An untitled sonnet by the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889) expresses insights that are essential to both the Catholic and the Quaker experience:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

It is the nature of kingfishers to “catch fire” when they fly, as it is the nature of dragonflies to “draw flame” as light flashes from their wings. And it is the nature of stones to ring out their nature as they tumble down wells, striking the stony sides of the ring that is the well. So, too, an instrument’s string or a bell’s “bow,” or curved shape, naturally “finds tongue to fling out broad its name”—to speak and proclaim what it is. Likewise, each human being “selves,” or “goes itself,” “deals out that being indoors each one dwells”—that is, each of us inevitably expresses that in which we live, that which lives in us, that which we are. What we do bespeaks—is—what, who, and why we are. “What I do is me: for that I came.”

In the sonnet’s second section, Hopkins succinctly asserts an insight that is prominent in primitive Quaker thought as well, if never so well expressed: “the just man justices.” (Just as he earlier used “selves,” so Hopkins now uses “justices” as a verb.) Here, in an honesty that refutes and refuses the Protestant dodge of “imputed righteousness,” the poet, like the primitive Quakers and consistent with his Catholic tradition, recognizes and insists that a “justified” person is one who lives justly, one who lives justice. The just person “keeps grace,” abiding in the “sanctifying grace” which is, in Catholic theology, the life of God-who-is-love in the human soul. And thus the just one, “all his goings graces,” goes gracefully “over the world, answering that of God in every one” (George Fox). Expressing his nature, he is justice and grace for others, because he “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—Christ.”

For Christ, the Word-in-flesh, the expression of the nature of God, is the crucified yet saving seed of love which is raised in us when, recognizing in the shadow of death that but for that seed we are nothing, we cease our often unconscious but always desperate striving to keep it buried under a built-up self. When the normal human delusion of self gives way to faith in love, then the seed, which according to scripture is innumerable yet one, comes into its own as the true self, the real nature, of each of us: “for Christ plays in ten thousand places.” To “act in God’s eye what in God’s eye [we are]—Christ” is, as inspired writers have told us since ancient times, the meaning of faith. Faith in Christ-in-us is the activation, the real-ization, of the truth that there is more to our lives than the emptiness of self and death, that our lives are the life of Christ as, in brief but beautiful fire, we fly in him, which is to allow him to fly in us, “To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

As dragonflies flash flame and bells sing their essence, so we spontaneously speak the Word—the spirit of love which is the divine nature in us—in the grace of our comings and goings in justice: Christ “Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his….” I am reminded of a passage, sung by the Virtues but appropriate as well to the just, in Hildegard von Bingen’s “Ordo Virtutem,” which was composed about 725 years before Hopkins wrote his sonnet:

Verbum dei clarescit in forma hominis,
Et ideo fulgemus cum illo,
Edificantes membra sui pulcri corporis.

The Word of God shines bright in human form,
And thus we shine with him,
Building up the limbs of his beautiful body.

—————
Thanks to Frank Seeburger, on whose blog Trauma and Philosophy I found a reference to the Hopkins poem along with help in understanding the rich but difficult work of Jean-Luc Nancy. And thanks to Desmond Egan for his helpful “‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’. . . — analysis of Imagery and a Suggestion.”

The image below is a detail from a photo of a kingfisher by Ravi Vaidyanathan; you can click it to see the original at Wikipedia Commons.

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars.

…

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings.

Those are the first and last stanzas of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “Christ Climbed Down.”¹ Ferlinghetti’s understanding of a particular (and peculiar) dogma may have been off — the “Immaculate Conception” doctrine refers to the conception of Mary, not to that of Jesus Christ — but that’s not the worst of his heterodoxies, at least from some broadly accepted Christian perspectives. For many Christians, the implication that the more important birth of Christ is that which he awaits “in the darkest night of everybody’s anonymous soul” is something one might expect to hear from an incorrigible heretic — from, say, a Quaker.

Our Quaker tradition reads stories in scripture as pointers to inward events. In a Quaker reading of the annunciation narrative,² each of us is an anonymous Mary, in whose dark heart-womb the seed Christ lives. Christ, the image (eikon) of God-who-is-love,³ the seed promised to Abraham,⁴ is the promise, or “principle,” of divine life waiting within us to be born and to re-create our hearts and souls by imparting to us its own life. But, as Isaac Penington has warned us, that living seed is easily missed or rejected.

For though this principle be all life, yet it is at first but as a seed, and the appearance of the Lord in it is but as in a seed; very little, low, weak, hard to be discerned, easy to be overlooked and despised, and some greater and more undeniable appearance expected.⁵

We don’t recognize the seed because we don’t expect to find the deepest and most powerful truth of our lives in something small and frail, almost invisible, apparently worthless and even undesirable if glimpsed or felt. Our expectation is that the experience of the presence of God will be affirming, uplifting, powerful, awe-inspiring. But this tiny, wretched, seemingly powerless seed of sacrificial love? Not what we’re looking for.

Yet in our inner darkness the seed continues to live and move, the “secret virtue [i.e., hidden power for good] and stirring of the life in [the] heart.”⁶ And when at last the seed is found and recognized; when, understanding what it is and what it offers, we respond with our “Fiat voluntas tua,” allowing it to be born and to grow in us: then is the coming of God in human form, the coming of Christ in the flesh — in our flesh. Then is the coming of God in power,⁷ “the very craziest of Second Comings.”

It is the seed of God, and it is the very nature of God [i.e., love: see Penington's "Concerning Love"]; and [a person] in whom it springs, and who is gathered into it, born of it, and one with it, partakes of the divine nature. Peter speaks of the great and precious promises, whereby the saints are made partakers of the divine nature. All the promises are to the seed of promise, to Christ the Son of God, to the seed of God, to the heirs of life and salvation in Christ; and they are all fulfilled to them, and enjoyed by them, who are ingrafted into, and one with Christ, the seed; which cannot be, but by the grace, by the truth, by the light, life, Spirit, and power, which he sows in the heart; which are not many things, but all contained and comprehended in the one seed.⁸

Earlier generations of Quakers, perhaps more attuned than we are to that living inward promise, refused to erect “rootless Christmas trees,” symbols of the spiritual rootlessness resulting from our ignoring or despising the life of sacrificial love flickering weakly in the dark depths of our hearts. And of course they refused to erect crosses and crèches, which divert our gaze from the living icon of love, the inner Christ, to physical and conceptual idols.⁹ As Jean-Luc Marion tells us, the idol stops our gaze at itself, occluding the horizon, and then, mirror-like, returns our gaze to us in a spiritual narcissism; but the icon inverts that process: in the icon, the invisible “opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to summon them to its depth.”¹⁰ Christ, the seed of love in the heart, is “the icon of the invisible God.”¹¹ Through that icon, the invisible power and nature of God¹² engage us and transform us unto what we behold.

And so we Friends direct our attention not outward to an idol-symbol but inward to the living icon, the seed of God, within — to the small stirring of love in our hearts. By feeling and responding to the movement of that life in our spiritual wombs, we dispose ourselves to become Theotokos, the God-bearer, and thereby to be re-created in the divine image — a true “immaculate conception.” May our Advent, the season in which we can only acknowledge our longing for the saving birth of love, come swiftly to its end: may Christ take flesh in us today. May this be the Christmas Day on which we say,

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year.

_______
NOTES

1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958), 69-70.
2. Luke 1:26-38.
3. Colossians 1:15 (see note 11, below); 1 John.
4. Galatians 3:16.
5. Isaac Penington, “Concerning God’s Seeking Out His Israel” (1663).
6. Isaac Penington, “To All Such That Complain That They Want Power” (1661).
7. See Mark 9:1.
8. Isaac Penington, “The Seed of God and of His Kingdom” (undated).
9. “Idol”: “A form or appearance visible but without substance” — Merriam-Webster Online.
10. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19. Here, from page 21, is Marion’s translation of “an astonishing sequence from Saint Paul,” 2 Corinthians 3:18: “We all, with face unveiled and revealed [anakekalummeno prosopo], serving as optical mirror to reflect [katoptrizomenoi] the glory of the Lord, we are transformed in and according to his icon [eikona], passing from glory to glory, according to the spirit of the Lord.”
11. Colossians 1:15: “Hos estin eikon tou theo tou aoratou.”
12. See Romans 1:20.

It is a bright, cold afternoon in late fall. Pulling open an embossed bronze door, I enter the monstrous Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore. Ahead of me, the heavy glass doors between narthex and nave are propped open by two full black trash bags; I silently step past them. Walking up the warm but gloomy center aisle, I turn for a moment to look up at the ranks of organ pipes, their form leading the eye to a huge stony Christus Rex surrounded by stained glass. I remember the relatively recent recital here of music by Messiaen, including a physically oppressive piece that was intended, according to the program notes, to express the power of the Catholic Church. The mass of sound from the pipes high behind us pushed with unrelenting pressure against our necks and backs, pressing us down until some of us were bent over and leaning against the pew ahead for support, wanting to escape. As I reach the transept, I smile and shake my head at the irony: Messiaen knew not what truth he told.

The chapel on the north side of the transept is named the “Blessed Sacrament Chapel.” Except for ambient light from the dim nave, only a small sanctuary lamp, a sign to believers that Jesus is present as bread behind the veil of the tabernacle, relieves the darkness of the space today. I discern the bent form of a white-haired man kneeling near the altar, adoring his hidden Christ in the hidden wafers while gilt angels inexplicably show their backs to his savior. The old man is small and frail in the vast, hard church. But the cathedral has its own frailty: looking up at the massive side walls of the chapel, I note the long, crooked crack in each, cracks spanned by small devices that track their widening over time. I know that the south transept is also cracked and metered. Slowly but measurably, the arms of the cross are breaking off as the church’s foundation fails.

Leaving the old man to his murky worship, I turn and walk to the south side. The chapel here is a shrine to St. Joseph, the shadowy husband of the mother of Jesus. But now the altar and its reredos, with its tall gilt Joseph, are covered by a large curtain, before which is a crèche lit by electric lanterns held by plaster figures. The scene, with angel and star suspended on strings, is empty at its center: the season being Advent, the plaster baby Jesus has not yet been placed. Mary gazes tenderly upon the emptiness that magi, shepherds, and angels adore. I smile again while a smaller Joseph, not susceptible to irony, looks on solicitously, perhaps a little worried about the widening cracks.

On my way out, I make the visit that I came for: the altar dedicated to St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, le Curé d’Ars. Like the other saints at the abandoned side altars, this white stone priest is attached to the wall, seeming to hover there as, according to the friar who told me the story, a devil did during a famous exorcism. But Jean Vianney is the patron saint of parish priests and the namesake of one of the kindest men I have known, John Vianney Kelly, O. Carm., the prefect of my class at the Carmelite seminary. I was thirteen years old when I began living under Father John’s gentle oversight, and it was he who soothed me on the nights when, weeping, I could not sleep. Although he must have been tired, he never turned me away. I remember that he would remove his capuce, scapular, and tunic, kissing the small ivory cross embroidered on the scapular as he hung the habit on a hook on his cell’s door, and, wearing the white tee shirt and black slacks that the brown robe had covered, talk to me about my life and future, about his hopes and fears, and about art, especially religious art. I, having come from my two-tiered bunk in the dorm next to his cell, would be wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. Today, I recognize the danger of such a scene, but then I was an innocent. Had Father John been a predator, I don’t think I would have survived the disillusionment and shame. But he was a kind man, a sincere follower of Christ. John Vianney Kelly saw his thirtieth birthday that year, and he told me that he felt old. Perhaps he was prescient at that moment; he died, I learned recently, before the age of fifty.

“They have taken your other prie-dieu,” I tell the saint as I approach his narrow altar, which at my last visit was flanked by kneelers on both sides. Noting that no votive candles burn before the curé, I ask, “Has the patron of parish priests fallen out of favor — and in this, Benedict’s “Year for Priests” in honor of the 150^th anniversary of your death? Is this your situation now, that only an atheist stops to speak to you? Well, I won’t light a candle for you, because I won’t give them the five dollars that their sign demands. But I will talk to you: I have something on my mind.” I kneel on the remaining prie-dieu and look the statue in its stony eye. “Father John Vianney Kelly took yours as his religious name. True, he laughed as he told me that he had chosen your name partly because his given name was John: there was already a John in the province and therefore he could not simply keep his baptismal name when he made his Carmelite vows, but ‘John Vianney’ was considered to be sufficiently distinctive. And so you helped him retain the name that his parents had given him and avoid some obscure tongue-twister. But it’s also true that he admired you and tried to follow you, especially in your self-sacrificing dedication to the ordinary people under your care. He was a beautiful soul. He brought honor to your name and profession.”

I look intently at the saint’s rigid features. “But what would you think of those other priests? What would you think of the consecrated men who had befriended me before I met Father John, men like Robert Hopkins, the proud priest who outlived John Kelly by many years, basking in the admiration of the gullible while abusing children over a quarter-century, confessing his crimes only when confronted as an old man? And that other one, the one who never confessed? I know what they were. I know that they were grooming me. I don’t think that they were ever able to molest me, but I know that other boys were not as lucky as I.”

As anger and sorrow rise higher in my heart, I arise quickly and walk toward the narthex. Stopping at the great glass doors, I turn back to the statue. “I try to do good in the world,” I say silently to the vacant saint, “despite your evil men and despite the fear and emptiness that your church gave to me as God’s gracious presence. I have made a promise to your brother John, who was truly a father to me, and although he no longer exists I keep that promise: I help feed the hungry, heal the sick, comfort the afflicted, liberate the oppressed. In doing those things, I honor him, because, priest though he was (and he held his priesthood humbly), he showed me how to live love. His spirit speaks to me today, renewing my resolve. Like him, I will look to what is beautiful in human existence, to kindness and art. Like him, I will give of myself in the small things of everyday life. Like him, I will be a source of hope and comfort for children who weep and don’t know why.”

I pass through the open doorway, past the bags of trash, into the cooler air of the narthex. At the outer doors, I turn and pause. “Goodbye, patron of priests. You must remain attached to your sinking church, shamed by what your men have done. I leave you behind in your gloom, but the spirit of your namesake goes with me. Something good must come of this; I promise you that.” Pushing the ponderous bronze door, I step into the clean, cold light of day.



In this way and that I tried to save the old pail…
until at last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail!
No more moon in the water! . . . . . .—  13^th-century Zen adept Chiyono, on her satori

“Every experience worthy of the name runs counter to our expectation.” —  Hans-Georg Gadamer

“I don’t suppose that if God had given us the clear knowledge of how closely we are bound to one another both in good and evil, that we could go on living….” So said the curé of Ambricourt in The Diary of a Country Priest. The same priest, in whom already coiled the cancer that would kill him, had moments earlier said that “hidden sins poison the air which others breathe.” He knew how we are bound together, and somehow he lived with the knowledge — just as somehow many of us who know continue to live. But the knowing is a kind of cancer, a carrier of death.

In this knowing, this awful communion, the horizon of self is transgressed. I am opened to the unexpected reality of alterity, of the inalienable alienness of myself and others. I cannot withstand this knowledge, cannot go on living. Either I perish or, understanding the otherness in and around me, I become something different, something beyond what I have been. The question is not whether death will come, but whether it will become resurrection.

“Who are you to condemn another’s sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.” Thrown into the community of alterity in the ineluctable encounter with truth, I lose my standing to condemn or to boast. I must acknowledge that the sin — “There is only one sin” — is ours, as is the good. In this experience I am denied, contradicted; I find myself loving those whom I would hate. Dying to the lie of autonomy, one descends into the madness of love or of hell. “Hell is not to love any more. As long as we remain in this life we can still deceive ourselves, think that we love by our own will, that we love independently of God. But we’re like madmen stretching our hands to grasp the moon reflected in water.” It’s madness, then, like death, in any case: the human condition. When the bottom falls out, do we choose the form of our madness?

I don’t know if I make a choice; it may be that I make only a report. My report is this: somehow, whether by chance or by choice, I want to love.

“Death isn’t like madness —”
“No, indeed. We know even less about it.”
“Love is stronger than death — that stands written in your books.”
“But it isn’t we who invented love. Love has its own order, its own laws.”
“God is love’s master.”
“No, not its master. God is love itself…. If you want to love don’t place yourself beyond love’s reach.”

Not to place myself beyond love’s reach in living hell is not to recoil from love’s kenotic madness. And it is to hope against hope that “the lowest of human beings, even though he no longer thinks he can love, still has in him the power of loving” — to be able to answer that of God in every one, even one who tortures me, even myself. Caught between two forms of madness, unable to escape de-struction, I hesitate, trembling. But I know which way I must go, led, lured, pushed by both fear of hell and hope of resurrection.

The yearning for purification and transformation, which is especially intense today, has been with me for a long time. It often brings to mind the promise of Ezekiel.

A new heart also will I give you,
and a new spirit will I put within you:
and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you a heart of flesh.

More than once I have referred to that passage (Ezek. 36:26) in vocal ministry, at least once offering something like a prayer: “Take away this heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh.” But again today I wonder, as I do each time the passage comes to me, if such complete re-creation can ever really happen.

Ezekiel’s promise is interwoven in my mind with a passage from Ode of Solomon XI (trans. Barnstone). I once mentioned part of it — lines 1, 2, and 5 — in vocal ministry, and those same lines often come to mind during worship and at other times, such as now, when I’m feeling the weight of the world’s sadness. Here’s the entire passage.

My heart was cloven and there appeared a flower,
and grace sprang up, and fruit from the Lord,

for the highest one split me with his holy spirit,
exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love.

His splitting of my heart was my salvation,
and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth.

Picturing those lines, I usually see a rock being cracked open by the force of the world’s random suffering. I see a small stem emerge, blossoming: the flower of compassion. But then I remember the passage from Ezekiel, and the image freezes; I am unable to imagine how a small blossoming of compassion would lead to the removal and replacement of my heart. Today, however, perhaps because of the urgency of my feeling, which is tinctured with the intuition of nonexistence, I need to resolve this, to understand. But I don’t want to uncouple the two passages, which both speak to me powerfully and which together seem to form a gestalt. And so I read more carefully, noting that the ode’s author says, in the lines I usually overlook, that he or she was filled with the Lord’s love when her own love was exposed. And I look within more carefully, allowing imagination to illuminate.

Peering into the cleft, which is growing wider as I look, I see that the stone is hollow, a mere shell. Within the stone is earth, and I recall Jesus’ reference to the fertile ground in which the seed of the divine Kingdom of justice, mercy, and peace is rooted. I perceive that the flower of compassion proceeds not from a simple stem but from a vine, and I understand that this vine of the Kingdom is the Christ, “the hidden human being of the heart” (1 Pet. 3:4). The vine grows as I watch; it fills the empty space within the stony shell and begins to wrap around the outside. Soon it covers the stone completely, so that the shell is both filled with and covered by the life of compassion and justice.

“Seeing” that, I feel that my eyes have been opened.

In my naïveté and pride, I had imagined that my stony heart would dramatically be destroyed and replaced; that, as I thought Paul said in Galatians 2:20, I would be crucified and live no longer as I. But today I am edified and humbled by this vision. In my case at least, pace Ezekiel, the stone is not removed; it is covered, inside and out, by the spiritual vine Christ, the divine-human form of love — or is that equivalent to removal and replacement? And, pace Paul, I am not crucified; I am broken, yes, but I am also covered, knit together in my brokenness, by suffering love — or is that equivalent to crucifixion and resurrection? (Does not the risen Christ continue to bear his wounds?) The images, icons, take me beyond themselves into the reality of my heart.

As understanding deepens, I see and can say this: I have never had a heart of stone. My heart has a stony carapace, but by the grace of love it has never been fully enclosed within its shell. And the shell itself is increasingly opened and covered by love’s flesh and blood, the Christ-vine of compassion whose seed lives in the humus, the God-breathed earthly humanity, that has always been my heart of hearts.

Knowing that life and love are suffering and will always be so, I understand the shell’s formation and function: it is the original innocent transgression, the protective human sin that is with us from birth. I understand, too, that for now it must remain, although eventually it may crumble, no longer needed, within the vine’s embrace. No matter. “Blessed is he whose sin is forgiven, whose transgression is covered” (Ps. 32:1). The vine lives in me and offers its healing life to me: freely may I receive; therefore, freely may I give. As compulsion yields to compassion, I see the end of law; I know more fully the peace of freedom in the face of nonexistence; I feel the blessedness of a heart of flesh.

Liberal Quakerism increasingly identifies itself with a small subset of Quaker vocabulary and practices, all loosely defined if at all. The Quaker metanarrative context which gave our vocabulary and practice meaning is ignored or intentionally rejected rather than faithfully developed, as if our selected slogans (“spirit,” “light,” “continuing revelation,” etc.) and practices (silent “worship,” consensus decision-making, etc.) could have meaning in themselves, outside of any contextual framework. But in reality they can’t exist in autonomous isolation; nothing can. In reality, when removed from their matrix they are assimilated into a dominant cultural metanarrative.

For, as minds like Derrida — and vital religious traditions as well — remind us, context is everything. Words out of context would become meaningless, so when ripped from their web they quietly take on new, unexamined meanings. Practices out of context would become empty forms, so they tend to do the same. But we liberal Quakers turn a blind eye to that inevitable process. Consequently, we no longer know what we’re talking about or why we do what we do, and we no longer acknowledge or even see that darkness in our psyches which uses our willful ignorance (and misappropriation of phrases like “that of God”) as cover. And we’re fiercely proud and protective of that ignorance, which we have substituted for the faith in “faith and practice.” As a result, we are increasingly spiritually vitiated, morally compromised, intellectually impoverished, and outreach-impaired. We are a plant without roots, withering in the success of our determination to do without them.

Our root-text, the explicit Quaker religious worldview in which our practices had their identity and function, has effectively been cut off, but selected practices are continued, justified by a few ambiguous words and phrases pulled from the text, and made central and definitive. We have reached the low-water mark of defining ourselves not as people who share a beautiful and powerful metanarrative, a religious worldview finding expression in spiritually transformative disciplines and practices, but as people who perform together certain practices that have no real grounding in anything other than personal preference and liberal values. Consequently, the practices no longer function as disciplines of critical self-knowledge and self-transcendence; on the contrary, we use them as vehicles of self, for reinforcement, celebration, and expression of naively self-centered modernistic individuality. Liberal Quakerism, instead of functioning as a critically questioning corrective for self and society, has become an agent of the modern liberal identity and culture. We who refuse the name “church” have become in practice a tiny, ultra-liberal church, an organization based on forms and insupportable doctrines that furthers the aims of a powerful segment of society.

True, we differ somewhat in that we emphasize practices, keeping our doctrines to a minimum. But in doing so, we simply sever our practices from their intellectual foundations and make them available as vessels for the modernist liberal paradigm. Defecting from our beginnings as a people who rejected forms — which, again, are never really empty — we have become the community of forms par excellence. Abandoning the deeply transforming existential and spiritual, context-derived meaning that once gave life to the forms, we continue in the forms for comfort, companionship, and a feeling of being “spiritual.” Meanwhile, we continue also to despoil the planet, hoard resources, and enjoy all the benefits, including protection by a huge and aggressive military establishment, of the oppressor class to which we pretend not to belong — even as we affirm our “testimonies” of simplicity and peacefulness. We simply make ourselves feel better, and better than others, by spiritual pretense. But outside of our Quaker mini-culture, our pretense is increasingly transparent, and our testimonies are increasingly, and justifiably, seen as hypocrisy.

We assert, for example, that we want the military disbanded, as if we’re really desirous of living with no protection against the appalling violence and poverty in which much of the world lives now while we sip lattes behind the lines.* We project our guilt onto the powerful bodies, such as corporations and governments, our true selves writ large, that satisfy our cravings for security, comfort, pleasure, and power, and then we come together on Sundays to feel good about ourselves for our pretense of spirit-led protest — although we can’t say what “spirit” means, in part because we reject any “limiting” definitions. We are now moving into the position which apostate Christianity occupied for the first Quakers: we have the forms and (some of) the words, including the word “spirit,” but we do not actually know the spirit — or the spirit we know is not the spirit that created and animated the Quaker movement. We, along with some other Friends from whom we imagine we differ greatly, are becoming the present-day Antichrist, the Antiquaker.

Although Friends originally were united in a common metanarrative, and while other subsets of Quakerism continue to be so, ultimately we are held together not even by our common use of words and practices, which mean different things if anything to different liberal Friends, but by the reactive belief that to come together in such a manner, unmoored from a Quaker metanarrative that would question, challenge, and change first self and then society, is a salutary, even ideal, thing to do. Ignorant of the irony, we insist that the word “Quaker” stand for this vacuous, status-quo-perpetuating middle- and upper-class inversion of what was once a revolutionary faith and practice. And yet, although we reject the claims of historic Quakerism when they challenge our prejudices or lifestyles, we do not hesitate to appeal to any elements, apostate or not, of Quaker history that we might use as justification of what we are and do.

And that is today’s report, from one liberal Friend, on the dark side of liberal Quakerism.

At best, what I have described is only a transitional condition, a correctable misstep in our journey through the modern to the postmodern world. At worst, it is evidence of the impending death of liberal Quakerism as a Quaker movement — a death that some liberal Friends actively seek. Although hope is sometimes battered by sounds of victory celebrations coming from within as well as without our community, I continue to hope that it is the former. And I am encouraged by the hunger for a deeper and deeply-transforming spiritual life, and the desire to raise the treasure of our torpedoed tradition, that many liberal Friends and worship-attenders continue to express. The light, though beaten down and covered over, still shines in the darkness.

———-
*Driving to meeting one day around twenty years ago, I heard a news report about debate in Japan’s Parliament on Japan’s constitutional prohibition of a military establishment. (Japan has a self-defense force but lacks a military establishment and has constitutionally rejected war and war potential.) One member argued that Japan was not truly pacifist but simply a hypocritical freeloader that relies on others, such as the United States, to do the military dirty work that keeps it secure. “What are we,” he asked, “a bunch of nouveaux-riches Quakers?”

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[For related posts, see the "Liberal Quakerism" category.]

Welcome, Friends, to an experiment in reading and thinking; to the inspirited play of Quaker theopoetics; to a paralogy of a Paul, two Georges, and thee.

The popular Quaker phrase “that of God in every one” has its source in a passage in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. Although the first Friends were familiar with apostates’ tendentious translations developed from the Textus Receptus, the Friends’ hermeneutic, or principle of biblical interpretation, allowed them to enter into the spirit of the passage and to understand it as referring not to outward signs of God in the world but to the power of the light of Christ present within them. I find that by using the NA26/27 Greek text, with interlinear English and a variety of reference materials, I can provide a rendering of the passage that conveys Quaker thinking and experience quite effectively.

I’ll also offer two brief commentaries, each from a different Quaker perspective: one (verse-based) from the traditional, and one from the universalist/postmodern.

The passage is Romans 1:16-25.

[16] For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God unto saving for all who have faith in it, to the Jew first and even to the Greek, [17] and because God’s justice is being revealed in that power, from faith into faithfulness, according to what has been written: ‘the just shall live by faithfulness.’

[18] For God’s indignation is being disclosed from heaven over all ungodliness and injustice of human beings who are restraining the truth in injustice, [19] because that which is known of God is known within them, for God shows himself to them. [20] For, apart from what is perceived in the ordering of the world for the created things, that which is unseen of him — his eternal power and divine nature [i.e., love*] — is being discerned, and thus they are without excuse [21] inasmuch as, not recognizing God as God, they give glory or thanks but are already idolatrous in their thinking; thus their unwise heart is darkened.

[22] Professing to be wise, they are made fools, [23] and they change the glory of the incorruptible God in a likeness of an image of a corruptible human being, and flying things, and four-footed beasts, and reptiles. [24] Thus God also surrendered them into uncleanness in the desires of their hearts, to despising their bodies within themselves — [25] those who alter the truth of God in the falsehood, and are venerated, and worship the created things above the creator, who is blessed in the ages. Amen.

* * *

A brief, more traditional Quaker commentary:

16, 17. The gospel is the power of God. Christ is the power of God (1 Cor. 1:24). Both are the power of God, whose nature is love.* Therefore, gospel = Christ = power of love, the one salvific power for everyone. Those who trust in that power and are faithful to it reveal in their lives the justice of God. (Based on Paul’s reference to Habukkak 2:4 — “… for the just shall live by faithfulness [emunah]” — I am interpreting Paul’s phrase “ek pistews eis pistin” as a play on words.)

18. In the working of the light of Christ in the heart, God’s rejection of injustice is revealed, and, as we have seen, power is given to overcome injustice and become just (justified). Those who are “restraining the truth in injustice” are the false teachers, Antichrist, who will be discussed in verses 21 through 25. Some of them will teach the ungodly doctrine of “imputed justification”; all of them will divert people’s attention from the power of love in the heart to images of created things.

19-20. That which can be known of God by human beings is the power of love in the heart: we know God directly, immediately, only in that power. Even if we can deduce God’s existence from the order of the world, we can directly know God’s nature (and thus know the true God), “that which is unseen of him,” only as the power of love within. Everyone has that power — the light enlightens everyone — and so there is no excuse for not knowing God in the power here and now; i.e., no excuse for being unloving, unjust, idolatrous.

21-23. Those who do not trust in the light of love nor recognize it as the power of God will offer worship and thanksgiving, thinking that they are doing the right thing, but in fact they are worshiping idols, whether their deluded minds and hearts have imagined God with the characteristics of a human being or an animal of some sort. Genesis 1:26 says, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”: but they reverse the divine creation, which was done through Christ the Logos, by making God in the human image; therefore, they are the Antichrist. And in 1 Cor. 15:52, Paul says, “… the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed”: thus they also reverse the divine re-creation, which is also done through Christ, by exchanging the glory of God, which is Christ in them, for something corruptible. Their identity as Antichrist is twice confirmed.

24. Given that their hearts are in thrall to an imaginary idol-God, their desires become increasingly disordered, and they dishonor or despise their own bodies within themselves — which may well be a reference not simply to unjust or unsafe behaviors but to dishonoring the spiritual body of Christ within, “the hidden man of the heart”: “But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price” (1 Peter 3:4).

25. Such people may think and speak about God and Christ, but they are altering the gospel, attempting to make it a matter of words rather than the power of God in the heart — this is “the falsehood,” the teaching of Antichrist, the attempt to justify themselves and their way of life by choosing words over the self-sacrificing power of love within. Although they think of themselves, and are venerated by others, as holy, in fact they are idolaters, thieves using the language of religion, “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” And because they could know God in the power of love in their hearts but will not open themselves to that power, even though they feel its pull, they have no excuse.

A briefer, universalist/postmodern Quaker commentary:

Whether we are theists or not, if we are faithful to our Quaker tradition then we are united in the faith and experience that the phrase “that of God in every one” points to the power of love in the heart. We are united in the faith and experience that it is by the light of love that we see the delusion, idolatry, and injustice in ourselves; that it is by the same light of love that we see the just person we could be; and that it is by the power of love that we become that just person, that our hearts and lives are “justified” (i.e., made just) according to the ever-growing “measure” of love in us each day.

Our practices and testimonies develop from that faith and experience. We worship in silence not because we are simply calming ourselves or want to think clearly about things but because we are opening ourselves to feel the “unseen” searching, guiding, and empowering work of love in our hearts — an experience that, as Paul tells us, is inaccessible if we are not focused on love’s light and power of justice within. We live honestly, simply, and peacefully, and we conduct our business in unity, not because we believe that we should or that other people have divinity in them, but because love leads us to do so, leads us to live justly, leads us to allow it to express itself in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Despite our diversity of beliefs, which love teaches us to hold loosely lest we fall into some form of idolatry, we are one in being people whom love has claimed.

In the emptiness of our own self-centered hearts as much as in the suffering of the world, love calls to us. We have no excuse for not opening ourselves to its transforming power within us, and we need no excuse for doing so: love is its own justification — and ours.

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* Isaac Penington (“Concerning the Seed of God, or the Seed of the Kingdom”): “As God is love, so the seed that is born of him partakes of his love. There is no enmity in it, and no enmity or ill-will springs from it. This is it that makes it so natural to the children of God to love; because they are born of that seed which came from the God of love, whose nature is love.” See 1 John 4.

Another perspective on the heart of Quakerism: Friend Isaac Penington speaks to us about love, which is the nature of God and the happiness and salvation of human beings, in a section of his “Some Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Glanced At” (1663).

This needs no commentary. I’ve simply broken up Penington’s two long paragraphs and provided explanatory notes for archaic usages.

CONCERNING LOVE

Quest. What is love?

Ans. What shall I say of it, or how shall I in words express its nature! It is the sweetness of life; it is the sweet, tender, melting nature of God, flowing up through his seed of life into the creature, and of all things making the creature most like unto himself, both in nature and operation. It fulfils the law, it fulfils the gospel; it wraps up all in one, and brings forth all in the oneness. It excludes all evil out of the heart, it perfects all good in the heart. A touch of love doth this in measure; perfect love doth this in fulness.

But how can I proceed to speak of it! Oh that the souls of all that fear and wait on the Lord might feel its nature fully! and then would they not fail of its sweet, overcoming operations, both towards one another, and towards enemies.

The great healing, the great conquest, the great salvation is reserved for the full manifestation of the love of God. His judgments, his cuttings, his hewings by the word of his mouth, are but to prepare for, but not to do, the great work of raising up the sweet building of his life, which is to be done in love, and in peace, and by the power thereof.

And this my soul waits and cries after, even the full springing up of eternal love in my heart, and in the swallowing of me wholly into it, and the bringing of my soul wholly forth in it, that the life of God in its own perfect sweetness may fully run forth through this vessel, and not be at all tinctured by the vessel, but perfectly tincture and change the vessel into its own nature; and then shall no fault be found in my soul before the Lord, but the spotless life be fully enjoyed by me, and become a perfectly pleasant sacrifice to my God.

Oh! how sweet is love! how pleasant is its nature! how takingly doth it behave itself in every condition, upon every occasion, to every person, and about every thing! How tenderly, how readily, doth it help and serve the meanest! How patiently, how meekly, doth it bear all things, either from God or man, how unexpectedly soever they come, or how hard soever they seem! How doth it believe, how doth it hope, how doth it excuse, how doth it cover even that which seemeth not to be excusable, and not fit to be covered! How kind is it even in its interpretations and charges concerning miscarriages [i.e., misdeeds]! It never overchargeth [i.e., exaggerates the misdeed], it never grates upon the spirit of him whom it reprehends; it never hardens, it never provokes; but carrieth a meltingness and power of conviction with it.

This is the nature of God; this, in the vessels capacitated to receive and bring it forth in its glory, the power of enmity is not able to stand against, but falls before, and is overcome by.

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Source: http://www.qhpress.org/texts/penington/mysteries.html.

I want to speak about the heart of Quakerism. In order to do that, I must speak about Jesus, Christ, God. I am not a theist. So when I speak in those terms, I’m not pushing a standard Christian, or even theistic, belief agenda; I’m using the religious metaphors of our tradition to point to the heart of our identity as Friends. That heart is a very specific, ongoing experience that is, as Quakers have insisted from the very first, available to believers and nonbelievers alike, an experience that is, in fact, as our ancestors pointed out repeatedly, very often blocked by religious belief. So I’m not talking at all about belief, or what normally passes for belief, but about the experience of transformation, of having our fundamental ways of thinking and feeling be “turned around” — converted — from the normal, commonsense “wisdom of the world” to the foolish wisdom of the spirit of Christ.

If the question then is “how do we know what we mean by ‘the spirit of Christ’?” then the otherwise meaningless slogan is correct: Jesus is the answer. The spirit of Christ is the spirit that animated Jesus, that is shown to us in his life and death and teachings.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus, “the visible form of the invisible God” who is love, announced the coming of the Kingdom of God, the wisdom of which is not of this world. What does that image, “Kingdom of God,” mean? The evangelist Luke has Jesus define the Kingdom clearly, at the very outset of his ministry, in words borrowed from Isaiah, a great prophet of social justice: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor….” He continues, but I think it’s highly significant that the very first phrase Jesus uses to describe the new order, the Kingdom of God, is “good news for the poor.” That’s the agenda of the spirit of Christ in nutshell: “good news for the poor.”

And what would be good news for the poor, except that those of us who have more than enough would learn to share much more than we do now, so that justice would be realized? In another place, Jesus tells the story of two men. One, well off, relaxes comfortably in his spacious home every evening, enjoying his plentiful and delicious dinner, perhaps planning his postprandial pleasures while he eats; the other, the poor man Lazarus, lies just on the other side of the well-off man’s locked gate, bleeding and starving to death, hoping for crumbs from the other’s table — as if human beings can survive on crumbs, as if we well-off should consider ourselves generous if we give our crumbs to the poor. If you don’t know the rest of the story, you can find it in the same Gospel of Luke (and read George Fox’s “sermon” on it here): briefly, it graphically illustrates just what Jesus thought of that well-off man and those like him, who use the rationalizations of accepted worldly wisdom to justify their pleasures while the poor lie bleeding at their gates.

[T]he Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor, healing for the broken-hearted, freedom for the imprisoned, sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed: to preach the year of the Lord’s favor.

“The year of the Lord’s favor” is the Jubilee year, the year in which the commonsense, private-property economic rules of society are set aside for the sake of justice, a year in which land is taken back from those who have hoarded it, slaves are freed, and debts are forgiven. In the Kingdom of God, the Jubilee year is now. Justice, healing, liberation, vision: the agenda of the spirit of Christ.

So we’re talking about a man who put the poor first, who fed the hungry when he could, healed the sick when he could, associated with sinners and outcasts, insisted that we care for the just and the unjust alike, openly challenged religious people whose religion is a mask for unacknowledged self-centeredness and aggression, turned on their heads the commonsense rules of conventional morality — which always favor those who have and hoard wealth and power — and was therefore tortured to death. But he passed on his vision of the Kingdom, and he passed on the Spirit of Christ, and he became the key to our realizing that Kingdom and Spirit in our lives.

Some sixteen hundred years later, our ancestors, too, were tortured, sometimes to death, because they dared to assert their right and their obligation to be possessed of and by the Spirit that was in Jesus — the spirit that gives and then gives more, that forgives and then forgives more; that willingly sacrifices for justice, for love of the other, and that calls on all of us to do the same, to open our hearts to the suffering of the world and to be moved to action.

They, in their turn, passed that Spirit on to us. And they handed down to us this institution called Quakerism, all of the accomplishments of which come out of that transformation of individual hearts. They gave us our unique forms of meeting: for worship in silence, and for making decisions in the Spirit of Christ — both expressions of the unique gift which Quakerism offers the world. And these forms of gathering together have deep and serious purpose and meaning: the crucifixion of the “natural” person, the raising of the spiritual Christ in our hearts, and the manifestation of that spirit in and among us and, through us, in the world.

I’ve been told that Quaker meeting is a place where all opinions are respected and can get a hearing, and that Quaker decision-making is a process of arriving at truth through attending to each person’s expressed opinion. Our ancestors, however, tell us that the only place personal opinions have within the meetinghouse walls is on the cross, as we courageously allow them to be crucified by love so that the spirit of Christ, which they have been trampling and trying to destroy while telling us they’re doing the opposite, can be raised in us. As the first Friends read Paul, “if Christ be not raised [in us], then our faith is in vain.” Our faith, our coming together, our going out into the world under the name of Quaker: all vanity unless we allow our worldly wisdom to die in silence so that the spirit of love can be raised in our hearts, can break open our hearts and make us new — unless we help each other set aside our cherished opinions and ways of seeing the world in order that we may, as Paul said, “have the mind of Christ,” that we may be brought into one mind, one heart, one body.

That is not easy. The logic of the Kingdom of God is illogic to the natural mind; the agenda of God seems to be madness. But I ask myself which is more of madness: an open life of giving and forgiving, filled with the joy and pain of love, or a life centered on the smallness of self, a life that closes its heart to Lazarus at my gate. Certainly, the life of love is very difficult and costly. But I can only echo Paul, who said that “Our present sufferings I count as nothing compared to the glory that us now unfolding within us.” Our ancestors taught that each of us has a measure, more or less of the divine glory of love within us. May we be faithful to that measure, help it grow, and help each other in that process.

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The little essay above is reprinted, with minor changes, from the current section of my journal, where it was originally published in April of 2008. I post it here in order to offer it to a new readers and to permit comments and discussion. — G.A.

Is the confession that “Christ is come in the flesh” at the point of convergence for theistic and nontheistic Friends? As Bierce might ask, “Can such things be?”

The phrase “Christ is come in the flesh” is from 1 John 4:1-4.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.

A “professor” named William Jeffries attempted to use that passage against the primitive Quakers, writing, “The spirit of antichrist denies Christ come in the flesh, and says the light within is Christ, when at the best it is but the light of nature.” As do his responses to other such charges, George Fox’s response to Jeffries implies a sharp distinction between the belief that Christ came to earth (lived, died, and was raised) 2,000 years ago, which is apostate Christianity’s basis of faith, and the Quakers’ experience that Christ is come here and now in his saints, in the reality of the inner Light, by which his flesh is known in our own.

Before looking at Fox’s response to Jeffries, which will tell us more about what the phrase “Christ is come in the flesh” means in primitive Quaker exegesis and theology, a few words of caution and preparation are in order.

It’s all too easy for us to read Fox under the influence of 2,000 years of the apostate (i.e., defective!) Christian worldview. It is helpful to remember that truth is not a cognitive datum for primitive Quakerism, but is the living Christ himself (who, it bears repeating, is not a cognitive datum). Because, as Fox often said, Christ is the power of God (e.g., The Great Mystery, hereinafter GM, p. 464; see also 1 Cor. 1:24), we can say that “truth is power.” We know Christ by being empowered in his divine life of love here and now. In that intimate union, his flesh and ours is one: we are “flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone” (see Gen. 2:23 and Eph. 5:30).

The church — we saints — is, then, the very body of Christ. Another traditional image of the church, that of the bride of Christ, also tells us that we are formed, as was Eve of Adam’s, of Christ’s own flesh. Fox puts the two together and tells us how to become thus incorporated into Christ: we are, in the mythic and paradoxical language of scripture, to spiritually eat the flesh of Christ. “[T]he saints are ‘flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone,’ and the church which he is head of, is his body. And every one that eats his flesh, knows his body given for the life of the world …” (GM, p. 51). To “eat” Christ’s spiritual flesh (cf. Gen. 9:4 and John 6:53) in holy communion means to be “partakers of the divine nature” through “his divine power” (2 Peter 1: 3-4) — to become, through living in the light and power of love, the living flesh and blood and bone of Christ here and now. This is not what the world knows as Christianity.

Here now is the heart of Fox’s response to Jeffries:

[No one can] know him in the flesh, confess him ‘come in the flesh,’ or know his flesh, or the flesh of the son of man, but who are in the light that comes from him that ‘doth enlighten every man,’ &c…. And walking in the light, it leads into the day, where there is no night, which light is Christ the covenant of God; and such come to know the darkness past. Now I say [none who have their] eyes closed to that of God in them … can ‘confess Christ come in the flesh,’ but only from the letter; for these know not his flesh. [...] The apostates must come all to that which they have ravened from inwardly, before they come to know Christ’s flesh, and are of his flesh, and eat his flesh, and ‘confess that Christ is come in the flesh,’ who is the offering, and the sacrifice of the whole world that makes the peace between God and man, and ‘perfects for ever them that are sanctified.’ — GM, pp. 246-247, emphasis added.

“Christ the covenant of God” refers, of course, to the New Covenant (or Testament) of which the Hebrew scriptures speak:

And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever. (Micah 4:3-5)

and

[T]his shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

This is the new covenant/testament of peace and toleration which Paul said is “not of words [gramma: the letter; the written word; the scripture], for words kill, but of spirit, for spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). “The new covenant is Christ” (GM, p. 507), who is himself the way, the truth, the life, the gospel, the power of God (again, see GM p. 464).

In the theopoetic imagery of 1 John, it is the spirits in us that make confession, and anyone in whom the spirit is confessing that “Christ is come in the flesh” is of the spirit of God. How does the spirit make that confession in us? Again, it is not in words; as Fox points out repeatedly, the devil, the antichrist, the apostates believe and say those words. As we have seen, truth is power. Christ is come in power (GM, p. 449). To confess that “Christ is come in the flesh,” then, has nothing to do with words or beliefs: it is nothing other than to live in the power of the God who is love, to be the living presence of Christ here and now.

As Quakerism has always recognized, one need not know the words “God” and “Christ,” or the story of Jesus, in order to do that, whereas “many have the words, and [yet] deny the word itself [e.g., the divine Logos, the creating, illuminating, enlivening power of God]” — and “the word is Christ and God” (GM, pp.364 and 463, respectively). To actually “confess that Christ is come in the flesh” is to surrender to the searching and empowering work of the light of love in the heart. Then one’s life is the divine spirit’s confession, a confession not in words but in the Word, which is “the true light that enlightens every one,” the creative power of love “made flesh” in us.*

Principle. He [i.e., Samuel Eaton, "who calls himself a teacher of the church of Christ"] saith he doth ‘not believe that there is any substantial, essential, or personal union betwixt the eternal spirit and believers.’

Answer. [But] the scripture saith, the spirit dwells in the saints, 1 Cor. 6, and, ‘He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.’ 1 John 1. As though the saints had not union with God, which the scripture saith they have. — GM, p. 34.

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits….” The spirit of the God of love is Christ, the head of the body of saints, we saints who, abiding in love, are “flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone.” Christ is come in our flesh. In light of the reality expressed in those theopoetic images, we see that words and beliefs are mere pointers, pointers that lead to delusion and death when spirits are poorly discerned. The world believes that it knows Christ, that it confesses Christ come in the flesh, but that confession, in words of belief, leaves evil rampant: the bloody “man of sin,” the spirit of self, still dominates the world. It is only in our effective life-confession, our living in the power of love, that evil is overcome. “Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.”

Here, again, in our living in the unity of the holy spirit of perfect and perfecting love, not in the words “Christ is come in the flesh” but in their actualization, is the point of convergence for Friends. We do well to keep that before us, to live and celebrate our unity in the “universal love” that many of us name “God,” “till we all come, in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

——
* From “Several scriptures corrupted by the translators” in Fox, The Great Mystery, p. 582 (punctuation and emphasis edited): “John i. 14: ‘The word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us’; in the Greek it is in us …. By true interpretation it is, ‘the word became flesh, and pitched his tent in us.’”