Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 27 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 25)

Isaiah 27 – The Lord’s “terrible, swift sword” will “punish Leviathan, the swiftly moving serpent” (27:1). And, following up on image of the vineyard presented in Isaiah 5, the prophet tells us of God’s love of it. “I, the Lord, will watch over it, watering it carefully. Day and night I will watch so no one can harm it. My anger will be gone (27:3-4).

The Lord will burn up the “briers and thorns” (27:3) that try to invade them, but if they “make their peace with me” (27:5), they will find shelter in the Lord. The exiled will return and worship on the holy mountain

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 25

In January of 1980, I had an opportunity to attend a conference in Pennsylvania of a Quaker group called New Foundation Fellowship, led by a man named Lewis Benson. Born a Friend in 1909, Benson discovered the writings of George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, early in his life, shortly after experiencing a Christian conversion similar in some respects to the conversion Fox had undergone. Benson had been amazed to learn how different Fox’s message was from the message he had grown up with as a birthright Friend [even then]. By the late 1970s, he had become the leading authority on Fox and Fox’s theology among Friends. The disparity between that theology and the relatively incoherent theology of twentieth-century Friends distressed him, so he made it his life’s work to try to revive the Christian vision of Fox in the Society of Friends. New Foundation was only his latest effort to promote this mission.

The gathering was my first formal exposure to Fox’s thought and to the kind of worship that could happen when everyone was gathered into the same vision of Christ. It was very inspiring. I had read a little of Fox in shorter pamphlets and collections of early Quaker writers, but now I became familiar with his journal. Because of the importance of Fox’s vision to my own ideas and my own journey, I need to spend some time presenting his thought. To do that I must also touch a little on the historical context in which he lived.

Fox was born in 1624 in the midlands of England. To put that date into some historical context, 1624 was just a little over a hundred years after Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church and just a little under a hundred years since England’s Henry VIII had broken from Rome to start the Church of England. In that hundred years, England had suffered enormous religious turmoil. Henry’s daughter Mary had tried to reestablish the Roman Catholic Church, burning at the stake some three hundred Protestants in the effort. Elizabeth I reversed her sister’s work and reestablished the Protestant church along more “moderate” lines – keeping a good deal of the Catholic pageantry and hierarchical structure while moving away from Catholic dogmas a bit more than her father had.

At the same time all these religious changes were taking place, the economic and political stability of the country was also being shaken to the core, a shaking that brought forth numerous splinter groups of religious dissenters. The dissenters had radical ideas about the shape England’s social and political structure should assume. By the time Fox was born, religious tolerance had gained a modest foothold in England, but radical Protestants and Catholics were still subject to persecution – lose of property, jailing, whipping, branding, and other trials. The brutality and persistence of religious conflict in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would ultimately bring about an antireligious reaction with the coming of the Enlightenment, but Fox lived in the turmoil just before, a period of radical religious thought and millenarian expectations. Fox was sixteen when the English Civil War broke out. He was twenty-five when Charles I was put to death by the Puritan faction of the English Parliament.

        

Fox describes himself in his journal as an ardent Christian from his earliest years, but his devotion to Christ and his constant reading of the scriptures did not bring him happiness. This depressed and distressed him. At nineteen, he left home to seek out someone who could give him advice or guide him, encourage him, and help him achieve the kind of peace he thought the gospel of Christ promised to believers. He visited everyone he thought might be able to help – all the “experts” in religion – but no one could help him. His relatives tried to get him to find a wife and settle down, but he was persistent. After a few years, he began to have what he called “openings” into the gospel and the Scriptures – things he felt clear and certain about. He realized, for example, that true believer in Christ is not just someone who calls himself a Christian, but one who has in some way “passed from death to life” (Fox, Journal, 7); that being a real “minister of Christ” (Fox, Journal, 11) meant more than just getting a degree at a university; and “that God, who made the world, [really] did not dwell in temples made with hands . . . but in people’s hearts” (Fox, Journal, 8).

Then, sometime in the year 1647, when he was twenty-three, Fox had a powerful personal experience of God’s presence. He described it as a voice saying “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition . . .[and] when I heard it my heart did leap for joy” (Fox, Journal, 11).  It is hard at first to understand why these words had such revelatory power for Fox. He already believed that God dwelled in human hearts, and he already knew that Christ was the center of his faith. But what he experienced was not an intellectual idea but and experience of God’s voice opening Christ’s presence to him in a very immediate way. Fox’s experience of Christ’s voice and presence in him were not the end of his seeking, any more than they would be for me centuries later. It was the beginning. For several years after this opening, Fox continued struggling with the temptations and worldly habits that kept him from entering into Christ’s peace. But he finally did come into a state of mind and heart so settled and so sure of Christ’s support that he described it as a kind of reentry into paradise. The idea that a Christian could come into such a blessed state in this life outraged many contemporaries of Fox, who believed as a matter of doctrine that man could never overcome sin in this life but had to wait for God’s reward of peace in heaven. Fox didn’t mean by his claim that all the outward incidences of life could be perfect – he suffered many outward hardships over the course of his later life – but he never retracted his statement that believers could come into a state of spiritual restoration in this life. In fact, many of the “testimonies” Friends later became famous for flowed directly from the conviction that they could.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 24-26 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 24)

Isaiah 24 – Yahweh lays waste the earth and all who live on it – good, bad, high and low – the blessed “everlasting covenant” (24:5) God made with all humans has not been held sacred. The sounds of joyful celebration are silenced.

But there are “islands” in the world – pockets of faithful – who still lift up their voices and sing for joy. All will be destroyed – from the deities who claim honor in the skies to kings who will also be “herded together” (24:21) and shamed.

For Isaiah, this all-inclusive “covenant” that God made from the beginning, is the key covenant and obligation. Interesting the allusion to islands of faithfulness (verse 15) where honor is accorded to those who are upright.

Isaiah 25 – The prophet extols Yahweh because he brings down the proud and unjust. He is “a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in distress, a shelter from the storm, a shade from the heat”(25:4).

On the mountain of Zion Yahweh will prepare a “banquet of rich food” for “all peoples” (25:6). He will destroy Death forever. He “will wipe away the tears from every cheek” (25:8). “Let us rejoice in the salvation he brings!” (25:9).

Moab, however, will be “brought down to the ground, down into the dust” (25:12).

Isaiah 26 – In that day “everyone in the land of Judah will sing this song: ‘Our city is strong. We are surrounded by the walls of God’s salvation. Open the gates to all who are righteous; allow the faithful to enter. You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you. Trust in the Lord always, for the Lord God is the eternal Rock’” (26:1-4).

Verses from a number of psalms follow: “At night my soul longs for you and my spirit in me seeks for you: when your judgments appear on earth the inhabitants of the world learn the meaning of integrity” (26:9).

The experience of allowing God to lead and guide them, punish and revive them is what has made them great, is what has permitted them to give birth to God’s fruit. And this fruit will not perish in death. “[T]hose who die in the Lord will live; their bodies will rise again. Those who sleep in the earth will rise up and sing for joy. For your life-giving light will fall like dew on your people in the place of the dead” (26:19). “The Lord is coming from heaven to punish the people of the earth for their sins” (26:21).

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 24

How one is to “live” this very experiential faith is very particular to each person. For purposes of this blog, I am going to skip the details of my life back in the early 1980s, which I do into in my book. I want to focus on the general principles and the early Quaker writings I came across during this time that were so helpful, so amazing.

The journey starts where you are, in whatever darkness and confusion you are in:

“Do not look for such great matters to begin with; but be content to be a child, and let the Father proportion out daily to thee what light, what power, what exercises, what straits, what fears, what troubles he sees fit for thee and do thou bow before him continually in humility of heart. Thou must join in with the beginning of life, and be exercised with the day of small things before thou meet with the great things, wherein is the clearness and satisfaction of the soul. The rest is at noonday, but the travels begin at the breakings of day, wherein are but glimmerings of little light, wherein the discovery of good and evil are not so manifest and certain; yet THERE must the traveler begin and travel; and in his faithful travels the light will break in upon him more and more” (Penington quote from a British Faith and Practice).

This was true. To imagine that God will suddenly give you the power to work miraculous changes in your life or to undo the consequences of sins you have persisted in for years is to expect too much. It is to “run off” in your own will, thinking it is God’s, following some notion you have about what God would have you do. Real faith doesn’t look like that. Real faith in the beginning is only a tiny seed that has been much neglected. It is a seed with great potential and great promise, but it is still a seed. The important thing is to try in the small ways that are opened to you to move in the direction of the light that will make the seed grow. God does not expect extraordinary things from spiritual newborns. The life of faith is a journey; one doesn’t just materialize at the finish line without first learning how to crawl, how to toddle, and then how to walk.

As for running, one could never aspire to that. Running was always seen as a bad thing in the thinking of early Friends. One couldn’t keep in touch with one’s guide when one ran.

“Thou must wait for life to be measured out by the Father and be content with what proportion, and at what time, he shall please to measure. Oh! Be little, be little; and then thou wilt be content with little. And if thou feel now and then a check or a secret smiting – in that is the Father’s love; be not over-wise or over-eager in thy own willing, running, and desiring, and thou mayst feel it so and by degrees come to the knowledge of thy Guide, who will lead thee, step by step, in the path of life and teach thee to follow and in his own season, powerfully judge that which cannot or will not follow. Be still, and wait for light and strength and desire not to know or comprehend, but to be known and comprehended in the love and life, which seeks out, gathers, and preserves the lost sheep” (Penington, Early Quaker Writings, Barbour and Roberts, eds. 239-240).

But it isn’t easy being little. The heroes of faith we celebrate – the prophets, martyrs, and saints – sometimes give us the impression that God is only interested in the great and memorable demonstrations of his power in our lives, but this is not true. The sturdy foundation in faith is built on faithfulness in the small things that make up the fabric of our lives – the integrity of words and deeds, our willingness to recognize and repair mistakes we make, our willingness to witness to his presence and authority in our lives – the small and very concrete ways we express the love he pours out on us. These were the things I felt most encouraged to work on.

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.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 15-18 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 20)

Isaiah 15 – This oracle on Moab – the mountainous region on the eastern side of the Dead Sea. In the biblical story, Moab was the son of Lot and Lot’s elder daughter. The Assyrians invaded Moab. Nebo to the north was the mountain on which Moses was said to have died. The people lament; the land is a wasteland.

Isaiah 16 – Moabite survivors ford the Arnon – boundary with Judah – and take refuge there. When the assault is over and the “destroyer is no more” (16:4), a king will be reestablished there, “a judge careful for justice and eager for integrity” (16:5). The prophet grieves for Moab; his “whole being quivers like lyre strings” (16:11). In the end this proud land will be reduced to impotency.

Isaiah 17 – Oracle against Damascus: The city will soon be a “heap of ruins” – towns “abandoned for ever” (17:1). “That day, man will look to his creator and his eyes will turn to the Holy One of Israel” (17:7). Idolatry will end, worship of gods like Adonis.

Isaiah 18 – Oracle against Cush (Ethiopia), which then was in control of Egypt: They are a nation that is “mighty and masterful” (18:2) but it will not always be this way. They will one day turn to Yahweh too on Mt. Zion.

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 20

I had had the knowledge of Christ but had missed the connection, and now that I was seeing the connection and the relevance, the knowledge seemed much more credible. How could I have been so willing to set aside these experiences and memories? How could I have turned my back on the life He had begotten in my heart?

Early Friends addressed such questions too, and the answers they gave seemed right to me. There was also  “that in us” that did not want to respond to God, a part of us that was much more comfortable with the answers the world gave. Francis Howgill, one of the early Friends I liked the best, wrote of this with insight as well:

         It [Christ’s word in you] has often checked and called, but you

have not answered its call, and so have chosen your own way, and so have gone from the way, which is the light of Christ in you. And so you run into the broad way; and that which desired after God hath not been nourished and fed, but hath been famished and another hath been fed, which now is for the slaughter. But now as you return home to within, to the true Light of Jesus, which is that one thing, which leads all men that own it, and to be guided by it, you shall have true rest and peace (Howgill, Early Quaker Writings, Barbour and Roberts, eds, 175-176).

This was true. I too had famished the part of me that had desired after God, and I had fed the doubting parts. I too had rushed into the “broad way” – the popular way – of my generation, the way of ideology and political theorizing, the way of psychology and scientific “positivism,” the way of doubt and skepticism of all tradition and truth. Now I wanted to “return home” as these early Friends had done, to “own” the light again and be guided by it to a place of “true rest and peace.” God had been pouring his spirit out on me my entire life, and I had not received Him in a way I could build on, but now I would. I felt my heart respond to the idea of returning to Christ:

O that I might now be joined to him, and he alone might live in me! And so, in the willingness which God had wrought in me, in this day of his power to my soul, I gave up to be instructed, exercised and led by him, in the waiting for and feeling of holy see, that all might be wrought out of me which could not live with the see, but would be hindering the dwelling and reigning of the seed in me, which it remained and had power (Penington, The Light Within, 6).

This was the way back – waiting for and feeling for his “holy seed,” listening for his voice to instruct me, seeing the things in me that “could not live with [it] but [that] hinder[ed] the dwelling and reigning of the seed in me.” This was the way Friends pointed toward. It was just as present to us as it had been to Quakers in seventeenth-century England and to Christians in first-century Jerusalem.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 14 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 19)

Isaiah 14 – The “Lord will have mercy on the descendants of Jacob. He will choose Israel as his special people once again. He will bring them back to settle one again in the own land” (14:1).

The prophet offers a satire on the king of Babylon: In Sheol, the “kings” of the earth will greet the Babylonians, saying “So you too have been brought to nothing” (14:10). 

They used to think they would “climb up to the heavens” (14:13) but no – they cannot rival God. People of the world will look and see them no longer. God will wipe out every memory and remnant. Assyria too will be brought to nothing, and the Philistines are warned too.

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 19

This early Quaker message wasn’t a message they had invented, but it was one they were clearer about than any other Christians I had ever come in contact with. The Scriptures told us of this Christ. In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul writes these words: “Examine your selves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test Yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” (13:5)

And John—John knew this Christ:

He [John the Baptist]. . . was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming

into the world (John 1:8-9).

God’s light enlightens every person according to John, and this light came into the world in the person of Jesus. “Abide in me as I abide in you,” Christ says to his disciples (John 15:4). The indwelling Christ was the “light” in us that permitted us to see God and Christ (see 1 Cor.2: 10-12), to hear God’s voice and feel the encouragement of God’s love: “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us” (1 John 3:24).

These are all familiar passages to people who read the Bible or attend church with any regularity. I had heard and read these passages earlier in my life too, but I had never realized that they meant what they said in any kind of practical way—poetical flourish or mystical sentiments maybe--but nothing I could relate to my day-to-day-life.

No one I had ever met as a practicing Episcopalian or Catholic had ever spoken of these things in a way that related them to my experience. But it stood to reason that if Christ’s Spirit is really in the human spirit, it must be something you can experience and be in contact with. How does one sense that presence? How does one discern it from all the other things that are present in the human mind and heart? How does it connect with the gospel the apostles preached or the church they established? These were the things Friends spoke of in their preaching and writing. These were the things they focused on in their worship and in the living of their lives.

They talked about “motions” that drew them to God and made them feel his presence and “openings” that helped them comprehend his will. They experienced “pressings” that revealed to them God’ s displeasure with things that they said or did, and “callings” from him to challenge worldly customs or preach his gospel to the world. These were the things Friends wrote about. I knew what it was to have such “motions,” “pressings,” and “openings.” I had had them one way or another all my life. I had just not been able to see them in the context of the Christ spoken of in Scripture. A few of the “openings” I had had over the course of my life had even survived my atheism. I still believed there was order and design in the universe, and I still felt there was something in human nature that tapped into some transcendent something somewhere.

Now I began to open myself to the idea that it was not just weakness or neediness in me that was at the root of these experiences and intuitions, but something real and necessary and solid—even God himself:

 . . .this is he whom I have waited for and sought after from my

childhood, who was always near me, and had often begotten life in

my heart, but I knew him not distinctly, nor how to receive him or

dwell with him (Isaac Penington, Early Quaker Writings, Barbour and Roberts, eds., 233).

I had tried to convince myself that he had been an illusion, but now I could see that he simply needed to be accepted in faith. Friends’ way of applying the Christ event to my interior life permitted me to see a validity in it that was so helpful and so powerful spiritually that the intellectual difficulties I had had seemed to pale by comparison. A profound and powerful sense of meaning came from accepting it. Again there were words in the Eliot poem that seemed perfectly to capture what was happening:

         [I had] had the experience but missed the meaning,

         And approach to the meaning restores the experience

         In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness (Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”, Four Quartets, II. 93-96).