‘Early Friends had no confusion when it came to identifying that Inward Light with the historical person of Jesus Christ.’ Photo: by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash
Come to Jesus: Cap Kaylor says there’s a forgotten engine to Quaker spirituality
‘Early Friends were convinced that they were connecting with something more than an abstraction.’
In his book, With My Own Eyes, the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand recounts his fourteen years of imprisonment and torture in a Romanian prison, for the crime of preaching the gospel: ‘I was in jail and I fell very ill. I had intestinal tuberculosis, diabetes, heart failure… I was near death. On my right was a priest by the name of Iscue. He was the abbot of a monastery. This man, perhaps in his forties, had been so tortured that he was near to death. But his face was serene as he spoke of his hope for heaven, and about his love for Christ, and his faith. He radiated joy. In a grim irony, the priest’s torturer somehow ran afoul of his comrades, and was himself arrested, tortured, and thrown into the same cell as his victims. He was near me and dying in agony. During the night he would awaken me, crying out, “Pastor, please pray for me. I can’t die, I have committed such terrible crimes”. Then one night I saw a miracle. The dying priest called two other prisoners to help him and, leaning on their shoulders, slowly, slowly, walked past my bed, sat down on the bedside of this murderer, and caressed his head – I will never forget this gesture. I watched a murdered man caressing his murderer. Fr. Iscu said, “You are young, you didn’t know what you were doing. I love you with all my heart. If I who am a sinner can love you so much imagine how much Christ loves you. He forgives you. You only need to turn to Him.” In this prison in which there was no possibility of privacy I overheard the confession of this murderer to the man he murdered. They prayed together, and the priest went back to his cot. Both men died that night. It was Christmas Eve.’
It has been said that the world has heard every argument there is for God and faith, and has rejected them all. All except one: the transcendence we call holiness. Love, self-sacrifice, and especially forgiveness, are values beyond the comprehension of a purely-materialistic understanding of the universe. The sight of a nun washing the wounds of the poor in the slums of Calcutta, or the members of Charleston’s Mother Emmanuel Church forgiving the racist killer who slaughtered their elderly parishioners at Bible study, or the Amish community that forgave the murderer of their children by embracing his widow and donating money for the support of her children. Such events have the power to make the most hardened cynic stop in wonder. People like curmudgeonly author Malcolm Muggeridge, who had believed secular humanism to be the ideal social system until he visited a leprosarium run by nuns in India. Seeing the love and respect lavished on the sick, the dying, and those no one else wanted, he was thunderstruck by the insufficiency of his own philosophy. As he later wrote, ‘Humanists don’t run leprosariums.’ A life spent caring for people whose skin stuck to the pavement when they were lifted off the street requires more than humanism. The engine for that kind of service lies elsewhere.
We all need more love than we deserve. And, if we are honest with ourselves, we all need more mercy than we deserve. Forgiveness is the supremely-personal act in which love reaches its perfection.
Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and chronicler of the Nuremberg trials, said that ‘the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs is Jesus of Nazareth.’ Forgiving one’s enemies may be valued in some spiritual traditions as a kind of psychological therapy, to assuage obsessive feelings of anger and resentment. But in Christianity it has the force of a moral imperative. ‘Peter asked, “Lord, how often must I forgive those who sin against me? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy times seven times”’ (Matthew 18:21-22). In other words, without limit.
The Christian motive behind forgiveness is love. We love and forgive in imitation and affirmation of the God who, in Jesus, is the agent of reconciliation and salvation. To be reconciled is to be restored to friendship and harmony in right relationship with God, with others, and with all creation. To be saved, in the Christian sense, is to be fully and permanently united with God and one another in God. It is the goal toward which all creation tends, and the end-product, and purpose, of the Jesus event. The Christian God is a God with whom one is called to be in relationship.
Early Quakers, like all mystics, sought a direct, unmediated experience of God. But their mysticism remained a Christian mysticism, grounded in an experience of communion with an all-powerful intelligence – one that is immanent yet transcendent, creative, eternally self-sustaining, personal, and, yes, loving. Early Friends were convinced that, in worship, they were connecting with something more than an abstraction. Not a ‘cosmic consciousness’ or ‘ground of being’, but a Divine power – a who not a what. John’s Gospel expresses that intimate encounter well: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ (1:1).
Early Friends had no confusion when it came to identifying that Inward Light with the historical person of Jesus Christ. In the mystical experience all the ordinary limits of physics and perception give way to a radical consciousness of unity. Christ was an individual as well as the eternal Logos, permeating the universe as its motive force, and present in every human being as a potentiality.
The Quaker author Howard Brinton held that the uniqueness of Jesus consists in the fact that he was the supreme revelation of God in human terms. He proceeded eternally from God to create whatever is good in the world. While the Light dwelt in some measure in human beings, Jesus possessed the Light without measure because he was the Light. This allowed Friends to acknowledge the truth they encountered in other faiths without diluting their own self-understanding as Christians.
The Jesus event created the possibility of a new sort of humanity. Quakers believed they had discovered the original blueprint for Christianity. This transformative encounter with the Inward Light, which is the presence of Christ operating within the conscience of a person, illuminated their true spiritual condition, simultaneously forgiving their sins and guiding them as moral agents in the world. It is a fundamentally optimistic view of creation: human beings, and the world they inhabit, are perfectible. The incarnation and sacrifice of Christ had cosmic implications beyond showing humans the way to reconciliation with God. Christ’s sacrifice is the visible part of the eternal, cosmic process of salvation.
But what of Quakerism now? When I first began to explore Quakerism, a friend warned me that I would be disappointed if I expected to find the Quakerism I had read about in books – the Quakerism of John Woolman, Rufus Jones, Howard Brinton, and Thomas Kelley. Contemporary Quakerism had devolved along divergent paths, he said: either a simplistic biblical fundamentalism, or a lazy pluralism that rendered Christ’s sacrifice irrelevant. Neither of these resembled the spirituality I had found in the early sources. One camp offered me a Bronze Age tyrant, the other an abstraction, a progressive social agenda in place of a core Christian faith. It left my spiritual longing for love and forgiveness with nowhere to go.
The Quaker religion began as a reform movement within Christianity. Early Friends were embedded in a society that was permeated with a Christian ethos. The language, customs – the very stones around them – proclaimed the Christian faith, yet Friends dispensed with the historic channels through which that Christian faith was usually transmitted: scripture, tradition, and ritual. Those things weave together the narrative of Christian identity, and its shared memory of Jesus. The rejection of them in favour of the individual’s experience of the Inward Light make Quakerism unique, but also make it vulnerable to the loss of its historically-Christian identity. Bereft of Christian spirituality, we now live in the era of hyphenated Quakers: Buddhist-Quakers, or nontheist-Quakers. To me, these developments represent the loss of a sense of God as personal, as relational. God is no longer seen as a who but a what. Can we reduce God to an abstraction, an ethical code, or a function of the mind like conscience, and still experience what our Quaker ancestors knew – God as the engine of love and forgiveness, and the object of our spiritual hope and passion?
One of the great Quaker insights was the idea of ongoing revelation. The mystery of God is eternally visible in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who ‘speaks to our condition’. God is personally present, and active in the heart of every human. Quakerism’s freedom to approach the Jesus event without pre-packaged dogmas is also a strength. Many who long for a relationship with God are revolted by the idea of a vengeful deity who can only be appeased by the torture of God’s own son. The saints, mystics, great teachers, and the scriptures offer us a very different vision: God is love, and it is the nature of God to love and to forgive. He can do no other.
The medieval Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus taught that the incarnation was a manifestation of God’s presence in the universe. It would have happened even if humans had never fallen from grace, he said. It was God’s idea all along. God is ever-present in creation, from micro-second to micro-second, loving it into existence from the inside out and becoming personal at last in the incarnation. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was not a rescue mission from sin, but a personification of the Divine Presence, of the God ‘in whom all things hold together’. This is not, then, a picture of a vengeful God, but one of a loving God, breathing into creation and drawing all back in a loving embrace.
For Jesus’ crucifixion to make sense, we don’t have to accept theories like substitutionary atonement. It is God’s final act of sympathy with humanity – ‘I will suffer with you.’ The mystery of suffering will always be with us as mystery. Jesus does not come to explain suffering. He does not do away with it, he fills it with his presence and leaves us with a promise in the form of an empty tomb.
We do have a choice beyond a Quakerism shorn of its Christian mysticism or a biblical fundamentalism whose literal reading of the Bible renders it increasingly untenable. As Olivia Chalkley wrote recently in Friends Journal, ‘We know that Christianity, like all religions, has (at times) been co-opted by some of the most violent forces in history. But that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of it altogether. Our duty, as progressive Christians, is to reclaim our faith, just as the early Friends did.’
We can reclaim the power of the Christian narrative in ways that are consistent with the best of our traditions – Christocentric without being fossilised. There have always been different ways to tell the Christian story. From the Franciscans who tell us we should preach by our deeds, to Teilhard de Chardin, who saw the cosmos permeated by the presence of Christ, to John Duns Scotus, who saw the world not fallen in original sin but glittering in original blessing. For all of those legendary pioneers, and the millions more who roam through realms of the spirit, the great discovery was and is, in the words of Richard Rohr, ‘that Jesus did not come to change God’s mind about Humanity but to change Humanity’s mind about God’.
