickened to a divine but painful concern for the world -- amor mundi. He plucks the world out of our hearts, loosening the chains of attachment. And He hurls the world into our hearts, where we and He together carry it in infinitely tender love (TD 47).

This note of compassion, of tenderness, sounds repeatedly through Kelly's scattered essays. Reflecting on his experiences in Hitler's Germany, he writes,

For a few agonized moments we may seem to be given to stand within the heart of the World-Father and feel the infinite sufferings of love toward all the Father's children. And pain inflicted on them becomes pain inflicted on ourselves. Were the experience not also an experience suffused with radiant peace and power and victory, as well as tragedy, it would be unbearable (EP 29).

One might almost say we become cosmic mothers, tenderly caring for all .... Would that we could relove the whole world! (TD 990.

There is a sense in which, in this terrible tenderness, we become one with God and bear in our quivering souls the sins and burdens, the benightedness and the tragedy of the creatures of the whole world, and suffer in their suffering, and die in their death (TD 107).

Kelly acknowledged quite frankly that there is a suffering in the world so awesome, so vast, that it can only be termed unremovable. "I must confess," he wrote, "that, on human judgment, the world tasks we face are appalling -- well-nigh hopeless." (TD 64). "An awful solemnity is upon the earth, for the last vestige of earthly security is gone. It has always been gone, and religion has always said so, but we haven't believed it. There is an inexorable amount of suffering in all life, blind, aching, unremovable, not new but only terribly intensified in these days" (TD 68ff.).

"But there is also removable suffering;" as Kelly put it:

The Cross as dogma is painless speculation; the Cross as lived suffering is anguish and glory. I dare not urge you to your Cross. But He, more powerfully, speaks within you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments, and disquiets us with the world's needs. By inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God's burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us (TD 710 .

...He, working within us, portions out His vast concern into bundles, and lays on each of us our portion. These become our tasks (TD 123).

It was important to Kelly that Christians become responsible to and for the specific concerns God places within them. Good intentions do not substitute for concrete action that addresses specifics -- action prompted by immediate spiritual guidance.

When we say Yes or No to calls for service on the basis of heady decisions, we have to give reasons, to ourselves and to others. But when we say Yes or No to calls, on the basis of inner guidance... we have no reason to give, except one -- the will of God as we discern it. Then we have begun to live in guidance. And I find He never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness. The Cosmic Patience becomes, in part, our patience, for after all God is at work in the world. It is not we alone who are at work in the world, frantically finishing a work to be offered to God (TD 123f.).

Kelly says little about the future except to comment on time and eternity.

Were earthly life to end in this moment, all would be well. For this Here, this Now, is not a mathematical point in the stream of Time; it is swollen with Eternity, it is the dwelling place of God Himself. We ask no more; we are at home. Thou who hast made us for Thyself dost in each moment give us our rest in Thee. Each moment has a Before and After; but still deeper, it has Eternity, and we have tasted it and are satisfied (EP 21f.).

Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It is amazing. It is triumphant. It is radiant. It takes no time, but it occupies all our time. And it makes our life programs new and overcoming. We need not get frantic. He is at the helm. And when our little day is done we lie down quietly in peace, for all is well (TD 124).

ASSESSMENT

We may now attempt a summary analysis of the devotional theology of Thomas Kelly. In assaying the contents of Kelly's writings, it is imperative that we not seek for a fully-orbed theological statement. Although he was seminary trained as well as philosophically disciplined, Kelly's writings are occasional pieces, always assuming familiarity with Quaker thought and life. At the same time, he displayed the gifts of being able to transcend the limits of denominationalism (EP 45) and to communicate that broader vision through the spoken and written word (EP 7).

In the area of theology proper, Kelly adopts a traditional Quaker stance, emphasizing the inner light, the living Christ, the prevenient Spirit resident within every person. According to this doctrine, we search vainly in the world or in others for God. Instead, we need a turning inward to the depths of our being and a cultivation of the God who is already active there. The imperative of personal experience of this God is strong and consistent in all that Kelly wrote.(10)

In anthropology, he "employs always a positive psychology, founded upon the Quaker high estimate of human nature and potential." (11) Simultaneously, he believes humanity has been marred by sin, and the result is that we do not seek God rightly or we try to flee from the hound of heaven. We are -- to use Kelly's terms -- fragmented, shallow, and disorganized, needing to become settled, coordinated, and unselfed. The crux of the matter is the human will which can, if it chooses, discern and obey the will of God. Taken alone, such a concept sounds Pelagian, but the initiative for Kelly is always divine, so that we are in truth responders and followers and disciples.

No clear line of transition in soteriology is prescribed by Kelly, no outward repentance is called for. Instead there may be, in his view, an awkward turning toward the light and a rather groping start at walking in it. Eventually there should come a kind of living in which we function adequately on two levels at once: the upper, outer order of life which is visible to others, and the deep, inner level where true reality dwells. The goal is continuously refreshed immediacy, and this immediacy will express itself in both worship and service, in work as well as prayer.

Kelly's ecclesiology describes the Church as the company of those so committed, the blessed community in which we are at home in the interconnectedness of those who are loved and who love in return. In this fellowship the usual symbols of Christian faith (e.g., language, creeds, sacraments) may give way to such "recreated symbols" as lived-out behaviors and filled silence. Here the practice of the presence of God is ongoing daily business. Scripture and devotional literature become staples for the journey which takes the form of dual vertical and horizontal dimensions. The most difficult aspects come in maintaining holy obedience to the God who asks all, and in entering suffering for the sake of God's world.

At the end lies death and the experience of a life where work and worship coalesce in a single reality. As for the world, Kelly does not intimate whether it may continue forever or end with bang or whimper. What matters -- and, for him, all that matters -- is the ongoing encounter with the God who addresses us through the living Christ within our truest selves.

CONCLUSION: THE DIVINE INVASION

Several closing comments about the work of Kelly may be in order. Like all substantial devotional writing, it needs to be read slowly, thoughtfully, and repeatedly. At first glance some of his language may sound dissonant. God for example, is referred to as the Presence, the Center, the Silence, the Abyss, the Seed. Those already acquainted with Quaker devotion or the mystical authors of the Church should have no difficulty with the language. Readers may, in fact, be pleased that Kelly uses almost none of the technical vocabulary normally found in philosophers and theologians.

A second and related comment concerns Kelly's use of Scripture, which is more indirect than direct. Ever the Quaker, he relies on a principle enunciated by George Fox: "The Lord has come to teach His people Himself." Revelation therefore is a present experience, and Scripture is to be understood from within the life of God. Kelly's bent to rigorous scholarship does not eliminate matters of grammatical-historical exegesis but, to use Reformation terminology, the inner witness of the Spirit takes precedence.

Finally, upon first reading, one may conclude that Jesus of Nazareth occupies little place in Kelly's thought, for he seldom refers to the events of Bethlehem, Galilee, Calvary, or Pentecost. Incarnation and atonement are scarcely mentioned. This is not because Kelly was oblivious to them or uncaring of them, but because he had adopted from study and personal experience the view of the living and written Word already described. In one striking passage, however, he does speak of the significance of Jesus:

In the dawning experience of the living Christ, the life, the teaching, and particularly the Cross and the triumph of Jesus of Nazareth become indescribably vivid and significant. For in Him the Divine Invasion... has taken place as never before, nor since, complete .... And although we understand Him in part, through the Living Christ, yet we do not understand all. For the communion of Love and Suffering... and victory on the Cross contains the secret which leads back into the very nature of God Himself (EP 31f.).In so saying, Thomas Kelly had come home. His search for an adequate life was fulfilled and, a half-century later, his description remains true and relevant.

NOTES

1. Richard M. Kelly, Thomas Kelly: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 122.

2. D. Elton Trueblood, The People Called Quakers (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 222.

3. Almost all of Thomas Kelly's published works are to be found in two volumes, 1] A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), hereafter abbreviated TD, and 2] The Eternal Promise (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), hereafter abbreviated EP. Cf. the one item by Kelly not included in TD or EP: 3] "The Reality of the Spiritual World" in The Pendle Hill Reader, ed. Herrymon Maurer, Essay Index Reprint Series (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, n.d.), pp. 1-40. It was a lecture first published in Great Britain in 1944.

4. Kelly suffered from hay fever so severe that it usually left him bedfast, a sinus infection which required surgery, kidney stones at the age of forty, and, at almost forty-two, a nervous breakdown (see TD 15; Richard Kelly op. cit., p. 69).

5. Ibid., pp. 91f.

6. Douglas V. Steere, A Testament of Devotion, Living Selections from the Great Devotional Classics (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1955), p. 5.

7. Elton Trueblood, The New Man for Our Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 63. Trueblood includes Kelly's work in a list of classics for the nurture of Christian spirituality. The other authors in Trueblood's list are Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, Blaise Pascal, John Woolman, and William Law.

8. Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 27, 45, 72, 80, 128, 164; Freedom of Simplicity (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 5, 78, 86, 87, 103.

9. E. Glenn Hinson (ed.), The Doubleday Devotional Classics, Volume III (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1978), p. 165. Hinson's introduction to Kelly's life and work (pp. 165-81) is an outstanding condensation of the known data about him together with Hinson's discerning interpretation.

10. "Like Rufus Jones, Thomas Kelly interpreted Quakerism as fundamentally empirical. It is not enough, he insisted, to believe; we must actually experience the love of God .... His words came out of what can only be called a baptism by fire. He was enkindled and he burned with a fast flame" (Elton Trueblood in Herrymon Maurer, op. cit., p. xi).

11. Hinson, op. cit., p. 161.