Worship and peace
October 23, 2017 § 6 Comments
I have spent the whole of this past summer furiously writing to meet a deadline early this month for two long essays, and so have had no time or focus for this blog. One of these essays was a short history of Right Sharing of World Resources, the other a very condensed version of the book in Quakers and Capitalism I’m writing, parts of which I offered here a few years ago. For the past couple of weeks I have been resting my brain and waiting for the Holy Spirit to guide my next efforts.
The Quakers and Capitalism piece got me started again on the research I need to do on the twentieth century in order to finish the book. Doing so, I stumbled upon the Official Report of the All Friends Conference of 1920, held in London, the first worldwide conference of Friends.
The Conference was called to deal primarily with the peace testimony in the aftermath of the Great War. The book features, among other things, short prepared messages on the following topics:
- The Character and Basis of our Testimony for Peace
- The Peace Testimony in Civic and International Life
- The Testimony in Personal Life and Society
- The Life of the Society in Relation to the Peace Testimony
- Problems of Education in Relation to the Testimony
- The International Service of Friends
- Methods of Propaganda
Two Friends presented messages under each heading and that was followed by a time of worship with vocal ministry as commentary on the presentations. In the Discussion, as the book calls these offerings, on The Life of the Society appears a relatively long piece of vocal ministry by Rufus Jones. It brought me up short, and I decided to share it here:
“We shall be weak in our work and message for the present hour unless we greatly deepen our manner and power of worship. We are here, a selected group out of more than 150,000 Friends, and we are supposed to be, in some measure at least, leaders and representatives of the larger group. We have been together now for more than half our Conference, and we have had many occasions set apart for worship. I have been impressed myself with our weakness as a gathered body in reaching these marvellous (sic) depths of spiritual corporate life with God, as we meet together. We have hardly experienced in any very large and striking fashion yet, the tremendous power of silent community fellowship with God. We have found it extremely difficult to avoid saying the words that popped into our minds, when we should have reached so much power if we could have gathered into the complete unity of life with God. I do not discount words; I feel that words are often of the very greatest importance in interpreting what one has arrived at; but first of all I must arrive before interpreting. I feel as I have studied in the last ten years* the life of our Society, as contrasted with the life of our Society in earlier times, that we have a decided weakness in what Gladstone once called the work of worship. We do not succeed in anything like the way we should succeed, as a living body of Christ in the world to-day, in coming into union with God in our gatherings. We do not achieve that corporate effort of spirit that would bring us into parallelism with the divine currents that are waiting to unify and dynamise us with the living fire of the presence of God.
I hope we shall go, all of us, in our communities at home with this concern as a personal concern, to make our meetings for worship in the times of silence vastly more real and powerful than they are at present. It is perhaps the greatest thing we have to exhibit to the spiritual life of our age. It is perhaps our most unique contribution, and we must not fail in that.” (p. 132, All Friends Conference London, August, 1020; Official Report; The Friends Bookshop, London1920.)
This message dismayed me, but it didn’t surprise me. And how far have we come in answering his urgent appeal? In my own meeting yesterday I could almost smell the popcorn. Two messages before twelve minutes had passed and on and on from there. Our meeting was hosting quarterly meeting, so we had a lot of visitors from the other meetings in Philadelphia, which swelled our numbers from the usual 45–65 to maybe 75 or even 90. The bigger the meeting the more people who will speak, by statistical determination. But the wide range of spiritual discernment and self-discipline was stunning, from the relatively deep and valuable to the . . . well let me just leave it there. One never knows when some speech that seems weak and useless is actually answering that of God in someone else.
And with the president rattling his megaton saber with his own undisciplined mouth, we need a strong peace testimony now more than we have since the fateful wars following 9/11. How long has this nation gone without a war since 1920? Not counting the incursions and CIA-sponsored coups in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvadore, Nicaragua, Grenada, the Balkans, Chile, and Iran, just to name the ones I remember: twenty years to WWII; five years to Korea; ten years to Vietnam; ten years to the first Iraq War. ten years to Afghanistan and the second Iraq War. We’re overdue, according to this timeline, though the second Iraq War has never really ended, only morphed into the nebulous, terrifying, and unwinnable War against Terror.
I pray with Rufus Jones that we will recommit ourselves to true worship and in the Presence find our voice against the sea of darkness that is trying to drown the world. We need to start writing letters and Op-Ed pieces to the editors of our newspapers, letters to our political representatives, open letters to the other churches. We might get together with the Mennonites and Church of the Brethren to see what we might do together. But most of all, we need to recover deep worship and true communion, from which would spring the prophetic spirit that I know we all long for.
* Jones is referring to his The Later Periods of Quakerism, the third in the historical series that he and John Wilhelm Rowntree and other leaders of the new liberal movement in Quakerism conceived after the Manchester Conference in 1895. The other two are William C. Braithwaite’s The Beginnings of Quakerism to 1660 and The Second Period of Quakerism. The Later Periods of Quakerism was published in 1921.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Friend Steven,
Thank you for the blessing of this piece to me, including the Jones quote and your reflections on the time named “worship,” time which you, I, and our faith community share.
– Viv Hawkins
Thank you so much, Steve, for finding and sharing this admonition from Rufus Jones. It’s sad to know that, according to Jones, the worship among the gathered body of Quaker leaders and representatives at the All Friends Conference of 1920 was weak in reaching the “depths of spiritual corporate life with God.” Sadly, that is still true for so many of the gatherings of Friends today.
I agree with Jones about the importance of the body of Friends learning to be gathered deeply together in the Spirit. I believe that Friends are called to something even more essential and transforming than a prophetic message or voice for our times. More fundamentally, we are called as a individuals and as a body to enter into the Spirit in such profoundly transforming ways that it is not only our voice and message that are powerful and effective, but our very being, and our way of being with others. What transforms us and what will transform the world is being in communion with the divine Source, orienting our consciousness and our lives around the eternal reality that many of us call God, or Christ, or the Light. To become part of the healing of the world we need to become the message, not just speak it. We learn to do that, in part, through entering together into deep spiritual communion with God in worship.
Steve, it’s good to see you blogging again, and particularly on this topic. I join you in praying “with Rufus Jones that we will recommit ourselves to true worship and in the Presence find our voice against the sea of darkness that is trying to drown the world.”
But I disagree that “we need to start writing letters and Op-Ed pieces to the editors of our newspapers, letters to our political representatives, open letters to the other churches.” We need to do that only if that’s what the Holy Spirit tells us to do, and if the Holy Spirit restrains us from such activity because we’re still in bondage to sin, or outrunning our guide in unsubdued self-will, or saying “let us do evil, that good may come” (Romans 8:3), or in any other way keeping ourselves unfit to serve as God’s messengers, then we must stay quiet until the Holy Spirit gives us words with power — otherwise we’re likely to look as foolish, and be as thoroughly and humiliated and defeated, as the sons of Sceva (Acts 19:14).
Samuel Bownas (_A Description of the Qualifications of a Gospel Minister_, 4) famously warned Friends not to dare appear in the Gospel ministry until they were fit to represent the Gospel, warning them, “unto the wicked God saith, What hast thou to do to declare my statutes…?” (Psalm 50:16) The Psalmist continues: “…thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee” (15:21). It may be because we fancy that we have “a call to spread the Quaker message,” rather than wait till we are given a personal commission to preach the everlasting gospel, that we look like ineffectual fools saying “peace, peace, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14, 8:11).
Well, you’re right, John, of course. What was I thinking. The real root of our witness should be the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Which calls me back to the central role of worship and a personal devotional life.
I believe we’ve overrated silence as a means of deepening. “Listening” has its importance, likewise patience and ‘waiting’. Key is orientation:
‘Where’ is our attention directed? Not “Thee shouldn’t have been thinking in Meeting, Rufus!” — but Whom are those thoughts coming from?
We’ve almost stopped explicitly praying, certainly aloud but maybe also in the larger sense of directing ourselves towards ‘God’. Meditating can be Worship, but the goal can be different and the form the results take may be limited by what we’re prepared to receive.
I’ve recently found some extremely liberating insights in things I’ve been reading by Roberta Bondi, starting with _To Pray and to Love_ — dealing with her studies of early Christian monastic teachers and her development of that in her own prayer life. God can’t exactly be our Buddy, given the manifest gaping gap in wisdom, power, and so on… but we can just be together like old friends who may speak, or not, as that may be appropriate…
I’ve been wrestling with this matter of focus a lot—or I was before these other writing projects suspended my latest series. I agree that it does seem to matter what/who we focus on. That a great diversity of focus in our meetings does not foster deep communion. That no focus at all does no better.
But this must be done with integrity. By which I mean that one can only focus on what one is given to focus on, or, as I do with part of my own devotional life, on the spirit of Christ, as a matter of faith. The spirit of Christ being that spirit in which we do find ourselves in communion, now and then, even if it’s not clear that it’s Jesus the Christ. Just as it was not immediately clear what spirit the early disciples were experiencing after the crucifixion. That seems to have required time and collective discernment. Even to Mary Magdalene and the brothers on the road to Emmaus, the spirit of Christ did not appear initially with a name tag on.