Vigils Reading

THE ETERNAL PROMISE

By the 19th century Quaker Thomas R. Kelly5 ◊◊◊

The old self, the little self-how weak it is, and how absurdly confident and how absurdly timid it has been! How jealously we guard its strange precious pride! Famished for superiority… its defeats must be offset by a dole of petty victories. In religious matters we still thought that we should struggle to present to God a suitable offering of service. We planned, we prayed, we suffered, we carried the burden. The we, the self, how subtly it intrudes itself into religion! And then steals in, so sweetly, so all-replacing, the sense of Presence, the sense of Other, and he plans, and he bears the burdens, and we are a new creature.
Prayer becomes not hysterical cries to a distant God, but gentle upliftings and faint whispers, in which it is not easy to say who is speaking, we, or an Other through us. Perhaps we can only say: praying is taking place. Power flows through us, from the Eternal into the rivulets of Time. Amazed, yet not amazed, we stride the stride of the tender giant who dwells within us, and wonders are performed. Active as never before, one lives in the passive voice, alert to be used, fearful of nothing, patient to stand and wait.

It is an amazing discovery, at first, to find that a creative Power and Life is at work in the world. God is no longer the object of a belief; He is a Reality, who has continued, within us, his real Presence in the world. God is aggressive. He is an intruder, a lofty lowly conqueror on whom we had counted too little, because we had counted on ourselves. Too long have we supposed that we must carry the banner of religion, that it was our concern. But religion is not our concern; it is God’s concern. Our task is to call men to “be still,” and… hearken to that of God within them, to invite, to unclasp the clenched fists of self-resolution, to be pliant in his firm guidance, sensitive to the inflections of the inner voice.

For there is a life beyond earnestness to be found. It is the life rooted and grounded in the Presence, the Life which has been found by the Almighty. Seek it, seek it. Yet it lies beyond seeking. It arises in being found. To have come only as far as religious determination is only to have stood in the vestibule. But our confidence in our shrewdness, in our education, in our talents, in some aspect or other of our self-assured self, is our own undoing. So earnestly busy with anxious, fevered efforts for the kingdom of God have we been, that we failed to hear the knock upon the door, and to know that our chief task is to open that door and be entered by the Divine Life.

…To become unselfed is to become truly integrated as a richer self. The little, time-worn self about which we fretted – how narrow its boundaries, how unstable its base, how strained its structure. But the experience of discovering that life is rooted and grounded in the actual, active, loving Eternal One is also to experience our own personal life firm-textured and stable.

…There is an introduction to suffering which comes with the birth pains of Love. And in such suffering one finds for the first time how deep and profound is the nature and meaning of life. And in such suffering one sees, as if one’s eye were newly opened upon a blinding light, the very Life of the Eternal God himself. And there too is suffering, but there, above all, is peace and victory