Weekday

KINDLED AND ENFLAMED BY GOD
From “The Eternal Promise” by Quaker Thomas Kelly5
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God your passion? Do you long for Him and rejoice in Him and find life
meaningful only to the degree you are in His Presence and He is in your life? Do
you keep close to the Divine Center, the Inner principle counting all else as loss?
For a depth of commitment such as mild men do not know, I speak in order that
you may hear Him speak in you the same message. Out of such lives will the world
be reborn, will the church be reborn. Hasten unto God, all you zealous pearlmerchants! There will you find rest for your souls, and power, and peace, and joy
unspeakable and full of Glory.

Hasten unto God. I have spoken with deep feeling, for I am convinced this is
the deepest need of all men. We…have become earthy. We are more at home with
humans than we are with God. We have men of burning social passion, but not so
many that burn for God, who long for God, who go down deep into the Waters of
His life, who call to us, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” Social reformers we
have now, men who are great in their contribution to social thinking, to war, to
peace, to economic injustice, to racial cooperation. But this epoch of history is
weak in great prophets of the inner life, great voices who cry in the wilderness,
“Prepare ye the way of the Lord within your hearts.” Skill in social expressions of
God is great; skill in communion with Him, agile obedience to the Inward Glory, is
less common today…

Strip monasticism; strip it of its retreat behind walls from much human
need; strip it of its celibacy; and there is left, in Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis
of Assisi, a God-hunger, and completeness of renunciation of all else in the world
in comparison with the life that is hid with Christ in God. Such a passion for God as
leads men… to leave father and mother and all the world… until deep relations
with God have been found… Such men and women, not with social techniques, but
with God-motivations born out of deep immersion in the ocean of the Love of
God… Down at the base of life, for all such people, would be a fellowship in a
common Life which is the Light within every man who is kindled and enflamed by
God.

Do not misunderstand me. There is a practice of the presence of God which
is done on the run, in the busiest of days, in office, and schoolroom, and kitchen.
Little prayers and communion; ejaculation of surrender and joy and exaltation…
And most of our lives can be lived this way, as divine conversation of our soul with
God, going on behind the scenes all the time. But then come crucial periods in life
when the quest for God grows hot, when the hot breath of the Hound of Heaven is
at our heels, when the heart cries out, “Give me the Presence or I die.” And these
are the times when we get beneath the conventional mildness of average
religiosity, and find Him more fully, who is dearer than life itself. From these men
and women will come the profound return to religion… the love of God and
neighbor, which is so desperately needed.

5 Kelly, Thomas. The Eternal Promise. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966. 116-118.