Sunlight on benches at Jordans Meeting House Photo: Photo: Trish Carn
Deep within
Jennifer Kavanagh is inspired by a quote by Thomas Kelly
There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. At one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings. Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion
The American Quaker Thomas Kelly wrote this in the mid-twentieth century. I read it when I came to Quakers some fifty years later – and I immediately knew it to be true. My response then and now is that these words bring together the essential qualities of what it means to be a Quaker: the active and the contemplative, the practical and the mystical. There’s the recognition that we are active participants in the world, but also that we owe our true allegiance to something more profound, from which authentic action flows.
When I first found Friends some sixteen years ago, I jumped in with both feet: changing my career, becoming clerk of this and that, both working and volunteering for Quaker charities. I was a busy person. At the same time I was powerfully drawn to a contemplative life. So, periodically, I would lay everything down and retreat, even selling up and, for the space of about eighteen months, becoming a nomad. It was a life of extremes, passionately committed, but split.
The experience described by Kelly has always been an aspiration, and kept alive by the glimpses I have had in my own life. But it is only in the last couple of years that I have been able to come close to a steady rooted state in which the contemplative and active can be held together in unity. Like all aspects of the spiritual life, holding the balance is the challenge of a lifetime.
