William Penn Lecture
1939
Holy Obedience
Delivered at
Arch Street Meeting House
Philadelphia
by
Thomas R. Kelly
Haverford College
Out in front of us is the drama of men and of
nations, seething, struggling, laboring, dying. Upon this tragic
drama in these days our eyes are all set in anxious
watchfulness and in prayer. But within the silences of the souls of
men an eternal drama is ever being enacted, in these days
as well as in others. And on the outcome of this inner
drama rests, ultimately, the outer pageant of history. It is the
drama of the Hound of Heaven baying relentlessly upon the
track of man. It is the drama of the lost sheep wandering in
the wilderness, restless and lonely, feebly searching, while
over the hills comes the wiser Shepherd. For His is a
shepherd's heart, and restless until He holds His sheep in His arms.
It is the drama of the Eternal Father drawing the
prodigal home unto Himself, where there is bread enough and
to spare. It is the drama of the Double Search, as Rufus
Jones calls it. And always its chief actor isthe Eternal God
of Love.
It is to one strand in this inner drama, one scene,
where the Shepherd has found His sheep, that I would direct
you. It is the life of absolute and complete and holy obedience
to the voice of the Shepherd. But ever throughout the
account the accent will be laid upon God, God the initiator, God
the aggressor, God the seeker, God the stirrer into life, God
the ground of our obedience, God the giver of the power
to become children of God.
The Nature of Holy Obedience
Meister Eckhart wrote: "There are plenty to follow
our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give
up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them
too closely to disown themselves." It is just this astonishing
life which is willing to follow Him the other half, sincerely
to disown itself, this life which intends complete
obedience, without my reservations, that I would propose to you in
all humility, in all boldness, in all seriousness. I mean
this literally, utterly, completely, and I mean it for you and
for mecommit your lives in unreserved obedience to Him.
If you don't realize the revolutionary explosiveness
of this proposal you don't understand what I mean. Only
now and then comes a man or a woman who, like John
Woolman or Francis of Assisi, is willing to be utterly obedient, to
go the other half, to follow God's faintest whisper. But
when such a commitment comes in a human life, God
breaks through, miracles are wrought, world-renewing divine
forces are released, history changes. There is nothing
more important now than to have the human race endowed
with just such committed lives. Now is no time to say, "Lo,
here. Lo, there." Now is the time to say, "Thou art the man."
To this extraordinary life I call youor He calls you
through menot as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim
at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to
be lived here and now, in industrial America, by you and
by me.
This is something wholly different from mild, conventional religion which, with respectable skirts
held back by dainty fingers, anxiously tries to fish the world
out of the mudhole of its own selfishness. Our churches,
our meeting houses are full of such respectable and
amiable people. We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the
first half of the way. Many of us have become as mildly and
as conventionally religious as were the church folk of
three centuries ago, against whose mildness and mediocrity
and passionlessness George Fox and his followers
flung themselves with all the passion of a glorious and a
new discovery and with all the energy of dedicated lives. In
some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in
others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that
for which Christ lived and died.
There is a degree of holy and complete obedience
and of joyful self-renunciation and of sensitive listening that
is breathtaking. Difference of degree passes over into
utter difference of kind, when one tries to follow Him the
second half. Jesus put this pointedly when he said, "Ye must
be born again" (John 3:3), and Paul knew it: "If any man is
in Christ, he is a new creature" (2 Cor. 5:17).
George Fox as a youth was religious enough to meet
all earthly standards and was even proposed as a student
for the ministry. But the insatiable God-hunger in him
drove him from such mediocrity into a passionate quest for
the real whole-wheat Bread of Life. Sensible relatives told
him to settle down and get married. Thinking him crazy,
they took him to a doctor to have his blood letthe equivalent
of being taken to a psychiatrist in these days, as are
modern conscientious objectors to war in Belgium and
France. Parents, if some of your children are seized with
this imperative God-hunger, don't tell them to snap out of it
and get a job, but carry them patiently in your love, or at
least keep hands off and let the holy work of God proceed in
their souls. Young people, you who have in you the stirrings
of perfection, the sweet, sweet rapture of God Himself
within you, be faithful to Him until the last lingering bit of self
is surrendered and you are wholly God-possessed.
The life that intends to be wholly obedient,
wholly submissive, wholly listening, is astonishing in
its completeness. Its joys are ravishing, its peace profound,
its humility the deepest, its power world-shaking, its
love enveloping, its simplicity that of a trusting child. It is
the life and power in which the prophets and apostles lived.
It is the life and power of Jesus of Nazareth, who knew
that "when thine eye is single thy whole body is full of
light" (Luke 11: 34). It is the life and power of the apostle
Paul, who resolved not to know anything among men save
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It is the life and power of
Saint Francis, that little poor man of God who came nearer
to reliving the life of Jesus than has any other man on
earth. It is the life and power of George Fox and of Isaac and
Mary Penington. It is the life and power and utter obedience
of John Woolman who decided, he says, "to place my
whole trust in God," to "act on an inner Principle of Virtue,
and pursue worldly business no farther than as Truth
opened my way therein." It is the life and power of myriads
of unknown saints through the ages. It is the life and power
of some people now in this room who smile knowingly as
I speak. And it is a life and power that can break forth in
this tottering Western culture and return the Church to
its rightful life as a fellowship of creative, heaven-led souls.
Gateways into Holy Obedience
In considering one gateway into this life of
holy obedience, let us dare to venture together into the
inner sanctuary of the soul, where God meets man in
awful immediacy. There is an indelicacy in too-ready speech.
Paul felt it unlawful to speak of the things of the third
heaven. But there is also a false reticence, as if these things
were one's own work and one's own possession, about which
we should modestly keep quiet, whereas they are wholly
God's amazing work and we are nothing, mere passive
receivers. "The lion hath roared, who can but tremble? The voice
of Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" (Amos 3:23)
Some men come into holy obedience through the gateway of profound mystical experience.
It is an overwhelming experience to fall into the
hands of the living God, to be invaded to the depths of one's
being by His presence, to be, without warning, wholly
uprooted from all earth-born securities and assurances, and to
be blown by a tempest of unbelievable power which leaves
one's old proud self utterly, utterly defenseless, until one
cries, "All Thy waves and thy billows are gone over me" (Ps. 42:
7). Then is the soul swept into a Loving Center of
ineffable sweetness, where calm and unspeakable peace and
ravishing joy steal over one.
And one knows now why Pascal wrote, in the center
of his greatest moment, the single word, "Fire." There
stands the world of struggling, sinful, earth-blinded men
and nations, of plants and animals and wheeling stars of
heaven, all new, all lapped in the tender, persuading Love at
the Center. There stand the saints of the ages, their hearts
open to view, and lo, their hearts are our heart and their
hearts are the heart of the Eternal One. In awful solemnity
the Holy One is over all and in all, exquisitely loving,
infinitely patient, tenderly smiling. Marks of glory are upon all
things, and the marks are cruciform and blood-stained. And
one sighs, like the convinced Thomas of old, "My Lord and
my God" (John 20: 28). Dare one lift one's eyes and look?
Nay, whither can one look and not see Him? For field and
stream and teeming streets are full of Him. Yet as Moses knew,
no man can look on God and livelive as his old self.
Death comes, blessed death, death of one's alienating will.
And one knows what Paul meant when he wrote, "The life
which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of
God" (Gal. 220). One emerges from such soul-shaking, Love-invaded times into more normal states of consciousness. But
one knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world,
the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life
must henceforth be forever determined by that Real. Like
Saint Augustine one asks not for greater certainty of God but
only for more steadfastness in Him. There, beyond, in Him is
the true Center, and we are reduced, as it were, to nothing,
for He is all.
Is religion subjective? Nay, its soul is in objectivity,
in an Other whose Life is our true life, whose Love is our
love, whose Joy is our joy, whose Peace is our peace,
whose burdens are our burdens, whose Will is our will. Self
is emptied into God, and God in-fills it. In glad,
amazed humility we cast on Him our little lives in trusting
obedience, in erect, serene, and smiling joy. And we say, with a
writer of Psalms, "Lo, I come: in the book of the law it is written
of me, I delight to do Thy will, O my God" (Ps. 40:7-8).
For nothing else in all of heaven or earth counts so much as
His will, His slightest wish, His faintest breathing. And
holy obedience sets in, sensitive as a shadow, obedient as
a shadow, selfless as a shadow. Not reluctantly but with
ardor one longs to follow Him the second half. Gladly,
urgently, promptly one leaps to do His bidding, ready to run and
not be weary and to walk and not faint.
Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the
life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations
of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the
amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a
God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness
are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening
and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a
God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober,
workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete
obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems
to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And
our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being
firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us.
But in contrast to this passive route to
complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas
Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and,
like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning
dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by
bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.
But the first step to the obedience of the second half
is the flaming vision of the wonder of such a life, a vision
which comes occasionally to us all, through biographies of
the saints, through the journals of Fox and early
Friends, through a life lived before our eyes, through a
haunting verse of the Psalms"Whom have I in heaven but
Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee"
(Ps. 73: 25)through meditation upon the amazing life and
death of Jesus, through a flash of illumination or, in
Fox's language, a great opening.
But whatever the earthly history of this moment
of charm, this vision of an absolutely holy life is, I
am convinced, the invading, urging, inviting, persuading
work of the Eternal One. It is curious that modern
psychology cannot account wholly for flashes of insight of any
kind, sacred or secular. It is as if a fountain of creative Mind
were welling up, bubbling to expression within prepared
spirits. There is an infinite fountain of lifting power, pressing
within us, luring us by dazzling visions, and we can only say,
The creative God comes into our souls. An increment of
infinity is about us. Holy is imagination, the gateway of Reality
into our hearts. The Hound of Heaven is on our track, the God
of Love is wooing us to His Holy Life.
Once having the vision, the second step to holy obedience is this: Begin where you are. Obey now. Use
what little obedience you are capable of, even if it be like a
grain of mustard seed. Begin where you are. Live this
present moment, this present hour as you now sit in your seats,
in utter, utter submission and openness toward Him.
Listen outwardly to these words, but within, behind the scenes,
in the deeper levels of your lives where you are all alone
with God the Loving Eternal One, keep up a silent prayer,
"Open Thou my life. Guide my thoughts where I dare not let
them go. But Thou darest. Thy will be done." Walk on the
streets and chat with your friends. But every moment behind
the scenes be in prayer, offering yourselves in
continuous obedience.
I find this internal continuous prayer life
absolutely essential. It can be carried on day and night, in the thick
of business, in home and school. Such prayer of
submission can be so simple. It is well to use a single sentence,
repeated over and over and over again, such as this: "Be Thou
my will. Be Thou my will," or "I open all before Thee. I open
all before Thee," or "See earth through heaven, See
earth through heaven." This hidden prayer life can pass, in
time, beyond words and phrases into mere ejaculations, "My
God, my God, my Holy One, my Love," or into the adoration
of the Upanishad, "O Wonderful, O Wonderful, O
Wonderful." Words may cease and one stands and walks and sits
and lies in wordless attitudes of adoration and submission
and rejoicing and exultation and glory.
And the third step in holy obedience, or a counsel,
is this: If you slip and stumble and forget God for an
hour, and assert your old proud self, and rely upon your
own clever wisdom, don't spend too much time in
anguished regrets and self-accusations but begin again, just where
you are.
Yet a fourth consideration in holy obedience is
this: Don't grit your teeth and clench your fists and say, "I will!
I will!" Relax. Take hands off. Submit yourself to God.
Learn to live in the passive voicea hard saying for
Americansand let life be willed through you. For "I will" spells
not obedience.
Humility and Holiness
The fruits of holy obedience are many. But two are
so closely linked together that they can scarcely be
treated separately. They are the passion for personal holiness
and the sense of utter humility. God inflames the soul with
a craving for absolute purity. But He, in His glorious
otherness, empties us of ourselves in order that He may become all.
Humility does not rest, in final count, upon
bafflement and discouragement and self-disgust at our shabby lives,
a brow-beaten, dog-slinking attitude. It rests upon
the disclosure of the consummate wonder of God, upon
finding that only God counts, that all our own
self-originated intentions are works of straw. And so in lowly humility
we must stick close to the Root and count our own powers
as nothing except as they are enslaved in His power.
But O how slick and weasel-like is self-pride!
Our learnedness creeps into our sermons with a clever
quotation which adds nothing to God's glory, but a bit to our
own. Our cleverness in business competition earns as much
self-flattery as does the possession of the money itself. Our
desire to be known and approved by others, to have heads
nod approvingly about us behind our backs, and
flattering murmurs which we can occasionally overhear, confirm
the discernment in Alfred Adler's elevation of the
superiority motive. Our status as "weighty Friends" gives us
secret pleasures which we scarcely own to ourselves, yet
thrive upon. Yes, even pride in our own humility is one of
the devil's own tricks.
But humility rests upon a holy blindedness, like
the blindedness of him who looks steadily into the sun.
For wherever he turns his eyes on earth, there he sees only
the sun. The God-blinded soul sees naught of self, naught
of personal degradation or of personal eminence, but only
the Holy Will working impersonally through him, through
others, as one objective Life and Power. But what trinkets we
have sought after in life, the pursuit of what petty trifles
has wasted our years as we have ministered to the
enhancement of our own little selves! And what needless anguishes
we have suffered because our little selves were defeated,
were not flattered, were not cozened and petted!
But the blinding God blots out this self and
gives humility and true self-hood as wholly full of Him. For as
He gives obedience so He graciously gives to us what
measure of humility we will accept. Even that is not our own, but
His who also gives us obedience. But the humility of the
God-blinded soul endures only so long as we look steadily at
the Sun. Growth in humility is a measure of our growth in
the habit of the Godward-directed mind. And he only is near
to God who is exceedingly humble. The last depths of holy
and voluntary poverty are not in financial poverty, important
as that is; they are in poverty of spirit, in meekness
and lowliness of soul.
Explore the depths of humility, not with your
intellects but with your lives, lived in prayer of humble
obedience. And there you will find that humility is not merely a
human virtue. For there is a humility that is in God Himself. Be
ye humble as God is humble. For love and humility walk
hand in hand, in God as well as in man.
But there is something about deepest humility
which makes men bold. For utter obedience is
self-forgetful obedience. No longer do we hesitate and shuffle and
apologize because, say we, we are weak, lowly creatures and the
world is a pack of snarling wolves among whom we are sent
as sheep by the Shepherd (Matt. 10:16). I must confess
that, on human judgment, the world tasks we face are
appallingwell-nigh hopeless. Only the inner vision of God, only
the God-blindedness of unreservedly dedicated souls, only
the utterly humble ones can bow and break the raging pride
of a power-mad world.
But self-renunciation means God-possession, the
being possessed by God. Out of utter humility and
self-forgetfulness comes the thunder of the prophets, "Thus
saith the Lord." High station and low are leveled before Him.
Be not fooled by the world's power. Imposing institutions
of war and imperialism and greed are wholly vulnerable
for they, and we, are forever in the hands of a conquering
God. These are not cheap and hasty words. The high and
noble adventures of faith can in our truest moments be seen
as no adventures at all, but certainties. And if we live
in complete humility in God we can smile in patient
assurance as we work. Will you be wise enough and humble enough
to be little fools of God? For who can finally stay His
power? Who can resist His persuading love? Truly says
Saint Augustine, "There is something in humility which
raiseth the heart upward." And John Woolman says, "Now I
find that in the pure obedience the mind learns contentment,
in appearing weak and foolish to the wisdom which is of
the World; and in these lowly labors, they who stand in a
low place, rightly exercised under the Cross, will
find nourishment."
But God inflames the soul with a burning craving
for absolute purity. One burns for complete innocency
and holiness of personal life. No man can look on God and
live, live in his own faults, live in the shadow of the least
self-deceit, live in harm toward His least creatures, whether
man or bird or beast or creeping thing. The blinding purity
of God in Christ, how captivating, how alluring, how
compelling it is! The pure in heart shall see God? More, they who
see God shall cry out to become pure in heart, even as He
is pure, with all the energy of their souls.
This has been an astonishing and unexpected
element for me. In this day of concern for social righteousness
it sounds like a throwback to medieval ideals of
saintliness and soul-combing. Our religious heroes of these social
gospel days sit before a battery of telephones, with full
office equipment, with telegraph lines to Washington and
London and Tokyo and Berlin. And this is needed,
desperately needed. Yet there is in the experience of God this
insistent, imperative, glorious yearningthe craving for
complete spotlessness of the inner self before Him.
No average goodness will do, no measuring of our
lives by our fellows, but only a relentless, inexorable
divine standard. No relatives suffice; only absolutes satisfy the
soul committed to holy obedience. Absolute honesty,
absolute gentleness, absolute self-control, unwearied patience
and thoughtfulness in the midst of the raveling friction of
home and office and school and shop. It is said that the
ermine can be trapped by surrounding it with a circle of filth. It
will die before it will sully its snowy coat.
Have we been led astray by our fears, by the fear
of saccharine sweetness and light? By the dangers of
fanatical scrupulousness and self-inspection and halo-hunting?
By the ideal of a back-slapping recommendation of religion
by showing we were good fellows after all? By the fear of
quietism and of that monastic retreat from the world of men's
needs which we associate with medieval passion for holiness
of life? Nay, tread not so far from the chasm that you fall
into the ditch on the other side. Boldly must we risk the
dangers which lie along the margins of excess, if we would live
the life of the second half. For the life of obedience is a holy
life, a separated life, a renounced life, cut off from
worldly compromises, distinct, heaven-dedicated in the midst of
men, stainless as the snows upon the mountain tops.
He who walks in obedience, following God the
second half, living the life of inner prayer of submission
and exultation, on him God's holiness takes hold as a
mastering passion of life. Yet ever he cries out in abysmal sincerity,
"I am the blackest of all the sinners of the earth. I am a
man of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King,
Jehovah of Hosts." For humility and holiness are twins in
the astonishing birth of obedience in the heart of men. So
God draws unworthy us, in loving tenderness, up into
fellowship with His glorious self.
Entrance into Suffering
Another fruit of holy obedience is entrance
into suffering. I would not magnify joy and rapture,
although they are unspeakably great in the committed life. For
joy and rapture need no advocates. But we shrink from
suffering and can easily call all suffering an evil thing. Yet we live
in an epoch of tragic sorrows, when man is adding to the
crueler forces of nature such blasphemous horrors as drag soul
as well as body into hell. And holy obedience must walk in
this world, not aloof and preoccupied, but stained with
sorrow's travail.
Nor is the God-blinded soul given blissful oblivion
but, rather, excruciatingly sensitive eyesight toward the
world of men. The sources of suffering for the tendered soul
are infinitely multiplied, well-nigh beyond all endurance.
Ponder this paradox in religious experience: "Nothing
matters; everything matters." I recently had an unforgettable
hour with a Hindu monk. He knew the secret of this
paradox which we discussed together: "Nothing matters;
everything matters." It is a key of entrance into suffering. He who
knows only one-half of the paradox can never enter that door
of mystery and survive.
There is a lusty, adolescent way of thought among
us which oversimplifies the question of suffering. It merely
says, "Let us remove it." And some suffering can, through
more suffering, be removed. But there is an inexorable
residue which confronts you and me and the blighted souls of
Europe and China and the Near East and India, awful,
unremovable in a lifetime, withering all souls not genuinely rooted
in Eternity itself. The Germans call it Schicksal or
Destiny. Under this word they gather all the vast forces of
nature and disease and the convulsive upheavals of social life
which sweep them along, as individuals, like debris in a
raging flood, into an unknown end. Those who are not prepared
by the inner certitude of Job, "I know that my Avenger
liveth" (Job 19: 25), must perish in the flood.
One returns from Europe with the sound of weeping
in one's ears, in order to say, "Don't be deceived.
You must face Destiny. Preparation is only possible now. Don't
be fooled by your sunny skies. When the rains descend
and the floods come and the winds blow and beat upon
your house, your private dwelling, your own family, your
own fair hopes, your own strong muscles, your own body,
your own soul itself, then it is well-nigh too late to build a
house. You can only go inside what house you have and pray
that it is founded upon the Rock. Be not deceived by distance
in time or space, or the false security of a bank account
and an automobile and good health and willing hands to
work. Thousands, perhaps millions as good as you have had
all these things and are perishing in body and, worse still,
in soul today."
An awful solemnity is upon the earth, for the
last vestige of earthly security is gone.
It has always been gone, and religion has always said so, but we haven't believed it.
And some of us Quakers are not yet undeceived, and
childishly expect our little cushions for our little bodies, in a
world inflamed with untold ulcers. Be not fooled by
the pleasantness of the Main Line life, and the niceness
of Germantown existence, and the quiet coolness of your
well-furnished homes. For the plagues of Egypt are upon
the world, entering hovel and palace, and there is no escape
for you or for me. There is an inexorable amount of suffering
in all life, blind, aching, unremovable, not new but only
terribly intensified in these days.
One comes back from Europe aghast at having
seen how lives as graciously cultured as ours, but rooted only
in time and property and reputation, and self-deluded by
a mild veneer of religious respectability but unprepared
by the amazing life of commitment to the Eternal in
holy obedience, are now doomed to hopeless, hopeless
despair. For if you will accept as normal life only what you
can understand, then you will try only to expel the dull,
dead weight of Destiny, of inevitable suffering which is a part
of normal life, and never come to terms with it or fit your
soul to the collar and bear the burden of your suffering
which must be borne by you, or enter into the divine
education and drastic discipline of sorrow, or rise radiant in
the sacrament of pain.
One comes back from Europe to plead with you,
you here in these seats, you my pleasant but often
easy-living friends, to open your lives to such a baptism of
Eternity now as turns this world of tumbling change into a
wilderness in your eyes and fortifies you with an unshakable
peace that passes all understanding and endures all earthly
shocks without soul-destroying rebelliousness. Then and then
only can we, weaned from earth, and committed wholly to
God alone, hope to become voices crying in this wilderness
of Philadelphia and London, "Prepare ye the way of the
Lord. Make straight in this desert a highway for our God"
(Isa. 40:3). These are old truths. But now is no time for
enticing novelties but for a return to the everlasting truths of
life and suffering and Eternity and unreserved commitment
to Him who is over all.
The heart is stretched through suffering, and
enlarged. But O the agony of this enlarging of the heart, that one
may be prepared to enter into the anguish of others! Yet the
way of holy obedience leads out from the heart of God and
extends through the Valley of the Shadow.
But there is also removable suffering, yet such as
yields only to years of toil and fatigue and unconquerable
faith and perchance only to death itself. The Cross as dogma
is painless speculation; the Cross as lived suffering is
anguish and glory. Yet God, out of the pattern of His own heart,
has planted the Cross along the road of holy obedience. And
He enacts in the hearts of those He loves the miracle
of willingness to welcome suffering and to know it for what
it isthe final seal of His gracious love. I dare not urge you
to your Cross. But He, more powerfully, speaks within
you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments,
and disquiets us with the world's needs. By inner
persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks,
our tasks, God's burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us. And
He gives us the royal blindness of faith, and the seeing eye
of the sensitized soul, and the grace of unflinching
obedience. Then we see that nothing matters, and that
everything matters, and that this my task matters for me and for
my fellow men and for Eternity. And if we be utterly humble
we may be given strength to be obedient even unto death,
yea the death of the Cross.
In my deepest heart I know that some of us have
to face our comfortable, self-oriented lives all over again.
The times are too tragic, God's sorrow is too great, man's
night is too dark, the Cross is too glorious for us to live as
we have lived, in anything short of holy obedience. It may or
it may not mean change in geography, in profession, in
wealth, in earthly security. It does mean this: Some of us will
have to enter upon a vow of renunciation and of dedication to
the "Eternal Internal" which is as complete and as
irrevocable as was the vow of the monk of the Middle Ages.
Little groups of such utterly dedicated souls,
knowing one another in Divine Fellowship, must take an
irrevocable vow to live in this world yet not of this world, Franciscans
of the Third Order, and if it be His will, kindle again the
embers of faith in the midst of a secular world. Our meetings
were meant to be such groups, but now too many of them
are dulled and cooled and flooded by the secular. But
within our meetings such inner bands of men and women,
internally set apart, living by a vow of perpetual obedience to the
Inner Voice, in the world yet not of the world, ready to go
the second half, obedient as a shadow, sensitive as a
shadow, selfless as a shadowsuch bands of humble prophets
can recreate the Society of Friends and the Christian
church and shake the countryside for ten miles around.
Simplicity
The last fruit of holy obedience is the simplicity of
the trusting child, the simplicity of the children of God. It is
the simplicity which lies beyond complexity. It is the
naiveté which is the yonder side of sophistication. It is the
beginning of spiritual maturity, which comes after the awkward age
of religious busy-ness for the Kingdom of Godyet how
many are caught, and arrested in development, within
this adolescent development of the soul's growth! The mark
of this simplified life is radiant joy. It lives in the Fellowship
of the Transfigured Face. Knowing sorrow to the depths it
does not agonize and fret and strain, but in serene,
unhurried calm it walks in time with the joy and assurance of
Eternity. Knowing fully the complexity of men's problems it
cuts through to the Love of God and ever cleaves to Him.
Like the mercy of Shakespeare, "'tis mightiest in the
mightiest." But it binds all obedient souls together in the fellowship
of humility and simple adoration of Him who is all in all.
I have in mind something deeper than the
simplification of our external programs, our absurdly crowded
calendars of appointments through which so many pantingly
and frantically gasp. These do become simplified in
holy obedience, and the poise and peace we have been
missing can really be found. But there is a deeper, an
internal simplification of the whole of one's personality,
stilled, tranquil, in childlike trust listening ever to
Eternity's whisper, walking with a smile into the dark.
This amazing simplification comes when we
"center down," when life is lived with singleness of eye, from a
holy Center where the breath and stillness of Eternity are
heavy upon us and we are wholly yielded to Him. Some of
you know this holy, recreating Center of eternal peace and
joy and live in it day and night. Some of you may see it over
the margin and wistfully long to slip into that amazing
Center where the soul is at home with God. Be very faithful to
that wistful longing. It is the Eternal Goodness calling you
to return Home, to feed upon green pastures and walk
beside still waters and live in the peace of the Shepherd's
presence. It is the life beyond fevered strain. We are called
beyond strain, to peace and power and joy and love and
thorough abandonment of self. We are called to put our
hands trustingly in His hand and walk the holy way, in no
anxiety assuredly resting in Him.
Douglas Steere wisely says that true religion
often appears to be the enemy of the moralist. For religion
cuts across the fine distinctions between the several virtues
and gathers all virtues into the one supreme quality of love.
The wholly obedient life is mastered and unified and
simplified and gathered up into the love of God and it lives and
walks among men in the perpetual flame of that radiant love.
For the simplified man loves God with all his heart and
mind and soul and strength and abides trustingly in that
love. Then indeed do we love our neighbors. And the
Fellowship of the Horny Hands is identical with the Fellowship of
the Transfigured Face, in this Mary-Martha life.
In this day when the burdens of humanity press
so heavily upon us I would begin not first with techniques
of service but with the most "Serious Call to a Devout Life,"
a life of such humble obedience to the Inner Voice as we
have scarcely dared to dream. Hasten unto Him who calls you
in the silences of your heart. The Hound of Heaven is
ever near us, the voice of the Shepherd is calling us home.
Too long have we lingered in double-minded obedience and
dared not the certainties of His love. For Him do ye seek, all
ye pearl merchants. He is "the food of grown men."
Hasten unto Him who is the chief actor of the drama of time
and Eternity. It is not too late to love Him utterly and obey
Him implicitly and be baptized with the power of the
apostolic life.
Hear the words of Saint Augustine, as he rued his
delay of commitment to Him.
"Too late loved I Thee, O Thou
beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I loved Thee!
And behold, Thou wert within and I abroad, and there I
searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms
which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me but I was not
with Thee. Things held me far from Thee which, unless they
were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst and shoutedst,
and burstedst my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest,
and scattered my blindness. Thou breathedst odors, and I
drew in breath and pant for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and
thirst. Thou touchedst me and I burned for Thy peace. When
I shall with my whole soul cleave to Thee, I shall
nowhere have sorrow or labor, and my life shall live as wholly full
of Thee."