The heartbeat of time
Bernard Coote remembers William Penn
William Penn will be remembered quietly in many countries this year, the tercentenary of his death on 30 July 1718.
His style and speech give an appearance of another age: time past. Remembering, though, is more than looking back at something lost in time. William Penn continues with us, significantly. It might be called ‘the heartbeat of time’.
In 2018, to sit in the Meeting house where he worshipped, where he made plans with local people for the ‘holy experiment’ in Pennsylvania, unites past and present. Life is our shared journey, generation with generation, realising the vision and mystery of our being here now, of creation and destiny. In silence, wherever we are, remembering unites us in time, recalling the lines of TS Eliot: ‘to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’.
In his younger days at the Huguenot university in Saumur, France, William Penn was an eager student then colleague and close friend of the internationally honoured and learned scholar Moise Amyraut. The young Englishman impressed with his quick mind and excellent French. The two men explored matters of faith, belief, freedom and order in a bitterly divided Europe after the Reformation.
The question at issue was: ‘What is it to be a Christian?’ Later we find in William Penn’s writings: ‘I never had any other religion in my life than what I felt. From the age of sixteen I have been a great sufferer for it. I never addicted myself to school learning to understand religion by.’
Moise Amyraut was a Huguenot and saw himself as a Christian humanist – a radical philosopher of religion. His death, while William Penn was still young, was a severe blow. The two of them had chipped away at the dictates and structures that confine the spirit. Dogma was but a narrow window admitting only a narrow shaft of light. They sought a faith that illuminated the whole world, a faith that did not exclude but embraced in love. Love transcends time and place.
This was the vision that carried William Penn to Pennsylvania. It was the heartbeat of his commitment to God and all fellow beings. It moved him to learn the language and customs of the indigenous people, identifying with them. He had taken no weapons for his protection, or for the ‘enforcement’ of his plans.
William Penn was insistent that: ‘Force may subdue but love gains’ and: ‘Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity, for that reason it should be our utmost care to learn it’. This was an ‘embracing’ at the most personal level of ordinary life as much as in the ‘great concerns’ of state and constitution. Remembering William Penn is to be touched by that spirit, drawn into that heartbeat. It is to know what we are a part of.
In today’s changed world of nations and lifestyles, we still live alongside those who have never had a sense of belonging, of being ‘embraced’ and of having worth. With the Friends who shared his vision, William Penn held all in the Light. Now, in our remembering, we become the continuation of love and inclusion. Living beyond the visible: that is faith, hope and love.
It is in the heartbeat of time – joined in the one source.
God’s time. Our time.
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