First Set
JO: So, we are talking about this phrase that’s simple but remarkable that we can be a friend of God—you, you, I can be a friend of God. [Yes] Both of you actually were the ones through whom I found out about this fellow, Frank Laubach, a Methodist educator and missionary in the Philippines who found that he was supposed to be doing God’s work but didn’t know what does it mean to be a friend of God and I think for a lot of people, it’s a wonderful sounding phrase and I kind of hope it means that when I die, I don’t get in trouble. But what does it mean right here right now can be harder and Laubach in reading him, it was very dramatic for me because he took it so seriously and there is that story of him being up on Signal Hill, and he was so disappointed in his life. I think all but one of his children had died of malaria and his wife had to be very far from him. He was not able to be President of the school that he was hoping to be President of because he lost by a single vote.
RF: One vote…yes.
DW: So much for nobility. [Laughter]
JO: Or stupidity—vote for yourself, man but he’s up on Signal Hill and it was so poignant to think of somebody who is seeking to serve God and yet there is this sense of distance estrangement and then in the midst of that pain and often it seems like there has to be pain and that desperate desire to want that life with God more than you want anything else. Then, for the thought to come that God really could speak to him and then for it to come in such an interesting way as best as I can understand it. The way that he would actually experience prayer is, he would talk to God and then he would say back what he understood God to be saying to him.
RF: Yes. In fact, John, I have a little passage that you know he went to Signal Hill virtually every day for a year and it says in this one passage, “Just at this moment, you must hear of this sacred evening. The day had been rich but strenuous, so I climbed Signal Hill back of my house talking and listening to God all the way up and all the way back, all the lovely half hour on top and God talked back. I let my tongue go loose and from it there flowed poetry far more beautiful than anything I ever composed. It flowed without pausing and without ever a failing syllable for half an hour. I listened astonished and full of joy and gratitude. I wanted a Dictaphone for I knew that I should not be able to remember it and now I cannot. Why someone may ask, did God waste his poetry on you alone when you could not carry it home? You will have to ask God that question. I only know he did, and I am happy in the memory.” Isn’t that lovely?
DW: That is wonderful how out of this he learned a presence of God with him and a speaking voice that then he became this one figure inventive of a technique for teaching people to read that is still used.
JO: Each one, teach one.
DW: Each one, teach one, that’s right. The very lovely story about how he taught one Chief of the Morose to read and the Chief out of gratitude asked if there is anyone that he wanted him to kill because that was one way that the Morose tribe……
JO: It was their love language—in fact, I am thinking in Gary Chapman’s book, that’s the sixth love language. [Laughter]
DW: But, you know, the thing is that it seems so private and yet you can’t contain it.
RF: And it was so public. I mean he would say in another little book, Learning the Vocabulary of God, he would say that little child that can’t read, “is that you speaking to me, God?” which led him to this great Laubach literacy work.
DW: His great work came in the area of language, you see. It is actually tied right into the issue of communication and intimacy that comes through that conversational relationship that he was walking into with God.
JO: I loved his definition of a mystic, which I thought was so memorable. He said a mystic is somebody that believes when you talk to God, God talks back.” And it puts it so simply because either that’s the case or God doesn’t talk back and I know for me, and I think it’s probably true for a lot of people, I tend to be so suspicious and put off by the abuse of “God told me so” language that I would tend to go to the other extreme [Exactly] and close myself off from the possibility.
DW: Yes, I think that’s what most people do.
RF: But you know, really, even in the Bible era, I mean, Paul had to tell right and say, “Despise not prophesying.” I think he had to say that because there was so much holy bologna going around and he said, now, you know, “Test things; don’t despise it. Test what is true; hold fast to it.”
JO: Part of what was so helpful to me, and I think, Dallas that you wrote about this in Hearing God, and I know C. S. Lewis wrote about it. Laubach talks about, I love he says, “The reason that there are so many human beings is that God is running experiments with all of them to see how much of me can this person carry in this moment” and that thought that was so helpful to me is that communication is simply guiding somebody’s thoughts. [Exactly] That all that communication is guiding somebody’s thoughts because we are finite; we have to use finite means. We have to use sounds or written images and then because that’s happening because I am making these sounds, you’re having thoughts that you would not otherwise have but because God is infinite, He can guide our thoughts without needing to have any finite means in between and that means, it becomes very possible that I could be having this thought because God is guiding it and there is still a mystery to it but it’s not so confusing then.
RF: You know, one of the things that is so lovely is we can’t be on Signal Hill in that kind of context but that little book he wrote, Game with Minutes was this sort of practical way that all of us, and I always found it such a delight that he called it a game—how many minutes can I be aware of God’s presence and at one point in one of his writings, he would put—these were journal writings and at the top of the journal entry, he would put 50% conscious, 70% conscious or whatever and I used to go—conscious of what? You know. He was playing this game with minutes.
DW: That’s one of the most encouraging things about this though for those of us who think we are modern and up to date and all of that is that he was an extremely well-educated person in the social sciences especially and in psychology and that he would put a percentage on it.
JO: He tried to get precise with it.
DW: Absolutely.
JO: Unfortunately, speaking of minutes, we’re to our last minute. That’s it for now. I’m sorry, Dallas.
DW: This is the end of the road.
JO: You had a really profound thought [no doubt it was] and everybody who is watching this video is going to have to go into eternity never having heard it.
DW: Perhaps, God will talk to them. [7:57]
Second Set:
JO: We are thinking now about what does it NOT mean to hear from God? I just finished reading a wonderful biography of Dietrich Bonheoffer that a guy named Eric Metaxas wrote and Bonheoffer—brilliant man from a brilliant family. His father was the pre-eminent psychiatrist in Germany in his day—had psychology in Berlin and Bonheoffer ended up going into theology and then just being pulled more and more into Jesus so that by the time he started his little underground seminary in Fingernald, he took a lot of flak; not just because it was underground and the Nazis were opposed to it, but he was accused of being far too pious because he did not fit the stereotypical academic format but believed that the practices that get talked about in Life Together—that fabulous book about mediation, allowing God to have the first word, listening to God—the believer should not begin the day with anxiety—needs to be part of what forms people that will do ministry and part of what was so sobering in reading that book that I have just been living with is, how from within the first couple days of Hitler’s election, Bonheoffer begin to make decisions to protest and to deliberately place himself in harm’s way. He could have immigrated to America but believed that he heard God calling him to go back to Germany and eventually to be martyred and I find myself asking, “Am I becoming somebody like that? or “How easy would it be for me to think that God is calling me to just get along, to rationalize my need to be successful.” He was asked one time, “Don’t you think it would be good to just identify with the German church instead of the confessing church and try to work for reform from within.” And he had this great response, he said, “If you get on a train going the wrong direction, it does no good to run down the aisle in the opposite way.” [10:00] So, you know, this is a life that ended on a gallows but was lived in obedience of his understanding of hearing God and it was a lifelong practice. He had this practice of meditation at the beginning of the day, Metaxas writes about how when he ended up being imprisoned, he did not have to try to begin a new practice when he was in crisis; it was part of his life already but so many people did not hear from God well. Dallas, tell us a little bit more about what does it mean to have an incorrect approach to hearing from God?
DW: Well, usually it means that we are being governed by something in our mind as to how we are righteous or good and for example, you have people who think that what I call “a message a minute” is the way you hear from God that it’s just everything that you are doing. God doesn’t intend to do that. He intends for us to have a freedom to develop and grow and choose within which He may speak. Now, when He speaks, it’s interesting. We can be kind of suspicious of whether or not it is God speaking if it turns out that what we hear is in favor of things that we might want and the illustration from Bonheoffer is beautiful in that regard. But if you observe people, very often it turns out God is telling them to do ……
JO: So, hearing from God is not getting a free pass from the anxiety of having to make hard decisions like getting messages every moment about every single detail.
DW: Absolutely right. That is really crucial to understand because so often desiring to hear from God really means trying to be not responsible for my choices or “God told me” and then you push that to the extreme and you get people who are just being told to do everything…..
RF: Or they go to the Bible and, you know…….
DW: Yes, that’s a little more risky. [12:12]
RF: It is, but the thing I loved about Bonheoffer’s in this is that at that little seminary at Finkenwald, he would have students and faculty alike meditate on one scripture passage, all of them for a week…the same passage for a whole week so that they were sinking down into a passage until there was …..
JO: The Bible roulette thing….. it’s striking how often we all tend to deteriorate into just superstition. I have a friend, really bright guy, is actually a New Testament professor but he desperately wanted to marry a woman, and she didn’t really want to marry him and so he found himself doing things like saying, “If I punch this button on the car radio and our song is on, it means that God wants us to be together.
DW: Yes, that’s unfortunately a general way in which people who are locked into managing their own world superstitiously start to do things that if they backed up and reflected on the picture of Christ and of life in the Kingdom of God, they would realize it never works that way.
JO: I never thought about that before. Is the difference between living in the supernatural realm versus superstition—is it the attempt to manage or control God or the divine? What marks off superstition from cooperating with the supernatural?
DW: In superstition, there is no natural connection between what you are trying to manipulate and what you hope to come out of it. There is no natural connection.
JO: Some day, I want to ask you about a word and have you say, “I have no idea. I’ve never thought about that before.”
DW: Actually, I have thought about this because ….
JO: I know you have….
DW: Because actually the way many people pray. It’s superstitious.
JO: It is! The amount of superstition that enters into Christian faith, but we don’t think of it because it’s attached to Jesus and attached to the Bible, so we think somebody with a Ouija Board, they are being superstitious but not us.
DW: Right, but now, on the positive side, you see prayer and listening and hearing and all of that—if you understand it in the framework of the kingdom of God, there is a natural connection. That’s how kingdoms work is by speaking, asking, responding and so on and so when we understand the cosmic …..
JO: No, what does that mean? And there is a natural connection versus there is no natural connection. What makes a connection natural?
DW: What makes a connection natural is that you don’t “cook it up.”
RF: And that there is always that element of ethical transformation, that is, “I am changed through the experience.”
JO: Fixed with the way persons work—the human being and God.
DW: That’s exactly right.
JO: As opposed to the way that something mechanical works.
DW: Right, and without good teaching, that’s why so many people just can’t pray, or praying is just saying words is because they don’t understand what it is and how it does have a natural connection. And then of course, this point that it has an ethical tone in the Kingdom of God. It always does and that of course is what puts my will in the back seat.
JO: Well, unfortunately, we have to just about wrap this up. Richard, you have an old worn copy of The Cost of Discipleship.
RF: I just wanted to show you that when I was a teenager, a new Christian and I was looking for disciples and I mean, I was probably a little too judgmental, but I couldn’t find it and it was this little book that kept me to Christ. I would read it over and over because this was the place where I found what I felt the Bible was talking about and then of course years later there were people that I would encounter but it was this.
JO: Jesus spoke to you through that book, and you needed to hear it.
RF: And I’ve always kept this little….I’ve got other copies, but I’ve always kept this little one just to remind me.
JO: That’s a precious thing. Thanks. [16:18]
Third Set:
JO: So, we are thinking now about this communion, this fellowship that we are invited to be a part of with the Trinity and there is this fellow, Nicholas Herman, many centuries ago who had had some difficult experiences with military and professionally and ended up going into an order and became known as Lawrence of the Resurrection…Brother Lawrence. And wrote in such a winsome way about, you know, this notion to practice the presence that the presence is possible but also that it is something that we can practice.
I remember, I grew up in a Protestant, Baptist tradition and probably two of the earlier works from outside of the tradition that I read when I was pretty young were The Imitation of Christ and Practicing the Presence and I actually found the Imitation kind of forbidding. It was a little, you know, it felt severe. I was immediately drawn to Brother Lawrence. It just felt like there was such humility and openness, you know, “I am making my little omelet and if I have nothing else to do, I just flop down on the ground and enjoy that God is here, and I’m not worried about how well I do at it. You know, and that for the first four years when he was in the order, when he went in, he was convinced he was damned and you know, had not much relief from that after four years but found practicing the presence of God brought such joy to him, it’s not even that he felt resolution around that but he just stopped worrying about heaven and hell because the joy of practicing that presence of being in the actual presence of God was such a powerful thing.
DW: Yes
RF: That’s lovely.
JO: Yeah, and I found myself just being drawn into “that I want.” There are aspects of what I think that faith might involve that I have to work on but “that I want.” [18:15]
RF: You know, and he was very attractive to me too. He called himself “the Lord of all pots and pans” and I thought that’s…I used to wash dishes in a restaurant, and I thought that’s something I could do. He also mentioned that it took him ten years to come into that—that sense of the practice of the presence of God to be as much in the presence of God while he is washing pots and pans as if he were at the holy Eucharist. Amazing!
JO: Well, and I thought he’s such a great picture of the hiddenness of the Kingdom. He didn’t write a book while he was alive. He would counsel people or sometimes write spiritual letters, and it wasn’t until after he was dead that it got compiled so if you had been around in that day, you know, whoever the head of his order was, whoever the Pope was, they would be quite famous. Nobody knew who this little guy was in the kitchen and here all these centuries later, either of you know who was Pope when he was working? I don’t know. You know, how would we have known that where the grace of God was going out be poured out in ways that would be blessing people centuries later. It wasn’t at this level on the Org chart. It wasn’t here on the Org chart. It’s this little guy and who knows at what church right now, there are Popes, Bishops, mega churches, but there is somebody peeling potatoes in a kitchen some place and four centuries from now, that’s the person through whom the Trinity will have worked. [19:50]
DW: I think that’s where the word intimacy comes in. This man was intimate with God. How was he intimate with God? He shared God’s life right where he was, and he did that by not allowing what he was doing to stand over against being with God. The intimacy with God is what makes a person a source of light and power. Jesus said, “Anyone who believes on me, from his belly—which I am glad he didn’t say his mouth—but from his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” This brother is so illustrative of that; actually, Kempis was too but in a different way, but this person is so good in helping ordinary people have hope about their lives. [20:46]
JO: I wanted to ask you about part of your teaching around this subject. You talked about how intimacy is built on shared experiences and persons are made up by experiences. Say a word about what is an experience; how should we understand that word.
RF: Good question.
DW: Well, an experience is a conscious event that becomes a part of your life. You live through experiences. They make up your life and since they are sharable, they provide a basis for our lives being shared and us being intimate with one another.
JO: So, we are looking out on a mountain right now in Colorado. That’s an experience.
DW: That’s an experience and very interesting, you know how we want others to look at it with us.
JO: Yeah! All of you watching, you can’t look right now but we’re looking and it’s beautiful. (Picture of the mountains)
DW: Right.
FR: One of the things I love about Brother Lawrence in this regard is how work was not an obstacle but an avenue. I remember when I was, you know, in pastoral work and one of my tasks was visiting the sick in the hospitals and I was trying to learn how to pray and I remember one time I was rushing off to the hospital and I’m saying, “if I just didn’t have to make all these hospital calls, I could learn how to pray, until it dawned on me; this is where I am to learn and if I am to pray for people, that’s how I learn how to pray.
DW: Absolutely, and of course the inclusion of you and me and you and others in the Trinitarian fellowship is primarily a matter of bringing our work with us and expecting what we are doing to be a manifestation of the presence of God in our lives and as we do that, then we begin to build a substance in our experience that is nourishing to everyone we come in contact with and that’s old Brother Lawrence here, I mean he’s still just feeding people by the hundreds.
RF: The amazing thing is you know we build a history with God through those experiences.
JO: That’s a wonderful phrase—we build a history with God.
RF: Yeah. Yeah, and it isn’t anyplace else.
JO: And it’s nobody else’s. I mean it enriches other people; you know as that happens in you. It changes you and I get enriched by that but that’s something that you and God have that’s private and precious, and anybody can have and that’s what makes our lives bigger than our work or our reputation or our success or bank account.
DW: Yes, and our spiritual substance turns out to be the greatest substance—greater than anything in the world apart from us.
RF: Now, you have to unpack that a little for me.
JO: And you have thirty seconds to do it.
DW: Well, substance is a biblical term actually and it refers to the underlying reality that holds everything else up and in our lives, it isn’t the physical side, it’s the spiritual side that holds everything else up and that’s where eternal life and eternal living comes in because God moves in there with us and as Jesus said, “If you do what I say, you keep my commandments, I and my Father will come and move in with you.”
JO: That’s a wonderful place to stop. Thank you. [24:39]
Fourth Set:
RF: Thomas Kelley is an amazing person to me. Mid-twentieth century figure—a philosopher…..
DW: Philosopher indeed…….a published philosopher.
RF: Yeah, it’s amazing!
DW: Technical journals…….
RF: Yeah, he really got into those things but that’s not what we really remember him for. He said he wanted to make his life a miracle and he set out in that regard but then had several huge failures—one of them surrounded World War II and just the tragedy of what happed during that era. The other was he wanted to get a second Ph.D.—can you imagine—he had one, but he wanted a second but then he had these woozy spells when he was doing his oral exams, and they failed him, and I believe it was Harvard. He thought his life was over; in fact, the president of the college where he was walked with him all night long around the football field because he was afraid, he might, you know commit suicide. And then it was after those two kind of crushing events that he began to speak in a whole other way—that intimacy with God—that awareness of the still small voice of God and that’s what was compiled after his death. He died young and they took some of his lectures really and put them together and we see that in Testament of Devotion and I have read some of the material that he wrote before that time and then the material that he wrote after those crises—they are like night and day. [26:29] This Testament of Devotion is the best known—another called Eternal Promise, but I just wanted to read a little passage for us because here is one sentence that I just live off of sometimes because it describes me so easily. He says, “I find God never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.” [Laughter] And you know, for us, if we are going to be attentive to the still, small voice, we have to find ways to learn to be, to let go of that intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.
DW: That’s where it’s so important to understand the connection between hearing the voice of God and practices such as solitude and silence—also service is very good to calm the feverishness.
RF: Well, for today, I think one of the deepest problems we deal with with Christians is distractedness; just that sense of constant agitation and I know John, you work with that all of the time in the congregation you work with and how to help people—how to help ourselves to let go of that kind of constant scramble of panting feverishness.
DW: Well, we need to tell them and exhibit the calming effects of hearing God speak and encourage them to believe that that’s for them also because normally, that’s a part of their feverishness is they don’t think that anything can come to them from God and stabilize their world so that they don’t have to carry on.
JO: Well, and it’s a complex dynamic—we are so afraid of boredom, you know. I think it was Eugene Peterson who wrote that the ancient Greeks did not actually have a word for boredom, and we look at life in the ancient world and think how boring, but it wasn’t boring to them. It’s just we have become so dependent on external stimulation that our capacity to manage our attention has become enormously weak. [28:51]
RF: …addicted to adrenalin….and all of that stuff.
JO: Yeah, and there has to be, you know, an iPod, a television, a computer, something going on or else if I don’t have something to carry to occupy my mind, then I will be bored and so I think part of listening to the still, small voice that is very hard for folks is I have to be willing to get to the other side of boredom. [Yeah, right] I have to be willing to go off and be bored and that’s a hard thing to ask of people.
RF: Dallas, that passage from Pasqual about that…..
DW: Well, he has this wonderful statement about if people just knew all of the troubles that would be solved if people knew how to just go sit by themselves.
JO: The inability of people to just go sit in a room by themselves.
DW: And it’s actually true because once you begin to take yourself off of the outer stimulation, then you discover a whole different world and there are few things that help you with that more than learning to hear God’s voice in your heart and in your mind because all of a sudden with that kind of word comes substance again. That is, boredom is actually a reflection of emptiness, and you can’t—activities and distractions such as Pasqual always does such a wonderful job talking about how kings and others have to have people around to scratch them. It doesn’t cure the problem; it just puts it off. When you begin to experience the substance of your own soul and of God speaking in your soul, then suddenly you are not empty anymore.
JO: And that’s where what Kelley writes about what’s at the center of yourself was so helpful and the idea of, which I had not thought about before, not just with God but with any person, we always learn their voice by experience.
RF: And that’s your teaching about the quality of the voice of God and the spirit in the voice of God and the content…..
DW: You can isolate some factors and that helps because it will help you distinguish that voice from other voices. But then, you simply come to know that voice by its overall quality just like you know the voice of others that you are familiar with.
RF: Yes, it’s an amazing thing, you know.
JO: Yeah, and we don’t have the physical part of it with God but the other aspects of it—the content, and the emotional tone to it and the effect that it has on us. We have that to recognize him from.
RF: And Kelley had that and it calmed his life. And he writes in this little book, “Life from the center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It is amazing. It is triumphant. It is radiant. It takes no time, but it occupies all our time, and it makes our life programs new and overcoming. We need not get frantic. God is at the helm and when our little day is done, we lie down quietly in peace for all is well.”
DW: Isn’t that beautiful? [32:09]
Fifth Set:
RF: One of the amazing things about this lady, Julian of Norwich—the first woman to write in English–
DW: Is that so?
RF: Yeah. You know, a substantial piece and she had these, what, sixteen revelations.
DW: I think that’s the number.
RF: And she gave—she had this experience and then gave the rest of her life entering into that and moving into the depths of that and I find that especially when we think of the Kingdom of God and life in the Kingdom, here’s someone who this was who she was—she attached herself to a church. She did have a cat. [Oh, did she?] We know that because in one of the stained-glass pieces there at Norwich, she had a cat at her feet.
JO: Grace abounds. [Laughter]
RF: But on one of those sixteen visions, one of those where she is talking about the crucifixion, and she says, “I saw the red blood running down from under the crown, hot and flowing freely and a living stream just as it was the time when the crown of thorns was pressed against his blessed head.” OK. She is meditating on this experience in the crucifixion, and it led her to a whole contemplation on the Trinity, which I found very interesting. At that revelation that suddenly the Trinity “filled my heart full of the greatest joy and I understood that it would be so in Heaven without end to all would come there for the Trinity is God. God is the Trinity. The Trinity is our maker. The Trinity is our protector. The Trinity is our everlasting lover.” Isn’t that an amazing sentence? “The Trinity is our endless joy and bliss but by our Lord Jesus Christ and in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Now, I find it interesting that a meditation on the crucifixion lead her to this larger picture—I mean, larger in the sense of meditation on the Trinity and how the members of the Trinity relate and her participation in that.
DW: Well, don’t you think that the first move there was she was caught up in admiration of the Son on the cross—that the blood represents His life and that then brings out the other members of the Trinity because they are close together and looking at the sacrifice of the cross brings out admiration and you know, it’s strange but many people don’t think of admiration with reference to the Trinity. And they don’t think of what is going on within the Trinity and I like to point out to people that the members of the Trinity admire one another, and they are filled with joy with the other members of the Trinity and then of course through the Kingdom of God, they reach out to include Julian of Norwich and us and it never stops expanding.
JO: There’s a wonderful little book by Dale Bruner called, The Holy Spirit, The Shy Member of the Trinity. He talks about how people often talk about how the Holy Spirit gets neglected but says he doesn’t think the holy spirit minds as long as people are celebrating Jesus and one of the ways he’ll picture the Holy Spirit is to have the image of Jesus on a black board and get behind it and then points—the spirit does but then Jesus says, ”It’s good for you that I am going to leave because the Spirit is going to come.” So, Jesus has this same shyness. It’s not the shyness of timidity but the shyness of other-centeredness. And then when the Father speaks in the Gospels, He doesn’t say, “Hey, don’t get too caught up in Jesus.” He says, “This is my beloved son, listen to Him.” And Jesus says, “I can only do the will of the Father.” And Bruner says, ”For the whole blessed Trinity is shy.”
DW: Talk a little more about shyness. What is it to be shy?
JO: Well, as He means it there, it’s not to be afraid—it’s not to be frightened.
DW: So, not gun-shy as we say?
JO: Yeah, not gun-shy but to be so aware of and delighted by the other that you no longer need to promote yourself in order to enjoy your existence.
RF: And this phrase that Julian has, “The Trinity is our everlasting lover.” I mean, you know, we get in all these debates about the Trinity, and she brings that right into this sort of circle of love that—I mean, when did she write that? In the 14th century or something like that? It’s instructive I think to us.
DW: Well, you know, in those years, people like her, and others spent a lot of time meditating on these things and that allows the thing you are meditating on to begin to fill your heart and your life and the way the members of the Trinity relate to one another is almost inscrutable to us. It is in some measure no doubt. But we try to think of it in human terms [Yeah] and how would John, Dallas and Richard manage to be a Trinity? [Laughter] Well, I think you guys are making some progress but again, one of the things about watching people when they begin to move into that is indeed their own shyness. They kind of withdraw admiration… [38:58]
RF: And admiring—I mean I think, you know, the times we’ve had together, I go—I admire what you do. I just find it astonishing.
DW: Yes.
JO: A friend of mine just said to his daughter—she’s got a number of issues, and he had been reading that passage by C.S. Lewis in the Weight of Glory where he says, “You know you will never eat meat an ordinary mortal. Everybody’s becoming either a beast like you and seeing a nightmare or a creature of such splendor you would want to bow down and worship.” He read that and he said to his daughter, “You know we talk a lot in our house about logistics and money and plans; there is only one thing in this house that is sacred and that’s you.”
DW: Wow! That’s a beautiful thing.
RF: You know, another thing about Julian that I love so much was how she took ordinary things and the most famous passage about her is this hazelnut. She finds this hazelnut and she meditates on the hazelnut. “It has three properties. The first is that God made it. The second is that God loves it. And the third is that God preserves it. God is creator, protector, and lover.”
DW: Yes, I think the idea of God loving a hazelnut is one of the most profound theological insights that you can have.
JO: And that notion that the whole universe just fits in the hand of God and that all will be well, you know because instead of it being a big universe and a little God, it’s a little universe and a big God.
DW, JO, & RF: All will be well and all will be well, and no manner of things shall be well.
RF: Isn’t that astonishing?
DW: That’s right. [40:45]
Sixth Set:
RF: One of the beautiful things in the life of George Fox is that theme that we’ve worked on in this last session—hearing God as a life—this life and he had the experience where he was seeking God and not finding, not finding, kept seeking, not finding and then finally he had that well known experience where he says “When all my hopes in them and in everyone were gone, so that I had nothing outward to help me, nor could I tell what to do, oh then I heard a voice which said, “There is one even Christ Jesus that can speak to Thy condition” and when I heard it “my heart did leap for joy” and then he adds, “and this I knew experientially.”
DW: That’s right and of course that was the great key to Fox’s life and to the power of the Quakers was that as he also said, “I am taking people off of men and putting them onto Christ and Christ as the inner light was something that he experienced constantly and it manifested itself of course in various ways but when you were quiet as a Quaker, you were waiting to hear the voice of God and the quietness was not as is sometimes mistaken today—it wasn’t just for its own sake but to give you a chance to hear from God so you could speak to the meeting.
RF: Right and it always had that corporation sense of us together listening together. I sat once in the meetinghouse one where Fox was. It was a meetinghouse that was actually built out of the lumber of the Mayflower.
DW: No kidding.
RF: Yeah, when it was decommissioned, they took the wood and they built and you could see the timbers and some of the names carved and I spent maybe four hours just sitting various places and wondering, you know, what it would have been like when they gathered and it was very tender because there was a sense that God was with us together and we could depend and listen to one another and …..
DW: And you don’t have to be in the steeple house.
RF: You don’t have to be in the steeple house. [Laughter]
JO: You know, I think part of what is so resonate in it is when he says, “One who could speak to my condition.” And you know, no matter how religious or irreligious folks become, we want Dr. Phil. We want somebody who can speak to our condition. And so often, we don’t even think of ourselves, as having a condition until somebody says it and that’s what Jesus does is He speaks to our condition.
DW: That’s right. Now that has so many dimensions in this particular tradition that one is that Fox trained his friends when they were being persecuted and badly treated that they would address Christ in the person who was mistreating them and one of the most powerful things in his teaching was that there’s going to be Christ there. There will be Christ there. This scares many evangelicals, and they say, “Well, do you mean they are all going to go to Heaven?” Well, that wasn’t the issue—that whatever happens to them, every person has the light of Christ in them because He is the light that lights everyone that comes into the world and that just changes the whole picture of human relationships when you think that, you know? [44:55]
RF: Another experience that he had that I found was very interesting was great temptations and what he learned from that, and it also led him to studying the Bible, you know—essentially studying all the sins of everybody and he said, “He wondered why he went through this experience and then he writes, “The Lord answered that it was needful. I should have a sense of all conditions. How else should I speak to all conditions and in this I saw the infinite love of God and then he writes (this is so beautiful), “I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death but an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness.” [45:43]
DW: That’s lovely. He was so conscious of that. You remember the scene where he is sitting by the fire and it comes over him that all things comes by nature, and he sits for a while in this kind of depression with that thought, and then the word comes to him, “There is a God who is over nature and that sense of the greatness of the Kingdom and how it encompasses everything and of course, he and his friends took that into all their lives and they sanctified everything they touched.