Thomas Kelly
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From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia:
Thomas Raymond Kelly (1893-1941) was an American Quaker educator. He taught and wrote on the subject of mysticism. His books are widely read, especially by people interested in spirituality.
Kelly was born in 1893 in Ohio to a Quaker family. The branch of Quakerism in which he was raised (Wilmington Yearly Meeting) had been influenced by the 19th century revivalists and worship services were similar to other low-church Protestant groups.
He graduated in 1913 from Wilmington College as a chemistry major. Then he went to Haverford College just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he came under the mentoring of Rufus Jones, a prominent Friend. It was at this time that he came into contact with the more traditional mystical vein of the Religious Society of Friends.
Kelly taught for two years (1919–1921) at his alma mater, Wilmington College. Then he went back to Hartford Seminary where he earned a doctorate in philosophy and an induction to Phi Beta Kappa. He and his wife then went to Berlin and worked with the American Friends' Service Committee in the child feeding program, where they were instrumental in founding the Quaker community in Germany.
When he returned he was appointed head of the Philosophy Department of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. He was unhappy there and came to realize that he did not agree with much of his evangelical background anymore.
In 1930 Kelly began working on a second Ph.D. at Harvard. While working on this degree he taught at Wellesley College (1931–1932) and again at Earlham (1932–1935). In 1935, he went to teach at the University of Hawaii and began advanced research in Eastern philosophies.
In 1936, Kelly became a professor at Haverford College. He published the dissertation for his second doctorate in 1937, but he failed in the oral defense due to a memory lapse. This failure put Kelly into a period of grief, during which time he apparently had a spiritual awakening.
In 1938, Kelly went to Germany to encourage Friends living under Hitler's regime.
Kelly received word on January 17, 1941 that Harper and Brothers was willing to meet with him to discuss the publication of a devotional book. He died of a heart attack later that same day. Three months later Kelly's colleague, Douglas V. Steere, submitted five of Kelly's devotional essays to the publisher along with a biographical sketch of Kelly. The book was published under the title A Testament of Devotion (1941). Some of his other essays have been collected in a book entitled The Eternal Promise (1966). A formal biography, Thomas Kelly: A Biography, was written by his son, Richard Kelly in 1966.
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Excerpts from http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/904214flora.html:
Jerry R. Flora: Searching for an Adequate Life: The Devotional Theology of Thomas R. Kelly
JUDGMENT AND DOCTRINE
The worth of Thomas Kelly's legacy has been noted by such authors as D. Elton Trueblood (The New Man for Our Time, p. 63. Trueblood includes Kelly's work in a list of classics for the nurture of Christian spirituality.) and Richard J. Foster (Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, rev. ed. , pp. 27, 45, 72, 80, 128, 164; Freedom of Simplicity, pp. 5, 78, 86, 87, 103). ...The Eternal Promise p. 90: ... 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.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 29: 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.
ASSESSMENT
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.
DISCIPLESHIP AND WORSHIPA Testament of Devotion, p. 82: 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.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 77: "When we are drowned in the overwhelming seas of the love of God, 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.
The Eternal Promise p. 25-26: 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.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 47: 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.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 99: One might almost say we become cosmic mothers, tenderly caring for all.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 107: 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.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 71: 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.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 123-124: 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 (.).
CONCLUSION: THE DIVINE INVASION
God is referred to as the Presence, the Center, the Silence, the Abyss, the Seed.
Kelly's use of Scripture 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, the inner witness of the Spirit takes precedence.
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.A Testament of Devotion, p. 3: Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, i Divine Center, a speaking voice, to which we may continually return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warning us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. ... It is a light which illuminates the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the human face. ... 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.
A Testament of Devotion, p. 8: 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 groups - yes, and of non-Christian groups as well who seriously mean to dwell in the secret place of the Most High.
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