Thought for the Week: God. Holy? Pure?
Jill Allum reflects on whether holiness/pureness is possible
What does a word mean? How do we know what thoughts are in someone’s head? If we are listening carefully, we are listening for the meaning behind their words, from the smallest child to the cleverest intellectual.
I love doing theology from a phenomenological perspective: what that person, wherever he is, says he thinks is what he thinks. It’s his truth, so we must listen. There is no hypothetical truth. We will never all agree.
So, let us ask some questions. Say we start with a three-to-four-year-old and ask: What does holy mean? What does God mean? You will be surprised by the answers. Simple, direct and honest. Children haven’t learnt to be otherwise and give no wordy, intricate answers, where the hearers switch off after the first two sentences. I have met so many people who say, ‘When I was three, I had a sense of the holy/numinous/mystical,’ and they can tell you exactly where they were when the ‘revelation’ came.
Is holiness/pureness possible? George Fox thought so: ‘When I came to eleven years of age, I knew pureness and righteousness’, and, at twenty-four years, he said: ‘Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God’. Jesus thought so. He said to the penitent thief on the cross: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ and ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’. Kathleen Ashford, an elder at Beccles for many years, also thought so: ‘I was four years old when I wet my pants, and knew I had left the Garden of Eden and could never go back.’
Our university, the University of East Anglia, held a ‘Hot Potato’ evening on 19 March with the question, ‘What does it mean to be pure in heart?’ A Christian, a Muslim and a Jew attempted answers. Is this a key question? How do you imagine each one answered? How would a Quaker answer?
When George Fox was twenty-six years old, before the magistrate at Derby, he said: ‘they asked me whether I was sanctified. I said, “Sanctified? Yes”, for I was in the paradise of God.’ At thirty-four years of age he was talking to a Yearly Meeting: ‘Friends must be kept in the life which is pure, that they may answer the pure life of God in others.’ Was he holy? Was he pure? He would answer, ‘Yes, by the grace of God.’
How did he become so sure? I think that his ‘opening’ at twenty-four, when he got through the flaming sword into paradise, is the key. I believe that a major event took place for the young George, not unlike Paul’s conversion on the Damascus road. He has already heard the revelatory voice saying, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’. Then, the following year, he has the ‘vision’ of being in paradise knowing ‘nothing but pureness and innocency and righteousness’.
I believe this is crucial to Fox, because he put this flaming sword on his favourite seal. Now, if you were going to have a seal made, and write 400 letters, surely you would want your seal to be what you would want to be known by – the first thing that would be noticed before the letter was opened. So, a curved sword and the flourishing letters GF. No one could mistake it! It was the symbol of paradise. What cost was a letter, almost always written from prison by someone there to help him, sent out across the country on horseback!
Dear George, if only we could get closer to you, and not doubt but believe!
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.