Kelly A Testament of Devotion 4] The Eternal Now and Social Concern

 

4] The Eternal Now and Social Concern

There is an experience of the Eternal breaking into time, which transforms all life into a miracle of faith and action. Unspeakable, profound, and full of glory as an inward experience, it is the root of concern for all creation, the true ground of social endeavor. This inward Life and the outward Concern .are truly one whole, and, were it possible, ought to be described simultaneously. But linear sequence and succession of words is our inevitable lot and compels us to treat separately what is not separate: 

first, the Eternal Now and the Temporal Now, and 

second, the Na­ture and Ground of Social Concern.

1] THE ETERNAL Now AND THE TEMPORAL Now

There is a tendency today, in this generation, to suppose that the religious life must prove its worth because it changes the social order. The test of the importance of any supposed dealing with Eternity is the benefits it may possibly bring to affairs in time. Time, and the enrichment of events in time, are sup­posed to pass a judgment upon the worth of fellow­ship with the Eternal. We breathe the air of a genera­tion which, as the old phrase goes, "takes time seriously." Men nowadays take time far more seri­ously than eternity.(89)  90

German theology of a century ago emphasized a useful distinction between This-sidedness and Other-sidedness, or Here and Yonder. 

The church used to be chiefly concerned with Yonder, it was oriented toward the world beyond, and was little concerned with this world and its sorrows and hungers. 

Be­cause the sincere workingman, who suffered under economic privations, called out for bread, for whole-wheat-flour bread, the church of that day replied, "You're worldly-minded, you're crass, you're mate­rialistic, you're oriented toward the Here. You ought to seek the heavenly, the eternal, the Yonder." 

But the workingman wasn't materialistic, he was hungry; and 

Marxian socialism promised him just the tem­poral bread he needed, whereas the church had re­buked him for not hungering for the eternal Bread.

All this is now changed. We are in an era of This-sidedness, 

with a passionate anxiety about economics and political organization. 

And the church itself has largely gone "this-sided," and 

large areas of the So­ciety of Friends seem to be predominantly concerned with this world, with time, and with the temporal order. And the test of the worthwhileness of any ex­perience of Eternity has become: "Does it change things in time? If so, let us keep it, if not, let us dis­card it."  91

I submit that this is a lamentable reversal of the true order of dependence. 

Time is no judge of Eter­nity. 

It is the Eternal who is the judge and tester of time.

But in saying this I am not proposing that we leave the one-sidedness of the Here and of time-preoccu­pation for the equal one-sidedness of the Yonder, nor advocate a lofty scorn of this maimed and bleed­ing world while we bask serenely upon the sunny shores of the Eternal. 

But I am persuaded that 

in the Quaker experience of Divine Presence 

there is a seri­ous retention of both time and the timeless, 

with the final value and significance located in the Eternal, 

who is the creative root of time itself. 

For "I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness."

The possibility of this experience of Divine Pres­ence, 

as a repeatedly realized and present fact, and 

its transforming and transfiguring effect upon all life

this is the central message of Friends. 

Once discover this glorious secret, this new dimension of life, and 

we no longer live merely in time but we live also in the Eternal. 

The world of time is no longer the sole reality of which we are aware. 

A second Reality hovers, quickens, quivers, stirs, energizes us, breaks in upon us and in love embraces us, together with all things, within Himself. 

We live our lives at two levels simultaneously, the level of time and the level of the Timeless. 92 

They form one sequence, with a fluctuating border between them. 

Sometimes the glorious Eternal is in the ascendancy, 

but still we are aware of our daily temporal routine. 

Sometimes the clouds settle low and we are chiefly in the world of time, 

yet we are haunted by a smaller sense of Pres­ence, in the margin of consciousness.

But, fluctuating in predominance though the two levels be, 

such a discovery of an Eternal Life and Love breaking in, nay, always there, 

but we were too preoccupied to notice it, makes life glorious and new. 

And one sings inexpressibly sweet songs within one­self, and one tries to keep one's inner hilarity and exuberance within bounds lest, like the men of Pente­cost, we be mistaken for men filled with new wine. 

Traditional Quaker decorum and this burning ex­perience of a Living Presence are only with the great­est difficulty held together! 

I'd rather be jolly Saint Francis hymning his canticle to the sun than a dour old sobersides Quaker whose diet would appear to have been spiritual persimmons.

But now let us examine the ordinary experience of time, unrevised by this great discovery of the Eternal Life springing up within it. The ordinary man, busy earning a living, exercises care, caution, foresight. He calculates probabilities. He studies the past in order to predict and control the future. 93 Then when he has weighed all his factors and plotted the out­come, with energy and industry he wills himself into persistent activity along the lines of calculated wis­dom.

And much religious work is carried on in just this same way. 

With shrewd and canny foresight religious people study the past, 

examine all the factors in the situation which they can foresee, and then decide what is wisest to undertake, or what is most congru­ous with the Christian life described in the Gospels. Then they breathe a prayer to God to reinforce their wills and keep them strong in executing their resolve.

In this process, time spreads itself out like a rib­bon, 

stretching away from the now into the past, and 

forward from the now into the future, 

at the far end of which stands the New Jerusalem. 

In this ribbon of time we live, anxiously surveying the past in order to learn how to manage the most important part of the ribbon, the future. 

The now is merely an incidental dividing point, unstable, non-important, except as by its unstaying migration we move ahead into the richer meadows and the greener pastures of the future.

This, I fear, is the all-too-familiar world of all too many religious men and women, when a deeper and a richer experience is possible. 

The experience of Divine Presence changes all this familiar picture. 

There come times when the Presence steals upon us, all unexpected not the product of agonized effort, and we live in a new dimension of life. 94 

You who have experienced such plateaus of glory know what I mean. 

Out from the plain of daily living suddenly loom such plateaus. 

Before we know it we are walking upon their heights, and all the old familiar landscape becomes new. 

The experience of Paul is very true: 

"The former things are passed away; behold, they are become new." 

One walks in the world yet above the world as well, giddy with the height, 

with feather tread, with effortlessness and calm security, 

meeting the daily routine, yet never losing the sense of Presence. 

Sometimes these periods are acute and brief, too dazzling to report to anyone.

Sometimes they are less elevated but more prolonged, with a milder sense of glory and of lift, yet as surely of a piece with the more acute experience. 

Such ex­periences are emotionless, in themselves, but suffuse all emotion with a background of peace, utter, utter peace and security. 

The sense of Presence! I have spoken of it as steal­ing on one unawares. 

It is recorded of John Wilhelm Rowntree that as he left a great physician's office, where he had just been told that his advancing blind­ness could not be stayed, he stood by some railings for a few moments to collect himself when he "sud­denly felt the love of God wrap him about as though a visible presence enfolded him and a joy filled him such as he had never known before." 95 

 An amazing timeliness of the Invading Love, as the Everlasting stole about him in his sorrow. I cannot report such a timeliness of visitation, but only unpredictable ar­rivals and fadings-out. But without doubt it is given to many of richer experience to find the comfort of the Eternal is watchfully given at their crises in time.

In the immediate experience of the Presence, the Now is no mere nodal point between the past and the future. 

It is the seat and region of the Divine Pres­ence itself. 

No longer is the ribbon spread out with equal vividness before one, 

for the past matters less and the future matters less, 

for the Now contains all that is needed for the absolute satisfaction of our deepest cravings. 

Why want, and yearn, and struggle, when the Now contains all one could ever wish for, and more? 

The present Now is not something from which we hurriedly escape, toward what is hoped will be a better future. 

Instead of anxiety lest the future never yield all we have hoped, 

lest we fail to contribute our full stint before the shadows of the evening fall upon our lives, we only breathe a quiet prayer to the Now and say, "Stay, thou art so sweet." 

Instead of anxiety lest our past, our past defects, our long-standing deficiencies blight our well-intentioned future efforts, 

all our past sense of weakness falls away and we stand erect, in this holy Now, joyous, serene, assured, unafraid. 

Between the relinquished past and the untrodden future stands this holy Now, whose bulk has swelled to cosmic size, 

for within the Now is the dwelling place of God Himself. 96 

In the Now we are at home at last. The fretful winds of time are stilled, the nostalgic longings of this heaven-born earth-traveler come to rest. 

For the one-dimen­sional ribbon of time has loosed its hold. It has by no means disappeared. We live within time, within the ne-dimensional ribbon. But every time-now is found to bc a continuance of an Eternal Now, and in the Eternal Now receives a new evaluation. We have not merely rediscovered time; we have found in this holy immediacy of the Now the root and source of time itself. For it is the Eternal who is the mother of our holy Now, nay, is our Now, and time is, as Plato said, merely its moving image.

The sense of Presence is as if two beings were joined in one single configuration, and the center of gravity is not in us but in that Other. As two bodies, closely attached together and whirling in the air, are predominantly determined by the heavier body, so does the sense of Presence carry within it a sense of our lives being in large part guided, dynamically moved from beyond our usual selves. Instead of being the active, hurrying church worker and the anxious, careful planner of shrewd moves toward the good life, we become pliant creatures, less brittle, less ob­stinately rational. The energizing, dynamic center is not in us but in the Divine Presence in which we share.97 Religion is not our concern; it is God's con­cern. The sooner we stop thinking we are the ener­getic operators of religion and discover that God is at work, as the Aggressor, the Invader, the Initiator, so much the sooner do we discover that our task is to call men to be still and know, listen, hearken in quiet in­vitation to the subtle promptings of the Divine. Our task is to encourage others first to let go, to cease striving, to give over this fevered effort of the self-sufficient religionist trying to please an external deity. Count on God knocking on the doors of time. God is the Seeker, and not we alone; He is anxious to swell out our time-flows into an Eternal Now by filling them with a sense of Presence. I am persuaded that religious people do not with sufficient seriousness count on God as an active factor in the affairs of the world. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock," but too many well-intentioned people are so preoccupied with the clatter of effort to do something for God that they don't hear Him asking that He might do something through them. We may admire the heaven-scaling desires of the tower-builders on the Plain of Shinar, but they would have done better to listen and not drown out the call from heaven with the clang of the mason's trowel and the creaking of the scaf­folding.

An invariable element in the experience of Now is that of unspeakable and exquisite joy, peace, serene release. 98 A new song is put into our mouths. No old song ever has caught the glory and the gladness of this Now; no former Now can be drawn upon to give perfect voice to this Now. The well-springs of Life are bubbling up anew each moment. When the angel is troubling the waters, it is no time to stand on the bank and recite past wonders. 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. It seems to me, in the experience of plateau living in the Divine Pres­ence, that the Everlasting is the singer, and not we ourselves, that the joy we know in the Presence is not our little private subjective joy, pocketed away from other men, a private gift from a benevolent and gra­cious God. It is the joy and peace and serenity which is in the Divine Life itself, and we are given to share in that joy which is eternally within all Nows. The song is put into our mouths, for the Singer of all songs is singing within us. It is not we that sing; it is the Eternal Song of the Other, who sings in us, who sings unto us, and through us into the world.

For the holy Now is not something which we, by our activity, by our dynamic energy, overtake or come upon. It is a now which itself is dynamic, which lays hold actively upon us, which breaks in actively upon us and re-energizes us from within a new center. We can count upon this as the only secure dynamic, an all‑ potent factor in world-events. 99 For the Eternal is ur­gently, actively breaking into time, working through those who are willing to be laid hold upon, to sur­render self-confidence and self-centered effort, that is, self-originated effort, and let the Eternal be the dy­namic guide in recreating, through us, our time-world.

This is the first fruit of the Spirit—a joy unspeak­able and full of glory.

The second is love. It is second not in importance but merely in order of mentioning. For it is true that in the experience of Divine Presence that which flows over the ocean of darkness is an infinite ocean of light and love. In the Eternal Now all men become seen in a new way. We enfold them in our love, and we and they are enfolded together within the great Love of God as we know it in Christ. Once walk in the Now and men are changed, in our sight, as we see them from the plateau heights. They aren't just masses of struggling beings, furthering or thwarting our ambi­tions, or, in far larger numbers, utterly alien to and insulated from us. We become identified with them and suffer when they suffer and rejoice when they re­joice. One might almost say we become cosmic moth­ers, tenderly caring for all. But that, I believe, is ex­perienced only in the acutest stages of mystic ecstasy, whereas I have been discussing the experience of milder, less lofty plateaus of glory, prolonged days and even weeks of sense of Presence wherein, as Isaac Penington would say, the springings of the Life are ever fresh. In such a sense of Presence there is a vast background of cosmic Love and tender care for all things (plants included, I find for myself), but in the foreground arise special objects of love and concern and tender responsibility. 100 The people we know best, see oftenest, have most to do with, these are reloved in a new and a deeper way. Would that we could re-love the whole world! But a special fragment is placed before us by the temporal now, which puts a special responsibility for our present upon us. The responsibility arising from our location in space is very different from our responsibility arising out of our location in time. For we can journey to distant places and get a different foreground of objects and events, but we cannot journey out of our time-now into a new historical location. The invading Love of the Eternal Now must break in through us into this time-now.

But what is the content and aim of this yearning Love, which is the Divine Love loving its way into and through us to others? It is that they too may make the great discovery, that they also may find God or, better, be found by Him, that they may know the Eternal breaking in upon them and making their lives moving images of the Eternal Life. 101 It is not reserved merely for the Father-Love in heaven to grieve over prodigal sons. Wherever any heart has tasted of thi heavenly Love, there is the Father-Love grieving over prodigals, there is the shepherd heart yearning over sheep not having a shepherd, not knowing where are the green pastures, not even aware that there are green pastures to find, there is one of the sons of God mourning to see his fellows raking together the sticks. and the straws while over their heads is held the crown of life. Heaven's eternal Now within us makes us speak blasphemous things, for we seem to assume the prerogatives of God. But this is a part of that as­tounding boldness of which I mean to speak under the head of peace—our next main fruit of the spirit.

But first I would point out the new fellowship. which is born among those who have found the Love which is in the Eternal Now. For those who have been brought back to the Principle within them are ex­quisitely drawn toward all others who have found the same Principle. The fellowship is not founded upon a common subjective experience, like the fellowship of hay-fever sufferers! It is founded upon a common Object, who is known by them all to be the very Life within them. This is the Reality which removes Quakerism from pure individualism and from pure subjectivism, as it is so commonly and so mistakenly interpreted.

The third element in the experience of Presence after love and joy, is peace. And I make bold to speak of this, even if at this very hour the tragedies of China and of Spain and of German concentration camps are heavy upon us.  102

The amazing way that anxieties pass away, when enfolded and quickened by the Presence! The old life of one dimension, lived merely in the ribbon of time, was always a strained life. Had we calculated the past correctly? What unforeseen happening in the future can arise and overthrow all our efforts? Strain! Strain! Out of such attitudes are built those lives which get written up in the success-stories of the American Magazine. And religious people think they must work hard and please God and make a good record and bring in the kingdom! Has the Nietzschean ideal of the superman, with heroic, world-striding power, hypnotized the church into an over-activistic attitude?

And then comes the sense of Presence. The Eternal Now breaks through the time-nows and all is secure. A sense of absolute security and assurance of being linked with an overcoming Power replaces the old anxieties about the Kingdom. It is a security regard­ing the individual and regarding the group and re­garding the race of men. Then we say, "How could we have been so blind?" For surely all things of value are most certainly made secure through Him! Faith, serene, unbroken, unhurried world-conquest by the power of Love is a part of peace.

For the experience of Presence is the experience of peace, and the experience of peace is the experience not of inaction but of power, and the experience of power is the experience of a pursuing Love that loves its way untiringly to victory. 103 He who knows the Pres­ence knows peace, and he who knows peace knows power and walks in complete faith that that objective Power and Love which has overtaken him will over­come the world.

And an immediate corollary to this is the weaken­ing of the merely calculated, rationally planned decisions. When we lived in the one-dimensional time-ribbon we had to think life out all by ourselves. The past had to be read cautiously, the future had to be planned with care. Nothing was to be undertaken unless the calculations showed that success was to be expected. No blind living, no marching boldly into the dark, no noble but ungrounded ventures of faith. We must be rational, sensible, intelligent, shrewd. But then comes the reality of the Presence, and the Now-Eternal is found to underlie and generate all timetemporals. And a life of amazing, victorious faith-living sets in. Not with rattle and clatter of hammers, not with strained eyebrows and tense mus­cles but in peace and power and confidence we work upon such apparently hopeless tasks as the elimina­tion of war from society, and set out toward world-brotherhood and interracial fraternity in a world where all the calculated chances of success are very meagre.

I said that the rational element in the conduct of life is weakened. But the checking and co-ordinating considerations of reason are not eliminated from life guided by the Presence, replaced by the promptings of the moment. 104 Between the atomistic, unintegrated chaos of the time-flows and the coherent, integrated unity of a rational system, wherein time has lost its meaning—between these two factors reflective men have always sought to effect a marriage. Surrender to the promptings of the Eternal Now may involve the absurd courage of faith in the face of insuperable obstacles. But it does not release us from all intelli­gent and rational and co-ordinated behavior, all rea­soning and consistency. Speaking of his openings Fox said he found that "they answered one another and answered the scriptures." There is a unity and co­herence and rational continuity in the out-cropping guidances of Spirit-led men. Penn, at the time of the Wilkinson-Story separation, wrote concerning the antinomian claims of the separatists: "As if the Light were inconsistent with itself, or admitted of unity under not only different but contrary practices in the one family and flock of God." This matter needs very careful and much fuller sifting. But I am sure that the outcome must be such that reason and intelligence are not eliminated from those lives who live within the Presence, nor on the other hand are reasoning and intellectual calculations to replace or paralyze the vigor and imperiousness of the Eternal Now.

But in the sense of Presence some of the past nows of our time-now change their character entirely. 105 Our old failures are so apt to paralyze us. The Eternal Now may counsel: "Undertake this." Our time-now says: "See what a weakling you proved yourself to be in an earlier case. Better not try it now." But the as­surance of the Eternal Now is enough, as it should have been for Moses: "Surely I shall be with thee." Submit yourself to the Eternal Now and in peace serene, in the boldness of perfect faith, you can ad­vance into miraculous living. Or, in the opposite di­rection, our time-now may say: "Do this. You are well prepared for it. Your education and training fit you, perhaps to teach, to preach, to counsel, to guide an enterprise. And if you don't, nobody will." But the Eternal Now in us may say: "Stay. Wait. Don't rely upon yourself. Don't think you can reason yourself into your obligation. Know you not that I can raise up of these stones men better able than you to do this?"

Thus in faith we go forward, with breath-taking boldness, and in faith we stand still, unshaken, with amazing confidence. For the time-nows are rooted in the Eternal Now, which is a steadfast Presence, an infinite ocean of light and love which is flowing over the ocean of darkness and death.

2. THE NATURE AND GROUND OF SOCIAL CONCERN

The experience of Divine Presence wholly satis­fies, and there are a few who, like those on the Mount of Transfiguration, want to linger there forever and never return to the valleys of men, where there are demons to be cast out. 106 But there is more to the ex­perience of God than that of being plucked out of the world. The fuller experience, 1 am sure, is of a Love which sends us Out into the world. "As the Father bath sent me, even so send I you" becomes, not an external, Biblically authorized command, but a living, burning experience. For the experience of an inflooding, all-enfolding Love, which is at the center of Divine Presence, is of a Love which embraces all creation, not just our little, petty selves. "'Would that all men might be even as I am," are the words of a man such as John Hughes used to call an authentic. Not only does all creation have a new smell, as Fox found, but it has a new value, as enwrapped in the infinite Love of God, wherein not a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father. Have you experienced this concern for the sparrow's fall? This is not just Jesus' experience. Nor is it His inference about God's tender love; it is the record of His experience in God. There is a tendering of the soul, toward everything in creation, from the sparrow's fall to the slave under the lash. The hard-lined face of a money-bitten finan­cier is as deeply touching to the tendered soul as are the burned-out eyes of miners' children, remote and unseen victims of his so-called success. 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.107

This is the experience underlying Kagawa's poem, "To Tears," published in the Christian Century:

Ah tears! Unbidden tears!
Familiar friends since childhood's lonely years, Long separated we,
Why do ye come again to dwell with me?
At midnight, dawn, midday
Ye come; nor wait your coming nor delay; Nay fearless, with what scorn
Ye picture China by my brothers torn.
Your scorn 1 must accept,
But I'm no coward; pray. heed ere more ye've wept; I love Japan so fair,
And China too; this war I cannot bear.
"Is there no other way?"
Thus do I search my spirit all the day Nor ever reach a goal;
I live, but only as a phantom soul.

Like Christ who bore our sins upon the Cross, I, too, must bear my country's sins and dross; Land of my love! Thy sins are grievous to be borne, Mv head hangs low upon my form forlorn.108


4 Testament of Devotion

Ah tears! Unbidden tears! Long separated we,
Alas! has come another day When ye must dwell with me.

This is the voice of an authentic, who knows the tendering of the Presence, a tendering which is­sues in the burden-bearing, cross-carrying, Calvary-re-enacting life.

Against this cosmic suffering and cosmic re­sponsibility we must set the special responsibility experienced in a concern. For a Quaker concern par­ticularizes this cosmic tenderness. It brings to a defi­nite and effective focus in some concrete task all that experience of love and responsibility which might evaporate, in its broad generality, into vague yearn­ings for a golden Paradise.

There are two ways in which a concern is a par­ticularization. It is a particularization of the Divine Concern of God for all creation. God's love isn't just a diffused benevolence. As the Eternal is the root and ground of all times, yet breaks into particular mo­ments, so the Infinite Love is the ground of all crea­tures, the source of their existence, and also knows a tender concern for each, and guides those who are sensitive to this tender care into a mutually support­ing Blessed Fraternity.109


But it is a particularization of my responsibility also, in a world too vast and a lifetime too short for me to carry all responsibilities. My cosmic love, or the Divine Lover loving within me, cannot ac­complish its full intent, which is universal saviour-hood, within the limits of three score years and ten. But the Loving Presence does not burden us equally with all things, but considerately puts upon each of us just a few central tasks, as emphatic responsibili­ties. For each of us these special undertakings are our share in the joyous burdens of love.

Thus the state of having a concern has a fore­ground and a background. In the foreground is the special task, uniquely illuminated, toward which we feel a special yearning and care. This is the concern as we usually talk about it or present it to the Monthly Meeting. But in the background is a second level, or layer, of universal concern for all the multitude of good things that need doing. Toward them all we feel kindly, but we are dismissed from active service in most of them. And we have an easy mind in the presence of desperately real needs which are not our direct responsibility. We cannot die on every cross, nor are we expected to.

Behind the foreground, behind the background, we may distinguish the Ultimate Background, which is the Eternal Concernedness of Love, anterior to its differentiation into the multitude of particulars of creation. 110

I wish I might emphasize how a life becomes sim­plified when dominated by faithfulness to a few con­cerns. Too many of us have too many irons in the fire. We get distracted by the intellectual claim to our interest in a thousand and one good things, and be­fore we know it we are pulled and hauled breathlessly along by an over-burdened program of good commit­tees and good undertakings. I am persuaded that this. fevered life of church workers is not wholesome. Un­dertakings get plastered on from the outside because we can't turn down a friend. Acceptance of service on a weighty committee should really depend upon an answering imperative within us, not merely upon a rational calculation of the factors involved. The con­cern-oriented life is ordered and organized from within. And we learn to say No as well as Yes by attending to the guidance of inner responsibility. Quaker simplicity needs to be expressed not merely in dress and architecture and the height of tomb­stones but also in the structure of a relatively simpli­fied and co-ordinated life-program of social responsi­bilities. And I am persuaded that concerns introduce that simplification, and along with it that intensifica­tion which we need in opposition to the hurried, su­perficial tendencies of our age.

We have tried to discover the grounds of the social responsibility and the social sensitivity of Friends. It is not in mere humanitarianism. 111 It is not in mere pity. It is not in mere obedience to Bible commands. It is not in anything earthly. The social concern of Friends is grounded in an experience—an experience of the Love of God and of the impulse to saviourhood in­herent in the fresh quickenings of that Life. Social concern is the dynamic Life of God at work in the world, made special and emphatic and unique, par­ticularized in each individual or group who is sensi tive and tender in the leading-strings of love. A con­cern is God-initiated, often surprising, always holy, for the Life of God is breaking through into the world. Its execution is in peace and power and astounding faith and joy, for in unhurried serenity the Eternal is at work in the midst of time, triumphantly bringing all things up unto Himself.

Kelly A Testament of Devotion 3] The Blessed Comunity

 

3] The Blessed Community

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 rich volume and luminous bulk and warmth of 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. Are these the bonds of love which knit together the early Christians, the very warp and woof of the Kingdom of God? In glad amazement and wonder we enter upon a relationship which we had not known the world contained for the sons of men. Why should such bounty be given to unworthy men like ourselves?

By no means is every one of our friends seen in this new and special light. A wholly new alignment of our personal relations appears. Some men and women whom we have never known before, or whom we have noticed only as a dim background for our more special friendships, suddenly loom large, step forward in our attention as men and women whom

[77) 78

we now know to the depths. Our earlier conversations with these persons may have been few and brief, but now we know them, as it were, from within. For we discern that their lives are already down within that Center which has found us. And we hunger for their fellowship, with a profound, insistent craving which will not be denied.

Other acquaintances recede in significance; we know now that our relationships with them have al­ways been nearer the surface of life. Many years of happy comradeship and common adventures we may have had together, but now we know that, at bottom. we have never been together in the deep silences of the Center, and that we never can be together, there where the light of Eternity shines still and bright. For until they, too, have become wholly God-en­thralled, Light-centered, they can be only good ac­quaintances with whom we pass the time of day. A yearning over them may set in, because of their dim­ness of vision, but the eye-to-eye relationship of love which binds together those who live in the Center is reserved for a smaller number. Drastically and re-creatively, Fellowship searches friendships, burning, dissolving, ennobling, transfiguring them in Heaven's glowing fire.

Not only do our daily friendships become re­aligned; our religious friends are also seen anew. Many impressions of worth are confirmed, others are

79

reversed. Some of the most active church leaders, well-known for their executive efficiency, people we have always admired, are shown, in the X-ray light of Eternity, to be agitated, half-committed, wistful, self-placating seekers, to whom the poise and serenity of the Everlasting have never come. The inexhausti­ble self-giving of others of our religious acquaint­ances we now understand, for the Eternal Love kindles an ardent and persistent readiness to do all things for, as well as through, Christ who strength­ens us. In some we regret a well-intentioned, but feverish over-busyness, not completely grounded in the depths of peace, and we wish they would not blur the beauty of their souls by fast motion. Others, who may not have been effective speakers or weighty financiers or charming conversationalists or members of prominent families are found to be men and women on whom the dews of heaven have fallen in­deed, who live continuously in the Center and who, in mature appreciation, understand our leaping heart and unbounded enthusiasm for God. And although they are not commissioned to any earthly office, yet they welcome us authoritatively into the Fellowship of Love.

"See how these Christians love one another" might well have been a spontaneous exclamation in the days of the apostles. The Holy Fellowship, the Blessed Community has always astonished those who stood without it.8o The sharing of physical goods in the primitive church is only an outcropping of a pro­foundly deeper sharing of a Life, the base and cen­ter of which is obscured, to those who are still oriented about self, rather than about God. To others, tragic to say, the very existence of such a Fellowship within a common Life and Love is unknown and Un-guessed. In its place, psychological and humanistic views of the essential sociality and gregariousness of man seek to provide a social theory of church mem­bership. From these views spring church programs of mere sociability and social contacts. The precious word Fellowship becomes identified with a purely horizontal relation of man to man, not with that hori­zontal-vertical relationship of man to man in God.

But every period of profound re-discovery of God's joyous immediacy is a period of emergence of this amazing group inter-knittedness of God-enthralled men and women who know one another in Him. It appeared in vivid form among the early Friends. The early days of the Evangelical movement showed the same bondedness in love. 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. William C. Braithwaite says in the Rowntree Series, that it was a tragic day when the Quakers ceased to be a Fellowship and became a Society of Friends. 81Yet ever within that Society, and ever within the Christian church, has existed the Holy Fellowship, the Blessed Community, an ekklesiola in ekk/esia, a little church within the church.

Yet still more astonishing is the Holy Fellowship, the Blessed Community, to those who are within it, Yet can one be surprised at being at home? In won­der and awe we find ourselves already interknit within unofficial groups of kindred souls. A "chance' conversation comes, and in a few moments we know that we have found and have been found by another member of the Blessed Community. Sometimes we are thus suddenly knit together in the bonds of a love far faster than those of many years' acquaintance. In unbounded eagerness we seek for more such fellow­ship, and wonder at the apparent lethargy of mere "members."

In the Fellowship cultural and educational and national and racial differences are leveled. Unlettered men are at ease with the truly humble scholar who lives in the Life, and the scholar listens with joy and openness to the precious experiences of God's deal­ing with the workingman. We find men with chilly theologies but with glowing hearts. 82 We overleap the boundaries of church membership and find Lutherans and Roman Catholics, Jews and Christians, within the  Fellowship. We re-read the poets and the saints, and the Fellowship is enlarged. With urgent hunger we read the Scriptures, with no thought of pious exer­cise, but in order to find more friends for the soul. We brush past our historical learning in the Scrip­tures, to seize upon those writers who lived in the Center, in the Life and in the Power. 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. Time telescopes and vanishes, centuries and creeds are overleaped. The incident of death puts no boundaries to the Blessed Community, wherein men live and love and work and pray in that Life and Power which gave forth the Scriptures. And we won­der and grieve at the overwhelmingly heady preoccu­pation of religious people with problems, problems, unless they have first come into the Fellowship of the Light.

The final grounds of holy Fellowship are in God. Lives immersed and drowned in God are drowned in love, and know one another in Him, and know one another in love. God is the medium, the matrix, the focus, the solvent. As Meister Eckhart suggests, he who is wholly surrounded by God, enveloped by God, clothed with God, glowing in selfless love to­ward Him—such a man no one can touch except he touch God also. Such lives have a common meeting-point; they live in a common joyous enslavement. 83They go back into a single Center where they are at home with Him and with one another. It is as if every soul had a final base, and that final base of every soul is one single Holy Ground, shared in by all. Persons in the Fellowship are related to one another through Him, as all mountains go down into the same earth. They get at one another through Him. He is actively moving in all, co-ordinating those who are pliant to His will and suffusing them all with His glory and His joy.

The relation of each to all, through God, is real, objective, existential. It is an eternal relationship which is shared in by every stick and stone and bird and beast and saint and sinner of the universe. On all the wooing love of God falls urgently, persuadingly. But he who, having will, yields to the loving urgency of that Life which knocks at his heart, is entered and possessed and transformed and transfigured. The scales fall from his eyes when he is given to eat of the tree of knowledge, the fruit of which is indeed for the healing of the nations, and he knows himself and his fellows as comrades in Eden, where God walks with them in the cool of the day. As there is a mysterious many-ing of God, as He pours Himself forth into the universe, so there is a one-ing of those souls who find their way back to Him who is their [84] home. And these are in the Holy Fellowship, the Blessed Community, of whom God is the head.

This community of life and love is far deeper than current views based upon modern logic would sup­pose. Logic finds, beneath every system of thought, some basic assumptions or postulates from which all other items of belief are derived. It is said that those who share in a system of thought are those who hold basic assumptions in common. But these assumptions are of the intellect, subsequent products, efforts to capture and clarify and make intelligible to ourselves and to others some fragment of that immediacy of experience which is the soul of life itself. Such as­sumptions we must make, but they are experimental, variant, conditioned by our culture period. But Holy Fellowship reaches behind these intellectual frames to the immediacy of experience in God, and seeks contact in this fountain head of real, dynamic con­nectedness. Theological quarrels arise out of differ­ences in assumptions. But Holy Fellowship, freely tolerant of these important yet more superficial clarifications, lives in the Center and rejoices in the unity of His love.

And this Fellowship is deeper than democracy, conceived as an ideal of group living. It is a theoc­racy wherein God rules and guides and directs His listening children. The center of authority is not in man, not in the group, but in the creative God Him‑self.  [85]

 Nor do all members share equally in spiritual discernment, but upon some falls more clearly the revealing light of His guiding will. "Weighty Friends," with delicate attunement both to heaven and to earth, bulk large in practical decisions. It would be a mistake indeed to suppose that Holy Fellowship is chained fast to one political system, or bound up inextricably with the fortunes of any one temporal structure of society. For the swaying for­tunes of democracy and of fascism and of commu­nism are of time, but the Fellowship in God is of all times and is eternal. It is certainly true that some temporal systems are more favorable than are others to the flowering of the Fellowship. But within all groups and nations and creeds it springs up, smiling at differences, for, existing in time, it is rooted in the Eternal One.

No single person can hold all dedicated souls within his compass in steadfast Fellowship with equal vividness. There are degrees of Fellowship, from wider, more diffused relations of love to nearer, more intense inter-knittedness. As each of us is at a point in space which compels us to a perspective relation­ship to all things, some near, some far, so each of us is dear to some and remote from others in the bonds of love.

Within the wider Fellowship emerges the special circle of a few on whom, for each of us, a particular emphasis of nearness has fallen. 86 These are our spe­cial gift and task. These we "carry" by inward, word­less prayer. By an interior act and attitude we lift them repeatedly before the throne and hold them there in power. This is work, real labor of the soul. It takes energy but it is done in joy. But the member­ship of such special groups is different and overlap­ping. From each individual the bonds of special fel­lowship radiate near and far. The total effect, in a living Church, would be sufficient intersection of these bonds to form a supporting, carrying network of love for the whole of mankind. Where the Fel­lowship is lacking the Church invisible is lacking and the Kingdom of God has not yet come. For these bonds of divine love and "carrying" are the stuff of the Kingdom of God. He who is in the Fellowship is in the Kingdom.

Two people, three people, ten people may be in living touch with one another through Him who underlies their separate lives. This is an astounding experience, which I can only describe but cannot ex­plain in the language of science. But in vivid exper­ience of divine Fellowship it is there. We know that these souls are with us, lifting their lives and ours con­tinuously to God and opening themselves, with us, in steady and humble obedience to Him. It is as if the boundaries of our self were enlarged, as if we were within them and as if they were within us. 87

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. On the borders of the experience lie amazing events, at which reputable psychologists scoff, and for which I would not try any accounting. But the solid kernel of community of life in God is in the center of the experience, renewing our life and courage and commitment and love. For daily and hourly the cos­mic Sacrament is enacted, the Bread and the 'Wine are divided amongst us by a heavenly Ministrant, and the substance of His body becomes our life and the substance of His blood flows in our veins. Holy is the Fellowship, wondrous is the Ministrant, marvelous is the Grail.

Frequency of personal contact in this Fellowship is not imperative, although desirable. Weeks and months and even years may elapse, yet the reality re­mains undimmed. Conversations within the Fellow­ship gravitate toward Him who is dearer than life itself. Yet the degree of self-disclosure which we are given to make to others is variable with time and place and person. And never is it complete. For as it nears completeness, words no longer help, but hinder, and the final pooling of joy and love in Him is ac­complished in the silences of the Eternal.88 

All friendships short of this are incomplete. All personal relations which lie only in time are open ended and unfinished, to the soul who walks in holy obedience. Can we make all our relations to our fel­lows relations which pass through Him? Our rela­tions to the conductor on a trolley? Our relations to the clerk who serves us in a store? How far is the world from such an ideal! How far is Christian prac­tice from such an expectation! Yet we, from our end of the relationship, can send out the Eternal Love in silent, searching hope, and meet each person with a background of eternal expectation and a silent, word­less prayer of love. For until the life of men in time is, in every relation, shot through with Eternity, the Blessed Community is not complete.

Kelly A Testament of Devotion 2] Holy Obedience

 

2] Holy Obedience

I. THE NATURE OF HOLY OBEDIENCE
II. GATEWAYS INTO HOLY OBEDIENCE
III. HUMILITY AND HOLINESS
IV. ENTRANCE INTO SUFFERING

V. SIMPLICITY

Out in front of us is the drama of men and of nations, seething, struggling, laboring, dying. Upon this tragic drama in these days our eyes are all Set in anxious watchfulness and in prayer. But within the silences of the souls of men an eternal drama is ever being en­acted, in these days as well as in others. And on the outcome of this inner drama rests, ultimately, the outer pageant of history. It is the drama of the Hound of Heaven baying relentlessly upon the track of man. It is the drama of the lost sheep wandering in the wilderness, restless and lonely, feebly searching, while over the hills comes the wiser Shepherd. For His is a shepherd's heart, and He is restless until He holds His sheep in His arms. It is the drama of the Eternal Father drawing the prodigal home unto Himself, where there is bread enough and to spare. It is the drama of the Double Search, as Rufus Jones calls it. And always its chief actor is—the Eternal God of Love.

It is to one strand in this inner drama, one scene, where the Shepherd has found His sheep, that I would direct you. It is the life of absolute and complete and holy obedience to the voice of the Shepherd. But ever throughout the account the accent will be laid upon [52] God, 

• God the initiator, 
• 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.

I. THE NATURE OF HOLY OBEDIENCE

Meister Eckhart wrote: 

"There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves." 

It is just this astonishing life which is willing to follow Him the other half, sincerely to disown itself, this life which intends complete obedience, without any reservations, that I would propose to you in all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness. I mean this literally, ut­terly, completely, and I mean it for you and for me—commit your lives in unreserved obedience to Him.

If you don't realize the revolutionary explosiveness of this proposal you don't understand what I mean. Only now and then comes a man or a woman who, like John Woolman or Francis of Assisi, is willing to be utterly obedient, to go the other half, to follow God's faintest whisper. But when such a commitment comes in a human life, God breaks through, miracles are wrought, world-renewing divine forces are re­leased, history changes. There is nothing more impor­tant now than to have the human race endowed with [53] just such committed lives. 

Now is no time to say, "Lo, here. Lo, there." 

Now is the time to say, "Thou art the man." 

To this extraordinary life I call you—or He calls you through me—not as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to be lived here and now, in industrial America, by you and by me.

This is something wholly different from mild, con­ventional religion which, with respectable skirts held back by dainty fingers, anxiously tries to fish the world out of the mudhole of its own selfishness. Our churches, our meeting houses are full of such re­spectable and amiable people. We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the first half of the way. Many of us have become as mildly and as conven­tionally religious as were the church folk of three cen­turies ago, against whose mildness and mediocrity and passionlessness George Fox and his followers flung themselves with all the passion of a glorious and a new discovery and with all the energy of dedi­cated lives. In some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that for which Christ lived and died.

There is a degree of holy and complete obedience and of joyful self-renunciation and of sensitive listen­ing that is breath-taking. Difference of degree passes over into utter difference of kind, when one tries to [54] follow Him the second half. Jesus put this pointedly when He said, "Ye must be born again" (John 3:3), and Paul knew it: "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature" (2 Cot. 5:17).

George Fox as a youth was religious enough to meet all earthly standards and was even proposed as a student for the ministry. But the insatiable God-hunger in him drove him from such mediocrity into a passionate quest for the real whole-wheat Bread of Life. Sensible relatives told him to settle down and get married. Thinking him crazy, they took him to a doctor to have his blood let—the equivalent of being taken to a psychiatrist in these days, as are modern conscientious objectors to war in Belgium and France. Parents, if some of your children are seized with this imperative God-hunger, don't tell them to snap out of it and get a job, but carry them patiently in your love, or at least keep hands off and let the holy work of God proceed in their souls. Young peo­ple, you who have in you the stirrings of perfection, the sweet, sweet rapture of God Himself within you, be faithful to Him until the last lingering bit of self is surrendered and you are wholly God-possessed.

The life that intends to be wholly obedient, wholly submissive, wholly listening, is astonishing in its com­pleteness. Its joys are ravishing, its peace profound, its humility the deepest, its power world-shaking, its love enveloping, its simplicity that of a trusting child. [55]

It is the life and power in which the prophets and apostles lived. It is the life and power of Jesus of Nazareth, who knew that "when thine eye is single thy whole body is full of light" (Luke 11:34). It is the life and power of the apostle Paul, who resolved not to know anything among men save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It is the life and'power of Saint Francis, that little poor man of God who came nearer to re-living the life of Jesus than has any other man on earth. It is the life and power of George Fox and of Isaac and Mary Penington. It is the life and power and utter obedience of John Woolman who decided, he says, "to place my whole trust in God," to "act on an inner Principle of Virtue, and pursue worldly business no farther than as Truth opened my way therein." It is the life and power of myriads of un­known saints through the ages. It is the life and power of some people now in this room who smile know­ingly as I speak. And it is a life and power that can break forth in this tottering Western culture and re­turn the Church to its rightful life as a fellowship of creative, heaven-led souls.

II. GATEWAYS INTO HOLY OBEDIENCE

In considering one gateway into this life of holy obedience, let us dare to venture together into the inner sanctuary of the soul, where God meets man in [56] awful immediacy. There is an indelicacy in too-ready speech. Paul felt it unlawful to speak of the things of the third heaven. But there is also a false reticence, as if these things were one's own work and one's own possession, about which we should modestly keep quiet, whereas they are wholly God's amazing work and we are nothing, mere passive receivers. "The lion hath roared, who can but tremble? The voice of Jehovah bath spoken, who can but prophesy?" (Amos 3:8).

Some men come into holy obedience through the gateway of profound mystical experience.

It is an overwhelming experience to fall into the hands of the living God, to be invaded to the depths of one's being by His presence, to be, without warn­ing, wholly uprooted from all earth-born securities and assurances, and to be blown by a tempest of un­believable power which leaves one's old proud self utterly, utterly defenseless, until one cries, "All Thy waves and thy billows are gone over me" (Ps. 42:7). Then is the soul swept into a Loving Center of in. eff able sweetness, where calm and unspeakable peace and ravishing joy steal over one. And one knows now why Pascal wrote, in the center of his greatest mo­ment, the single word, "Fire." There stands the world of struggling, sinful, earth-blinded men and nations, of plants and animals and wheeling stars of heaven, all new, all lapped in the tender, persuading [57] Love at the Center. There stand the saints of the ages, their hearts open to view, and lo, their hearts are our heart and their hearts are the heart of the Eternal One. In awful solemnity the Holy One is over all and in all, exquisitely loving, infinitely patient, tenderly smiling. Marks of glory are upon all things, and the marks are cruciform and blood-stained. And one sighs, like the convinced Thomas of old, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28). Dare one lift one's eyes and look? Nay, whither can one look and not see Him? For field and stream and teeming streets are full of Him. Yet as Moses knew, no man can look on God and live—live as his old self. Death comes, blessed death, death of one's alienating will. And one knows what Paul meant when he wrote, "The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God" (Gal. 2:20).

One emerges from such soul-shaking, Love-invaded times into more normal states of consciousness. But one knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world, the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life must henceforth be forever determined by that Real. Like Saint Augustine one asks not for greater certainty of God but only for more steadfast­ness in Him. There, beyond, in Him is the true Center, and we are reduced, as it were, to nothing, for He is all.

Is religion subjective? Nay, its soul is in objectivity,

[58]

in an Other whose Life is our true life, whose Love is our love, whose Joy is our joy, whose Peace is our peace, whose burdens are our burdens, whose Will is our will. Self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it. In glad, amazed humility we cast on Him our little lives in trusting obedience, in erect, serene, and smil­ing joy. And we say, with a writer of Psalms, "Lo, I come: in the book of the law it is written of me, I delight to do Thy will, 0 my God" (Ps. 40:7-8). For nothing else in all of heaven or earth counts so much as His will, His slightest wish, His faintest breathing. And holy obedience sets in, sensitive as a shadow, obedient as a shadow, selfless as a shadow. Not re­luctantly but with ardor one longs to follow Him the second half. Gladly, urgently, promptly one leaps to do His bidding, ready to run and not be weary and to walk and not faint.

Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, work­aday living. And some are led into the state of com­plete obedience by this well-nigh passive route,

[59]

wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us.

But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and pro­gressively, to the divine Will.

But the first step to the obedience of the second half is the flaming vision of the wonder of such a life, a vision which comes occasionally to us all, through biographies of the saints, through the jour­nals of Fox and early Friends, through a life lived before our eyes, through a haunting verse of the Psalms—"Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee" (Ps. 73:25)—through meditation upon the amazing life and death of Jesus, through a flash of illumina­tion or, in Fox's language, a great opening. But whatever the earthly history of this moment of charm, this vision of an absolutely holy life is, I am con­vinced, the invading, urging, inviting, persuading work of the Eternal One. It is curious that modern psychology cannot account wholly for flashes of in­sight of any kind, sacred or secular. [6o] It is as if a fountain of creative Mind were welling up, bubbling to expression within prepared spirits. There is an infinite fountain of lifting power, pressing within us, luring us by dazzling visions, and we can only say, The crea­tive God comes into our souls. An increment of in­finity is about us. Holy is imagination, the gateway of Reality into our hearts. The Hound of Heaven is on our track, the God of Love is wooing us to His Holy Life.

Once having the vision, the second step to holy obedience is this: Begin where you are. Obey now. Use what little obedience you are capable of, even if it be like a grain of mustard seed. Begin where you are. Live this present moment, this present hour as you now sit in your seats, in utter, utter submission and openness toward Him. Listen outwardly to these words, but within, behind the scenes, in the deeper levels of your lives where you are all alone with God the Loving Eternal One, keep up a silent prayer, "Open thou my life. Guide my thoughts where I dare not let them go. But Thou darest. Thy will be done." Walk on the streets and chat with your friends. But every moment behind the scenes be in prayer, offer­ing yourselves in continuous obedience. I find this internal continuous prayer life absolutely essential. It can be carried on day and night, in the thick of business, in home and school. Such prayer of sub­mission can be so simple. [61] It is well to use a single sentence, repeated over and over and over again, such as this: "Be Thou my will. Be Thou my will," or "I open all before Thee. I open all before Thee," or "See earth through heaven. See earth through heaven." This hidden prayer life can pass, in time, beyond words and phrases into mere ejaculations, "My God, my God, my Holy One, my Love," or into the adora­tion of the Upanishad, "0 Wonderful, 0 Wonderful, o Wonderful." Words may cease and one stands and walks and sits and lies in wordless attitudes of adora­tion and submission and rejoicing and exultation and glory.

And the third step in holy obedience, or a counsel, is this: if you slip and stumble and forget God for an hour, and assert your old proud self, and rely upon your own clever wisdom, don't spend too much time in anguished regrets and self-accusations but begin again, just where you are.

Yet a fourth consideration in holy obedience is this: Don't grit your teeth and clench your fists and say, "I will! I will!" Relax. Take hands off. Submit yourself to God. Learn to live in the passive voice—a hard saying for Americans—and let life be willed through you. For "I will" spells not obedience.

III. HUMILITY AND HOLINESS

The fruits of holy obedience are many. But two are so closely linked together that they can scarcely be treated separately. [62] They are the passion for personal holiness and the sense of utter humility. God inflames the soul with a craving for absolute purity. But He, in His glorious otherness, empties us of our­selves in order that He may become all.

Humility does not rest, in final count, upon baffle­ment and discouragement and self-disgust at our shabby lives, a brow-beaten, dog-slinking attitude. It rests upon the disclosure of the consummate wonder of God, upon finding that only God counts, that all our own self-originated intentions are works of straw. And so in lowly humility we must stick close to the Root and count our own powers as nothing except as they are enslaved in His power.

But 0 how slick and weasel-like is self-pride! Our learnedness creeps into our sermons with a clever quotation which adds nothing to God's glory, but a hit to our own. Our cleverness in business Competi­tion earns as much self-flattery as does the possession of the money itself. Our desire to be known and ap­proved by others, to have heads nod approvingly about us behind our backs, and flattering murmurs which we can occasionally overhear, confirm the dis­cernment in Alfred Adler's elevation of the superi­ority motive. Our status as "weighty Friends" gives us secret pleasures which we scarcely own to ourselves, yet thrive upon. Yes, even pride in our own humility is one of the devil's own tricks. [63]

But humility rests upon a holy blindedness, like the blindedness of him who looks steadily into the sun. For wherever he turns his eyes on earth, there he sees only the sun. The God-blinded soul sees naught of self, naught of personal degradation or of personal eminence, but only the Holy Will work­ing impersonally through him, through others, as one objective Life and Power. But what trinkets we have sought after in life, the pursuit of what petty trifles has wasted our years as we have ministered to the enhancement of our own little selves! And what needless anguishes we have suffered because our little selves were defeated, were not flattered, were not cozened and petted! But the blinding God blots out this self and gives humility and true selfhood as wholly full of Him. For as He gives obedience so He graciously gives to us what measure of humility we will accept. Even that is not our own, but His who also gives us obedience. But the humility of the God-blinded soul endures only so long as we look steadily at the Sun. Growth in humility is a measure of our growth in the habit of the Godward-directed mind. And he only is near to God who is exceedingly hum­ble. The last depths of holy and voluntary poverty are not in financial poverty, important as that is; they are in poverty of spirit, in meekness and lowli­ness of soul. [64] 

Explore the depths of humility, not with your in­tellects but with your lives, lived in prayer of humble obedience. And there you will find that humility is not merely a human virtue. For there is a humility that is in God Himself. Be ye humble as God is humble. For love and humility walk hand in hand, in God as well as in man.

But there is something about deepest humility which makes men bold. For utter obedience is self-forgetful obedience. No longer do we hesitate and shuffle and apologize because, say we, we are weak, lowly creatures and the world is a pack of snarling wolves among whom we are sent as sheep by the Shepherd (Matt. io:i6). I must confess that, on human judgment, the world tasks we face are ap-palling—well-nigh hopeless. Only the inner vision of God, only the God-blindedness of unreservedly dedi­cated souls, only the utterly humble ones can bow and break the raging pride of a power-mad world. But self-renunciation means God-possession, the being possessed by God. Out of utter humility and self-forgetfulness comes the thunder of the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord." High station and low are lev­eled before Him. Be not fooled by the world's power. Imposing institutions of war and imperialism and greed are wholly vulnerable for they, and we, are forever in the hands of a conquering God. These are not cheap and hasty words. The high and noble adventures of faith can in our truest moments be seen as no adventures at all, but certainties. [65] And if we live in complete humility in God we can smile in patient assurance as we work. Will you be wise enough and humble enough to be little fools of God? For who can finally stay His power? Who can resist His persuading love? Truly says Saint Augustine, "There is something in humility which raiseth the heart upward." And John Woolm'an says, "Now I find that in the pure obedience the mind learns con­tentment, in appearing weak and foolish to the wis­dom which is of the World; and in these lowly labors, they who stand in a low place, rightly exer­cised under the Cross, will find nourishment."

But God inflames the soul with a burning craving for absolute purity. One burns for complete innocency and holiness of personal life. No man can look on God and live, live in his own faults, live in the shadow of the least self-deceit, live in harm toward His least creatures, whether man or bird or beast or creeping thing. The blinding purity of God in Christ, how captivating, how alluring, how compelling it is! The pure in heart shall see God? More, they who see God shall cry out to become pure in heart, even as He is pure, with all the energy of their souls.

This has been an astonishing and unexpected ele­ment for me. In this day of concern for social righteousness it sounds like a throwback to medieval ideals of saintliness and soul-combing. [66] Our religious heroes of these social gospel days sit before a battery of telephones, with full office equipment, with tele­graph lines to Washington and London and Tokyo and Berlin. And this is needed, desperately needed. Yet there is In the experience of God this insistent, imperative, glorious yearning—the craving for com­plete spotlessness of the inner self before Him.

No average goodness will do, no measuring of our lives by our fellows, but only a relentless, inexor­able divine standard. No relatives suffice; only abso­lutes satisfy the soul committed to holy obedience. Absolute honesty, absolute gentleness, absolute self-control, unwearied patience and thoughtfulness in the midst of the raveling friction of home and office and school and shop. It is said that the ermine can be trapped by surrounding it with a circle of filth. It will die before it will sully its snowy coat. Have we been led astray by our fears, by the fear of saccharine sweetness and light? By the dangers of fanatical scrupulousness and self-inspection and halo-hunting? By the ideal of a back-slapping recommendation of religion by showing we were good fellows after all? By the fear of quietism and of that monastic retreat from the world of men's needs which we associate with medieval passion for holiness of life? Nay, tread not so far from the chasm that you fall into the ditch on the other side. [67] Boldly must we risk the dangers which lie along the margins of excess, if we would live the life of the second half. For the life of obedience is a holy life, a separated life, a renounced life, cut off from worldly compromises, distinct, heaven-dedicated in the midst of men, stainless as the snows upon the mountain tops.

He who walks in obedience, following God the second half, living the life of inner prayer of sub­mission and exultation, on him God's holiness takes hold as a mastering passion of life. Yet ever he cries Out in abysmal sincerity, "I am the blackest of all the sinners of the earth. I am a man of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of Hosts." For humility and holiness are twins in the astonishing birth of obedience in the heart of men. So God draws unworthy us, in loving tenderness, up into fellowship with His glorious self.

IV. ENTRANCE INTO SUFFERING

Another fruit of holy obedience is entrance into suffering. I would not magnify joy and rapture, al­though they are unspeakably great in the committed life. For joy and rapture need no advocates. But we shrink from suffering and can easily call all suffering an evil thing. Yet we live in an epoch of tragic sor­rows, when man is adding to the crueler forces of nature such blasphemous horrors as drag soul as well as body into hell. [68] And holy obedience must walk in this world, not aloof and preoccupied, but stained with sorrow's travail.

Nor is the God-blinded soul given blissful oblivion but, rather, excruciatingly sensitive eyesight toward the world of men. The sources of suffering for the tendered soul are infinitely multiplied, well-nigh be­yond all endurance. Ponder this paradox in religious experience: "Nothing matters; everything matters." I recently had an unforgettable hour with a Hindu monk. He knew the secret of this paradox which we discussed together: "Nothing matters; everything matters." It is a key of entrance into suffering. He who knows only one-half of the paradox can never enter that door of mystery and survive.

There is a lusty, adolescent way of thought among us which oversimplifies the question of suffering. It merely says, "Let us remove it." And some suffering can, through more suffering, be removed. But there is an inexorable residue which confronts you and me and the blighted souls of Europe and China and the Near East and India, awful, unremovable in a life­time, withering all souls not genuinely rooted in Eternity itself. The Germans call it Schicksal or Des­tiny. Under this word they gather all the vast forces of nature and disease and the convulsive upheavals of social life which sweep them along, as individuals, like debris in a raging flood, into an unknown end. Those who are not prepared by the inner certitude of Job, "I know that my Avenger liveth" (Job 19:25), must perish in the flood. [69] 

One returns from Europe with the sound of weep­ing in one's ears, in order to say, "Don't be deceived. You must face Destiny. Preparation is only possible now. Don't be fooled by your sunny skies. When the rains descend and the floods come and the winds blow and beat upon your house, your private dwell­ing, your own family, your own fair hopes, your own strong muscles, your own body, your own soul itself, then it is well-nigh too late to build a house. You can only go inside what house you have and pray that it is founded upon the Rock. Be not deceived by distance in time or space, or the false security of a bank account and an automobile and good health and willing hands to work. Thousands, perhaps millions as good as you have had all these things and are perishing in body and, worse still, in soul today."

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. And some of us Quakers are not yet unde­ceived, and childishly expect our little cushions for our little bodies, in a world inflamed with untold ulcers. Be not fooled by the pleasantness of the Main Line life, and the niceness of Germantown ex­istence, and the quiet coolness of your well-furnished homes. [70] For the plagues of Egypt are upon the world, entering hovel and palace, and there is no escape for you or for me. There is an inexorable amount of suffering in all life, blind, aching, unremovable, not new but only terribly intensified in these days.

One comes back from Europe aghast at having seen how lives as graciously cultured as ours, but rooted only in time and property and reputation, and self-deluded by a mild veneer of religious respecta­bility but unprepared by the amazing life of commit­ment to the Eternal in holy obedience, are now doomed to hopeless, hopeless despair. For if you will accept as normal life only what you can understand, then you will try only to expel the dull, dead weight of Destiny, of inevitable suffering which is a part of normal life, and never come to terms with it or fit your soul to the collar and bear the burden of your suffering which must be borne by you, or enter into the divine education and drastic discipline of sorrow, or rise radiant in the sacrament of pain.

One comes back from Europe to plead with you, you here in these seats, you my pleasant but often easy-living friends, to open your lives to such a bap­tism of Eternity now as turns this world of tumbling change into a wilderness in your eyes and fortifies you with an unshakable peace that passes all under­standing and endures all earthly shocks without soul-destroying rebelliousness. [71] Then and then only can we, weaned from earth, and committed wholly to God alone, hope to become voices crying in this wilder­ness of Philadelphia and London, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in this desert a high­way for our God" (Isa. 40:3). These are old truths. But now is no time for enticing novelties but for a return to the everlasting truths of_, life and suffering and Eternity and unreserved commitment to Him who is over all.

The heart is stretched through suffering, and en­larged. But 0 the agony of this enlarging of the heart, that one may be prepared to enter into the anguish of others! Yet the way of holy obedience leads out from the heart of God and extends through the Valley of the Shadow.

But there is also removable suffering, yet such as yields only to years of toil and fatigue and uncon­querable faith and perchance only to death itself. The Cross as dogma is painless speculation; the Cross as lived suffering is anguish and glory. Yet God, out of the pattern of His own heart, has planted the Cross along the road of holy obedience. And He enacts in the hearts of those He loves the miracle of willingness to welcome suffering and to know it for what it is—the final seal of His gracious love. 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 worlds needs. [72] By inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God's burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us. And He gives us the royal blindness of faith, and the seeing eye of the sensitized soul, and the grace of unflinching obedi­ence. Then we see that nothing matters, and that everything matters, and that this my task matters for me and for my fellow men and for Eternity. And if we he utterly humble we may be given strength to be obedient even unto death, yea the death of the Cross.

In my deepest heart I know that some of us have to face our comfortable, self-oriented lives all over again. The times are too tragic, God's sorrow is too great, man's night is too dark, the Cross is too glori­ous for us to live as we have lived, in anything short of holy obedience. It may or it may not mean change in geography, in profession, in wealth, in earthly se­curity. It does mean this: Some of us will have to enter upon a vow of renunciation and of dedication to the "Eternal Internal" which is as complete and as irrevocable as was the vow of the monk of the Mid-die Ages. Little groups of such utterly dedicated souls, knowing one another in Divine Fellowship, must take an irrevocable vow to live in this world yet not of this world, Franciscans of the Third Order, and if it be His will, kindle again the embers of faith in the midst of a secular world. Our meetings were meant to be such groups, but now too many of them are dulled and cooled and flooded by the secular. [73] But within our meetings such inner bands of men and women, internally set apart, living by a vow of per­petual obedience to the Inner Voice, in the world yet not of the world, ready to go the second half, obedi­ent as a shadow, sensitive as a shadow, selfless as a shadow—such bands of humble prophets can recreate the Society of Friends and the Christian church and shake the countryside for ten miles around.

V. SIMPLICITY

The last fruit of holy obedience is the simplicity of the trusting child, the simplicity of the children of God. It is the simplicity which lies beyond complex­ity. It is the naiveté which is the yonder side of sophis­tication. It is the beginning of spiritual maturity, which comes after the awkward age of religious busy­ness for the Kingdom of God—yet how many are caught, and arrested in development, within this adolescent development of the souls growth! The mark of this simplified life is radiant joy. It lives in the Fellowship of the Transfigured Face. Knowing sorrow to the depths it does not agonize and fret and strain, but in serene, unhurried calm it walks in time with the joy and assurance of Eternity. Knowing fully the complexity of men's problems it cuts through to the Love of God and ever cleaves to Him. Like the mercy of Shakespeare, "'tis mightiest in the might‑jest." [75] But it binds all obedient souls together in the fellowship of humility and simple adoration of Him who is all in all.

I have in mind something deeper than the simpli­fication of our external programs, our absurdly crowded calendars of appointments through which so many pantingly and frantically gasp. These do be­come simplified in holy obedience, and the poise and peace we have been missing can really be found. But there is a deeper, an internal simplification of the whole of one's personality, stilled, tranquil, in child­like trust listening ever to Eternity's whisper, walk­ing with a smile into the dark.

This amazing simplification comes when we "cen­ter down," when life is lived with singleness of eye, from a holy Center where the breath and stillness of Eternity are heavy upon us and we are wholly yielded to Him. Some of you know this holy, recreating Cen­ter of eternal peace and joy and live in it day and night. Some of you may see it over the margin and wistfully long to slip into that amazing Center where the soul is at home with God. Be very faithful to that wistful longing. It is the Eternal Goodness calling you to return Home, to feed upon green pastures and walk beside still waters and live in the peace of the Shepherd's presence. It is the life beyond fevered strain. We are called beyond strain, to peace and power and joy and love and thorough abandonment of self. [75] We are called to put our hands trustingly in His hand and walk the holy way, in no anxiety as­suredly resting in Him.

Douglas Steere wisely says that true religion often appears to be the enemy of the moralist. For religion cuts across the fine distinctions between the several virtues and gathers all virtues into the one supreme quality of love. The wholly obedient life is mastered and unified and simplified and gathered up into the Jove of God and it lives and walks among men in the perpetual flame of that radiant love. For the simpli­fied man loves God with all his heart and mind and soul and strength and abides trustingly in that love. Then indeed do we love our neighbors. And the Fel­lowship of the Horny Hands is identical with the Fellowship of the Transfigured Face, in this Mary-Martha life.

In this day when the burdens of humanity press so heavily upon us I would begin not first with tech­niques of service but with the most "Serious Call to a Devout Life," a life of such humble obedience to the Inner Voice as we have scarcely dared to dream. Hasten unto Him who calls you in the silences of your heart. The Hound of Heaven is ever near us, the voice of the Shepherd is calling us home. Too long have we lingered in double-minded obedience and dared not the certainties of His love. For Him do ye seek, all ye pearl merchants. [76] He is "the food of grown men." Hasten unto Him who is the chief actor of the drama of time and Eternity. It is not too late to love Him utterly and obey Him implicitly and be baptized with the power of the apostolic life. Hear the words of Saint Augustine, as he rued his delay of commitment to Him. "Too late loved I Thee, 0 Thou beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst and shoutedst, and burstedst my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scattered my blindness. Thou breathedst odors, and I drew in breath and pant for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me and I burned for Thy peace. When I shall with my whole soul cleave to Thee, I shall nowhere have sorrow or labor, and my life shall live as wholly full of Thee."