i love that proverb!
thanks for the info, Dick, i’m still lapping it up
Hi Sass -
I didn’t have to go to work this morning and hoped to make good progress. However, we have been inundated with the physiotherapist, the blood-letting person, and other carers for my Mum; and getting the care package organised. So I’ll get things together for this thread over the weekend.
Just to say sorry for being a mother hen, and that I feel completely and utterly reassured about you!
I remember a story I once heard in a sermon in which St Teresa of Avila got a mention. Apparently she was a formidable woman and used to take her novices through a dance routine with tambourines –leading them in the steps of dance. The nunnery was freezing cold and she insisted that her girls got this exercise to keep warm while also dancing for joy in the Lord. She said of this– ‘Our Lord wants life to be bearable for us!’
Hi James - yep that’s one funky proverb!!!
All good wishes
Dick
Hi Dick, no pressure. Don’t feel like you have to dedicate yourself to this thread, especially if there are other threads that are interesting to you as well. Circle back around when it suits you, brother. 
Hello Sister Sass -
That’s sweet of you - but I don’t want to let you down, or loses too much momentum. Obviously I’ve been a bit distracted of late being gobby elsewhere . However should be back in harness tomorrow.
Warm Greetings in Friendship
Dick
Hi Sass -
Have just found a copy of the Essay from Elia by Charles Lamb the English Romantic essayist mentioned by me in a early post on this thread. In this brief essay he tells of his experience as a non-Quaker attending Quaker meetings in the early nineteenth century in London. I think it’s a lovely essay - some of the language is archaic and he is big on allusions to the Roman and Greek classics and mythology (ni keepng wiht his Christian Humanist education - where the myths of Greek and Rome were seen as shadows prefiguring the clear truths of Chirstianity - anidea you also get in C.S. Lewis)- but you can ignore this stuff and still get the gist of the meaning. Here it is (and, as I said, don’t worry about the classical allusions - I don’t understand all of them and it hasn’t spoiled my understanding or enjoyment, and I’ve noted the allusions I do understand in brackets for you)
***Charles Lamb – A Quakers Meeting
Reader, would’st thou know what true peace and quiet mean; would’st thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; would’st thou enjoy at once solitude and society; would’st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; would’st thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite : – come with me into a Quaker’s Meeting.
Dost thou love silence deep as that “before the winds were made?” go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faith’d self-mistrusting Ulysses [in mythology Ulysees poured wax into his ears so as not to be seduced by the song of the sirens into shipwreck - I think the idea here is there is nothign dnagros in the mucsic of silence]. – Retire with me into a Quaker’s Meeting.
For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery.
What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes? – here the goddess reigns and revels. – “Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud,” [three out fo the four winds that are personfied in Greek mythology] do not with their inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawl – nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds – than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight.
There are wounds, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quaker’s Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes [St Anthomy and the early Christian hermits], not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another’s want of conversation. The Carthusian [monk] is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by – say, a wife – he, or she, too, (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral communication? – can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words? – away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me a sympathetic solitude.
To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, time-stricken;
Or under hanging mountains,
Or by the fall of fountains;
is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness “to be felt.” – The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quaker’s Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions,
– sands, ignoble things, dropt from the ruined sides of kings-- but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the fore-ground – Silence – the eldest of things [silence in one of the Greek creation myths is th eorigin of all thigns including the Word]-- language of old Night – primitive Discourser – to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression.
How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, Looking tranquillity!
Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! convocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory – if my pen treat of you lightly – as haply it will wander – yet my spirit hath the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. – I have witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you – for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the out-cast and off-scowering of church and presbytery [that is persecuted by both Anglicans and Calvinists]. – have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and “the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet.”
Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel’s History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth,) – James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given- way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still – so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated.
Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers.
How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. – If the spiritual pretensions the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard – you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds – with a low, buzzing., musical sound, laying out a few words which “she thought might suit the condition of some present,” with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty.-- The men, for what I observed, speak seldomer.
Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced “from head to foot equipt in iron mail.” His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit – I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable – he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail – his joints all seemed loosening – it was a figure to set off against Paul Preaching – the words he uttered were few, and sound – he was evidently resisting his will – keeping down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, than the world’s orators strain for theirs. “He had been a Wit in his youth,” he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confusion – understanding the term in its worldly acceptation – with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna [not sure what this means - but Dis is the terrifying god of the underwolrd in Roman myth]. – By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty.
More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!
Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like – as in the pasture – “forty feeding like one.” -
The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. ***
Wow! Charles Lamb seemed to be quite taken with that meeting! Particularly interesting is the fact that he alludes to a multiplication of that Silence within the group. Like there is a silence when sitting alone in silence and a silence that is even more profound when sitting in silence as a group. Extraordinary!
Hi Sass - lovely to hear from you . And yes - what you say reflecting on Lamb’s essay has sometimes been my experience of the most ‘gathered’ meeting I have attended too; the gathered silence is remarkably still and peacefull (I’ve also felt a similar and almost touchable peace during quite High Church ceremonial eucharists after taking the bread and the wine; don’t ask me why opposites often seem the same, but they do in my experience).
Funny what you say about Chick booklets on the ‘other’ thread - I had exactly the sames realisation once myself! It’s like what Blake says about ‘The Vision of Christ’
Blessings
Dick
Exactly…This brings to light one of the hardest things about being a Christian, for me. As in Blake’s poem you mentioned: “Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read’st black where I read white.” How can we KNOW we are “right”?
THIS is PRECISELY WHY I began looking into the mystical traditions.
Hi Sass
How are things me old treasure? Well it’s been a busy week over on the ‘Chick and the Catholics thread’ - sounds like the title of a good sit com to me - but we’ve got somewhere now which is so good (and we’ve all had cause to reflect on our own shortcomings and come out friends despite the explosive subject matter and our very colourful personalities).
The reason you give is precisely why I became interested in the Christian mystical tradition too, just as the Chick tracts were a major factor in persuading me that something was wrong with the gospel I was being taught. Today, one of my criteria for the rightness of gospel teaching is, ‘Does this promote love, or does it promote hatred and violence?’ If it does he latter it’s not the true gospel in my view. And even it was the ‘true Gospel’ then God would simply be overwhelmingly powerful and not worthy of our worship anyway.
I don’t know whether you do still feel a little miffed at Jack Chick and co. but if you do – don’t worry about it too much; it will pass (especially if you don’t worry about it too much - you have plenty on your plate and are a very strong person to make such an individual stand in your community). Are you going to touch base with Amy? Have you thought of doing some silent worship together (is not hard, and it’s not only Quakers that do it. I know there is a lovely little booklet ‘God is in silence’ by a French Quaker named Pierre Lacoute who used to be a Catholic monk from a silent order. If you are interested I can make enquiries about how you can get hold of a copy (it’s just a pamphlet and not too expensive). I know there is also an ecumenical Christian meditation movement that uses the techniques of the Orthodox ‘Philokalia’ for using the Jesus Prayer or similar short prayer of devotion to still the mind and place it in God’s silence;
The Jesus prayer in the Philokalia is
‘Lord Jesus Christ, Sno fo God, have mercy on me a sinner’
I think if we’ve just emerged from a penal substitution, ECT tradition we have to be careful and mindful of what these words might mean in the tradition of orthodox mysticism (I l had problems for a long time). They certainly do not mean
‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God please don’t punish me even though I deserve it; at least I can take refuge in the knowledge that God punished you in my place’
I guess if I was to try and put into words what they mean I’d say something more like -
‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, our/my great and glorious Victor, I have faith that you bring healing to my infirmities and forgiveness and compassion to my imperfections and limitations. May your great love renew the God image I me. May I be still so that you can be God in me.’
And that’s a bit of a clumsy old mouthful, but the point is worth stating I think. Obviously the words are meant t resonate with new meaning and insight as they become part of your life. Some people who practice this prayer pray it constantly as they go about their daily business.
This International Christian Meditation movement have a centre in London in an Anglican Church – do you want me to check them out? (I only know them by hearsay). I think the idea is that when you do your silent worship you know that you are a company of other people doing the same thing around the globe– so you feel a sense of singleness in a large company. They also can put you in touch with other people doing the same thing in your locality – if any exist.
Blessings
Dick
Hi Sass -
Please always be understading with me. If and when I speak to you like a concerned father figure - and if and when I do that to others on this site - it tends to be when my caring duties at home are intense. They have been for the past four days - and actually postnig here has been keeping me together (so I thank you for getting me back on site by asking your question about Quakers). Yep - I’m as dizzy adn ditsy as the next person; and I sometimes I find it hard to detach my caring role in one sphere of my life from my friendships in another. So if I ever give you cause to be angry/narked, be angry/narked, but don’t let the sun go down on it 
Actually the hmour - as i see it - in some of our communications has been a source of real gentle smiling for me. I just love it that a lot of us in England tend to express ourselves in understatment, while a lot of you in America sometimes make points using overstatment (and CAPITALISATION). Now we knowour different cultural modes - lets just have fun with them from tmie to time
Blessings
Dick
Hi. God bless you brother! You’re totally fine. I suppose it’s better to be overly concerned about the way you come across to people than to be under concerned. 
Amy has added me to some Facebook groups that are a fun diversion for me. I like the fast-paced nature of it all. You know us Generation X er’s…NOW, NOW, NOW! Anyway, the Jack Chick thing didn’t bother me at all. I just think it’s more sad. Like Johnny said: He scares people into the kingdom. How is that person EVER going to be able to come into a loving relationship with God. Sure, they’ve “accepted” but you’ve also put something in is heart that keeps him from ever really loving and trusting Him. It’s breeds fear which is…torment, as John says. Interesting word he chooses. I have wondered before if there is any connection between “eternal torment” and fear as torment. “Whoever fears is not made perfect in love, for fear has torment”. Hmmm. Silent worship? That is pretty interesting sounding.
Hi Sass -
Yes I know the generation Xers very well. I had the good fortune 
to teach English Language and Literature GCSE three times to groups of Generation Xers who had failed it - some as many as three times 
They ended up having to come to see me once a week for an evening class (the poor sweethearts 
) - because you have to get this qualification to do any sort of interesting job in England. Anyway - apart from two notable juvenile delinquent exceptions out of about sixty people I taught in the three years - they were all really nice kids, really nice. But they just could not concentrate beyond a blip of a sound bite. I spent a lot of time having to say - ‘Come on kids -focus, focus’. And they wanted instant results - agonising over grades rather than enjoying the subject. And I ended up not really being too fussed with the other teachers - they spoke to the kids in a very disrespectful way which was very different to the way I’ve been taught to do things 
(but I don’t blame them, the pressures they are sometimes under) It was the first time I’d taught kids - most of the time I teach adults. I’ve taught murderers in a prison before but I was more scared my first time with them than my first time in a prison cell!!! Anyway - everything went fine - but I do fear the internet with its fast pace is perhaps rewiring young people’s brains, notalways to their advantage (
Yes – I think Johnny put that very well about Jack the Chick; very well indeed in his inimitable direct style (he’s a really good bloke). I’m going through the posters one by one on the thread at the moment and will get to you someday soon – and emphasise the fact that my feisty young friend (you) was actually not bothered (but there was someone else who used to post here who clearly was traumatised by Chick and wasn’t ready to laugh or shrug it off, so I have them in mind too).
Do you want me find anything out for you about silent worship resources?
Here’s a poem by a Quaker named Christopher Fry. He was famous in the 1950’s long after the Quakers had re-embraced wit and the arts as things that are good and not to be shunned. He wrote some wonderful verse Christian verse comedies about the workings of redemptive love in ordinary situations (‘A Phoenix too frequent’, The Lady’s not for burning’ etc). So here he is -
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake!
(Christopher Fry –A Sleep of Prisoners)
Dick. Yes, I would appreciate some “silent worship” information. Looking forward to more “Jack Chick” stuff too! Bless you Brother!
Hi Sass
God is Silence (I was slightly wrong – this lovely little book is actually by a French Catholic Priest who has strong sympathies with Quakerism). See
quakerbooks.org/god_is_silence.php
So it’s available from Quaker Books run by the Friends General Conference in Philadelphia on mail order for the princely sum of $6
The Worldwide Christian meditation movement is based around the centring prayer technique of the Roman Catholic monk John Main. Here is an American site for the movement -
christianmeditation.us/cds.php
My one small note of caution with them is that the Catholic monk I spoke of in an earlier post who, in my view, very foolishly endorsed one of the most authoritarian and potentially damaging of the Human Potential movements (which I’m not going to name because we don’t want trolls from this movement on our site, and the net is awash with them). He is now dead and spoke not for the movement but rather on his own authority as a respected teacher of mysticism and a Catholic Abbot. But I note that others have reservations about the John Main technique for different reasons. Perhaps there are issues of discernment here. But have a look and make up your own mind.
Here is a site that compares John Main’s techniques with those of John Cassian (Philokalia) and The Cloud of Unknowing and raise the question of whether all three really are identical (without condemning John Main) -
innerexplorations.com/chmystext/john.htm
Oh and do remember that the fundamentalist - a la Jack Chick- criticism of silent prayer is that it empties the mind so that it can be filled with the devil – but they would say that wouldn’t they? A tree is known by its fruits.
Blessings old chum
Dick
Thanks for the websites, Dick. I’ll take a look.
**Hi Sass –
It sold grumpy here (I’m looking for a job in a Walt Disney cartoon )
I’ve mentioned John Woolman the sweet hearted American Quaker, champion of justice and the oppressed – lover of animals, lover of American Indians, lover of Slaves, and lover of God -over on the Chick thread. Well, here is a biographical note on him and extracts from his Journal from my copy of ‘Christian Faith and Practice in the Experience of the Society of Friends’**
John Woolman (1720-1772) of Mount Holly in New Jersey, was a man of many skills, who was called (in a pioneering community) to be by turns book-keeper, store-keeper, merchant, scrivener, notary, schoolmaster and farmer; but when tempted by wealth, he chose the trade of tailor. Although he said, with characteristic modesty, that he had ‘schooling pretty well for a planter’ he was in fact, well educated and widely read, and moved in the intellectual circle of the most lively minds in America just before the Revolution. His condemnation of slavery was a concern which was shared by others, notably (among Friends) by Benjamin Lay and Anthony Benzet. He found time to grow apples, write school books and tracts, travel widely in the ministry, attend business meetings regularly, and visit Indians who came to Philadelphia, as well as make his famous journey into their territory in time for war. His last journey was in England, where he died of smallpox in York.
47 *I kept steady to meetings, spent five-days in the afternoon chiefly in reading the scriptures and other good Books, and was early convinced in my mind that true Religion consisted in and inward life, wherein the Heart doth Love and Reverence God the Creator, and learn to exercise true Justice and Goodness, not only toward all men, but also toward the Brute Creatures. That as the mind was moved by an inward Principle of love God as an invisible, Incomprehensible Being, by the same principle it was moved to love him in all his manifestations in the Visible World. That as by his breath the flame of life was kindled in all Animal and Sensible Creator to say we Love God as unseen, and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by his life, or by life derived from Him, was a contradiction in itself. I found no narrowness respecting Sects and Opinions, but believed that sincere upright-hearted people in every society who truly love God were accepted of him . *
Journal, 1740
49 * A neighbour received a bad bruise in his body, and sent for me to bleed him; which being done, he desired me to write his will: I took notes and, amongst other things, he told me to which of his children he gave his young negro: I considered the pain and distress he was in, and knew not how it would end, so I wrote his Will, save only that part concerning his slave, and carrying it to his bedside, read it to him, and then told him in a friendly way, that I could not write any instruments by which my fellow-creatures were made slaves, without bringing trouble on my own mind. I let him know that I charged nothing for what I had done, and desired to be excused from doing the other part in the way he proposed. Then we had a serious conference on the Subject, and at length, he agreeing to set her free, I finished his will*.
Journal 1756
50 Written on the Indian Journey 1763: The 12th day of the 6th month of the week being a rainy day we continued in our Tent and here I led to think on the nature of the exercise which hath attended me. Love was the first motion, and then a Concern arose to spend time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life, and the Spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some Instruction from them, or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the Leadings of Truth amongst them, and as it pleased the Lord to make way for my going at a time when the troubles of war were increasing, and when by reason of much weather travelling was more difficult than usual at that Season, I looked upon it as a more favourable opportunity to season my mind, and bring me into a nearer sympathy with them. And as mine eye was at the great Father of Mercies, humbly desiring to learn what his will was concerning
me, I was made quiet and content.
Journal, 1763
51 *In a time of Sickness with the pleurisy, a little upward of two years and a half ago, I was brought so near the gates of death that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy colour between the South and the East, and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be, and alive, and that I was mixed with them, and that henceforth I might not consider myself as a distinct or Separate being. In this state I remained several hours. I then heard a soft, melodious voice, more pure and harmonious than any voice I had heard with my ears before; and I believed it was the voice of an angel who spake to the other angels. The words were, John Woolman is dead. I soon remembered that I was once John Woolman and being assured that I was alive in the body, I greatly wondered what that heavenly voice could mean. I believed beyond doubting that it was the voice of an holy angel, but as yet it was a mystery to me.
I was then carried in Spirit to the mines where poor Oppressed people were digging rich treasures for those called Christians, and heard them blaspheme the name of Christ, at which I was grieved, for His Name was precious. I was then informed that these heathen were told that those who oppressed them were the followers of Christ, and they said among themselves ‘If Christ directed them to use us in this sort, then Christ is a cruel tyrant’.
All this time the Song of the Angel remained a Mystery; and in the morning my dear wife and some others coming to my bedside, I asked them if they knew who I was, and they telling me I was John Woolman, thought I was only light-headed, for I told them not what they Angel said, nor was I disposed to talk much to anyone, but was very desirous to get so deep that I might understand this Mystery.
My tongue was often so dry that I could not speak til I moved it about gathering some moisture, and as I lay still for a time, at length I felt Divine power prepare my mouth that I could speak, and then said, ‘I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, is by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me’. Then the mystery was opened, I perceived there was joy in heaven over a sinner who repented, and that that language, John Woolman is dead, meant no more than the death of my own will*
Journal 1772
All very good wishes
Dick
Hi Dick! I have been busy causing trouble elsewhere on the forum as it seems you have too. Thanks for taking a break from your rabble-rousing to check in. I reply when I have some time…It’s a holiday weekend here.
Hi Dick, Thanks for those wonderful excerpts from the Journal of John Woolman. I’ve been reading a bit of William Stringfellow today (prompted by Richard Beck’s blog) and recognize them both as kindred spirits.
Hi Sass and Drew –
Good to hear from you both (and hope you are behaving yourself Sass – what have you been up to? )
Regarding Stringfellow and Woolman – interesting Drew. Can you tell us briefly what similarities you have in mind ? (Just a couple of very snappy sketchy point of similarity but no heavy duty stuff required)
I’ve been thinking about what my dear, and good friend Cindy had to say to me recently. My posts are often too long – so I’ll try to make them a wee bit shorter.
There are a few observations I could make about John Woolman’s journal but I’ll limit myself to a couple, a time, over a few posts.
First two general observations about the journal art form–
Early Friends, and Friends of latter times who kept some of the original spirit and concerns of the early Friends, were great ‘Journal’ keepers. George Fox’s famous journal was the pattern for this practice. A Friend’s journal was – if you like – an account of their ‘experiments with the Truth’ as this unfolded in their lives. Experiment and experimentally’ in traditional ‘Quaker-speak’ always carries the seventeenth century meaning of ‘by experience’ rather than ‘by scientific experiment’. Friends journals, as far as I can see, are different in flavour than other Puritan journals and diaries. Puritan diaries often focussed on giving an introspective account of the individual’s sinfulness in anticipation of Judgement Day (following St Augustine’s ‘Confessions’). Quaker journals have a far more extravert focus on an encounter with the ‘manifestations of the ‘invisible’ God in his ‘manifestations in the Visible’ because the sense of confidence in the God Image/Light Seed/Logos/Word within seems to act as liberation from anguished introspection
Friends/Quakers are often confused with Puritans (and real ‘Puritans’ are often hard to generalise about anyway).Suffice to say here that Quakers were always theologically far apart from the Puritans (who tended to be hard line Calvinists, especially in seventeenth and eighteenth century America, and therefore were inclined to ‘roar up for sin’). However, as with some of the Puritans, there was a note of world denying/kill joy priggishness in some of the Early Friends (although I’ve made it clear that I think Maggie Fell/Margaret Fox does not fit the profile here). George Fox was certainly a bit of a prig, for example. He famously disapproved of the Ranters – the hippies of his day – for many sound reasons. However, his specific distaste for their ‘whistling and skipping’ strikes me as taking matters too far. And the explicit rejection of drama, music, and art by the Quakers in their second phase (the Quietist phase that followed the revolutionary phase)was always a problem – and certainly most Friends have renounced this rejection and embraced all three in modern times.
But creativity will find an outlet in some form or another. Hence the Quaker journal became an art form in itself. Also journals often gave details of dreams – as with John Woolmans’ ‘Near Death Experience’ vision related at 51 above (its section 51 ni the book it comes from). Again the dream journal is a very creative art form, used by many great artists.
Blessings
Dick
The similarity I noticed was how these two highly capable men from different eras devoted themselves to the cause of justice for the oppressed and vulnerable. Both could probably have done better for themselves if they had taken the side of the powerful, but that’s not what they were about.