Quaker Practice: Way of Cross/ Witnessing
QUAKER PRACTICE: WAY of CROSS
260. The Way of the Cross: The Gospel Record (by Mary C. Morrison; 1985)
About the Author—Mary Morrison describes herself as 49% Quaker, 51% Episcopalian. She wrote 4 pamphlets before this one [120, 198, 219, 242, & 2 after (311, 364), the last at age 92]. Gospel Group study has had a long history at PH. Henry Burton Sharman began it at Pendle Hill’s beginnings in 1930; he taught for 3 yrs; his student Dora Wilson taught it 20 yrs. Mary Morrison taught it from 1957-77. [This pamphlet is part of her hope to lead people to the heart of the Gospel message & to describe Jesus’ life journey that became the Way].
Way of the Cross was for Jesus and is for us a much longer walk than [the Via Dolorosa]. It is the story of how Jesus lived out from beginning to end most truly and fully what was in him. True artists are those who shape not sounds or objects, but their own lives as they walk their path of life [as Jesus did]. Mary Morrison
We look at Jesus, crucified; & we see what we would rather not see, ever, during all our life: suffering; helplessness; defeat; humiliation; sorrow; death. Jesus’ experience draws our eyes not because it's unique, but because it can be ours. We need to know how he faced those things. John tells 1 story of this time; Luke another; Matthew & Mark unite to tell the third.
In John’s Gospel Jesus seems to stride along the road, carrying his own cross. [There is concern for others; there is a sense of a cry of triumph; there is not a sense of human need. We may have been luck enough to know people who met suffering and death like this, and who, moving on, left a blessing behind them. We may have met our crises strongly and triumphantly; but it does not happen often. There remains the uncomfortable thought, “What if you can’t do it that way?” So we look away ashamed.
We look at Jesus, crucified; & we see what we would rather not see, ever, during all our life: suffering; helplessness; defeat; humiliation; sorrow; death. Jesus’ experience draws our eyes not because it's unique, but because it can be ours. We need to know how he faced those things. John tells 1 story of this time; Luke another; Matthew & Mark unite to tell the third.
In John’s Gospel Jesus seems to stride along the road, carrying his own cross. [There is concern for others; there is a sense of a cry of triumph; there is not a sense of human need. We may have been luck enough to know people who met suffering and death like this, and who, moving on, left a blessing behind them. We may have met our crises strongly and triumphantly; but it does not happen often. There remains the uncomfortable thought, “What if you can’t do it that way?” So we look away ashamed.
Then our eyes are drawn back, to Luke’s Gospel. When Jesus comes along the road, exhausted, battered & bruised, he is not too exhausted to really see, the women along the road, his crucifiers, the penitent thief, or to commend himself in trust to God, the deepest, most personal of all his relationships. He is always in relationship in Luke’s story. [Again we ask]: “But what if you can’t? How can we follow him? We look away again.
Our eyes are drawn back again to the story Matthew and Mark join in telling. Jesus comes along that road, flogged, bleeding exhausted, dehydrated. They give him something undrinkable to drink. Jesus is alone in this story, and it is true that he cannot save himself. And that last and deepest relationship has vanished, it is nowhere to be found. Jesus cries out; there is no answer, and he dies. Terrible. But wonderful.
Here at last is the Jesus who can hold our gaze, who can draw us to him. [We do not ask, “What if I can’t.”] Jesus does not “curse God and die”; this is the ending that deserves a triumphant cry, [Jesus conquers nature and death]. We need all 3 pictures of Jesus at his crucifixion; this last one has the ultimate power to hold us and draw us in. God could save him [and us] at the very moment when he felt most completely lost; this we can follow.
I have begun in this way because here is where we all usually begin—& end—in thinking about the Way of the Cross. The Way of the Cross was for Jesus & is for us a much longer walk than [the Via Dolorosa]. It is the story of how Jesus lived out from beginning to end most truly & fully what was in him. True artists are those who shape not sounds or objects, but their own lives as they walk their path of life. Jesus did this supremely. It was Jesus’ life-journey to uniqueness and Godhood. It is also the human journey, taken step by step.
Most who have been parents have had a sense that the children who come to us are of “the Holy Spirit.” As children we may have been lucky enough to be with elders who saw promise in us. And all of us are heirs of a great tradition. Jesus could and did lay claim to all of this. [And with the story of the “lost” 12-year old boy, there is a sense of Jesus asking, “Didn’t you know I’d be at the Temple?” During the long silence, Jesus “advanced in wisdom and stature,” [probably by] a very human process.
What does it tell us about Jesus that he came to John [as part of a crowd] and was dipped by him into the River Jordan? He has grown up in a great tradition and has loved it. Now he must begin to question some of its easier and more comfortable assumptions. We find this a painful process; perhaps Jesus did too. Conscious choice of the Way of the Cross begins. And so Jesus comes to John the Baptist and gives himself over to the experience that John offers: [full-immersion baptism]. It involves 2 experiences: being accepted; knowing the powers that are within us. Perhaps we suddenly come, one day, to an inward sense of having all that we’ve been doing and thinking come together into a harmonious whole. With Jesus what is in him and must be lived out well is his sense that he has been chosen and given the power to usher in the Kingdom of God.
Together, acceptance & temptation are really 2 halves of one experience. These temptations are opportunities. 1st is the opportunity to test your acceptance & use your power for yourself. 2nd is the opportunity to prove it to the crowds. 3rd is the opportunity to use them within the existing, hardened channels of power. Nothing in all the Gospels is more exciting than his recognition that these opportunities are in fact temptations. With Jesus’ help we can see this too, & make of our own small way the Way of the Cross, with power subservient to love.
The most helpful aspect of his way was the fact that he did not know what it was. He had to grope along the path and test every step. 1st, Jesus begins to work with what he has been taught. As we read we can watch his concepts grow and change. [He learned the difference between miracles of proof and self-dramatization and miracles of compassion; the difference between his healing people and being an instrument of healing].
Conflicts run almost all the way through the Gospel between: patience and impatience; love and anger; peace and violence. They run all the way along his path of the Messiah, and in them we can see him feeling his way into what it means to be the one who ushers in the Kingdom. His path begins as a way of love and gentleness. He never claims the Messiahship. The moment comes when he says to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am? . . . Who do you say that I am?” My thesis is that he really needed to know the answers for his own sake; that what they thought of him was an important part of his knowledge of his Way.
` He has dealt inwardly & outwardly with love & anger, peace & violence & he has arrived at the knowledge that he can resolve these conflicts only by receiving violence, absorbing it, dying from it, & creating new life within it, [thus making] his power subservient to love. Human nature seems naturally to think that power sits up high & is able to accomplish things, rather than standing low & being able to endure things. But Jesus knew his way. He said: “Pagan Kings have power over the people ... But this isn’t the way it is with you ... rather the leader must be like the servant.” & so he went his Way to the very end. It wasn’t possible for death to hold him or that Way to have an end. Jesus lived out fully what was in him & took the consequences fully upon himself; & God did the rest. [We hope for the same] in our long walk. The thought is so simple it is hardly comprehensible.
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63. Ninth Hour (by Gilbert Kilpack; 1951)
About the Author—Gilbert Kilpack (1914-99) was born & raised in Portland, Oregon. He did undergraduate work at the University of Oregon & received an M.A. degree from Oberlin College in Christian Philosophy. He spent 5 years as Stony Run Friends Meeting's (Baltimore) executive secretary. He joined Pendle Hill's staff in '48, becoming Director of Studies in '54. He gave Philadelphia Young Friends Movement’s Wm. Penn Lecture in '46, The City of God & City of Man, which addressed issues raised by the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings.
[Introduction]—Out of the weak things of this world God brings forth the mighty, out of the despised things, the magnificent and out of darkness light. God so love the world that he hid his son’s last hours [from the 6th to the 9th], in darkness. God knew people would never find God’s son except in darkness. Henceforth it is not Judas treading alone in the night but councils, churches, factories, philosophies, that come with a betraying kiss. The darkness of the 9th hour is become the darkness of our century. We are a 9th hour people, a 9th hour civilization and all our mighty generators cannot dispel the darkness. On what shall we meditate and how shall we pray in this our 9th hour? [The following] is what I have thought.
[My Call to Witness]—[I was ashamed to speak my witness in the shadow of] St. Paul, St. Francis, George Fox, Pascal, John Woolman, Dostoievsky. There came a rebuke: You shall not hold a candle to Dante, but you shall carry a light in your own dark times. I am come to teach my people and until the last soul is perfected, my witnesses are all too few. There are some whom I am not intended to reach, that must be; someone else has been given the light to fill their need. I beg to be heard as a poor creature, not that I may be seen humble, but that the Lord may be seen magnificent. The dangers of enthusiasm are, I think not half so damning as that calculating caution which binds and gags a host of persons of otherwise good intentions.
God has a word for me alone, a word no one else can utter. So he has for every one that ever breathed, a word direct & pure that can't well fit [anyone else]. I must go forward with my word though it be against the whole world, for it isn't my word, but his. I must testify to the root of all evil, our times' sorrows, disbelief's torment, to finding a joyous community of the Lord, & eternal truths which sustain us even in darkness. There is a systematic logical ordering of beliefs, but there is another order which goes beyond reasoning & this I would call the holy spirit's ordering. We must go back to [the 9th hour] of an ancient scandal to straighten out our logic.
[Heirs to the Cross]—The Jews and Romans barbarously nailed Jesus to a cross. Jesus was of the line of prophets, and prophets have been outrageously disrespectful of ancient customs and have always rebelled against human authority, never content to conduct themselves properly. His death was a great stumbling block to the convincement of the world. There have always been persons who perhaps with fine intentions rushed forward to remove the stumbling block, to hide all suggestions of scandal, [to make Jesus respectable.] In doing so they lead others into greater darkness. This scandalous proceeding was God’s entrance into a dark world. Henceforth the cross is become the symbol of God’s love to all and everyone’s gateway into the kingdom. The drama of Golgotha must be reenacted within each of us. We must suffer the humiliation of the worlds’ bad opinion of us and the crucifixion of our self-sufficiency. What burden can be compared with that of those who bear their [self-made] crosses alone? That is, those who live their life alone.
The cross in that darkness is the scandal by which God found entrance into his own world, but God has sworn that we shall not be saved against our will; we must add our wounds to his before the 9th hour is finished. To postpone the cross to a more advantageous time is to deny it altogether. Isn't the denier still weeping? There is yet time to join our tears with his. It isn't so much the sins of the world which keep Jesus on the cross as it is the disparity between his promises & his church's timidity. When complacency, envy, judgment and avarice close in, there is no hope but to hoist this pure symbol of the inward eye of prayer. Though sons of the saints, we are more truly sons of Christ, the living spirit. If we are his sons, we are heirs to his cross; there is no other way.
[Dwelling on the Sunny Side of Christ]—The cross is as inherently a part of our being as our hands and feet. Each generation, each nation has its own peculiar temptations, afflictions and burdens which are its own occasion wherein the cross may bear them to resurrection. But the cross that is before us we deny. [We wait for the Kingdom to come]. Do we expect the Kingdom will fall like a ripe plum into our empty baskets?
We do not know Jesus; we do not know him because we do not want his cross. If we would know the truth, we must meditate upon Christ the despised one, the honored one. [Once it was dangerous and humiliating to be a Christian]. Nowadays it is healthy [and easy] to be a Christian. Forgive us, Lord, that we have not pleased thee, but thy suffering is not pleasing to us. [You who have never said no to the world]. You who have never been poor, never despised, never spat upon, never deserted, never scourged, how can you know of the Christ? Do you presume to sit in judgment on the Son of Man? We can argue him away, but he remains, as he stood before Pilate, waiting in patience for that moment when our hearts shall break open by his love. We shall be known by our obedience. We shall be judged by our tears. And we shall know heaven by our love.
I am clinging to that inward ground on which God stands to continue his work, that secret habitation from which he cannot be removed. God, save us from ourselves. We are polite and refined, quiet and respectable, but in our innermost part sits the demon of the universe. We fear to annoy him, he looks so much like ourselves. And so we come, not with many words but only in despair of self and hope in thee.
Our eyes are drawn back again to the story Matthew and Mark join in telling. Jesus comes along that road, flogged, bleeding exhausted, dehydrated. They give him something undrinkable to drink. Jesus is alone in this story, and it is true that he cannot save himself. And that last and deepest relationship has vanished, it is nowhere to be found. Jesus cries out; there is no answer, and he dies. Terrible. But wonderful.
Here at last is the Jesus who can hold our gaze, who can draw us to him. [We do not ask, “What if I can’t.”] Jesus does not “curse God and die”; this is the ending that deserves a triumphant cry, [Jesus conquers nature and death]. We need all 3 pictures of Jesus at his crucifixion; this last one has the ultimate power to hold us and draw us in. God could save him [and us] at the very moment when he felt most completely lost; this we can follow.
I have begun in this way because here is where we all usually begin—& end—in thinking about the Way of the Cross. The Way of the Cross was for Jesus & is for us a much longer walk than [the Via Dolorosa]. It is the story of how Jesus lived out from beginning to end most truly & fully what was in him. True artists are those who shape not sounds or objects, but their own lives as they walk their path of life. Jesus did this supremely. It was Jesus’ life-journey to uniqueness and Godhood. It is also the human journey, taken step by step.
Most who have been parents have had a sense that the children who come to us are of “the Holy Spirit.” As children we may have been lucky enough to be with elders who saw promise in us. And all of us are heirs of a great tradition. Jesus could and did lay claim to all of this. [And with the story of the “lost” 12-year old boy, there is a sense of Jesus asking, “Didn’t you know I’d be at the Temple?” During the long silence, Jesus “advanced in wisdom and stature,” [probably by] a very human process.
What does it tell us about Jesus that he came to John [as part of a crowd] and was dipped by him into the River Jordan? He has grown up in a great tradition and has loved it. Now he must begin to question some of its easier and more comfortable assumptions. We find this a painful process; perhaps Jesus did too. Conscious choice of the Way of the Cross begins. And so Jesus comes to John the Baptist and gives himself over to the experience that John offers: [full-immersion baptism]. It involves 2 experiences: being accepted; knowing the powers that are within us. Perhaps we suddenly come, one day, to an inward sense of having all that we’ve been doing and thinking come together into a harmonious whole. With Jesus what is in him and must be lived out well is his sense that he has been chosen and given the power to usher in the Kingdom of God.
Together, acceptance & temptation are really 2 halves of one experience. These temptations are opportunities. 1st is the opportunity to test your acceptance & use your power for yourself. 2nd is the opportunity to prove it to the crowds. 3rd is the opportunity to use them within the existing, hardened channels of power. Nothing in all the Gospels is more exciting than his recognition that these opportunities are in fact temptations. With Jesus’ help we can see this too, & make of our own small way the Way of the Cross, with power subservient to love.
The most helpful aspect of his way was the fact that he did not know what it was. He had to grope along the path and test every step. 1st, Jesus begins to work with what he has been taught. As we read we can watch his concepts grow and change. [He learned the difference between miracles of proof and self-dramatization and miracles of compassion; the difference between his healing people and being an instrument of healing].
Conflicts run almost all the way through the Gospel between: patience and impatience; love and anger; peace and violence. They run all the way along his path of the Messiah, and in them we can see him feeling his way into what it means to be the one who ushers in the Kingdom. His path begins as a way of love and gentleness. He never claims the Messiahship. The moment comes when he says to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am? . . . Who do you say that I am?” My thesis is that he really needed to know the answers for his own sake; that what they thought of him was an important part of his knowledge of his Way.
` He has dealt inwardly & outwardly with love & anger, peace & violence & he has arrived at the knowledge that he can resolve these conflicts only by receiving violence, absorbing it, dying from it, & creating new life within it, [thus making] his power subservient to love. Human nature seems naturally to think that power sits up high & is able to accomplish things, rather than standing low & being able to endure things. But Jesus knew his way. He said: “Pagan Kings have power over the people ... But this isn’t the way it is with you ... rather the leader must be like the servant.” & so he went his Way to the very end. It wasn’t possible for death to hold him or that Way to have an end. Jesus lived out fully what was in him & took the consequences fully upon himself; & God did the rest. [We hope for the same] in our long walk. The thought is so simple it is hardly comprehensible.
http://www.pendlehill.org/product-category/pamphlets
www.facebook.com/pendlehill?fref=ts
63. Ninth Hour (by Gilbert Kilpack; 1951)
About the Author—Gilbert Kilpack (1914-99) was born & raised in Portland, Oregon. He did undergraduate work at the University of Oregon & received an M.A. degree from Oberlin College in Christian Philosophy. He spent 5 years as Stony Run Friends Meeting's (Baltimore) executive secretary. He joined Pendle Hill's staff in '48, becoming Director of Studies in '54. He gave Philadelphia Young Friends Movement’s Wm. Penn Lecture in '46, The City of God & City of Man, which addressed issues raised by the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings.
[Introduction]—Out of the weak things of this world God brings forth the mighty, out of the despised things, the magnificent and out of darkness light. God so love the world that he hid his son’s last hours [from the 6th to the 9th], in darkness. God knew people would never find God’s son except in darkness. Henceforth it is not Judas treading alone in the night but councils, churches, factories, philosophies, that come with a betraying kiss. The darkness of the 9th hour is become the darkness of our century. We are a 9th hour people, a 9th hour civilization and all our mighty generators cannot dispel the darkness. On what shall we meditate and how shall we pray in this our 9th hour? [The following] is what I have thought.
[My Call to Witness]—[I was ashamed to speak my witness in the shadow of] St. Paul, St. Francis, George Fox, Pascal, John Woolman, Dostoievsky. There came a rebuke: You shall not hold a candle to Dante, but you shall carry a light in your own dark times. I am come to teach my people and until the last soul is perfected, my witnesses are all too few. There are some whom I am not intended to reach, that must be; someone else has been given the light to fill their need. I beg to be heard as a poor creature, not that I may be seen humble, but that the Lord may be seen magnificent. The dangers of enthusiasm are, I think not half so damning as that calculating caution which binds and gags a host of persons of otherwise good intentions.
God has a word for me alone, a word no one else can utter. So he has for every one that ever breathed, a word direct & pure that can't well fit [anyone else]. I must go forward with my word though it be against the whole world, for it isn't my word, but his. I must testify to the root of all evil, our times' sorrows, disbelief's torment, to finding a joyous community of the Lord, & eternal truths which sustain us even in darkness. There is a systematic logical ordering of beliefs, but there is another order which goes beyond reasoning & this I would call the holy spirit's ordering. We must go back to [the 9th hour] of an ancient scandal to straighten out our logic.
[Heirs to the Cross]—The Jews and Romans barbarously nailed Jesus to a cross. Jesus was of the line of prophets, and prophets have been outrageously disrespectful of ancient customs and have always rebelled against human authority, never content to conduct themselves properly. His death was a great stumbling block to the convincement of the world. There have always been persons who perhaps with fine intentions rushed forward to remove the stumbling block, to hide all suggestions of scandal, [to make Jesus respectable.] In doing so they lead others into greater darkness. This scandalous proceeding was God’s entrance into a dark world. Henceforth the cross is become the symbol of God’s love to all and everyone’s gateway into the kingdom. The drama of Golgotha must be reenacted within each of us. We must suffer the humiliation of the worlds’ bad opinion of us and the crucifixion of our self-sufficiency. What burden can be compared with that of those who bear their [self-made] crosses alone? That is, those who live their life alone.
The cross in that darkness is the scandal by which God found entrance into his own world, but God has sworn that we shall not be saved against our will; we must add our wounds to his before the 9th hour is finished. To postpone the cross to a more advantageous time is to deny it altogether. Isn't the denier still weeping? There is yet time to join our tears with his. It isn't so much the sins of the world which keep Jesus on the cross as it is the disparity between his promises & his church's timidity. When complacency, envy, judgment and avarice close in, there is no hope but to hoist this pure symbol of the inward eye of prayer. Though sons of the saints, we are more truly sons of Christ, the living spirit. If we are his sons, we are heirs to his cross; there is no other way.
[Dwelling on the Sunny Side of Christ]—The cross is as inherently a part of our being as our hands and feet. Each generation, each nation has its own peculiar temptations, afflictions and burdens which are its own occasion wherein the cross may bear them to resurrection. But the cross that is before us we deny. [We wait for the Kingdom to come]. Do we expect the Kingdom will fall like a ripe plum into our empty baskets?
We do not know Jesus; we do not know him because we do not want his cross. If we would know the truth, we must meditate upon Christ the despised one, the honored one. [Once it was dangerous and humiliating to be a Christian]. Nowadays it is healthy [and easy] to be a Christian. Forgive us, Lord, that we have not pleased thee, but thy suffering is not pleasing to us. [You who have never said no to the world]. You who have never been poor, never despised, never spat upon, never deserted, never scourged, how can you know of the Christ? Do you presume to sit in judgment on the Son of Man? We can argue him away, but he remains, as he stood before Pilate, waiting in patience for that moment when our hearts shall break open by his love. We shall be known by our obedience. We shall be judged by our tears. And we shall know heaven by our love.
I am clinging to that inward ground on which God stands to continue his work, that secret habitation from which he cannot be removed. God, save us from ourselves. We are polite and refined, quiet and respectable, but in our innermost part sits the demon of the universe. We fear to annoy him, he looks so much like ourselves. And so we come, not with many words but only in despair of self and hope in thee.
While the old world dies, and with it all self-sufficient creation, grant us, Almighty One, patience to wait and to know it’s the travail of a new birth, a new dawn, in the glory of which a new people shall inherit the earth. Gilbert Kilpack
[Human Sanctity]—[The rest of Peter’s life was the result] of the 9th hour when Peter, weeping, looked upon the ground and saw how great was his fall; then raising his eyes he looked upon the cross and saw the height to which he might be lifted. There is no human sanctity without the inward suffering and the humiliation of the 9th hour. Peter does not labor for virtue; it is given him when he discovers good and evil dwelling side by side and he recognizes the one by the other. The mark of sanctity is to live in absolute obedience to each day’s revealing of [God’s personal destination for you.] Sanctity is the cultivation of sorrow over separation from God; it is the aura of truth surrounding one with whom human endowments and earthly situations have been divinized; it is faithful discipline; it is the spirit of joy which attends all acts.
There is no saintly act; there is only a saintly spirit. A person of false motives may go through identical motions, but the issue is always corrupt though it be to feed the hungry, & raise the dead. The saints are given us 1st for encouragement & 2nd for judgment. They live & breathe at the heart of every generation. The 1st proceeding of sanctity is to abolish legalism. Christian perfection isn't outward form but inward fact, in a word, charity.
[Christian Quest and the Church]—Humans are by definition a chasm of freedom, a vast spiritual void. There is almost no evil greater than despair of the search [to fill that void]. Only the love of God, God’s people and his world can fill it. We all want deliverance—on our own terms. God confounds our pride by hiding majestic principles in things of low degree. In our quest we demand a rule of thumb; none shall be given. We are in God’s hands & we have the Spirit; “it is enough.” We are born to know God, to love God, to live in God’s Kingdom; we are to shake off the world’s delusive freedom, and accept the bondage of the Spirit and perfect freedom.
[Jesus’ 1st church was in the 9th hour] with murderers, thieves & soldiers. Not because I may be good am I a church member, but because I desire good. The church is the only true unity of all people. Other ties are creaturely bonds, serving their day & perishing. I have come to believe that the church is our true vocation & home. The inward church is our spiritual unitedness through God to all people, past & present. Its nature is that of prayer & work. There is no salvation outside the church. In God’s heart the church is accomplished; in this world it is poor, defeated, obscure, hard to find. The Church is the living Christ spread out over all the world. We recognize the true Spirit by his evidence & through him are able to resist evil & to accomplish the good. To know God through Christ & to know one another in him, this is the perfect unity of the church which can't be broken.
The church is a moving, growing life & not a legal corporation. The church is the living Spirit in people, seeking an outward form harmonious to itself. Let us not look for change in the church but for progress. I pray that we may all know & recognize one another in the church of the holy Spirit. The church is God’s way of ordering the world. The mystical body of Christ is all faithful souls & all evil-doers encircled by the love which flows from the Christ yet on his cross.
The Mystical Body is the spiritual Christ spread out in all lands passing from life to life his kingdom on earth. The church is the holy Spirit, yet also the holy Spirit communicating itself in all possible visible forms. Let us look at Quakers as a church in which all tradition & forms are held in perpetual openness to the Spirit’s purifying fires. If the Spirit of Christ comes into individual lives to free them from worldly allegiance, is it too much to expect that the same shall be accomplished in the church? Light shall penetrate to dark corners. & this shall come about because the church is God’s, as is the power & the glory. [I have had dreams & visions of: the world’s intrusion into the church; the savagery of the world; and the presence of all the saints in the world.
[Prayer]—Eternity of Spirit, you are upon me, yet I understand you not. Pressed upon all sides, I labor in confusion. I turn from nature in disgust, seeking your pure essence beyond all earthly forms. My soul, you must learn to live in this world, loving and hating it at once—this is your salvation. Love the earth when it is the mirror of God; hate it when self alone is reflected. You wept over Jerusalem. Your tears broke her heart. Shall I not praise you day and night, my God, having seen my frail humanity and fathered it with human tears. Through faith, God shows us in a moment of light our living self, that imperishable spirit, twin of the heavens.
The prayers of our 9th hour shall not bring great external light; they shall bring us enough light within that we may walk with confidence in the dark. Prayer is our vocation. We don't pray that the mystery be removed, but that grace be given to overcome the evil of this day alone. [Jesus prayed in the darkness of that 9th hour]. I shall never cease to wonder at the scandal of “sweet gentle prayer” turned into an agonized cry in a night of violence.
[The Old Mockers and Crucifiers of Jesus]—They mocked Jesus as he hung on the cross. And the father of lies has kept them going, but they are all old men, old in their youth, feeble in their mightiest works. From God has come the moral ethical laws, the codes of social decorum and justice which keep from complete chaos a people capable of absolute evil. But the inward kingdom of God is come; it is not yet spread abroad in all creation, but its claim on our allegiance is absolute. The evil of evils is to turn the holy Spirit into a law, to make God’s new creation into an untouchable tradition. The old men who crucified Jesus now worship him at a distance so that they can keep tab on him. The old man can’t hide from the insistent voice of Christ in his own heart, for it is the exorcism of all that is legal, all that is static, all that is dead.
Our world is a sick, dying old man. [Doctors, priest, historians, lawyers gather around his bedside and discuss and pray for his condition]. Others sit brooding, wondering how they can get on without the old man. He is our old man, the 10,000th son of Adam. You and I [as] sons of Adam celebrate the great cities, universities, hospitals, libraries, [and religions] he established. [He has done everything], except the one thing that is necessary.
Outside, men, women, and children have come to look upon the sunrise. They know that the old man must die, that he has died many times before, that he is always dying. They who have come early into the fields wait in silence for the flame of life. They are free for they know the kingdom and its power. They set to work with a free spirit, and whatsoever they turn their hands to, it is good. While the old world dies, and with it all self-sufficient creation, grant us, Almighty One, patience to wait and to know it’s the travail of a new birth, a new dawn, in the glory of which a new people shall inherit the earth.
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391. Getting Rooted: Living in the Cross; a Path to Joy & Liberation (by Brian Dayton; 2007)
About the Author—Brian Drayton of Weare MM is a plant ecologist working in science education research & a recorded minister in New England YM. He has traveled among Friends with a concern to encourage those who contribute to their meeting’s ministry. He was one of the Quaker Peacebuilders Camp’s originators; it taught Quaker nonviolent action. This essay had its origins in a Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting presentation.
Thou has sown a precious seed, and planted a noble vine by thine own hand, and given us a root of life, the foundation of our faith … Robert Barclay
What Does it Mean for us to “Find our Quaker Roots?”—The fruits of live lived more powerfully, humbly, & faithfully are urgently needed. The root zone of a plant is a dynamic area of growth, exploration, & stability. We feel a need for firmer footing or for nourishment that is lacking. In common parlance, “finding my roots” connotes a quest to become better acquainted with family history. Most Friends searching for spiritual roots aren’t Quakers by heritage. We resemble 1st-generation Friends, [who came to Quakerism in adulthood]. We lack a deep, wordless education that can come from immersion in a culture’s rhythms & boundary-keeping rituals. Roots are an integral part of the plant body, and the flows of life-materials are always going on in 2 direction, from the roots to the shoot, and from the shoot to the roots.
[Intellectual Approach & Tentative Discoveries]—If we see our search for roots primarily as intellectual, we run risk of [a purely] external experience. In a superficial, acquisitive approach, we fail to test the meaning & to be transformed by the truthfulness of the things that we encounter when “seeking our roots.” We are more likely to make progress in the quest to explore our roots if we recognize from the outset that such a search has a complex & fluid nature. If we aren’t mindful of the tentative condition of our discoveries, we can find ourselves caught in a cycle where resolution alternates with backsliding, [with its risk of] discouragement & loss of vision.
Such frustration is not a new phenomenon in Friendly experience; [Job Scott and John Woolman write of such experiences]: “I awoke with joy … that I had escaped imminent danger. But all proved insufficient to induce a re-engagement for reformation … My accuser, and yet my best friend, tormented me both day and night, yet in all tender love, in order to redeem my precious soul … [Job Scott]. “The Lord had been very gracious, and spoke peace to me in the time of my distress, and I now most ungratefully turned again to folly. At times I felt sharp reproof, but I did not get low enough to cry for help.” [John Woolman].
The waves of the incoming tide may recede, but they leave evidence of the higher level they have reached, suggesting that the water may rise to that height again. The residue of sweetness, of invitation that came from the occasional taste of Truth and freedom, kept him at least a little tender, a little accessible to further contact with the Light. Robert Barclay wrote: “I felt a secret power among them which touched my heart, and as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me and the good raised up, and so I became thus knit and united unto them, hungering more and more after the increase of this Power and Life.”
We are all likely, from time to time, to feel we have traveled farther in faithfulness than we have. I can sometimes see & say more than I have experienced. If we aren’t alert to possibility, [any progress we make can seem] an illusion, scrolling past for my reassurance. The Apostle Paul writes: “I find a law that when I would do good, evil is present with me … I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.”
Within hours of some peak of clarity, some moment of stress may come, & I react in anger or defensiveness. [I concentrate more on] taking the sense of blessing & reward [of right action] & let it feed my soul, rather than letting a subsequent stumbling demoralize me. [With their inconsistencies], Christians have been the best & the worst advocates for Christianity. The many selves we are (& wish to be, & have been) are “present in solution,” & the boundaries between one version of ourselves & another grow thin. With all our selves present, we can move more freely toward concern, toward integrity, inward to God, & outward to our brothers & sisters.
It is important to avoid the other trap, which is to discount the growth that has actually occurred, [or to feel that] we cannot recreate some impossible ideal from the past.
The temptation to admire others’ witness while avoiding our own is not new to our time. [John Browning said]: “I thought I might have felt some secret virtue in the place where George Fox had stood and preached, whom I believe was a good man. Whilst I stood there, I was secretly informed, that … virtue is not to be communicated by dead things … but by the power of God, who is the fountain of living virtue.” While we must avoid being in uncritical thrall to the past’s shadow (whether idealizing it or resisting it), I believe we have much to learn from Quaker of previous eras. Much depends on where we are standing when we seek to make our judgments and our choices about the way forward and about the way we are to be.
Living in the Cross: Becoming Rooted in the Life—The crucial ingredient for linking aspiration and vision with reality, for linking profession and possession, is a method for moving from where we are to where we hope to be. Our roots must be fixed in the experience of being worked upon by the living God. Friends have spoken of this as living in the Cross. 2 things seem very useful for understanding what it means to “live in the Cross”: knowing “Jesus Christ and him crucified”; “demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”
Friends have taught that if we are to benefit from the Christ event, we must experience it in our lives, day by day as way opens. The 1st Friends had a sense of the presence of the Christ life at work in everyone—though to some degree this life was oppressed, a suffering Seed in those who weren’t faithful. Even the smallest positive response on our part would mean more power being made available to us. Isaac Penington writes: “The power meets it, embraces it, appears to it, & manifests itself in it, proportional to its present capacity & condition.”
Living in the Cross means participating in a process of liberation from things, feelings, & beliefs that may give us a sense of security, but that also keep us bound & compelled in need & fear. In a spiritual sense, it is the death of some aspects of our Self so that God can raise up new Life in us. [There is fearing of the death of “not being,” (physical death), & death of “not-counting” (being without social value). Everyday concerns may be remote from the threat of total annihilation, but they can trigger “fight” or “flight” responses that are instinctive in us for bodily preservation. The fear of being excluded, dismissed, or ridiculed is very real & shapes our actions.
The 1st step is to be open, in some little degree, to the idea that something is amiss: to become tender and teachable. When we suspect some place in ourselves where the Life of God is oppressed, blocked, or denied, we have a new opportunity to make a choice for that Life or against it. The Quaker response is simple but subtle and very hard to do in any sustained fashion. It is a great temptation to mistake the moment of sudden insight for real understanding. In our moments of “Aha,” we can see where the problem lies—but there may be much yet to discover about how the problems connect to other parts of our personalities and habits. The key is not to rush to conclusion or action, but always to mind the Light 1st and foremost, waiting to feel the Presence, quiet and peaceful, and to receive assurance of the love and light that God sheds freely.
[Stirrings of life in the heart]—Penington writes: “Here is the great deceit of man; he looks for a great, manifest power in or upon him to begin with, & doth not see how the power is in the little weak ” By keeping our hand on the plow, we begin to find & feel the work of the Cross. [It isn't an act in any form]. It is an experience of the heart, soul, mind, & body, in which we participate. [We must wait for it expectantly]. In this transition of expectant waiting for the moment of illumination, there is learning. [I have] sometimes felt safe enough to admit how the anger has history, even utility, which has made it part of my toolkit and my personality.
We should not cling to the feelings and thoughts that arise too long, or they may prevent us from reaching the Presence. James Naylor writes: “Art thou in the Darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will fill thee, but stand still and act not, and wait in patience till Light arises out of Darkness to lead thee.” We can find ourselves struggling against change, feeling reluctant to become, even in a small matter, a new person. Inward experience is just the harrowing of the field to make way for fresh growth from the True Vine.
Until you have been able to look at your current problem in the love of Christ, you are not likely to see the true value of your plans and resolutions. In minding the Light and not your trouble, I believe that in time you will find yourself relinquished from the grip of the problem and drawn more strongly to a new way of life, able to live into a new habit of mind. [You can find a way to] not be its slave anymore]. Even with a small advance towards the Light, I am better able to see how darkness had some hold on me and the nature of that bondage.
Living in the Cross means one passes through death to a newness of life. In one’s own measure & sphere, one participates in the drama of salvation whose great signs are Calvary & the empty tomb; it is the Lamb’s war as you & I can live it. The presence is ever less veiled, which brings judgment & healing, establishes perspective, tends to humility & patience, strengthens compassion, & enriches [our perceptions] of beauty, purity, & mercy. Coming into this place, we find God is at work as an active spirit. Allowing ourselves to move away from being the center of the story, we are shown coherence & simplicity, & our openings are put to the test beyond the boundaries of our inner arena; we learn experimentally. George Fox wrote: “Friends, whatever you are addicted to, the Tempter will come in that thing. After you see your thoughts & temptations, don't think but submit. Stand still in the Light & submit to it, & the other will be hushed and gone. Then contentment comes.”
The Test of Practice—When Paul characterizes the power of God and human wisdom in opposition to each other, he is thinking of God as re-creator, the transformer of human lives. The power is that which can transform us from the inside out. Our testimony that God is alive and at work must come in our living, and in fact it is finally in the test of practice that we can learn the meaning of our openings. If I say, “[I think] I’m a Quaker, so I am living the Quaker way,” we may be a counsel of no-change. In such a condition, I am in fact limiting the motion of the Spirit or “covering the Seed” with too much earth and keeping it down.
The antidote isn't to leap into action, but renew our connection with the Living God. Penington writes: “All true religion hath a true root … It isn't enough to hear of Christ … [One must] feel him my root, my life, my foundation.” With the fresh understanding gained in the school of Christ, we have a keener perception of where that of God may be found in ourselves and others as well as a renewed eagerness to seek it and remain within it.
Living in the Cross requires an actual change. A breakthrough comes if we do not overreach, but stay low and teachable. We must be willing to be foolish with respect to human reckoning, and this can be hard. We must in all honesty fail to perform brilliantly as we would wish, but instead we find ourselves drawn into worshipful waiting, [seeking] to preserve our inward attention. If we work on seeking openly and do not rush to answers, speaking and living with more truthful adherence to what we have found, we will find that we are changed. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are the fundamental fruits which we can hope to see growing in us.
Growth of the Spirit also brings with it a power of sympathy & an enlargement of our ability to listen. As we grow in our understanding, we become increasingly aware of many shapes that the darkness can take, the many ways we shut out God’s love, & our reasons for sorrow are multiplied & intensified. Even the smallest step forward brings a reward of strength & delight. Joy is part of his life’s gift as is mourning, 2 sides of the same coin.
Rooted in Life, We Find Community—Through striving in the Spirit and being instructed by it, we tap the resources that allow us to love, to pray inwardly and in action, to overcome hurt, and to enact a true Gospel. We can learn from others by approaching our differences from that place of compassion that enriches all our faculties of mind and heart. We need to not dismiss or withdraw from what we find alien, but to wait with it in our peculiarly Quaker way, which is an active, questioning, engaged listening. While the official canon of Scripture was settled long ago, we are in some sense still living the latest chapters of the acts of the Apostles.
Through living and speaking this story of the power that Light and love can exert over dark, Friends have found the messages that need to be spoken to their times. We can see and say how so much of what people do is beside the point, how much of human effort contributes to an oppression that can only be lifted by opening to the Light. We can name the hard things, having been empowered to confront hard things in ourselves. We can testify out of the joy and labor of our inward experience and out of our experiments in turning the inward experience of Life into outward words and deeds.
Rooted in Life, in Community, We Take our Share in the Work of the Mystical Body—In the beginning of the 12th month [1758] I joined … in visiting such as had slaves … The Lord was near to me, and preserved my mind in calmness under some sharp conflicts, and begat a spirit of sympathy and tenderness in me towards some who were grievously entangled by the spirit of this world. John Woolman
The inward work that I have been speaking of is the root of true qualification for ministry. Our service in love is indeed a gift and service that arises from the spiritual Body which our community is part of. We can draw strength from other kinds of rootedness: community; tradition; and scripture. Skepticism about ministry is reasonable, because much so-called ministry of word or deed is not rooted in the experience I have been meditating upon in this essay. [John Woolman writes of those who share in the experience of the Life]: “Some glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true meekness. There is a harmony in the … voice to which Divine love gives utterance, and right order in their temper and conduct.”
If we believe that our spiritual experience isn’t entirely a personal chemical disturbance, & is available to anyone who seeks it, we capture some of our experiences in words & offer them to others for encouragement, invention, challenge, or surprise. Do you make space in daily life for a time of retirement, in which you wait until you are no longer contemplating yourself but come to where you can reach beyond yourself to the living Other? In that practice, & in growing obedience to the One we meet there, we are truly getting back to the Root.
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[Human Sanctity]—[The rest of Peter’s life was the result] of the 9th hour when Peter, weeping, looked upon the ground and saw how great was his fall; then raising his eyes he looked upon the cross and saw the height to which he might be lifted. There is no human sanctity without the inward suffering and the humiliation of the 9th hour. Peter does not labor for virtue; it is given him when he discovers good and evil dwelling side by side and he recognizes the one by the other. The mark of sanctity is to live in absolute obedience to each day’s revealing of [God’s personal destination for you.] Sanctity is the cultivation of sorrow over separation from God; it is the aura of truth surrounding one with whom human endowments and earthly situations have been divinized; it is faithful discipline; it is the spirit of joy which attends all acts.
There is no saintly act; there is only a saintly spirit. A person of false motives may go through identical motions, but the issue is always corrupt though it be to feed the hungry, & raise the dead. The saints are given us 1st for encouragement & 2nd for judgment. They live & breathe at the heart of every generation. The 1st proceeding of sanctity is to abolish legalism. Christian perfection isn't outward form but inward fact, in a word, charity.
[Christian Quest and the Church]—Humans are by definition a chasm of freedom, a vast spiritual void. There is almost no evil greater than despair of the search [to fill that void]. Only the love of God, God’s people and his world can fill it. We all want deliverance—on our own terms. God confounds our pride by hiding majestic principles in things of low degree. In our quest we demand a rule of thumb; none shall be given. We are in God’s hands & we have the Spirit; “it is enough.” We are born to know God, to love God, to live in God’s Kingdom; we are to shake off the world’s delusive freedom, and accept the bondage of the Spirit and perfect freedom.
[Jesus’ 1st church was in the 9th hour] with murderers, thieves & soldiers. Not because I may be good am I a church member, but because I desire good. The church is the only true unity of all people. Other ties are creaturely bonds, serving their day & perishing. I have come to believe that the church is our true vocation & home. The inward church is our spiritual unitedness through God to all people, past & present. Its nature is that of prayer & work. There is no salvation outside the church. In God’s heart the church is accomplished; in this world it is poor, defeated, obscure, hard to find. The Church is the living Christ spread out over all the world. We recognize the true Spirit by his evidence & through him are able to resist evil & to accomplish the good. To know God through Christ & to know one another in him, this is the perfect unity of the church which can't be broken.
The church is a moving, growing life & not a legal corporation. The church is the living Spirit in people, seeking an outward form harmonious to itself. Let us not look for change in the church but for progress. I pray that we may all know & recognize one another in the church of the holy Spirit. The church is God’s way of ordering the world. The mystical body of Christ is all faithful souls & all evil-doers encircled by the love which flows from the Christ yet on his cross.
The Mystical Body is the spiritual Christ spread out in all lands passing from life to life his kingdom on earth. The church is the holy Spirit, yet also the holy Spirit communicating itself in all possible visible forms. Let us look at Quakers as a church in which all tradition & forms are held in perpetual openness to the Spirit’s purifying fires. If the Spirit of Christ comes into individual lives to free them from worldly allegiance, is it too much to expect that the same shall be accomplished in the church? Light shall penetrate to dark corners. & this shall come about because the church is God’s, as is the power & the glory. [I have had dreams & visions of: the world’s intrusion into the church; the savagery of the world; and the presence of all the saints in the world.
[Prayer]—Eternity of Spirit, you are upon me, yet I understand you not. Pressed upon all sides, I labor in confusion. I turn from nature in disgust, seeking your pure essence beyond all earthly forms. My soul, you must learn to live in this world, loving and hating it at once—this is your salvation. Love the earth when it is the mirror of God; hate it when self alone is reflected. You wept over Jerusalem. Your tears broke her heart. Shall I not praise you day and night, my God, having seen my frail humanity and fathered it with human tears. Through faith, God shows us in a moment of light our living self, that imperishable spirit, twin of the heavens.
The prayers of our 9th hour shall not bring great external light; they shall bring us enough light within that we may walk with confidence in the dark. Prayer is our vocation. We don't pray that the mystery be removed, but that grace be given to overcome the evil of this day alone. [Jesus prayed in the darkness of that 9th hour]. I shall never cease to wonder at the scandal of “sweet gentle prayer” turned into an agonized cry in a night of violence.
[The Old Mockers and Crucifiers of Jesus]—They mocked Jesus as he hung on the cross. And the father of lies has kept them going, but they are all old men, old in their youth, feeble in their mightiest works. From God has come the moral ethical laws, the codes of social decorum and justice which keep from complete chaos a people capable of absolute evil. But the inward kingdom of God is come; it is not yet spread abroad in all creation, but its claim on our allegiance is absolute. The evil of evils is to turn the holy Spirit into a law, to make God’s new creation into an untouchable tradition. The old men who crucified Jesus now worship him at a distance so that they can keep tab on him. The old man can’t hide from the insistent voice of Christ in his own heart, for it is the exorcism of all that is legal, all that is static, all that is dead.
Our world is a sick, dying old man. [Doctors, priest, historians, lawyers gather around his bedside and discuss and pray for his condition]. Others sit brooding, wondering how they can get on without the old man. He is our old man, the 10,000th son of Adam. You and I [as] sons of Adam celebrate the great cities, universities, hospitals, libraries, [and religions] he established. [He has done everything], except the one thing that is necessary.
Outside, men, women, and children have come to look upon the sunrise. They know that the old man must die, that he has died many times before, that he is always dying. They who have come early into the fields wait in silence for the flame of life. They are free for they know the kingdom and its power. They set to work with a free spirit, and whatsoever they turn their hands to, it is good. While the old world dies, and with it all self-sufficient creation, grant us, Almighty One, patience to wait and to know it’s the travail of a new birth, a new dawn, in the glory of which a new people shall inherit the earth.
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391. Getting Rooted: Living in the Cross; a Path to Joy & Liberation (by Brian Dayton; 2007)
About the Author—Brian Drayton of Weare MM is a plant ecologist working in science education research & a recorded minister in New England YM. He has traveled among Friends with a concern to encourage those who contribute to their meeting’s ministry. He was one of the Quaker Peacebuilders Camp’s originators; it taught Quaker nonviolent action. This essay had its origins in a Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting presentation.
Thou has sown a precious seed, and planted a noble vine by thine own hand, and given us a root of life, the foundation of our faith … Robert Barclay
What Does it Mean for us to “Find our Quaker Roots?”—The fruits of live lived more powerfully, humbly, & faithfully are urgently needed. The root zone of a plant is a dynamic area of growth, exploration, & stability. We feel a need for firmer footing or for nourishment that is lacking. In common parlance, “finding my roots” connotes a quest to become better acquainted with family history. Most Friends searching for spiritual roots aren’t Quakers by heritage. We resemble 1st-generation Friends, [who came to Quakerism in adulthood]. We lack a deep, wordless education that can come from immersion in a culture’s rhythms & boundary-keeping rituals. Roots are an integral part of the plant body, and the flows of life-materials are always going on in 2 direction, from the roots to the shoot, and from the shoot to the roots.
[Intellectual Approach & Tentative Discoveries]—If we see our search for roots primarily as intellectual, we run risk of [a purely] external experience. In a superficial, acquisitive approach, we fail to test the meaning & to be transformed by the truthfulness of the things that we encounter when “seeking our roots.” We are more likely to make progress in the quest to explore our roots if we recognize from the outset that such a search has a complex & fluid nature. If we aren’t mindful of the tentative condition of our discoveries, we can find ourselves caught in a cycle where resolution alternates with backsliding, [with its risk of] discouragement & loss of vision.
Such frustration is not a new phenomenon in Friendly experience; [Job Scott and John Woolman write of such experiences]: “I awoke with joy … that I had escaped imminent danger. But all proved insufficient to induce a re-engagement for reformation … My accuser, and yet my best friend, tormented me both day and night, yet in all tender love, in order to redeem my precious soul … [Job Scott]. “The Lord had been very gracious, and spoke peace to me in the time of my distress, and I now most ungratefully turned again to folly. At times I felt sharp reproof, but I did not get low enough to cry for help.” [John Woolman].
The waves of the incoming tide may recede, but they leave evidence of the higher level they have reached, suggesting that the water may rise to that height again. The residue of sweetness, of invitation that came from the occasional taste of Truth and freedom, kept him at least a little tender, a little accessible to further contact with the Light. Robert Barclay wrote: “I felt a secret power among them which touched my heart, and as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me and the good raised up, and so I became thus knit and united unto them, hungering more and more after the increase of this Power and Life.”
We are all likely, from time to time, to feel we have traveled farther in faithfulness than we have. I can sometimes see & say more than I have experienced. If we aren’t alert to possibility, [any progress we make can seem] an illusion, scrolling past for my reassurance. The Apostle Paul writes: “I find a law that when I would do good, evil is present with me … I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.”
Within hours of some peak of clarity, some moment of stress may come, & I react in anger or defensiveness. [I concentrate more on] taking the sense of blessing & reward [of right action] & let it feed my soul, rather than letting a subsequent stumbling demoralize me. [With their inconsistencies], Christians have been the best & the worst advocates for Christianity. The many selves we are (& wish to be, & have been) are “present in solution,” & the boundaries between one version of ourselves & another grow thin. With all our selves present, we can move more freely toward concern, toward integrity, inward to God, & outward to our brothers & sisters.
It is important to avoid the other trap, which is to discount the growth that has actually occurred, [or to feel that] we cannot recreate some impossible ideal from the past.
The temptation to admire others’ witness while avoiding our own is not new to our time. [John Browning said]: “I thought I might have felt some secret virtue in the place where George Fox had stood and preached, whom I believe was a good man. Whilst I stood there, I was secretly informed, that … virtue is not to be communicated by dead things … but by the power of God, who is the fountain of living virtue.” While we must avoid being in uncritical thrall to the past’s shadow (whether idealizing it or resisting it), I believe we have much to learn from Quaker of previous eras. Much depends on where we are standing when we seek to make our judgments and our choices about the way forward and about the way we are to be.
Living in the Cross: Becoming Rooted in the Life—The crucial ingredient for linking aspiration and vision with reality, for linking profession and possession, is a method for moving from where we are to where we hope to be. Our roots must be fixed in the experience of being worked upon by the living God. Friends have spoken of this as living in the Cross. 2 things seem very useful for understanding what it means to “live in the Cross”: knowing “Jesus Christ and him crucified”; “demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”
Friends have taught that if we are to benefit from the Christ event, we must experience it in our lives, day by day as way opens. The 1st Friends had a sense of the presence of the Christ life at work in everyone—though to some degree this life was oppressed, a suffering Seed in those who weren’t faithful. Even the smallest positive response on our part would mean more power being made available to us. Isaac Penington writes: “The power meets it, embraces it, appears to it, & manifests itself in it, proportional to its present capacity & condition.”
Living in the Cross means participating in a process of liberation from things, feelings, & beliefs that may give us a sense of security, but that also keep us bound & compelled in need & fear. In a spiritual sense, it is the death of some aspects of our Self so that God can raise up new Life in us. [There is fearing of the death of “not being,” (physical death), & death of “not-counting” (being without social value). Everyday concerns may be remote from the threat of total annihilation, but they can trigger “fight” or “flight” responses that are instinctive in us for bodily preservation. The fear of being excluded, dismissed, or ridiculed is very real & shapes our actions.
The 1st step is to be open, in some little degree, to the idea that something is amiss: to become tender and teachable. When we suspect some place in ourselves where the Life of God is oppressed, blocked, or denied, we have a new opportunity to make a choice for that Life or against it. The Quaker response is simple but subtle and very hard to do in any sustained fashion. It is a great temptation to mistake the moment of sudden insight for real understanding. In our moments of “Aha,” we can see where the problem lies—but there may be much yet to discover about how the problems connect to other parts of our personalities and habits. The key is not to rush to conclusion or action, but always to mind the Light 1st and foremost, waiting to feel the Presence, quiet and peaceful, and to receive assurance of the love and light that God sheds freely.
[Stirrings of life in the heart]—Penington writes: “Here is the great deceit of man; he looks for a great, manifest power in or upon him to begin with, & doth not see how the power is in the little weak ” By keeping our hand on the plow, we begin to find & feel the work of the Cross. [It isn't an act in any form]. It is an experience of the heart, soul, mind, & body, in which we participate. [We must wait for it expectantly]. In this transition of expectant waiting for the moment of illumination, there is learning. [I have] sometimes felt safe enough to admit how the anger has history, even utility, which has made it part of my toolkit and my personality.
We should not cling to the feelings and thoughts that arise too long, or they may prevent us from reaching the Presence. James Naylor writes: “Art thou in the Darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will fill thee, but stand still and act not, and wait in patience till Light arises out of Darkness to lead thee.” We can find ourselves struggling against change, feeling reluctant to become, even in a small matter, a new person. Inward experience is just the harrowing of the field to make way for fresh growth from the True Vine.
Until you have been able to look at your current problem in the love of Christ, you are not likely to see the true value of your plans and resolutions. In minding the Light and not your trouble, I believe that in time you will find yourself relinquished from the grip of the problem and drawn more strongly to a new way of life, able to live into a new habit of mind. [You can find a way to] not be its slave anymore]. Even with a small advance towards the Light, I am better able to see how darkness had some hold on me and the nature of that bondage.
Living in the Cross means one passes through death to a newness of life. In one’s own measure & sphere, one participates in the drama of salvation whose great signs are Calvary & the empty tomb; it is the Lamb’s war as you & I can live it. The presence is ever less veiled, which brings judgment & healing, establishes perspective, tends to humility & patience, strengthens compassion, & enriches [our perceptions] of beauty, purity, & mercy. Coming into this place, we find God is at work as an active spirit. Allowing ourselves to move away from being the center of the story, we are shown coherence & simplicity, & our openings are put to the test beyond the boundaries of our inner arena; we learn experimentally. George Fox wrote: “Friends, whatever you are addicted to, the Tempter will come in that thing. After you see your thoughts & temptations, don't think but submit. Stand still in the Light & submit to it, & the other will be hushed and gone. Then contentment comes.”
The Test of Practice—When Paul characterizes the power of God and human wisdom in opposition to each other, he is thinking of God as re-creator, the transformer of human lives. The power is that which can transform us from the inside out. Our testimony that God is alive and at work must come in our living, and in fact it is finally in the test of practice that we can learn the meaning of our openings. If I say, “[I think] I’m a Quaker, so I am living the Quaker way,” we may be a counsel of no-change. In such a condition, I am in fact limiting the motion of the Spirit or “covering the Seed” with too much earth and keeping it down.
The antidote isn't to leap into action, but renew our connection with the Living God. Penington writes: “All true religion hath a true root … It isn't enough to hear of Christ … [One must] feel him my root, my life, my foundation.” With the fresh understanding gained in the school of Christ, we have a keener perception of where that of God may be found in ourselves and others as well as a renewed eagerness to seek it and remain within it.
Living in the Cross requires an actual change. A breakthrough comes if we do not overreach, but stay low and teachable. We must be willing to be foolish with respect to human reckoning, and this can be hard. We must in all honesty fail to perform brilliantly as we would wish, but instead we find ourselves drawn into worshipful waiting, [seeking] to preserve our inward attention. If we work on seeking openly and do not rush to answers, speaking and living with more truthful adherence to what we have found, we will find that we are changed. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are the fundamental fruits which we can hope to see growing in us.
Growth of the Spirit also brings with it a power of sympathy & an enlargement of our ability to listen. As we grow in our understanding, we become increasingly aware of many shapes that the darkness can take, the many ways we shut out God’s love, & our reasons for sorrow are multiplied & intensified. Even the smallest step forward brings a reward of strength & delight. Joy is part of his life’s gift as is mourning, 2 sides of the same coin.
Rooted in Life, We Find Community—Through striving in the Spirit and being instructed by it, we tap the resources that allow us to love, to pray inwardly and in action, to overcome hurt, and to enact a true Gospel. We can learn from others by approaching our differences from that place of compassion that enriches all our faculties of mind and heart. We need to not dismiss or withdraw from what we find alien, but to wait with it in our peculiarly Quaker way, which is an active, questioning, engaged listening. While the official canon of Scripture was settled long ago, we are in some sense still living the latest chapters of the acts of the Apostles.
Through living and speaking this story of the power that Light and love can exert over dark, Friends have found the messages that need to be spoken to their times. We can see and say how so much of what people do is beside the point, how much of human effort contributes to an oppression that can only be lifted by opening to the Light. We can name the hard things, having been empowered to confront hard things in ourselves. We can testify out of the joy and labor of our inward experience and out of our experiments in turning the inward experience of Life into outward words and deeds.
Rooted in Life, in Community, We Take our Share in the Work of the Mystical Body—In the beginning of the 12th month [1758] I joined … in visiting such as had slaves … The Lord was near to me, and preserved my mind in calmness under some sharp conflicts, and begat a spirit of sympathy and tenderness in me towards some who were grievously entangled by the spirit of this world. John Woolman
The inward work that I have been speaking of is the root of true qualification for ministry. Our service in love is indeed a gift and service that arises from the spiritual Body which our community is part of. We can draw strength from other kinds of rootedness: community; tradition; and scripture. Skepticism about ministry is reasonable, because much so-called ministry of word or deed is not rooted in the experience I have been meditating upon in this essay. [John Woolman writes of those who share in the experience of the Life]: “Some glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true meekness. There is a harmony in the … voice to which Divine love gives utterance, and right order in their temper and conduct.”
If we believe that our spiritual experience isn’t entirely a personal chemical disturbance, & is available to anyone who seeks it, we capture some of our experiences in words & offer them to others for encouragement, invention, challenge, or surprise. Do you make space in daily life for a time of retirement, in which you wait until you are no longer contemplating yourself but come to where you can reach beyond yourself to the living Other? In that practice, & in growing obedience to the One we meet there, we are truly getting back to the Root.
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WITNESSING
435. You Are My Witnesses: Witness and Testimony in the Biblical and Quaker Traditions (By Thomas Gates; 2015)
About the Author—Thomas Gates is a member of Lancaster (PA) MM; he has served the Committee for Worship & Ministry locally, & the Working Group on Deepening & Strengthening Our Meeting from Philadelphia YM. He spent 8 years of his medical career as a family doctor in rural NH. He & his family lived & worked at Friends Lugulu Hospital in Kenya (Stories from Kenya; PHP #319). He has been on the faculty of the Family Medicine Residency at Lancaster General Hospital, and currently has discerned a need to serve in rural Malawi. This essay is based on 5 talks given at New England YM 2014.
Introduction: A Cloud of Witnesses/ Is Your God Big Enough?: Witness against Idolatry—Hebrews 12:1 speaks of being surrounded by a "cloud of witnesses." In Isaiah 43:10; 43:12; & 44:8 God declares: "You are my witnesses!" Through these verses & early Quaker witness, I'll explore what tradition tells us about being witnesses now. Isaiah's "witness" passages were written by a Babylonian Jew in a section sometimes called "2nd Isaiah." This anonymous poet & prophet announces that Yahweh is about to end exile & bring the Jewish community back to Jerusalem. The writer uses the scene of a heavenly trial, with Babylonian gods on trial (See Isaiah 43: 9-13). The issue is idolatry; Isaiah mocks the wooden idols of Babylon, who can't answer the charges.
Just because we don't worship graven images or idols, we should not assume that the idolatry issue is no longer relevant. Everywhere we look, we see the de facto worship of lesser gods: money; power; career; consumerism; ideology; political causes; security. Is your God big enough? The issue is God's transcendence, God "going beyond" our normal, everyday experience. The prophet's poetry is replete with images of transcendence in Isaiah 55: 8-9 and Isaiah 40: 21-23. They are poetic and beautiful, but if we are honest, we are likely to admit that these ancient images of an all-powerful God [the puppeteer] are lost on us. Our images are necessary, but always inadequate, so the spiritual life often means a successive smashing of idols.
God 's new images have emerged. In particular, panentheism, "all in God, God in all," allows us to reclaim God's transcendent dimension. God is both transcendent & immanent. In panentheism, transcendence refers to the "More" of an added dimension. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls God "the beyond in our midst." Abraham Joshua Heschel writes: "There are no proofs for the God of Abraham ... only witnesses. Dorothy Day writes: "To be a witness ... means to live in such a way that one's life wouldn't make sense if God didn't exist. [We need to live as a part of the greater mystery that is God, & our lives need to appear as a mystery from the world's perspective].
Is Your God Close Enough?: The Witness Within—In the biblical worldview God was both transcendent and immanent. 2 broad spiritual paths resulted: ascending spirituality [transcendence, seeking God be-yond]; descending spirituality [immanence, looking for God in the world]. Beginning around 400 CE, and continuing for over 1,000 years, God's transcendence came to be emphasized and God's immanence neglected, except in the forms of Celtic Christianity, Francis of Assisi, medieval mystics and reformers.
One way to understand the significance of early Friends is to see them at the end of this 1,000 year detour, trying to recapture a fresh sense of God's immanence, in both their experience & their language. In a sense they were asking: Is your God close enough? Quakers had a rich language for immanence: Inward Light; the Seed; Inward Teacher; that of God in everyone. Based on I John 5:10, Fox exhorts Friends to "keep to the witness of God in yourselves," & "live up to the Witness." Fox talks of "reaching the witness" in those he is in dispute with, [& as living examples of "that of God," making] "the witness of God in them bless you."
Isaac Penington writes: "As God hath not left God's self without an outward witness ... so God hath not left God's self without a witness inwardly; there is something in men to testify of God." [Sarah Blackborrow speaks of her convincement by inner witness beginning when she was 8 or 9 without knowing what it was, & of realizing it & testifying with her own witness] "when it was spoken of to me by the Servants of the living God." Truth for early Friends was deceit's opposite, so the witness led Friends to 1st confront self-deceit & then deceit in others. The witness is the capacity to see our identities as limited in perspective. Light is the means by which we see all things. This inward witness or light seemed to help them see their lives through God's eyes, not their own. This allows dis-identifying with our ego-projects & concerns, our fears and insecurities, & vanities.
[Fox's experience was that]: "I was a man of sorrows in the times of the 1st workings of the Lord in me ... [And] now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all creation gave another smell ... beyond what words can utter." George Fox counseled early Friends: "Keep within ... For Christ is within you ... the measure is within ... the word of God is within, and you are the Temples of God." The pearl of great price cannot be inherited, but must be re-discovered by each generation.
Is Your God Real Enough?: Witness as Testimony—Is our God real enough? For early Friends, only a direct relationship with the Divine would give their lives meaning, purpose, wholeness, [and Truth]. This truth must have consequences for the way they lived their lives. In John 3:21, the Evangelist suggests the truth is not mere words, but rather something we do. Early Friends spoke of "having a testimony" and understood this as the way in which they witnessed to the truth they had experienced. Early Friends thought of their testimony in terms of what they did, the way they lived their lives. They did not swear oaths, because they believed in a single standard of truth. They did not pay tithes, because the gospel ministry had been freely received and was to be freely given. They would not fight, because they were to love their enemies and overcome evil with good.
Of all these aspects of Friends testimony, perhaps the basic was their manner of worship. After the restoration of the monarchy and the established church, anything resembling Quaker worship was against the law. [Friends were forced out of their "meeting house" and started meeting in the fields]. The men of the meeting were arrested, and the women and children continued to meet. When most of the women were arrested, the children continued to meet. The widow Margaret Whithart, proclaimed, "This is the place we have met since the beginning ... We do not meet here in willfulness or stubbornness, God is our witness ... we must bear our testimony publicly in this thing, whatever we suffer."
Early Friends' best known testimony was for peace. Before the historical Declaration of 1661, [there was a remarkable earlier incident]. Thomas Lurting was an artillery officer in the navy. There was a small group who met regularly in Quaker worship. [Impressed by their sense of community], Lurting was eventually drawn to join in their worship. [In the midst of battle, he realized the possibility of killing a man]. After sharing his new conviction with the small group of Quakers, and in a subsequent battle, he refused to report to his station, even under threat of death. What is most remarkable about this story is that at the time there was no public statement of the peace testimony. His action came solely from his silent waiting on the Light. This is one of many such stories of those risking or actually experiencing great suffering in bearing witness to the Truth.
Is Your God Real Enough?: [Modern Testimony]—These stories provide raw material from which we distill our modern testimonies. Originally, a martyr was simply a witness. Early Friends often found that Truth required suffering. This resonates with 2nd Isaiah, where the "servant songs" culminate in Isaiah 53's suffering servant. If I were on trial for being a Quaker, would there be enough evidence to convict me? Early Friends witness in the face of suffering & persecution makes no sense without including the transforming experience of the Divine Presence, the Light Within, the Inward Christ, the Witness of God in their hearts. William Penn said: "They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others." Early Friends lived in an authoritarian & hierarchical society. We live in a society that is individualistic, & not threatened by Quaker peculiarities, which are likely to be tolerated, but not likely to be taken seriously. What might it mean to witness to the Truth in today's culture? Might there even be ways in which we will be asked to suffer for the Truth?
Testimony as Stories of Witness—What are the Quaker testimonies? What were the Quaker testimonies early on? Many of us would spell out S.P.I.C.E.S. [simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship] that would have the character of virtues or abstract principles. Before the testimonies were a list, Michael Levi wrote: "Testimonies were leadings, stories from bygone days, many of which of which are still relevant to the challenges I face today." Early Friends did not think of them [as abstract testimonies of "integrity," "equality," "peace," and act accordingly], but by listening to the still small voice and responding to the choices before them. The testimonies as they have come to us are the distillation of generations of stories of faithfulness to the leadings of the Light. [In a pastoral visit I talked of] "my activist period" years before [and was asked] "And what are you doing now?" That question could be addressed to the entire Society of Friends.
[Testimonies are not to be found in lists]. They come from the bottom up; they are the end result of thousands of Friends around the world who are faithful to the leadings of the Light, to the Witness within them. How do we cultivate the ability to listen to promptings of love & truth in our hearts? What is love asking? If it sometimes seems that Friends' sense of testimony has waned in recent years, it is certainly not for lack of issues, global & local. I suspect that all of us have at times struggled with the temptation to hopelessness & despair.
Although we need to think globally, faithful action is likely to be local, modest in scope, humble in its aspirations, qualitatively persuasive rather than quantitatively decisive, more like yeast than the whole loaf. God doesn't require that we be successful, only that we be faithful. We do what we do because we are called to do it; not to achieve some calculated end or goal. A renewed testimony is likely to be personal, rooted in the particular circumstances of individual lives & local communities. Thomas Kelly writes: "For each of us [there are] special undertakings that are our particular share in the joyous burdens of love ... We can't die on every cross, nor are we expected to." If our testimony is rooted & grounded in love & spiritual abundance, then the burden is light. Truth isn't something we know but something we do. If our spiritual truth doesn't transform us & bear fruit, then it isn't truth but self-deception. How are the promptings of love & truth leading us to be "doers of the word"?
Witness in the Shadow of Empire—I want to explore the themes of empire and exile. These concerns are central to the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the New Testament we can't comprehend the church's claim that "Christ is Lord" without understanding it as a subversive counter to the empire's claim that "Caesar is Lord." Exile is not just geographical, but political, moral, and cultural, a loss of the structured, reliable world which gave meaning and coherence, while facing the twin temptations of assimilation and despair. [Jews endured this for 50 years]. Walter Brueggmann says that we should 1st read Hebrew poetry with an eye to the original historical context, remembering the Jews were the Palestinians of that time. [With our economic and military dominance in the world] we are uncomfortably reminiscent of Babylon.
Friends and others of prophetic faith find themselves a captive people, living in that strange land of exile, in the shadow of empire. We too are forced to choose between [assimilation and despair]. Where do we fit in the story of empire and exile, assimilation and despair? What is our testimony? One of the most pernicious tools of empire is to convince us that nothing can ever change. Over and over in history, things stay the same—until they change. Change when it comes is often sudden, unanticipated, seemingly miraculous [e.g. end] of Iron Curtain and apartheid. [For change to happen there must be "active hope."] Doug Gwyn has observed that, "Work for a sustainable human society on earth will focus much of our imagination and energies in this century."
According to Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, The 1st step in active hope is about recognizing, appreciating, & delighting in what is now present in our experience (See Isaiah 42:10; 43:1, 2, 4, 5; 45:18). The 2nd step in the spiral, honoring our pain for the world, allows us to break through avoidance & denial [of how bad things are.] It means we notice, & we care. Old Testament expression of pain & grief is seen in psalms of lament, the book of Lamentations & traces in 2nd Isaiah (See Isaiah 51:17-19). Thich Nhat Hahn says: "What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying." Most of us spend a lot of energy not noticing [the earth's crying].
The 3rd step in the spiral is "seeing with new eyes," seeing new possibilities that inspire hope (See Isaiah 43:18-19). It will mean coming to a wider sense of self, [transcending culture]. It will mean power with rather than power over, where cooperation & synergy replace hierarchy. Friend Eileen Flanagan reminds that seeing with new eyes is seeing that it is a question of the earth saving us; saving us from false separation [from nature], from the divine spirit that connects us all. Our hope is that once a certain portion of humanity makes a daunting shift in our thinking, our politics, & our spirituality, decisive change may come quite suddenly & unexpectedly.
The 4th and final step in the spiral is "going forth." Going forth means action [taken with] imagination and vision. There must be clarity about what it is we hope for. The new Jerusalem for which Jews yearn was a to be a light to all nations, a universal beacon of shalom, of peace and salvation [See Isaiah 49:6; 60:1,3]. How are we called to be God's witnesses in our time? What testimony do we have for this troubled & hopeless world? Let us take the 4 steps of active hope. And may God grant us a vision worthy of our task, a vision of God's shalom for all people, and for the earth.
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397. Quaker Witness as Sacrament (by Daniel O. Snyder; 2008)
About the Author—Daniel O. Snyder holds masters degrees from Earlham School of Religion & Boston University School of Theology, & a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. He does pastoral psychotherapy in Black Mountain, NC. The ideas in this pamphlet came from an address to New York YM in 2004. An expanded version was presented as the Richard L. Cary lecture presented for German YM in 2007.
Early Friends’ experience of the Inward Light was not as a cozy fire but rather a relentless, [long-lasting] search beam that showed them their sinfulness … [and then] led them to the victory of good over evil within them; a sense of inward peace followed. Michael Birkel
[Introduction]—Nick Ut took a picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc as she ran from her village, naked, burned, screaming in pain & terror. I was 22, white, male, middle class, & North American. [I assumed I would follow a typical career path for my class]. Kim Phuc came without words, without political analysis, without theological or moral argument. She took away my peace; I have spent 36 years trying to get it back. Kim Phuc became the poorest and weakest person I have encountered. How will the next step I take be of use to that person? I now understand that she became for me one of the faces of Christ. At the heart of it all is a conviction that Quaker witness, peace work, is sacramental. I have been fully restored to peace only in those moments when my life is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible Grace.
Sacramental life is a vision I have only glimpsed. When I neglect the inward or outward work, I become divided, & Grace attends this division with profound restlessness. Kim Phuc goaded me into a life I never could have designed for myself, one that I frequently didn’t understand & couldn't explain to others. Very, very slowly, I am learning to attend to my restlessness each day, listen to it, to be a novice under its instruction. It is as if my soul is a wild and shy animal who leaves small signs of disturbance, and my task is to attune to these signs.
Personal Journey—Kim Phuc’s picture unsettled me at my core, but I ran from it for more than 2 years. I applied to American Friends Service Committee to go to Vietnam right as the need for service declined. I was led to join a community of activists in Philadelphia who were committed to the study of the practice of nonviolence. Action that arose from clarity and action that arose from despair often took the same outward form; I was one of the despairing ones. The heroism I imposed upon myself lacked any real interior substance. Others were fed by inward springs that refreshed and renewed them. I was fed by surges of emotional energy with which I tried to lift myself out of an undertow. I had nothing to sustain me in what was a life’s work with [unimaginable sacrifices]. I left the activist community and took the next year at Pendle Hill in order to find out.
I went there with no idea what I would find. I wasn’t even sure what questions to ask. I only knew that something within me was asking a question for which I had no answer. There was no preaching, no insistence on doctrinal conformity, only an emphasis on silent waiting, listening, & attention. I took courses on Christian mysticism Quaker history and spirituality, and Thomas Merton. My faculty consultant was a visiting Catholic nun. I asked her a surprising question: “Can you help me find God?” We began a journey of spiritual nurture that led me into my growing hunger for a life of prayer. [I knew] the meagerness of my own resources and I knew that I had no real choice other than to walk fully into the mystery of prayer & meditation, fall into it if necessary.
I spent the following year with Thomas Merton’s Trappist [brother-monks] in the Colorado mountains. Prayer was hearing my own voice sending pleas up to God & freefall into that space where words were neither spoken nor heard, a space preceding language & thought. After a few months all the chatter in my head began to quiet down. It was enough to fall into the bottomless depth of God’s Presence & to feel myself held there. The cross hanging over my bed was a problem. I found a picture of a starving African child & pinned it to the cross.
This starving African Christ wrecked my peace. One day I could not bear any longer the anger and grief of this image. I hiked to the top of the nearest ridge and poured out my rage at God. Am I supposed to worship you when you send your own children to death? I called down God’s wrath on myself. I would go to hell with this child before I would go to heaven with an abusive god.
And then the Presence came again. Sky reached down and Earth reached up. Mountain wrapped me in her arms and Light, Air, and Water all seemed to be talking at once in a Cosmic babble of Joy. If God had spoken, [God might have said]: “I have been waiting for you to [“feed my sheep”]. Who do you think gave you that anger? Who gave you your compassion? Every suffering child is my child.”
[You Can Love Me in this Child]—What fell into place after I pinned the African child’s picture to the cross was an affirmation that all suffering is held within an infinite Presence. God seemed to say, “You cannot love me in formlessness, but you can love me in this child.” I was grateful for the hospitality of the monks. I found a sacred space in their monastery that had begun to feel like a space I could find within myself. I began to see that my path lay more in the intersection of the inward & the outward than in emphasizing one over the other. I wasn’t fully at home in either the activist or the monastery community. I knew that silence had taken root in me, & that I no longer needed a cloister to hold it.
[Now] I needed language, tools, experience [See About Author]. [After that] I could adequately name my experience and translate my intuitions into thought. I came to understand incarnation as the ongoing birth of God in the world; the deepest healing is incarnation. It sometimes needs our active intervention in helping to create the best possible conditions for its birth. [In my practice] there was outward engagement in therapy and inward engagement in my private time of intercession; both are essential. I came to think of myself as a kind of nonviolent interventionist in the inner worlds of my clients. How could I take the work and insights of therapy more deeply into the lives of activists?
I joined the Pendle Hill faculty; I developed a series of 3 courses: Nonviolence in Personal and Political Life; Prayer and Peacemaking; Forgiveness and Reconciliation for 3 questions: Where are we going and how do we get there? What sustains us on the journey? What do we do once we arrive? Each of these themes has been profoundly deepened by the Pendle Hill students and workshop attenders who participated.
Now I am back in private practice & combine that work with teaching & spiritual nurture within my community. I help activists find the particular spiritual path that can both deepen and sustain their work. [Many more suffering children have been added to my 1st two. Every child of war is like a silent witness, calling us to a world that can be safe for all future children. Kim Phuc herself directs a Canadian foundation focused on the needs of children affected by war and on forgiveness.
From Silence to Speech: The Meeting for Worship as Pattern for our Witness in the World—[Some in our community are excluded for “unacceptable beliefs or lifestyles].” Some resist the language of exclusivity and domination that has poisoned conservative Christian right rhetoric. [Some] finally come to the Stillness within and then, at last, they feel the Presence and learn that there is an Inward Teacher and Guide who can speak to their condition. We must be careful to reach deeper than the words themselves. Even if Christianity has been a language of Life for some, it has been a language of [injury and] death for others.
We must find a way that invites others to find words that are true to the Spirit that lives in them. Our aim is to reach the Life in the other, to bear witness to it, to create a space of Holy, expectant waiting, and to invite, welcome, and enjoy the wonder and surprise when it breaks into speech, into song, into a life made whole. [Each worshiper in silent worship], seeks to get above or below, between or beyond, the interior noise and rumination in order to be faithful to that inside for which Friends have many names.
The purpose of our disciplines of simplicity & plainness is to clear space, to give ourselves respite from distracting, unseasoned words. In worship we bring ourselves near to the Stillness & offer ourselves to Grace that draws down into Life’s seed. We are heirs to a tradition that seeks to release words back into their silence so that they can return to us fresh & alive, awakening us to new inspiration, new ways of seeing, new callings.
We may 1st come to meeting longing for sanctuary, refuge, comfort, safety, a place to heal. We soon find that the silence will hold us for awhile, it will eventually open up and bring us into a vast new world. A few words may form and we ask, is this message just for me or for others? Is it truly grounded in the light? Am I running ahead or behind the Guide? The content of the message may be important to some, or even just to one, but all will feel the presence of the Life that brings it forth, long after the content is forgotten.
To settle for anything less than this Life, according to our tradition, is to fall into an idolatry of form. Most of us are comfortable with no creeds. Perhaps we are less comfortable with the notion that we can trust the Sa-cred to lead us into right action & to political work [that witnesses] to truth. Our spiritual work is always a work of uncovering, revealing, returning to Life, again & again. We release our gods in order to surprised by God.
I must use words to evoke that which is before words. There is always some risk both in speaking & in witnessing in the world, for we never know with any certainty that our words & actions will be received in the Spirit in which we intend. Quaker witness must be grounded in the hope that our lives will quicken the Life within others & that they will come closer to the direct witness of Inward Teacher. We find community in the Life that is in, under, through those things, a Life that loves a profusion of diversity & is always seeking to be born again & again into the uniqueness of our lives. The Stillness that we find in our meetings for worship can take root within; it can become a hidden spring of refreshment & inspiration that we carry into our daily lives.
Inward Activism & Outward Prayer—It is the witness of our tradition that those who are naturally inclined to begin in prayer will eventually feel led into outward action, & those who are naturally led to action will eventually feel called more deeply into prayer. Sometimes, those who pray don't act, & those who act don't pray. At Pendle Hill, my classes on prayer & peacemaking tended to be small. For an introduction, I asked the class for words or phrases that expressed their worst & best judgments about spiritually-oriented people. We did a similar process for those who identified primarily as activists. The worst of spirituality was similar to the worst of activism, & the best of spirituality was similar to the best of activism. I promised that we would work toward a practice that integrated the best of both while guarding against the worst. [The worst of each emerged when prayer was disconnected from any outward fruit, and when activism had no inward drawing deeper into Spirit].
If the best of activism consists in an energetic, committed seeking of truth, and loving confrontation of all that obscures it, then this energetic commitment can be brought to prayer. The key is honesty, not piety, and a willingness not to get hung up on problems of belief. [Inward activism is a full engagement of the self with] an attitude of anticipation, intense listening, fierce participation, and an insistent desire to be re-formed in the Creative Presence at any cost. Michael Birkel writes: “Early Friends’ experience of the Inward Light was not as a cozy fire but rather a relentless, [long-lasting] search beam that showed them their sinfulness … [and then] led them to the victory of good over evil within them; a sense of inward peace followed.”
Inward activism exposes the projections and unconscious distortions that sometimes contaminate our political work. The Light that early Friends spoke of, does not confront us in the manner of an overworked and punitive conscience. It is rather the work of Love, a purifying Fire that brings us home to our deepest authenticity and truest nature. [“Inward activism” is our activism and the activism of God within us.] The type of practice suggested by the phrase “inward activism” is one in which we recognize that we have invented gods to mirror and support our personal identification. With persistence in prayer, these idols will begin to crack and falter. As we become aware of how deeply trapped we are by idols, we cry out to God to save us from our gods, and are willing to submit to God’s inward nonviolent campaign for our freedom. We are participating in what Rufus Jones called “the double search,” for the Divine Other whom we seek is also seeking us.”
To undergo an interior revolution of the Spirit is to have one’s whole life remade in a new pattern. [There is new hope, new vision, [a new steady, irrepressible joy]. Many around the country who participated in these workshops were working daily within a political context that was then and still remains quite discouraging. Some would argue that the love we seek and the joy that is promised can easily become ends in themselves. We needed much time to hear the grief and frustration in these comments.
Activists were cautioning us about an ever-present danger in spirituality and in not heeding the call into outward service and witness. Our outward work was not only the natural product of a deepened interior life, it was also a safeguard against the interior life becoming detached. The activist in our groups kept us grounded in the real and urgent needs of a broken world. The activists were challenged to season their sense of urgency in prayer. Hope is already visible in the faithfulness and courage that it takes to stand in a place of truth in spite of the world’s seeming indifference to our efforts.
Quaker Witness as Sacrament—We came to understand this inward/outward path as sacramental, [i.e.] the outward and visible sign [Quaker witness] of an inward and invisible Grace. To live sacramentally is to fall so completely into God’s infinite Love for us and for the world that we see and act in this world in light of this Love. We can enjoy a steady Presence of God, as we become increasingly attuned to the leadings that bring us into our right activity, purpose, and way of being in the world. Frederick Buechner writes: “The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and world’s deep hunger meet.”
The words “witness” & “testimony” suggest something much deeper, that we are giving voice & form to that which we now know from direct encounter. Thomas Kelly wrote: “Too many well-intentioned people are pre-occupied with the effort of doing something for God that they can’t hear God asking that God might do something through them.” We are called to work on behalf of what is right & just, but leave outcomes to God.
Our peacemaking is a way of being, a mutual infusion of self and world. George Fox challenged us to “be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them … answering that of God in every one.” Such a life may not make sense in the world’s terms; it may not even be visibly “effective” in the relatively short time frame of our own lives, but it is ultimately transformative in its power. There is a Stillness before form that rises into form. A Inward Teacher and Guide brings intimation of a world not yet fully visible but already here. Arundati Roy writes: “Another world is … on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
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262. Bearing Witness: Quaker Process and a Culture of Peace (by Gray Cox; 1985)
About the Author—Raised on the Maine coast, Gray Cox is a graduate of Wesleyan University in CT with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt. He has written: The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy. He was a member of a Witness for Peace delegation that visited Nicaragua in July 1984. The 1st part of the pamphlet is based on a Southern Appalachian YM talk. The 2nd part has grown out of current work on a book on peace and the transformation of our culture.
The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree, and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. Mohandas K. Ghandhi
“Do you live in the virtue of that life & power that takes away the occasion of all wars?” John Woolman
I. QUAKER PROCESS—Quakers are cultural mutants with odd ways of talking, uncommon ways of behaving, & a mutant ethic based on a mutant conception of rationality. They frequently use the metaphor “seed of Christ.” The Quaker ethic is a process meant to be practiced rather than a theory meant to be accepted or a set of dogma meant to be blindly obeyed. The commitments and concerns of Quakers are best understood in historic testimonies such as John Woolman’s and queries that address us as individuals and communities. John Woolman asked: “Do you live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars?”
1st, Quakers view truth as something that happens, it occurs. It is like the nourishment of a food that must be grown and cooked and eaten and assimilated; it is a living occurrence in which we participate. 2nd meaning is communal. We ask ourselves what we, collectively, mean. George Fox said that it is the voice of Christ who “has come to teach his people himself.” 3rd, feeling and reason are viewed as continuous with one another, [not working at odds with one another]. As the light leads us along our path, a feeling is a directed step making up the path we take; reason is the directing path of the walking made up of these steps. 4th, the self is inherently social and transitional; we are like crests and troughs of the many-layered waves of a river.
At the heart of the community in which we participate is a spirit—a spirit which grows out of each of us and yet also grows into each of us. The process of the Quaker ethic has 5 stages: quieting impulses; addressing concerns; gathering consensus; finding clearness; and bearing witness. We can focus on one at a time like stages, or we can look at any given moment and be aware of how all 5 should always be present as levels or aspects.
Quieting Impulses/Addressing Concerns—My typical frame of mind is fragmented by desires, fears, frustrations, angers, habits, expectations and impulses. George Fox’s “lusts” are mechanistic causes of our behavior. They push us from below and behind. The first step is to quiet these by having them let go of us & letting go of them. There are many techniques for evoking an inner distance, like laughing at ourselves. Sometimes I laugh & wonder how I could [be anxious about dying in nuclear war] and forget the basic fact of our mortality.
Friends seem to use various techniques at the beginning of service for “centering down.” A warm engrossing light is the kind Quakers focused on during the 18th century Quietism period. People caught up in it in meeting for worship will breathe slowly & smile. There is a 2nd sort of light more distinctive with Friends. It is like a beacon that beckons us on. It leads to an experience of disturbed care [& possibly “speaking out of the silence”]. It isn’t a result of impulse or lust but rather of feeling called into question in addressing a concern.
After we quiet our impulses, we are ready to address concerns. Genuine concerns have a different quality to distinguish them from mechanical habits or personal desires. They lure us on, and in addressing these concerns we find ourselves addressed by them. The Quaker queries provide a repository of key concerns of this sort. Meeting in worship intensifies the sense of being addressed by an issue or concern. We stand addressed by that powerful silence which waits upon us and listens.
Gathering Consensus/Finding Clearness/Bearing Witness—Once you have caught sight of the light or felt a “leading,” then you follow. This is “gathering consensus” or “seeking clearness.” The aim of gathering consensus is to explore concerns & the reality we live amidst & seek until we find a view that does justice to the complexity of reality & rightness. For Quakers, consensus is practicing communal discernment that yields agreement & truth. The trick is to keep different points of view in dialogue until a genuine consensus is reached.
Finding clearness is a stage of resolve, a stage at which we find ourselves standing in conviction of some truth. It is a matter of discovering objective moral truth, of finding your destiny, your calling. This finding has the character of discovering you are in the grip of something, which is experienced as truth known by direct revelation. Some indicators of clearness are useful, [if not infallible]. Clearness usually involves openness (to many perspectives), wholeness (all positions respected & given their due), unanimity, & presence. These 4 indicators can be reflected on, & enhanced by, our bodies’ postures & gestures. There is inclusive focus many Quakers have come to see as simplicity. Clearness simplifies. It is a unity of our thoughts & deeds, a gathering of clear focus.
Such a clearness can compel activity. Such activity isn’t best understood as “action” in the term’s traditional sense. What motivates the activity of those compelled to action isn’t achieving some end, but rather, the conviction that they must bear witness to truth. The guiding concern of people bearing witness is to live rightly. [In seeking & bearing witness to peace], they aren’t so much trying to find a way to get to peace as bear witness to the conviction that there is no way to peace; peace is the way. Quakers are convinced that genuine leadings proceed from a common ground, springing from a unity, [a person-like presence] which we seek & find. Friends differ in views about the metaphysical relationships between Jesus of Nazareth & this inclusive, organic, caring, respectful presence that addresses us. George Fox described it as: “Christ has come to teach his people himself.”
The Quaker process embodies seeds for a culture of peace. It is one that calls for new ways of talking & behaving. We have to become strange in word & deed if we are to progress towards a rightly ordered culture. There is growing convergence in world views being worked out by ecologists (i.e. “stewardship”), feminists (i.e. “cultural feminism”), peacemakers (i.e. “peacemaking”), civil rights activists (i.e. “community empowerment”), & others. These are yielding a new set of leading ideas & empowering practices for reconstruction of our culture.
II. A CULTURE OF PEACE—We often talk as though peace and war were symmetrical opposites. The fact that “war” is used as a verb and “peace” is not reflects the fact that while war is thought of as an activity, peace is thought of as a condition or state, not as something we can do. While war is characterized as something substantial and positive in its own right, peace is most often defined negatively, as the absence of confrontation. This definition identifies something bad we should avoid, but it leaves us [not knowing what to promote].
The other definition offered for peace by people with roots in a religious tradition, characterizes peace positively. Peace is said to be a state of harmony, tranquility, unity, or concord. But it fails to give us any concrete & dynamic notion we can use to guide our activity; [it describes the end of the journey but not how to get there]. And such concord or tranquility suggests a lack of vital life process and growth that make life worth living.
What do these 2 definitions reveal about our culture? Once we grant that conflict is an essential and ineradicable feature of all human activity, then it is indeed difficult to see how we conceive of peace as an activity. If peace is a lack of activity and all human activity has conflict, then peace is not an activity.
This conflict view of human nature is difficult to fight. The words that we use in reasoning itself are laced with metaphors of war & physical combat; ARGUMENT IS WAR. Law courts pose questions of justice in terms of conflicts between plaintiffs & defendants. Our economy is understood to be a mechanism for distributing resources between competing people. Feeling & Reason are seen as being in opposition to one another. The struggle between reason & feeling is taken to be the most radical source of conflict within each & between all.
Clearly these views of truth, feeling, and reason are quite different from those which underlie the Quaker process. Friends have always held that conflict is only an option, not a necessity. It is possible to live in the virtue of that power and spirit which takes away the occasion of all wars. The conflict view is deeply entrenched in our culture. To understand it, we need to think in terms of the impacts of the theological, scientific, and industrial revolutions that have taken place, [starting in the 300s A.D.].
Theological Revolution/Scientific Revolution—[Before the 300s], Christian communities believed that the Christ was in their midst and the Kingdom of God was within them. Then, an enterprising and pragmatic emperor appropriated their religion, making it state doctrine and there by tying the Church to Caesar’s realm. [The question became] How can each citizen reconcile the orders of the temporal with the path of Christ? The solution arrived at involved a revolution in religious thought. [The key concept was]: Christ is not of this world, and we are. All are conceived in lust, live in sin and must be ordered by practical principles of human justice. [Along with this concept came] the doctrine of the just war; both are still with us.
Sometime after 1600, a new science replaced theology as the driving force behind the construction of the western world view. Man was reconceived again, [this time] as knower & known. Knowledge consists of a value-free understanding of events’ causes—causes governed by mathematical laws. Later events are explained in terms of earlier. Nature is viewed as a great mechanism, pushed from past to present rather than guided toward future goal. Man appears as object in this world, governed by the same laws as those that order the rest of nature.
Values are not matters of fact, and questions about them cannot be rationally answered; they are simply subjective preferences. This view underlies contemporary economics; it pictures people as instrumental actors, manipulators using things and other human beings as means to an end. Since there is no way of deciding who is right, conflict is inevitable. Note that this instrumentalist model of human action is the old lust model in a new guise. Here people throng the world with conflicting values which cannot be rationally adjudicated, and they use each other as means for their subjective ends. This model was institutionalized beginning in the 18th century.
The Industrial Revolution—1st, workers, their labor, and its products each had to be viewed as inter-changeable parts in a flow of goods and services. 2nd, these were to be dealt with in ways that abstracted them from the organic details. Vast production systems became the means to achieve consumer preferences and government goals. Clearly a culture of peace would involve a different conception of social science, a different model of human action, new institutions and practices.
Critics of social sciences share the conviction that contemporary social science has failed to discover any laws of human behavior [among other things]. It is in peoples’ languages that we should explain human action. A critical participatory method amounts to social science as a gathering of consensus that yields clearness acknowledged by community. Besides theorists who advocate such a participatory method, there are activists who practice it & seeking to institutionalize it, conflict mediators, & people in various parts of the Peace Movement.
The activity is more like an art or craft than a mechanical procedure. These processes of human activity involve at least 3 features. 1st [All facets] of the process are viewed as emerging; we are in the process of finding out. 2nd, The facets are related in organic processes; means and ends are internally related to one another. 3rd, the social processes have integrity and give values an objectivity.
The development of institutions which would reflect & facilitate the critical participatory method could lead to a great reconstruction of our culture. Courts would become stewards of justice rather than referees at verbal duels. Economic institutions would become smaller, subservient to organic communities. The Pentagon would wither away, replaced by peace as an activity of resolving differences between people through consensus.
We need to reject the conflict view of human nature as well as the Galilean method of social science. Peace will become an activity in which we can vigorously engage. We have much to learn about what “peace” means as a verb. The source we can turn to for counsel is an inward presence. It is a light which we may walk and a beacon leading the way. Those who act [out peace] would know this presence experimentally.
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435. You Are My Witnesses: Witness and Testimony in the Biblical and Quaker Traditions (By Thomas Gates; 2015)
About the Author—Thomas Gates is a member of Lancaster (PA) MM; he has served the Committee for Worship & Ministry locally, & the Working Group on Deepening & Strengthening Our Meeting from Philadelphia YM. He spent 8 years of his medical career as a family doctor in rural NH. He & his family lived & worked at Friends Lugulu Hospital in Kenya (Stories from Kenya; PHP #319). He has been on the faculty of the Family Medicine Residency at Lancaster General Hospital, and currently has discerned a need to serve in rural Malawi. This essay is based on 5 talks given at New England YM 2014.
Introduction: A Cloud of Witnesses/ Is Your God Big Enough?: Witness against Idolatry—Hebrews 12:1 speaks of being surrounded by a "cloud of witnesses." In Isaiah 43:10; 43:12; & 44:8 God declares: "You are my witnesses!" Through these verses & early Quaker witness, I'll explore what tradition tells us about being witnesses now. Isaiah's "witness" passages were written by a Babylonian Jew in a section sometimes called "2nd Isaiah." This anonymous poet & prophet announces that Yahweh is about to end exile & bring the Jewish community back to Jerusalem. The writer uses the scene of a heavenly trial, with Babylonian gods on trial (See Isaiah 43: 9-13). The issue is idolatry; Isaiah mocks the wooden idols of Babylon, who can't answer the charges.
Just because we don't worship graven images or idols, we should not assume that the idolatry issue is no longer relevant. Everywhere we look, we see the de facto worship of lesser gods: money; power; career; consumerism; ideology; political causes; security. Is your God big enough? The issue is God's transcendence, God "going beyond" our normal, everyday experience. The prophet's poetry is replete with images of transcendence in Isaiah 55: 8-9 and Isaiah 40: 21-23. They are poetic and beautiful, but if we are honest, we are likely to admit that these ancient images of an all-powerful God [the puppeteer] are lost on us. Our images are necessary, but always inadequate, so the spiritual life often means a successive smashing of idols.
God 's new images have emerged. In particular, panentheism, "all in God, God in all," allows us to reclaim God's transcendent dimension. God is both transcendent & immanent. In panentheism, transcendence refers to the "More" of an added dimension. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls God "the beyond in our midst." Abraham Joshua Heschel writes: "There are no proofs for the God of Abraham ... only witnesses. Dorothy Day writes: "To be a witness ... means to live in such a way that one's life wouldn't make sense if God didn't exist. [We need to live as a part of the greater mystery that is God, & our lives need to appear as a mystery from the world's perspective].
Is Your God Close Enough?: The Witness Within—In the biblical worldview God was both transcendent and immanent. 2 broad spiritual paths resulted: ascending spirituality [transcendence, seeking God be-yond]; descending spirituality [immanence, looking for God in the world]. Beginning around 400 CE, and continuing for over 1,000 years, God's transcendence came to be emphasized and God's immanence neglected, except in the forms of Celtic Christianity, Francis of Assisi, medieval mystics and reformers.
One way to understand the significance of early Friends is to see them at the end of this 1,000 year detour, trying to recapture a fresh sense of God's immanence, in both their experience & their language. In a sense they were asking: Is your God close enough? Quakers had a rich language for immanence: Inward Light; the Seed; Inward Teacher; that of God in everyone. Based on I John 5:10, Fox exhorts Friends to "keep to the witness of God in yourselves," & "live up to the Witness." Fox talks of "reaching the witness" in those he is in dispute with, [& as living examples of "that of God," making] "the witness of God in them bless you."
Isaac Penington writes: "As God hath not left God's self without an outward witness ... so God hath not left God's self without a witness inwardly; there is something in men to testify of God." [Sarah Blackborrow speaks of her convincement by inner witness beginning when she was 8 or 9 without knowing what it was, & of realizing it & testifying with her own witness] "when it was spoken of to me by the Servants of the living God." Truth for early Friends was deceit's opposite, so the witness led Friends to 1st confront self-deceit & then deceit in others. The witness is the capacity to see our identities as limited in perspective. Light is the means by which we see all things. This inward witness or light seemed to help them see their lives through God's eyes, not their own. This allows dis-identifying with our ego-projects & concerns, our fears and insecurities, & vanities.
[Fox's experience was that]: "I was a man of sorrows in the times of the 1st workings of the Lord in me ... [And] now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all creation gave another smell ... beyond what words can utter." George Fox counseled early Friends: "Keep within ... For Christ is within you ... the measure is within ... the word of God is within, and you are the Temples of God." The pearl of great price cannot be inherited, but must be re-discovered by each generation.
Is Your God Real Enough?: Witness as Testimony—Is our God real enough? For early Friends, only a direct relationship with the Divine would give their lives meaning, purpose, wholeness, [and Truth]. This truth must have consequences for the way they lived their lives. In John 3:21, the Evangelist suggests the truth is not mere words, but rather something we do. Early Friends spoke of "having a testimony" and understood this as the way in which they witnessed to the truth they had experienced. Early Friends thought of their testimony in terms of what they did, the way they lived their lives. They did not swear oaths, because they believed in a single standard of truth. They did not pay tithes, because the gospel ministry had been freely received and was to be freely given. They would not fight, because they were to love their enemies and overcome evil with good.
Of all these aspects of Friends testimony, perhaps the basic was their manner of worship. After the restoration of the monarchy and the established church, anything resembling Quaker worship was against the law. [Friends were forced out of their "meeting house" and started meeting in the fields]. The men of the meeting were arrested, and the women and children continued to meet. When most of the women were arrested, the children continued to meet. The widow Margaret Whithart, proclaimed, "This is the place we have met since the beginning ... We do not meet here in willfulness or stubbornness, God is our witness ... we must bear our testimony publicly in this thing, whatever we suffer."
Early Friends' best known testimony was for peace. Before the historical Declaration of 1661, [there was a remarkable earlier incident]. Thomas Lurting was an artillery officer in the navy. There was a small group who met regularly in Quaker worship. [Impressed by their sense of community], Lurting was eventually drawn to join in their worship. [In the midst of battle, he realized the possibility of killing a man]. After sharing his new conviction with the small group of Quakers, and in a subsequent battle, he refused to report to his station, even under threat of death. What is most remarkable about this story is that at the time there was no public statement of the peace testimony. His action came solely from his silent waiting on the Light. This is one of many such stories of those risking or actually experiencing great suffering in bearing witness to the Truth.
Is Your God Real Enough?: [Modern Testimony]—These stories provide raw material from which we distill our modern testimonies. Originally, a martyr was simply a witness. Early Friends often found that Truth required suffering. This resonates with 2nd Isaiah, where the "servant songs" culminate in Isaiah 53's suffering servant. If I were on trial for being a Quaker, would there be enough evidence to convict me? Early Friends witness in the face of suffering & persecution makes no sense without including the transforming experience of the Divine Presence, the Light Within, the Inward Christ, the Witness of God in their hearts. William Penn said: "They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others." Early Friends lived in an authoritarian & hierarchical society. We live in a society that is individualistic, & not threatened by Quaker peculiarities, which are likely to be tolerated, but not likely to be taken seriously. What might it mean to witness to the Truth in today's culture? Might there even be ways in which we will be asked to suffer for the Truth?
Testimony as Stories of Witness—What are the Quaker testimonies? What were the Quaker testimonies early on? Many of us would spell out S.P.I.C.E.S. [simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship] that would have the character of virtues or abstract principles. Before the testimonies were a list, Michael Levi wrote: "Testimonies were leadings, stories from bygone days, many of which of which are still relevant to the challenges I face today." Early Friends did not think of them [as abstract testimonies of "integrity," "equality," "peace," and act accordingly], but by listening to the still small voice and responding to the choices before them. The testimonies as they have come to us are the distillation of generations of stories of faithfulness to the leadings of the Light. [In a pastoral visit I talked of] "my activist period" years before [and was asked] "And what are you doing now?" That question could be addressed to the entire Society of Friends.
[Testimonies are not to be found in lists]. They come from the bottom up; they are the end result of thousands of Friends around the world who are faithful to the leadings of the Light, to the Witness within them. How do we cultivate the ability to listen to promptings of love & truth in our hearts? What is love asking? If it sometimes seems that Friends' sense of testimony has waned in recent years, it is certainly not for lack of issues, global & local. I suspect that all of us have at times struggled with the temptation to hopelessness & despair.
Although we need to think globally, faithful action is likely to be local, modest in scope, humble in its aspirations, qualitatively persuasive rather than quantitatively decisive, more like yeast than the whole loaf. God doesn't require that we be successful, only that we be faithful. We do what we do because we are called to do it; not to achieve some calculated end or goal. A renewed testimony is likely to be personal, rooted in the particular circumstances of individual lives & local communities. Thomas Kelly writes: "For each of us [there are] special undertakings that are our particular share in the joyous burdens of love ... We can't die on every cross, nor are we expected to." If our testimony is rooted & grounded in love & spiritual abundance, then the burden is light. Truth isn't something we know but something we do. If our spiritual truth doesn't transform us & bear fruit, then it isn't truth but self-deception. How are the promptings of love & truth leading us to be "doers of the word"?
Witness in the Shadow of Empire—I want to explore the themes of empire and exile. These concerns are central to the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the New Testament we can't comprehend the church's claim that "Christ is Lord" without understanding it as a subversive counter to the empire's claim that "Caesar is Lord." Exile is not just geographical, but political, moral, and cultural, a loss of the structured, reliable world which gave meaning and coherence, while facing the twin temptations of assimilation and despair. [Jews endured this for 50 years]. Walter Brueggmann says that we should 1st read Hebrew poetry with an eye to the original historical context, remembering the Jews were the Palestinians of that time. [With our economic and military dominance in the world] we are uncomfortably reminiscent of Babylon.
Friends and others of prophetic faith find themselves a captive people, living in that strange land of exile, in the shadow of empire. We too are forced to choose between [assimilation and despair]. Where do we fit in the story of empire and exile, assimilation and despair? What is our testimony? One of the most pernicious tools of empire is to convince us that nothing can ever change. Over and over in history, things stay the same—until they change. Change when it comes is often sudden, unanticipated, seemingly miraculous [e.g. end] of Iron Curtain and apartheid. [For change to happen there must be "active hope."] Doug Gwyn has observed that, "Work for a sustainable human society on earth will focus much of our imagination and energies in this century."
According to Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, The 1st step in active hope is about recognizing, appreciating, & delighting in what is now present in our experience (See Isaiah 42:10; 43:1, 2, 4, 5; 45:18). The 2nd step in the spiral, honoring our pain for the world, allows us to break through avoidance & denial [of how bad things are.] It means we notice, & we care. Old Testament expression of pain & grief is seen in psalms of lament, the book of Lamentations & traces in 2nd Isaiah (See Isaiah 51:17-19). Thich Nhat Hahn says: "What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying." Most of us spend a lot of energy not noticing [the earth's crying].
The 3rd step in the spiral is "seeing with new eyes," seeing new possibilities that inspire hope (See Isaiah 43:18-19). It will mean coming to a wider sense of self, [transcending culture]. It will mean power with rather than power over, where cooperation & synergy replace hierarchy. Friend Eileen Flanagan reminds that seeing with new eyes is seeing that it is a question of the earth saving us; saving us from false separation [from nature], from the divine spirit that connects us all. Our hope is that once a certain portion of humanity makes a daunting shift in our thinking, our politics, & our spirituality, decisive change may come quite suddenly & unexpectedly.
The 4th and final step in the spiral is "going forth." Going forth means action [taken with] imagination and vision. There must be clarity about what it is we hope for. The new Jerusalem for which Jews yearn was a to be a light to all nations, a universal beacon of shalom, of peace and salvation [See Isaiah 49:6; 60:1,3]. How are we called to be God's witnesses in our time? What testimony do we have for this troubled & hopeless world? Let us take the 4 steps of active hope. And may God grant us a vision worthy of our task, a vision of God's shalom for all people, and for the earth.
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397. Quaker Witness as Sacrament (by Daniel O. Snyder; 2008)
About the Author—Daniel O. Snyder holds masters degrees from Earlham School of Religion & Boston University School of Theology, & a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. He does pastoral psychotherapy in Black Mountain, NC. The ideas in this pamphlet came from an address to New York YM in 2004. An expanded version was presented as the Richard L. Cary lecture presented for German YM in 2007.
Early Friends’ experience of the Inward Light was not as a cozy fire but rather a relentless, [long-lasting] search beam that showed them their sinfulness … [and then] led them to the victory of good over evil within them; a sense of inward peace followed. Michael Birkel
[Introduction]—Nick Ut took a picture of Phan Thi Kim Phuc as she ran from her village, naked, burned, screaming in pain & terror. I was 22, white, male, middle class, & North American. [I assumed I would follow a typical career path for my class]. Kim Phuc came without words, without political analysis, without theological or moral argument. She took away my peace; I have spent 36 years trying to get it back. Kim Phuc became the poorest and weakest person I have encountered. How will the next step I take be of use to that person? I now understand that she became for me one of the faces of Christ. At the heart of it all is a conviction that Quaker witness, peace work, is sacramental. I have been fully restored to peace only in those moments when my life is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible Grace.
Sacramental life is a vision I have only glimpsed. When I neglect the inward or outward work, I become divided, & Grace attends this division with profound restlessness. Kim Phuc goaded me into a life I never could have designed for myself, one that I frequently didn’t understand & couldn't explain to others. Very, very slowly, I am learning to attend to my restlessness each day, listen to it, to be a novice under its instruction. It is as if my soul is a wild and shy animal who leaves small signs of disturbance, and my task is to attune to these signs.
Personal Journey—Kim Phuc’s picture unsettled me at my core, but I ran from it for more than 2 years. I applied to American Friends Service Committee to go to Vietnam right as the need for service declined. I was led to join a community of activists in Philadelphia who were committed to the study of the practice of nonviolence. Action that arose from clarity and action that arose from despair often took the same outward form; I was one of the despairing ones. The heroism I imposed upon myself lacked any real interior substance. Others were fed by inward springs that refreshed and renewed them. I was fed by surges of emotional energy with which I tried to lift myself out of an undertow. I had nothing to sustain me in what was a life’s work with [unimaginable sacrifices]. I left the activist community and took the next year at Pendle Hill in order to find out.
I went there with no idea what I would find. I wasn’t even sure what questions to ask. I only knew that something within me was asking a question for which I had no answer. There was no preaching, no insistence on doctrinal conformity, only an emphasis on silent waiting, listening, & attention. I took courses on Christian mysticism Quaker history and spirituality, and Thomas Merton. My faculty consultant was a visiting Catholic nun. I asked her a surprising question: “Can you help me find God?” We began a journey of spiritual nurture that led me into my growing hunger for a life of prayer. [I knew] the meagerness of my own resources and I knew that I had no real choice other than to walk fully into the mystery of prayer & meditation, fall into it if necessary.
I spent the following year with Thomas Merton’s Trappist [brother-monks] in the Colorado mountains. Prayer was hearing my own voice sending pleas up to God & freefall into that space where words were neither spoken nor heard, a space preceding language & thought. After a few months all the chatter in my head began to quiet down. It was enough to fall into the bottomless depth of God’s Presence & to feel myself held there. The cross hanging over my bed was a problem. I found a picture of a starving African child & pinned it to the cross.
This starving African Christ wrecked my peace. One day I could not bear any longer the anger and grief of this image. I hiked to the top of the nearest ridge and poured out my rage at God. Am I supposed to worship you when you send your own children to death? I called down God’s wrath on myself. I would go to hell with this child before I would go to heaven with an abusive god.
And then the Presence came again. Sky reached down and Earth reached up. Mountain wrapped me in her arms and Light, Air, and Water all seemed to be talking at once in a Cosmic babble of Joy. If God had spoken, [God might have said]: “I have been waiting for you to [“feed my sheep”]. Who do you think gave you that anger? Who gave you your compassion? Every suffering child is my child.”
[You Can Love Me in this Child]—What fell into place after I pinned the African child’s picture to the cross was an affirmation that all suffering is held within an infinite Presence. God seemed to say, “You cannot love me in formlessness, but you can love me in this child.” I was grateful for the hospitality of the monks. I found a sacred space in their monastery that had begun to feel like a space I could find within myself. I began to see that my path lay more in the intersection of the inward & the outward than in emphasizing one over the other. I wasn’t fully at home in either the activist or the monastery community. I knew that silence had taken root in me, & that I no longer needed a cloister to hold it.
[Now] I needed language, tools, experience [See About Author]. [After that] I could adequately name my experience and translate my intuitions into thought. I came to understand incarnation as the ongoing birth of God in the world; the deepest healing is incarnation. It sometimes needs our active intervention in helping to create the best possible conditions for its birth. [In my practice] there was outward engagement in therapy and inward engagement in my private time of intercession; both are essential. I came to think of myself as a kind of nonviolent interventionist in the inner worlds of my clients. How could I take the work and insights of therapy more deeply into the lives of activists?
I joined the Pendle Hill faculty; I developed a series of 3 courses: Nonviolence in Personal and Political Life; Prayer and Peacemaking; Forgiveness and Reconciliation for 3 questions: Where are we going and how do we get there? What sustains us on the journey? What do we do once we arrive? Each of these themes has been profoundly deepened by the Pendle Hill students and workshop attenders who participated.
Now I am back in private practice & combine that work with teaching & spiritual nurture within my community. I help activists find the particular spiritual path that can both deepen and sustain their work. [Many more suffering children have been added to my 1st two. Every child of war is like a silent witness, calling us to a world that can be safe for all future children. Kim Phuc herself directs a Canadian foundation focused on the needs of children affected by war and on forgiveness.
From Silence to Speech: The Meeting for Worship as Pattern for our Witness in the World—[Some in our community are excluded for “unacceptable beliefs or lifestyles].” Some resist the language of exclusivity and domination that has poisoned conservative Christian right rhetoric. [Some] finally come to the Stillness within and then, at last, they feel the Presence and learn that there is an Inward Teacher and Guide who can speak to their condition. We must be careful to reach deeper than the words themselves. Even if Christianity has been a language of Life for some, it has been a language of [injury and] death for others.
We must find a way that invites others to find words that are true to the Spirit that lives in them. Our aim is to reach the Life in the other, to bear witness to it, to create a space of Holy, expectant waiting, and to invite, welcome, and enjoy the wonder and surprise when it breaks into speech, into song, into a life made whole. [Each worshiper in silent worship], seeks to get above or below, between or beyond, the interior noise and rumination in order to be faithful to that inside for which Friends have many names.
The purpose of our disciplines of simplicity & plainness is to clear space, to give ourselves respite from distracting, unseasoned words. In worship we bring ourselves near to the Stillness & offer ourselves to Grace that draws down into Life’s seed. We are heirs to a tradition that seeks to release words back into their silence so that they can return to us fresh & alive, awakening us to new inspiration, new ways of seeing, new callings.
We may 1st come to meeting longing for sanctuary, refuge, comfort, safety, a place to heal. We soon find that the silence will hold us for awhile, it will eventually open up and bring us into a vast new world. A few words may form and we ask, is this message just for me or for others? Is it truly grounded in the light? Am I running ahead or behind the Guide? The content of the message may be important to some, or even just to one, but all will feel the presence of the Life that brings it forth, long after the content is forgotten.
To settle for anything less than this Life, according to our tradition, is to fall into an idolatry of form. Most of us are comfortable with no creeds. Perhaps we are less comfortable with the notion that we can trust the Sa-cred to lead us into right action & to political work [that witnesses] to truth. Our spiritual work is always a work of uncovering, revealing, returning to Life, again & again. We release our gods in order to surprised by God.
I must use words to evoke that which is before words. There is always some risk both in speaking & in witnessing in the world, for we never know with any certainty that our words & actions will be received in the Spirit in which we intend. Quaker witness must be grounded in the hope that our lives will quicken the Life within others & that they will come closer to the direct witness of Inward Teacher. We find community in the Life that is in, under, through those things, a Life that loves a profusion of diversity & is always seeking to be born again & again into the uniqueness of our lives. The Stillness that we find in our meetings for worship can take root within; it can become a hidden spring of refreshment & inspiration that we carry into our daily lives.
Inward Activism & Outward Prayer—It is the witness of our tradition that those who are naturally inclined to begin in prayer will eventually feel led into outward action, & those who are naturally led to action will eventually feel called more deeply into prayer. Sometimes, those who pray don't act, & those who act don't pray. At Pendle Hill, my classes on prayer & peacemaking tended to be small. For an introduction, I asked the class for words or phrases that expressed their worst & best judgments about spiritually-oriented people. We did a similar process for those who identified primarily as activists. The worst of spirituality was similar to the worst of activism, & the best of spirituality was similar to the best of activism. I promised that we would work toward a practice that integrated the best of both while guarding against the worst. [The worst of each emerged when prayer was disconnected from any outward fruit, and when activism had no inward drawing deeper into Spirit].
If the best of activism consists in an energetic, committed seeking of truth, and loving confrontation of all that obscures it, then this energetic commitment can be brought to prayer. The key is honesty, not piety, and a willingness not to get hung up on problems of belief. [Inward activism is a full engagement of the self with] an attitude of anticipation, intense listening, fierce participation, and an insistent desire to be re-formed in the Creative Presence at any cost. Michael Birkel writes: “Early Friends’ experience of the Inward Light was not as a cozy fire but rather a relentless, [long-lasting] search beam that showed them their sinfulness … [and then] led them to the victory of good over evil within them; a sense of inward peace followed.”
Inward activism exposes the projections and unconscious distortions that sometimes contaminate our political work. The Light that early Friends spoke of, does not confront us in the manner of an overworked and punitive conscience. It is rather the work of Love, a purifying Fire that brings us home to our deepest authenticity and truest nature. [“Inward activism” is our activism and the activism of God within us.] The type of practice suggested by the phrase “inward activism” is one in which we recognize that we have invented gods to mirror and support our personal identification. With persistence in prayer, these idols will begin to crack and falter. As we become aware of how deeply trapped we are by idols, we cry out to God to save us from our gods, and are willing to submit to God’s inward nonviolent campaign for our freedom. We are participating in what Rufus Jones called “the double search,” for the Divine Other whom we seek is also seeking us.”
To undergo an interior revolution of the Spirit is to have one’s whole life remade in a new pattern. [There is new hope, new vision, [a new steady, irrepressible joy]. Many around the country who participated in these workshops were working daily within a political context that was then and still remains quite discouraging. Some would argue that the love we seek and the joy that is promised can easily become ends in themselves. We needed much time to hear the grief and frustration in these comments.
Activists were cautioning us about an ever-present danger in spirituality and in not heeding the call into outward service and witness. Our outward work was not only the natural product of a deepened interior life, it was also a safeguard against the interior life becoming detached. The activist in our groups kept us grounded in the real and urgent needs of a broken world. The activists were challenged to season their sense of urgency in prayer. Hope is already visible in the faithfulness and courage that it takes to stand in a place of truth in spite of the world’s seeming indifference to our efforts.
Quaker Witness as Sacrament—We came to understand this inward/outward path as sacramental, [i.e.] the outward and visible sign [Quaker witness] of an inward and invisible Grace. To live sacramentally is to fall so completely into God’s infinite Love for us and for the world that we see and act in this world in light of this Love. We can enjoy a steady Presence of God, as we become increasingly attuned to the leadings that bring us into our right activity, purpose, and way of being in the world. Frederick Buechner writes: “The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and world’s deep hunger meet.”
The words “witness” & “testimony” suggest something much deeper, that we are giving voice & form to that which we now know from direct encounter. Thomas Kelly wrote: “Too many well-intentioned people are pre-occupied with the effort of doing something for God that they can’t hear God asking that God might do something through them.” We are called to work on behalf of what is right & just, but leave outcomes to God.
Our peacemaking is a way of being, a mutual infusion of self and world. George Fox challenged us to “be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them … answering that of God in every one.” Such a life may not make sense in the world’s terms; it may not even be visibly “effective” in the relatively short time frame of our own lives, but it is ultimately transformative in its power. There is a Stillness before form that rises into form. A Inward Teacher and Guide brings intimation of a world not yet fully visible but already here. Arundati Roy writes: “Another world is … on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
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262. Bearing Witness: Quaker Process and a Culture of Peace (by Gray Cox; 1985)
About the Author—Raised on the Maine coast, Gray Cox is a graduate of Wesleyan University in CT with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt. He has written: The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy. He was a member of a Witness for Peace delegation that visited Nicaragua in July 1984. The 1st part of the pamphlet is based on a Southern Appalachian YM talk. The 2nd part has grown out of current work on a book on peace and the transformation of our culture.
The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree, and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. Mohandas K. Ghandhi
“Do you live in the virtue of that life & power that takes away the occasion of all wars?” John Woolman
I. QUAKER PROCESS—Quakers are cultural mutants with odd ways of talking, uncommon ways of behaving, & a mutant ethic based on a mutant conception of rationality. They frequently use the metaphor “seed of Christ.” The Quaker ethic is a process meant to be practiced rather than a theory meant to be accepted or a set of dogma meant to be blindly obeyed. The commitments and concerns of Quakers are best understood in historic testimonies such as John Woolman’s and queries that address us as individuals and communities. John Woolman asked: “Do you live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars?”
1st, Quakers view truth as something that happens, it occurs. It is like the nourishment of a food that must be grown and cooked and eaten and assimilated; it is a living occurrence in which we participate. 2nd meaning is communal. We ask ourselves what we, collectively, mean. George Fox said that it is the voice of Christ who “has come to teach his people himself.” 3rd, feeling and reason are viewed as continuous with one another, [not working at odds with one another]. As the light leads us along our path, a feeling is a directed step making up the path we take; reason is the directing path of the walking made up of these steps. 4th, the self is inherently social and transitional; we are like crests and troughs of the many-layered waves of a river.
At the heart of the community in which we participate is a spirit—a spirit which grows out of each of us and yet also grows into each of us. The process of the Quaker ethic has 5 stages: quieting impulses; addressing concerns; gathering consensus; finding clearness; and bearing witness. We can focus on one at a time like stages, or we can look at any given moment and be aware of how all 5 should always be present as levels or aspects.
Quieting Impulses/Addressing Concerns—My typical frame of mind is fragmented by desires, fears, frustrations, angers, habits, expectations and impulses. George Fox’s “lusts” are mechanistic causes of our behavior. They push us from below and behind. The first step is to quiet these by having them let go of us & letting go of them. There are many techniques for evoking an inner distance, like laughing at ourselves. Sometimes I laugh & wonder how I could [be anxious about dying in nuclear war] and forget the basic fact of our mortality.
Friends seem to use various techniques at the beginning of service for “centering down.” A warm engrossing light is the kind Quakers focused on during the 18th century Quietism period. People caught up in it in meeting for worship will breathe slowly & smile. There is a 2nd sort of light more distinctive with Friends. It is like a beacon that beckons us on. It leads to an experience of disturbed care [& possibly “speaking out of the silence”]. It isn’t a result of impulse or lust but rather of feeling called into question in addressing a concern.
After we quiet our impulses, we are ready to address concerns. Genuine concerns have a different quality to distinguish them from mechanical habits or personal desires. They lure us on, and in addressing these concerns we find ourselves addressed by them. The Quaker queries provide a repository of key concerns of this sort. Meeting in worship intensifies the sense of being addressed by an issue or concern. We stand addressed by that powerful silence which waits upon us and listens.
Gathering Consensus/Finding Clearness/Bearing Witness—Once you have caught sight of the light or felt a “leading,” then you follow. This is “gathering consensus” or “seeking clearness.” The aim of gathering consensus is to explore concerns & the reality we live amidst & seek until we find a view that does justice to the complexity of reality & rightness. For Quakers, consensus is practicing communal discernment that yields agreement & truth. The trick is to keep different points of view in dialogue until a genuine consensus is reached.
Finding clearness is a stage of resolve, a stage at which we find ourselves standing in conviction of some truth. It is a matter of discovering objective moral truth, of finding your destiny, your calling. This finding has the character of discovering you are in the grip of something, which is experienced as truth known by direct revelation. Some indicators of clearness are useful, [if not infallible]. Clearness usually involves openness (to many perspectives), wholeness (all positions respected & given their due), unanimity, & presence. These 4 indicators can be reflected on, & enhanced by, our bodies’ postures & gestures. There is inclusive focus many Quakers have come to see as simplicity. Clearness simplifies. It is a unity of our thoughts & deeds, a gathering of clear focus.
Such a clearness can compel activity. Such activity isn’t best understood as “action” in the term’s traditional sense. What motivates the activity of those compelled to action isn’t achieving some end, but rather, the conviction that they must bear witness to truth. The guiding concern of people bearing witness is to live rightly. [In seeking & bearing witness to peace], they aren’t so much trying to find a way to get to peace as bear witness to the conviction that there is no way to peace; peace is the way. Quakers are convinced that genuine leadings proceed from a common ground, springing from a unity, [a person-like presence] which we seek & find. Friends differ in views about the metaphysical relationships between Jesus of Nazareth & this inclusive, organic, caring, respectful presence that addresses us. George Fox described it as: “Christ has come to teach his people himself.”
The Quaker process embodies seeds for a culture of peace. It is one that calls for new ways of talking & behaving. We have to become strange in word & deed if we are to progress towards a rightly ordered culture. There is growing convergence in world views being worked out by ecologists (i.e. “stewardship”), feminists (i.e. “cultural feminism”), peacemakers (i.e. “peacemaking”), civil rights activists (i.e. “community empowerment”), & others. These are yielding a new set of leading ideas & empowering practices for reconstruction of our culture.
II. A CULTURE OF PEACE—We often talk as though peace and war were symmetrical opposites. The fact that “war” is used as a verb and “peace” is not reflects the fact that while war is thought of as an activity, peace is thought of as a condition or state, not as something we can do. While war is characterized as something substantial and positive in its own right, peace is most often defined negatively, as the absence of confrontation. This definition identifies something bad we should avoid, but it leaves us [not knowing what to promote].
The other definition offered for peace by people with roots in a religious tradition, characterizes peace positively. Peace is said to be a state of harmony, tranquility, unity, or concord. But it fails to give us any concrete & dynamic notion we can use to guide our activity; [it describes the end of the journey but not how to get there]. And such concord or tranquility suggests a lack of vital life process and growth that make life worth living.
What do these 2 definitions reveal about our culture? Once we grant that conflict is an essential and ineradicable feature of all human activity, then it is indeed difficult to see how we conceive of peace as an activity. If peace is a lack of activity and all human activity has conflict, then peace is not an activity.
This conflict view of human nature is difficult to fight. The words that we use in reasoning itself are laced with metaphors of war & physical combat; ARGUMENT IS WAR. Law courts pose questions of justice in terms of conflicts between plaintiffs & defendants. Our economy is understood to be a mechanism for distributing resources between competing people. Feeling & Reason are seen as being in opposition to one another. The struggle between reason & feeling is taken to be the most radical source of conflict within each & between all.
Clearly these views of truth, feeling, and reason are quite different from those which underlie the Quaker process. Friends have always held that conflict is only an option, not a necessity. It is possible to live in the virtue of that power and spirit which takes away the occasion of all wars. The conflict view is deeply entrenched in our culture. To understand it, we need to think in terms of the impacts of the theological, scientific, and industrial revolutions that have taken place, [starting in the 300s A.D.].
Theological Revolution/Scientific Revolution—[Before the 300s], Christian communities believed that the Christ was in their midst and the Kingdom of God was within them. Then, an enterprising and pragmatic emperor appropriated their religion, making it state doctrine and there by tying the Church to Caesar’s realm. [The question became] How can each citizen reconcile the orders of the temporal with the path of Christ? The solution arrived at involved a revolution in religious thought. [The key concept was]: Christ is not of this world, and we are. All are conceived in lust, live in sin and must be ordered by practical principles of human justice. [Along with this concept came] the doctrine of the just war; both are still with us.
Sometime after 1600, a new science replaced theology as the driving force behind the construction of the western world view. Man was reconceived again, [this time] as knower & known. Knowledge consists of a value-free understanding of events’ causes—causes governed by mathematical laws. Later events are explained in terms of earlier. Nature is viewed as a great mechanism, pushed from past to present rather than guided toward future goal. Man appears as object in this world, governed by the same laws as those that order the rest of nature.
Values are not matters of fact, and questions about them cannot be rationally answered; they are simply subjective preferences. This view underlies contemporary economics; it pictures people as instrumental actors, manipulators using things and other human beings as means to an end. Since there is no way of deciding who is right, conflict is inevitable. Note that this instrumentalist model of human action is the old lust model in a new guise. Here people throng the world with conflicting values which cannot be rationally adjudicated, and they use each other as means for their subjective ends. This model was institutionalized beginning in the 18th century.
The Industrial Revolution—1st, workers, their labor, and its products each had to be viewed as inter-changeable parts in a flow of goods and services. 2nd, these were to be dealt with in ways that abstracted them from the organic details. Vast production systems became the means to achieve consumer preferences and government goals. Clearly a culture of peace would involve a different conception of social science, a different model of human action, new institutions and practices.
Critics of social sciences share the conviction that contemporary social science has failed to discover any laws of human behavior [among other things]. It is in peoples’ languages that we should explain human action. A critical participatory method amounts to social science as a gathering of consensus that yields clearness acknowledged by community. Besides theorists who advocate such a participatory method, there are activists who practice it & seeking to institutionalize it, conflict mediators, & people in various parts of the Peace Movement.
The activity is more like an art or craft than a mechanical procedure. These processes of human activity involve at least 3 features. 1st [All facets] of the process are viewed as emerging; we are in the process of finding out. 2nd, The facets are related in organic processes; means and ends are internally related to one another. 3rd, the social processes have integrity and give values an objectivity.
The development of institutions which would reflect & facilitate the critical participatory method could lead to a great reconstruction of our culture. Courts would become stewards of justice rather than referees at verbal duels. Economic institutions would become smaller, subservient to organic communities. The Pentagon would wither away, replaced by peace as an activity of resolving differences between people through consensus.
We need to reject the conflict view of human nature as well as the Galilean method of social science. Peace will become an activity in which we can vigorously engage. We have much to learn about what “peace” means as a verb. The source we can turn to for counsel is an inward presence. It is a light which we may walk and a beacon leading the way. Those who act [out peace] would know this presence experimentally.
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