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2022/07/23
Kelly A Testament of Devotion 5] The Simplification of Life
5] The Simplification of Life
The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnight, like Jack's beanstalk, and before we know it we are bowed down with burdens, crushed under committees, strained, breathless, and hurried, panting through a never-ending program of appointments. We are too busy to be good wives to our husbands, good homemakers, good companions of our children, good friends to our friends, and with no time at all to be friends to the friendless. But if we withdraw from public engagements and interests, in order to spend quiet hours with the family, the guilty calls of citizenship whisper disquieting claims in our ears. Our children's schools should receive our interest, the civic problems of our community need our attention, the wider issues of the nation and of the world are heavy upon us. Our professional status, our social obligations, our membership in this or that very important organization, put claims upon us. And in frantic fidelity we try to meet at least the necessary minimum of calls upon us. But we're weary and breathless. And we know and regret that our life is slipping away, with our having tasted so little of the peace and joy and serenity we are persuaded it should yield to a soul of wide caliber. 113 The times for the deeps of the silences of the heart seem so few. And in guilty regret we must postpone till next week that deeper life of unshaken composure in the holy Presence, where we sincerely know our true home is, for this week is much too full.
But we must not spend precious time merely stating the problem. And although we all enjoy feeling sorry for ourselves, we must not linger long, bewailing the poverty of life induced by the overabundance of our opportunities. Nor must we rush hastily at a solution, breathlessly anxious for once to get something, this day, to show for the time we've spent upon our problem. Prune and trim we must, but not with ruthless haste and ready pruning knife, until we have reflected upon the tree we trim, the environment it lives in, and the sap of life which feeds it.
Let me first suggest that we are giving a false explanation of the complexity of our lives. We blame it upon the complex environment. Our complex living, we say, is due to the complex world we live in, with its radios and autos, which give us more stimulation per square hour than used to be given per square day to our grandmothers. This explanation by the outward order leads us to turn wistfully, in some moments, to thoughts of a quiet South Sea Island existence, or to the horse and buggy days of our great grandparents, who went, jingle bells, jingle bells, over the crisp and ringing snow to spend the day with their grandparents on the farm.114 Let me assure you, I have tried the life of the South Seas for a year, the long, lingering leisure of a tropic world. And I found that Americans carry into the tropics their same madcap, feverish life which we know on the mainland. Complexity of our program cannot be blamed upon complexity of our environment, much as we should like to think so. Nor will simplification of life follow simplification of environment. I must confess that I chafed terribly, that year in Hawaii, because in some respects the environment seemed too simple.
We Western peoples are apt to think our great problems are external, environmental. We are not skilled in the inner life, where the real roots of our problem lie. For I would suggest that the true explanation of the complexity of our program is an inner one, not an outer one. The outer distractions of our interests reflect an inner lack of integration of our own lives. We are trying to be several selves at once, without all our selves being organized by a single, mastering Life within us. Each of us tends to be, not a single self, but a whole committee of selves. There is the civic self, the parental self, the financial self, the religious self, the society self, the professional self, the literary self. 115 And each of our selves is in turn a rank individualist, not co-operative bit shouting out his vote loudly for himself when the voting time comes. And all too commonly we follow the common American method of getting a quick decision among conflicting claims within us. It is as if we have a chairman of our committee of the many selves within us, who does not integrate the many into one but who merely counts the votes at each decision, and leaves disgruntled minorities. The claims of each self are still pressed. If we accept service on a committee on Negro education, we still regret we can't help with a Sunday-school class. We are not integrated. We are distraught. We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all.
And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed, and fearful we shall be shallow. For over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is
- a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence,
- a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.
If only we could slip over into that Center!
If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!
We have seen and known some people who seem to have found this deep Center of living, where the fretful calls of life are integrated, where No as
well as Yes can be said with confidence. 116
well as Yes can be said with confidence. 116
- We've seen such lives, integrated, unworried by the tangles of Close decisions, unhurried, cheery, fresh, positive.
- These are not people of dallying idleness nor of ob-ViOUsly mooning meditation; they are busy carrying their full load as well as we, but without any chafing Of the shoulders with the burden, with quiet joy and springing step.
- Surrounding the trifles of their daily life is an aura of infinite peace and power and joy.
- We are so strained and tense, with our burdened lives; they are so poised and at peace.
If the Society of Friends has anything to say, it lies in this region primarily.
Life is meant to be lived frOrxi a Center, a divine Center.
Each one of us can live such a life of amazing power and peace and serenity, of integration and confidence and simplified multiplicity, on one condition—that is, if we really want to.
There is a divine Abyss within us all, a holy lfiriite Center, a Heart,
a Life who speaks in us and thrcn,.gh us to the world.
We have all heard this holy Whisper at times.
At times we have followed the Whisper, and amazing equilibrium of life, amazing effectiveness of living set in.
But too many of us have heeded the Voice only at times. Only at times have we submitted to His holy guidance.
We have not Counted this Holy Thing within us to be the most precious thing in the world.
We have not surrendered all else, to attend to it alone.
Let me repeat. 117
Most of us, I fear, have not surrendered all else, in order to attend to the Holy Within.
John Woolman did. He resolved so to order his outward affairs as to be, at every moment, attentive to that voice.
John Woolman did. He resolved so to order his outward affairs as to be, at every moment, attentive to that voice.
He simplified life on the basis of its relation to the divine Center.
Nothing else really counted so much as attentiveness to that Root of all living which he found within himself.
And the Quaker discovery lies in just that:
the welling-up whispers of divine guidance and love and presence, more precious than heaven or earth.
John Woolman never let the demands of his business grow beyond his real needs.
When too many customers came, he sent them elsewhere, to more needy merchants and tailors.
His outward life became simplified on the basis of an inner integration.
He found that we can be heaven-led men and women, and
he surrendered himself completely, unreservedly to that blessed leading, keeping warm and close to the Center.
I said his outward life became simplified, and used the passive voice intentionally. He didn't have to struggle, and renounce, and strain to achieve simplicity.
I said his outward life became simplified, and used the passive voice intentionally. He didn't have to struggle, and renounce, and strain to achieve simplicity.
He yielded to the Center and his life became simple.
It was synoptic. It had singleness of eye.
"If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light."
His many selves were integrated into a single true self, whose whole aim was humbly walking in the presence and guidance and will of God. 118
There was no shouting down of a disgruntled minority by a majority vote among his selves.
It was as if there were in him a presiding chairman who, in the solemn, holy silence of inwardness, took the sense of the meeting.
I would suggest that the Quaker method of conducting business meetings is also applicable to the conducting of our individual lives, inwardly.
The Holy One stood by, in the inner life of John Wool-man,
as did Jesus when He stood over against the treasury and watched men and women casting their gifts into the treasury.
And under the silent, watchful eye of the Holy One we all are standing, whether we know it or not.
And under the silent, watchful eye of the Holy One we all are standing, whether we know it or not.
And in that Center, in that holy Abyss where the Eternal dwells at the base of our being, our programs, our gifts to Him, our offerings of duties performed are again and again revised in their values.
Many of the things we are doing seem so important to us. We haven't been able to say No to them, because they seemed so important.
But if we center down, as the old phrase goes, and live in that holy Silence which is dearer than life, and
take our life program into the silent places of the heart, with complete openness, ready to do, ready to renounce according to His leading,
then many of the things we are doing lose their vitality for us.
I should like to testify to this, as a personal experience, graciously given.
There is a reevaluation of much that we do or try to do, which is done for us, and we know what to do and what to let alone. 119
Let me talk very intimately and very earnestly with you about Him who is dearer than life.
Let me talk very intimately and very earnestly with you about Him who is dearer than life.
Do you really want to live your lives, every moment of your lives, in His Presence? Do you long for Him, crave Him? Do you love His Presence?
Does every drop of blood in your body love Him?
Does every breath you draw breathe a prayer, a praise to Him?
Do you sing and dance within yourselves, as you glory in His love?
Have you set yourselves to be His, and only His, walking every moment in holy obedience?
I know I'm talking like an old-time evangelist.
But I can't help that, nor dare I restrain myself and get prim and conventional.
We have too long been prim and restrained.
The fires of the love of God, of our love toward God, and of His love toward us, are very hot.
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength."
Do we really do it?
Is love steadfastly directed toward God, in our minds, all day long?
Do we intersperse our work with gentle prayers and praises to Him?
Do we live in the steady peace of God, a peace down at the very depths of our souls, where all strain is gone and God is already victor over the world,
already victor over our weaknesses?
This life, this abiding, enduring peace that never fails,
this serene power and unhurried conquest,
inward conquest over ourselves,
out‑ward conquest over the world,
is meant to be ours.
It is a life that is freed from strain and anxiety and hurry,
for something of the Cosmic Patience of God becomes ours.
Are our lives unshakable, because we are clear down on bed rock, rooted and grounded in the love of God? 120
This is the first and the great commandment.
Do you want to live in such an amazing divine Presence that life is transformed and transfigured and transmuted into peace and power and glory and miracle? If you do, then you can.
Do you want to live in such an amazing divine Presence that life is transformed and transfigured and transmuted into peace and power and glory and miracle? If you do, then you can.
But if you say you haven't the time to go down into the recreating silences, I can only say to you, "Then you don't really want to, you don't yet love God above all else in the world, with all your heart and soul and mind and strength."
For, except for spells of sickness in the family and when the children are small, when terrific pressure comes upon us, we find time for what we really want to do.
I should like to be mercilessly drastic in uncovering any sham pretense of being wholly devoted to the inner holy Presence, in singleness of love to God.
I should like to be mercilessly drastic in uncovering any sham pretense of being wholly devoted to the inner holy Presence, in singleness of love to God.
But I must confess that it doesn't take time, or complicate your program. I find that a life of little whispered words of adoration, of praise, of prayer, of worship can be breathed all through the day.
One can have a very busy day, outwardly speaking, and yet be steadily in the holy Presence. We do need a half-hour or an hour of quiet reading and relaxation. 121
But I find that one can carry the recreating silences within oneself, well-nigh all the time.
But I find that one can carry the recreating silences within oneself, well-nigh all the time.
With delight I read Brother Lawrence, in his Practice of the Presence of God.
At the close of the Fourth Conversation it is reported of him,
"He was never hasty nor loitering, but did each thing in its season, with an even, uninterrupted composure and tranquillity of spirit.
'The time of business,' he said, 'does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.' "
Our real problem, in failing to center down, is not a lack of time;
it is, I fear, in too many of us, lack of joyful, enthusiastic delight in Him, lack of deep, deep-drawing love directed toward Him at every hour of the day and night.
I think it is clear that I am talking about a revolutionary way of living.
I think it is clear that I am talking about a revolutionary way of living.
Religion isn't something to be added to our other duties, and thus make our lives yet more complex.
The life with God is the center of life, and all else is remodelled and integrated by it. It gives the singleness of eye.
The most important thing is not to be perpetually passing out cups of cold water to a thirsty world.
We can get so fearfully busy trying to carry Out the second great commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," that we are under-developed in our devoted love to God.
But we must love God as well as neighbor.
These things ye ought to have done and not to have left the other only partially done. 122
There is a way of life so hid with Christ in God that in the midst of the day's business one is inwardly lifting brief prayers, short ejaculations of praise, subdued whispers of adoration and of tender love to the Beyond that is within.
There is a way of life so hid with Christ in God that in the midst of the day's business one is inwardly lifting brief prayers, short ejaculations of praise, subdued whispers of adoration and of tender love to the Beyond that is within.
No one need know about it. I only speak to you because it is a sacred trust, not mine but to be given to others.
One can live in a well-nigh continuous state of unworded prayer,
directed toward God, directed toward people and enterprises we have on our heart.
There is no hurry about it all; it is a life unspeakable and full of glory, an inner world of splendor within which we, unworthy, may live.
Some of you know it and live in it; others of you may wistfully long for it; it can be yours.
Now out from such a holy Center come the commissions of life.
Now out from such a holy Center come the commissions of life.
Our fellowship with God issues in world-concern.
We cannot keep the love of God to ourselves. It spills over. It quickens us. It makes us see the world's needs anew.
We love people and we grieve to see them blind when they might be seeing, asleep with all the world's comforts when they ought to be awake and living sacrificially, accepting the world's goods as their right when they really hold them only in temporary trust.
It is because from this holy Center we relove people, relove our neighbors as ourselves, that we are bestirred to be means of their awakening. 123
The deepest need of men is
The deepest need of men is
- not food and clothing and shelter, important as they are.
- It is God.
We have mistaken the nature of poverty, and thought it was economic poverty.
No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God's recreating, loving peace.
Peer into poverty and see if we are really getting down to the deepest needs, in our economic salvation schemes. These are important.
But they lie farther along the road, secondary steps toward world reconstruction. The primary step Is a holy life, transformed and radiant in the glory of God.
This love of people is well-nigh as amazing as the love of God.
This love of people is well-nigh as amazing as the love of God.
Do we want to help people because we feel sorry for them, or because we genuinely love them?
The world needs something deeper than pity; it needs love.
(How trite that sounds, how real it is!)
But in our love of people are we to be excitedly hurried, sweeping all men and tasks into our loving concern?
No, that is God's function.
But He, working within us, portions out His vast concern into bundles, and lays on each of us our portion. These become our tasks. Life from the Center is a heaven-directed life.
Much of our acceptance of multitudes of obligations is due to our inability to say No. We calculated that that task had to be done, and we saw no one ready to undertake it. 124
Much of our acceptance of multitudes of obligations is due to our inability to say No. We calculated that that task had to be done, and we saw no one ready to undertake it. 124
We calculated the need, and then calculated our time, and decided maybe we could squeeze it in somewhere.
But the decision was a heady decision, not made within the sanctuary of the soul. 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 and whispered promptings of encouragement from the Center of our life, or
- on the basis of a lack of any inward rising" of that Life to encourage us in the call,
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.
Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power.
Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power.
It is simple. It is serene. It is amazing. It is triumphant. It is radiant.
It takes no time, but it occupies all our time.
And it makes our life programs new and overcoming.
We need not get frantic. He is at the helm.
And when our little day is done we lie down quietly in peace, for all is well.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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 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,
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,
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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