Kelly A Testament of Devotion 1] The Light Within [D Steere selection in red]

1] The Light Within

Meister Eckhart wrote, 

"As thou art in church or cell, that same frame of mind carry out into the world; into its turmoil and its fitfulness." 

 the quality of being spasmodic and irregular. 

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.

 Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. 

Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. 

It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. 

Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all.

[Shekinah - the dwelling or settling of the divine presence]

You who read these words already know this inner Life and Light. For by this very Light within you, is your recognition given. In this humanistic age we suppose man is the initiator and God is the responder. [29][30]

But the Living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. "Behold I stand at the door and knock." And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us.

The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening. The secret places of the heart cease to be our noisy workshop. They become a holy sanctuary of adoration and of self-oblation, where we are kept in perfect peace, if our minds be stayed on Him who has found us in the inward springs of our life. 

And in brief intervals of overpowering visitation we are able to carry the sanctuary frame of mind out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness, and in a hyperaesthesia of the soul, we see all mankind tinged with deeper shadows, and touched with Galilean glories. 

Powerfully are the springs of our will moved to an abandon of singing love toward God; powerfully are we moved to a new and overcoming love toward time-blinded men and all creation. In this Center of Creation all things are ours, and we are Christ's and Christ is God's. We are owned men, ready to run and not be weary and to walk and not faint.

But the light fades, the will weakens, the humdrum returns. [31] 

Can we stay this fading? No, nor should we try, for we must learn the disciplines of His will, and pass beyond this first lesson of His Grace. 

But the Eternal Inward Light does not die when ecstasy dies, nor exist only intermittently, with the flickering of our psychic states. 

Continuously renewed immediacy, not receding memory of the Divine Touch, lies at the base of religious living. 

Let us explore together the secret of a deeper devotion, a more subter:anean sanctuary of the soul, where the Light Within never fades, but burns, a perpetual Flame, where the wells of living water of divine revelation rise up continuously, day by day and hour by hour, steady and transfiguring. 

The "bright shoots of everlastingness" can become a steady light within, if we are deadly in earnest in our dedication to the Light, and are willing to pass out of first stages into maturer religious living. Only if this is possible can the light from the inner sanctuary of the soul be a workaday light for the marketplace, a guide for perplexed feet, a recreator of culture-patterns for the race of men.

What is here urged are internal practices and habits of the mind. 

What is here urged are secret habits of unceasing orientation of the deeps of our being about the Inward Light, ways of conducting our inward life so that we are perpetually bowed in worship,[32] 

while we are also very busy in the world of daily affairs. 

What is here urged are inward practices of the mind at deepest levels, letting it swing like the needle, to the polestar of the soul. 

And like the needle, the Inward Light becomes the truest guide of life, showing us new and unsuspected defects in ourselves and our fellows, showing us new and unsuspected possibilities in the power and life of goodwill among men. 

But, more deeply, He who is within us urges, by secret persuasion, to such an amazing Inward Life with Him, so that, firmly cleaving to Him, we always look out upon all the world through the sheen of the Inward Light, and react toward men spontaneously and joyously from this Inward Center. 

Yield yourself to Him who is a far better teacher than these outward words, and you will have found the Instructor Himself, of whom these words are a faint and broken echo.

Such practice of inward orientation, of inward worship and listening, is no mere counsel for special religious groups, for small religious orders, for special "interior souls," for monks retired in cloisters.

 This practice is the heart of religion. It is the secret, I am persuaded, of the inner life of the Master of Galilee. 

He expected this secret to be freshly discovered in everyone who would be his follower. 

It creates an amazing fellowship, the church catholic and invisible, and institutes group living at a new level, a society [33]grounded in reverence, history rooted in eternity, colonies of heaven.

It is the special property of no group or sect, but is a universal obligation and privilege. 

Roman Catholics have treasured this practice, but have overlaid the authority of the Light Within by a heavy weight of external ecclesiastical authority. 

Protestant emphasis, beginning so nobly in the early Luther, has grown externally rationalistic, humanistic, and serv-ice-minded. 

Dogmas and creed and the closed revela¬tion of a completed canon have replaced the emphasis upon keeping close to the fresh upspringings of the Inner Life.

 The dearth of rich Protestant litera¬ture on the interior aspect of Christian living, except as it bears on the opening experience of conversion, bears testimony to its emphasis being elsewhere.

The Society of Friends arose as a rediscovery of the ever-open inward springs of immediacy and revelation.

George Fox and the Quakers found a Principle within men, a Shekinab of the soul, a Light Within that lights every man coming into the world. 

Dedicating themselves utterly and completely to attendance upon this Inward Living Christ, they were quickened into a new and bold tenderness toward the blindness of the leaders of Christian living. 

Aflame with the Light of the inner sanctuary, they went out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness, and called men to listen above all to that of God speaking [34] within them, to order all life by the Light of the Sanctuary. 

"Dear Friends," writes Fox to his groups, "keep close to that which is pure within you, which leads you up to God."

 John Woolman, the Quaker tailor of Mt. Holly, New Jersey, resolved so to order his outward affairs, so to adjust his business burdens, that nothing, absolutely nothing would crowd out his prime attendance upon the Inward Principle. And in this sensitizing before the inward altar of his soul, he was quickened to see and attack effectively the evils of slave-holding, of money-loaning, of wars upon the Indians.

But the value of Woolman and Fox and the Quakers of today for the world does not lie merely in their outward deeds of service to suffering men, 

it lies in that call to all men to the practice of orienting their entire being in inward adoration about the springs of immediacy and ever fresh divine power within the secret silences of the soul. 

The Inner Light, the Inward Christ, is no mere doctrine, belonging peculiarly to a small religious fellowship, to be accepted or rejected as a mere belief. 

It is the living Center of Reference for all Christian souls and Christian groups—yes, and of non-Christian groups as well '—who seriously mean to dwell in the secret place of the Most High. 

He is the center and source of action, not the end-point of thought. He is the locus of commitment, not a problem for debate. Practice [35] comes first in religion, not theory or dogma. And Christian practice is not exhausted in outward deeds. These are the fruits, not the roots. A practicing Chris¬tian must above all be one who practices the perpetual return of the soul into the inner sanctuary, who brings the world into its Light and rejudges it, who brings the Light into the world with all its turmoil and its fitfulness and recreates it (after the pattern seen on the Mount). To the reverent exploration of this prac¬tice we now address ourselves.


II]=================================

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. 

On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. 

But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.

The secular world of today values and cultivates only the first level, assured that there is where the real business of mankind is done, and scorns, or smiles in tolerant amusement, at the cultivation of the second level—a luxury enterprise, a vestige of superstition, an occupation for special temperaments. 

But in a deeply religious culture men know that the deep level of prayer and of divine attendance is the [36] most important thing in the world. 

It is at this deep level that the real business of life is determined. 

The secular mind is an abbreviated, fragmentary mind, building only upon a part of man's nature and neglecting a part—the most glorious part—of man's nature, powers and resources. 

The religious mind involves the whole of man, embraces his relations with time within their true ground and setting in the Eternal Lover. 

It ever keeps close to the fountains of divine creativity. In lowliness it knows joys and stabilities, peace and assurances, that are utterly incomprehensible to the secular mind.

 It lives in resources and powers that make individuals radiant and triumphant, groups tolerant and bonded together in mutual con¬cern, and is bestirred to an outward life of unremit¬ting labor.

Between the two levels is fruitful interplay, but ever the accent must be upon the deeper level, where the soul ever dwells in the presence of the Holy One.

 For the religious man is forever bringing all affairs of the first level down into the Light, holding them there in the Presence, reseeing them and the whole of the world of men and things in a new and over-turning way, and responding to them in spontaneous, incisive and simple ways of love and faith. 

Facts remain facts, when brought into the Presence in the deeper level, but their value, their significance, is wholly realigned. 

Much apparent wheat becomes [37] utter chaff, and some chaff becomes wheat. Imposing powers? 

They are out of the Life, and must crumble. Lost causes? 

If God be for them, who can be against them? Rationally plausible futures? They are weakened or certified in the dynamic Life and Light. Tragic suffering? Already He is there, and we actively move, in His tenderness, toward the sufferers. Hopeless debauchecs? These are children of God, His concern and ours. 

Inexorable laws of nature? The dependable framework for divine reconstruction. The fall of a sparrow? The Father's love. For faith and hope and love for all things are engendered in the soul, as we practice their submission and our own to the Light Within, as we humbly see all things, even darkly and as through a glass, yet through the eye of God.

But the upper level of our mind plays upon the deeper level of divine immediacy of internal communion and of prayer. It furnishes us with the objects of divine concern, "the sensualized material of our duty," as Fichte called it. 

It furnishes us with those culture-patterns of our group which are at one and the same time the medium and the material for their regeneration, our language, our symbols, our tradi¬tions, and our history. 

It provides for the mystic the suggestions for his metaphors, even the metaphor of the Light, the Seed, the Sanctuary, whereby he would suggest and communicate the wonder of God's immediacy and power. It supplies the present-day tools of  [38] reflection whereby the experience of Eternity is knit into the fabric of time and thought. 

But theologies and symbols and creeds, though inevitable, are transient and become obsolescent, while the Life of God sweeps on through the souls of men in continued revelation and creative newness. 

To that divine Life we must cling. In that Current we must bathe. In that abiding yet energizing Center we are all made one, behind and despite the surface differences of our forms and cultures. For the heart of the religious life is in commitment and worship, not in reflection and theory.

How, then, shall we lay hold of that Life and Power, and live the life of prayer without ceasing? 

By quiet, persistent practice in turning of all our being, day and night, in prayer and inward worship and surrender, toward Him who calls in the deeps of our souls. Mental habits of inward orientation must be established. 

An inner, secret turning to God can be made fairly steady, after weeks and months and years of practice and lapses and failures and returns. 

It is as simple an art as Brother Lawrence found it, but it may be long before we achieve any steadiness in the process. 

Begin now, as you read these words, as you sit in your chair, to offer your whole selves, utterly and in joyful abandon, in quiet, glad surrender to Him who is within. 

In secret ejaculations of praise, turn in humble wonder to the Light, faint though it [39] may be. Keep contact with the outer world of sense and meanings. Here is no discipline in absent-mindedness. 

Walk and talk and work and laugh with your friends. But behind the scenes, keep up the life of simple prayer and inward worship. 

Keep it up throughout the day. 

Let inward prayer be your last act before you fall asleep and the first act when you awake. 

And in time you will find as did Brother Lawrence, that "those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep."

The first days and weeks and months are awkward and painful, but enormously rewarding. 

Awkward, because it takes constant vigilance and effort and reassertions of the will, at the first level. 

Painful, because our lapses are so frequent, the intervals when we forget Him so long. 

Rewarding, because we have begun to live. But these weeks and months and perhaps even years must be passed through before He gives us greater and easier stayedness upon Himself.

Lapses and forgettings are so frequent. Our surroundings grow so exciting. Our occupations are so exacting. But when you catch yourself again, lose no time in self-recriminations, but breathe a silent prayer for forgiveness and begin again, just where you are. 

Offer this broken worship up to Him and say: "This is what I am except Thou aid me." Admit no discouragement, but ever return quietly to Him and wait in His Presence.  [40]

At first the practice of inward prayer is a process of alternation of attention between outer things and the Inner Light. Preoccupation with either brings the loss of the other. Yet what is sought is not al¬ternation, but simultaneity, worship undergirding every moment, living prayer, the continuous current and background of all moments of life. 

Long practice indeed is needed before alternation yields to concur¬rent immersion in both levels at once. The "plateaus in the learning curve" are so long, and many falter and give up, assenting to alternation as the best that they can do. And no doubt in His graciousness God gives us His gifts, even in intermittent communion, and touches us into flame, far beyond our achievements and deserts. 

But the hunger of the committed one is for unbroken communion and adoration, and we may be sure He longs for us to find it and supple¬ments our weakness. For our quest is of His initiation, and is carried forward in His tender power and completed by His grace.

The first signs of simultaneity are given when at the moment of recovery from a period of forgetting there is a certain sense that we have not completely forgotten Him. It is as though we are only coming back into a state of vividness which had endured in dim and tenuous form throughout. What takes place now is not reinstatement of a broken prayer but re¬turn to liveliness of that which had endured, but [41] mildly. The currents of His love have been flowing, but whereas we had been drifting in Him, now we swim. It is like the background of a picture which extends all the way across behind a tree in the foreground. It is not that we merely know intellectually that the background of the picture has unbroken ex' tension; we experience aesthetically that it does cx tend across. Again, it is like waking from sleep yet knowing, not by inference but by immediate aware¬ness, that we have lived even while we were asleep. For sole preoccupation with the world is sleep, but immersion in Him is life.

But periods of dawning simultaneity and steadfast prayer may come and go, lapsing into alternation for long periods and returning in glorious power. And we learn to submit to the inner discipline of withdrawing of His gifts. For if the least taint of spiritual pride in our prayer-growth has come, it is well that He humble us until we are worthy of greater trust. 

For though we begin the practice of secret prayer with a strong sense that we are the initiators and that by our wills we are establishing our habits, maturing experience brings awareness of being met, and tutored, purged and disciplined, simplified and made pliant in His holy will by a power waiting within us. 

For God Himself works in our souls, in their deepest depths, taking increasing control as we are pro¬gressively willing to be prepared for His wonder. We [42] cease trying to make ourselves the dictators and God the listener, and become the joyful listeners to Him, the Master who does all things well.

There is then no need for fret when faithfully turn¬ing to Him, if He leads us but slowly into His secret chambers. If He gives us increasing steadiness in the deeper sense of His. Presence, we can only quietly thank Him. If He holds us in the stage of alternation we can thank Him for His loving wisdom, and wait upon His guidance through the stages for which we are prepared. For we cannot take Him by storm. The strong man must become the little child, not under¬standing but trusting the Father.

But to some at least He gives an amazing stayed-ness in Him, a well-nigh unbroken life of humble quiet adoration in His Presence, in the depths of our being. 

Day and night, winter and summer, sunshine and shadow, He is here, the great Champion. And we are with Him, held in His Tenderness, quickened into quietness and peace, children in Paradise before the Fall, walking with Him in the garden in the heat as well as the cool of the day. 

Here is not ecstasy but serenity, unshakableness, firmness of life-orientation. We are become what Fox calls "established men."

Such men are not found merely among the canon¬ized Saints of the Church. They are the John Woolmans of today. They are housewives and hand work¬ers, plumbers and teachers, learned and unlettered, [43] black and white, poor and perchance even rich. 

They exist, and happy is the church that contains them. 

They may not be known widely, nor serve on boards of trustees, or preach in pulpits. Where pride in one's learning is found, there they are not. For they do not confuse acquaintance with theology and church history with commitment and the life lived in the secret sanctuary. 

Cleaving simply through forms and externals, they dwell in immediacy with Him who is the abiding Light behind all changing forms, really nullifying much of the external trappings of religion. 

They have found the Secret of the Nazarene, and, not content to assent to it intellectually, they have committed themselves to it in action, and walk in newness of life in the vast fellowship of unceasing prayer.

There is no new technique for entrance upon this stage where the soul in its deeper levels is continuously at Home in Him. The processes of inward prayer do not grow more complex, but more simple. 

In the early weeks we begin with simple, whispered words. 

Formulate them spontaneously, "Thine only. Thine only." Or seize upon a fragment of the Psalms: "so panteth my soul after Thee, 0 God." 

Repeat them inwardly, over and over again. For the conscious cooperation of the surface level is needed at first, before prayer sinks into the second level as habitual divine orientation. 

Change the phrases, as you feel [44] led, from hour to hour or from forenoon to afternoon. If you wander, return and begin again. 

But the time will come when verbalization is not so imperative, and yields place to the attitudes of soul which you meant the words to express, attitudes of humble bow¬ing before Him, attitudes of lifting high your whole being before Him that the Light may shine into the last crevice and drive away all darkness, attitudes of approach and nestling in the covert of His wings, attitudes of amazement and marvel at His transcend¬ent glory, attitudes of self-abandonment, attitudes of feeding in an inward Holy Supper upon the Bread of Life. 

If you find, after a time, that these attitudes become diffused and vague, no longer firm-textured, then return to verbalizations and thus restore their solidity.

But longer discipline in this inward prayer will es¬tablish more enduring upreachings of praise and sub¬mission and relaxed listening in the depths, unworded but habitual orientation of all one's self about Him who is the Focus.

 The process is much simpler now. Little glances, quiet breathings of submission and invitation suffice. 

Voluntary or stated times of prayer merely join into and enhance the steady undercurrent of quiet worship that underlies the hours. Behind the foreground of the words continues the background of heavenly orientation, as all the currents of our being [45] set toward Him. Through the shimmering light ot divine Presence we look out upon the world, and in its turmoil and its fitfulness, we may be given to respond, in some increased measure, in ways dimly suggestive of the Son of Man.

We may suppose these depths of prayer are our achievement, the precipitate of our own habits at the surface level settled into subconscious regions. But this humanistic account misses the autonomy of the life of prayer. 

It misses the fact that this inner level has a life of its own, invigorated not by us but by a divine Source. 

There come times when prayer pours forth in volumes and originality such as we cannot create. It rolls through us like a mighty tide. Our prayers are mingled with a vaster Word, a Word that at one time was made flesh. We pray, and yet it is not we who pray, but a Greater who prays in us. Something of our punctiform selfhood is weakened, but never lost. All we can say is, Prayer is taking place, and I am given to be in the orbit. In holy hush we bow in Eternity, and know the Divine Concern tenderly enwrapping us and all things within His persuading love. 

Here all human initiative has passed into acquiescence, and He works and prays and seeks His own through us, in exquisite, energizing life. Here the autonomy of the inner life becomes complete and we are joyfully prayed through, by a Seeking Life that flows through us into the world of men.  [46]Sometimes this prayer is particularized, and we are impelled to pray for particular persons or particular situations with a quiet or turbulent energy that, subjectively considered, seems utterly irresistible. 

Sometimes the prayer and this Life that flows through us reaches out to all souls with kindred vision and up-holds them in His tender care. Sometimes it flows out to the world of blinded struggle, and we become cosmic Saviors, seeking all those who are lost.

This "infused prayer" is not frequently given, in full intensity. But something of its autonomous char¬acter remains, not merely as a memory of a time when the fountains of creation were once revealed and we were swept along in their rising waters. 

It re¬mains as an increasing awareness of a more-than-ourselves, working persuadingly and powerfully at the roots of our own soul, and in the depths of all men. It is an experimental assurance of Divine Labor and persuasion pervading the world, impelling men to their cross. In holy awe we are drawn anew to "keep close to the fresh up-springings of the Life," amazed at that which is revealed as at work, at the base of all being, all men and ourselves.

 And we have our first¬hand assurance that He who began that good work in us, as in Timothy, can establish us in Him, can transform intermittency and alternation into simul-taneity and continuity. [47] 

III] ==================

Guidance of life by the Light within is not exhausted as is too frequently supposed, in special lead-ings toward particular tasks. It begins first of all in a mass revision of our total reaction to the world. Worshipping in the light we become new creatures, making wholly new and astonishing responses to the entire outer setting of life. These responses are not reasoned out. They are, in large measure, spontaneous reactions of felt incompatibility between "the world's" judgments of value and the Supreme Value we adore deep in the Center. There is a total Instruction as well as specific instructions from the Light within. The dynamic illumination from the deeper level is shed upon the judgments of the surface level, and lo, the "former things are passed away, behold, they are become new."

Paradoxically, this total Instruction proceeds in two opposing directions at once. We are torn loose from earthly attachments and ambitions—contemptiis mundi. And we are quickened to a divine but painful concern for the world—anzor 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.  [48]

The second half of the paradox is more readily accepted today than the first. For we fear it means world-withdrawal, world-flight. We fear a life of wallowing in ecstasies of spiritual sensuality while cries of a needy world go unheeded. And some pages of history seem to fortify our feats.

But there is a sound and valid contemptus mundi which the Inner Light works within the utterly dedicated soul. Positions of prominence, eminences of social recognition which we once meant to attain how puny and trifling they become! Our old ambitions and heroic dreams—what years we have wasted in feeding our own insatiable self-pride, when only His will truly matters! Our wealth and property, security now and in old age—upon what broken reeds have we leaned, when He is "the rock of our heart, and our portion forever!"

Again, we have quailed and been tormented in our obscurity, we have fretted and been anxious because of our limitations, set by our own nature and by our surroundings. The tasks are so great, and we have accomplished so little, and been assigned such lowly talents and occupations.

But instructed in one point of view of the paradox, we bestride the mountains or the valleys of earthly importance with a holy indifference, contempt, and detachment. Placed in coveted surroundings, recipients of honors, we count them as refuse, as nothing, utterly nothing. [49]  Placed in the shadows, we are happy to pick up a straw for the love of God. No task is so small as to distress us, no honor so great as to turn our heads.

Such loosening of the chains of attachment is easy, if we be given times of a sense of unutterable nearness to Himself. In those moments what would we not leave for Him? What mean honors or dishonors, comforts or wants, in Him? For some persons, in such moments, the work of detachment, contemptus mundi, exists chiefly as an intellectual obligation, ominously hovering over their heads as duty, but not known as experienced joy in the new freedom of utter poverty. Still others obstruct this detachment, reject it as absurd or unneeded, and cling to mammon white they seek to cling to God.

Double-mindedness in this matter is wholly destructive of the spiritual life. Totalitarian are the claims of Christ. No vestige of reservation of "our" rights can remain. Straddle arrangements and compromises between our allegiances to the surface level and the divine Center cannot endure. Unless the willingness is present to be stripped of our last earthly dignity and hope, and yet still praise Him, we have no message in this our day of refugees, bodily and spiritual. Nor have we yielded to the monitions of the Inner Instructor.

But actually completed detachment is vastly hardec  than intended detachment. [50] Fugitive islands of secret reservations elude us. Rationalizations hide them. Intending absolute honesty, we can only bring ourselves steadfastly into His presence and pray, "Cleanse thou me from secret faults." And in the X-ray light of Eternity we may be given to see the dark spots of life, and divine grace may be given to reinforce our will to complete abandonment in Him. For the guidance of the Light is critical, acid, sharper than a two-edged sword. He asks all, but He gives all.

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