Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 23 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 23)

Isaiah 23 – An oracle on Tyre (23:5-11) and Sidon (23:1-4 and 12-14). Sidon fell first in 701 BC. Sidon traded in the grain of Egypt and now is humbled. Yahweh did this or permitted it “to humble the pride of all her beauty and humiliate the great ones of the world” (23:9).  Now they must till the soil because the harbor is gone. Tyre will be forgotten for seventy years, after which she will again “play the whore” (23:17) to make money, but this time it will be money for those “dedicated to Yahweh”(23:18).

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 23

The way you “see” shapes everything you do—how you interpret your inner life, how you view events, how you conduct yourself, relate to others, respond to issues, and make decisions. “The eye is the lamp of the body. . . . if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light . . .”(Matt. 6:22). As I saw the landscape in me and around me that I had been blind to, I was seized with the same kind of thirst for it that Helen is seized with in The Miracle Worker, a thirst to explore it, to know the words that could open it, to see everything they could communicate. This wasn’t the same Quakerism I had been around for years. I wanted to know more about early Friends, more about how they had understood the Christian gospel, more about how they had put their faith to work in their lives. The process was not instantaneous, but the rewards it brought from the very beginning were very great. The changes it helped me make in my life, the intense satisfaction it brought to my heart as I yielded to it, and the confirmation it seemed to give to the faith I had learned but then rejected gave me reasons to trust it in a way I had not been able to do earlier.

There were no outward miracles in the beginning of my spiritual journey with Christ. I certainly was not called into any of the kind of ministries we so often associate with conversion, things like feeding the hungry or helping the homeless. These things were too similar to the kinds of things I had spent my adult life concerned about as a political radical—not that we ever really fed the hungry or helped the homeless, but we agitated against the “system” we saw as causing their hunger and homelessness. Anyway, for a while I found it difficult to separate even genuine works of charity from my earlier efforts at social change.

There was in me a recoiling from the things that I had “fed”, when I was famishing “that which desired after God” as Francis Howgill had said—the ideologies I had given myself to—the psychological theories, radical political ideas and the rigorous materialism I had seen as scientific. These had been my idols, the things I had used to keep me from God, things that had justified my lack of faith. Now I saw them as Jeremiah had seen the idols of his day, as “cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer.2:13).

My reaction was so strong that it would be years before I was able to feel any desire to be involved in political or social activism. I knew how dangerous such activism could be to spiritual growth and insight. The ideologies propelling the activism had credibility and stature in the modern world. They were the wind, earthquake, and fire around us that vied with the still voice of God in us, and I wanted no part of them any more. I confess now that I overreacted, but that was part of the journey.

What I did feel called to do was just to speak about what was happening to me. It wasn’t easy to let people know that I had changed. Even with my own children I felt a sense of discomfort about bringing God into the conversation. I have noticed this in other people as well. They shrink from speaking in terms of their faith, even when it is at the heart of everything they think and do. But it wasn’t just bringing God’s name into the conversation. It was bringing a sense of God’s reality and presence to bear on everything. It doesn’t do any good to speak about God when you know people cannot hear the name spoken without thinking you foolish or crazy, or just dismissing you as irrelevant. You have to find ways of speaking his name and telling about his work in ways people can hear. I don’t know how successful I was in this. I only know it was hard and is hard, but the advantage I brought to the task was that I knew what it was to be on the other side, to be alienated from God and talk of God, to put religious people into a category that didn’t require me to try to understand them or really listen to them. What I am doing in this book is an extension of this calling that I have felt from the beginning—trying to find a way to let people know that God is real and accessible, and that our religious traditions are vital and speak to our deepest human needs.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 21-22 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 22)

Isaiah 21 – An oracle on the fall of Babylon in 710. Elam is the name for the ancient inhabitants of the high plateau from whence the Persians originated and the Medes had been vassals of Cyrus before the capture of Babylon.

The Edomites, conquered by the Assyrians as well, turn to Isaiah for help. And the Arabs too will need help from the “stress of battle” (15).

Isaiah 22 – An oracle against the Valley of Hinnom, SW of Jerusalem, in 705 when the allies of Hezekiah won an early victory against Sennacherib. They rejoice too soon. The defenses they mount are futile. They have “no thought for the Maker, no eyes for him who shaped everything long ago” (21:11). Yahweh wants you to weep and mourn for your unfaithfulness, but you are rejoicing because of the pride you have drawn from a shallow victory.

Isaiah called Eliakim, son of Hilkiah, as Yahweh’s servant. “I place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; should he open, no one shall close, should he close, no one shall open” (22:21-22). He is seen as a fore-shadowing of the Messiah, but in the end he and his family will sink into oblivion.

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 22     

The goal of Christ’s saving work in us was to bring us out of “the fall” – the futility, alienation, and sin that ordinary life (life without faith) entailed. This fallenness was not some exotic state. It was the state of our ordinary lives when we tried to find our way without God. But salvation was more than about just our personal lives; there was a corporate dimension to salvation too – the creation of a kingdom-like order at least among those gathered into Christ – and an eternal dimension – the traditional vision of a heavenly state one could enter into after this life.  The part I identified with most in the beginning of my journey was the personal, experiential dimension, the sense I had as I began to see the gospel in the way I have described, that the futility, confusion, and meaninglessness of my life was something faith could overcome.

        

The first and most exciting part of the salvation I felt open to me in the earliest days of my conversion or convincement was the simple joy I felt at finally being able to see what I had been blind to about Christ – being able to know what it meant to have Christ “dwell in [my] heart through faith” as Paul had said, to begin “to have the power to comprehend  . . . the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, . . .

(Eph. 17-19). To this day it is one of the chief joys I have as a Christian. But it was more than this. It was a journey, a way of walking in the light and power of Christ, hearing his voice, experiencing the good that flowed from obedience to him in all the little things that made up my life.

        

No sudden outward miracles attended my convincement, unless you count as I do the deep and invisible miracle convincement was itself. My outward life was not suddenly different, but inwardly everything was changed. I saw differently.

        

When I spoke to my friend of what was happening in me, I found myself using an image from a movie I knew and loved—the 1962 classic The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. The movie, based on a play by William Gibson, was about the young Helen Keller, a woman whose victory over blindness and deafness made her a celebrity in the early years of the twentieth century. The story is about the breakthrough that made it possible for her to learn human language and have access to all that language brings—knowledge of the world, ordered thought, and communication—everything that makes human beings what they are. Helen’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, teaches her a tactile alphabet that makes it possible for Helen to learn words and language. Helen quickly learns the fingered alphabet and mimics the movement of her teacher’s fingers to get items she knows and wants—her D-O-L-L, her M-O-T-H-E-R, the sweet C-A-K-E she loves. She enjoys playing the finger game and gets to be quite good at it. But the concept behind the game—the thing her teacher really wants her to get—the idea that everything can be named and that these words can make learning and communication with other human beings possible for her—this is something Helen cannot seem to grasp. For months Miss Sullivan labors to get the idea across with no success. But finally, as she is about to give up, Helen has a moment of grace at the water pump outside her parents’ home. Forced to refill a pitcher of water she has intentionally dumped on her teacher, Helen holds the pitcher under the spout while Miss Sullivan pumps the water and spells the word W-A-T-E-R into her palm. Again and again, she pumps and spells. Finally it happens. Something in that moment at the pump—its intensity—its repetition—or its evocation of a primitive memory Helen has of a time when she still could see and hear and knew what water was—something, some grace sparks a light in Helen’s mind and she “sees” what her teacher has been trying to open to her.

        

This is exactly what I felt was happening to me. I was seeing a landscape I had never really seen before, a landscape I had stumbled around in for years and knew in a superficial way but not in a way I’d been able to make sense of. The words that were penetrating my darkness and opening my spiritual condition to me were words I had toyed with for years, words of Christian faith—the light of Christ, the cross, resurrection, the “Word”, the seed. But the words were more than just words. They were a set of contexts, a whole spiritual vocabulary rooted in the biblical story of Christ.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 19-20 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 21)

Isaiah 19 – Oracle against Egypt: The “idols of Egypt tremble before [Yahweh]” (19:1). The people of Egypt will fight against each other and the land will be demoralized. They will be handed over to a “hard master” (19:4), and the waters of the Nile will dry up. The fishermen, flax workers and weavers will all be dejected. The leaders of the country are fools – counting on the sages (past kings consulted by necromancers).

In a passage added later, according to the footnote, Egypt’s conversion is foreseen. Five towns will learn to speak the language of Canaan; they will set up altars to Yahweh. Yahweh will reveal himself to them and will heal them. Israel, Assyria and Egypt together at the “centre of the world” (19:25) will be blessed.

Isaiah 20 – Prophecy of the capture of Ashdod, a Philistine town taken by Sargon II, king of Assyria, in 711. Isaiah walked naked as he prophesied to represent the defeat Egypt and Cush would suffer from Assyria. It will be a lesson to those in Israel who looked to them to find safety from Assyria.

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 21

But there was more to it than this. The interior Christ was not just a presence, not just an aura to be engulfed in. He was an active presence. He was in us in his crucifixion. He was in us in his birth. He was in us to redeem us, to save us, to bring us back into the image and likeness of God that we had been created to reflect. As Penington put it in one of his writing, “I have met with my Saviour; and he has not been present with me without his salvation, . . .” (Penington, Early Quaker Writings, Barbour and Roberts, eds., 233).

        

Salvation, for Friends, was at the heart of God’s work in the world and in our lives. But salvation wasn’t something far off or distant any more than God was. It wasn’t something one came into only after death. It was something to be entered into now – a future perfection to be made real in us. Eternal life was not about before or after time for early Friends, or before or after the things in time. Eternal life was about coming into union with God by being joined to him in Christ. As John taught, “this is everlasting life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (17:3).

I didn’t see all of this in the very beginning of the turn in me. But I did see that it was possible that Christ was present in this intimate and powerful interior way, and that if I opened myself to him there, he would guide me back to life. As I opened to seeing what was going on in me and in my journey with my friend in terms of the Christian story, I began to feel this work of salvation as well. Friends used different images to name Christ’s presence and work:

He is light, opening and illuminating the way God wants us to walk and the way he wants us to understand his gospel;

He is God’s word or voice, communicating to us God’s will and letting us know the direction we should go in;

He is God’s holy seed, stirring in us, bursting through the hard ground of resistance in us and growing into a sheltering vine in which we can find life. These were the most common names Friends used to refer to Christ’s indwelling Spirit. But there were others.

He was our prophet, our high priest, our king, our messiah, our lamb, our shepherd. Virtually all of the redemptive images and figures that were part of the Scripture context pointed to some way that God’s presence and power was in and among us to lead us to life.