by Dan Wilson
Originally published in 1961 as Pendle Hill Pamphlet 113
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An Opening Way
One day last summer as I was sitting at the edge of the surf with the tide coming in, there was an instant when it seemed all right to let the waves sweep over and dissolve me into the sea. I cannot forget the temptation of that moment. There was tragic sorrow, but no fear, only peace. Without conscious impulse or thought, I got up, suddenly overflowing with the fullness of life. As though for the first time, the healing sun penetrated me through and through. There was a fresh awareness of everyone and everything. I ran to the family, as glad to see them as though I had been gone a long time.
In a way, I had been gone for a lifetime. There had been three weeks of playing with the children on the beach, walking or sitting by the hour in the sun, doing nothing purposefully, but all the while keeping watch on the journey of my conscious life from its beginning, waiting to let life disclose itself, rather than to attack it with preconceived notions and prearranged questions. What I have written here is an account of some discoveries on that voyage.
Part One
Homemade haircuts and patched overalls made our poverty conspicuous. The same shoes were worn in the barnyard and to school. Town children held their noses when I passed. Taught from the Bible that fighting was wrong, I early called on Jesus to deal with my taunters.
Everything was confided in Jesus, sometimes aloud, usually in an inward whisper. At times he made me feel ashamed, but in all he was my closest friend. I do not remember being lonely, even in the long hours spent herding the cows, often lying quietly, watching the clouds, seeing ships, castles, fairies and the face of Jesus there.
It early became clear that others could not be depended on to make the important decisions for me or to keep my needs in mind. My parents’ struggle to keep us fed and clothed was heroic, even to a child, and I was ashamed to ask anything more of them. The school principal’s promise of a place on his faculty, when I was ready, was the rock of the future, until he died of a heart attack shortly before my graduation. Jesus became the guardian of my life.
He was strongly with me when I was sent, just out of high school, to hold revival meetings in the small country town of Traer. I had preached frequently, since age 16, when, at a summer church convention I had pledged my life as a minister. My words were simple and direct, largely quotations from the Bible. The altar was filled every night.
I saw the same people come up the aisle night after night, and watched their tears and confessions become habitual as they looked to me to save them. I pled with them to take Christ into their own hearts and to trust no one but Him. They responded by praising God for sending them “Christ in this boy.” I began to believe them.
One night in self-righteous anger I told them they were hopeless. Immediately, as the words were spoken, I knew they were not from Christ. Self-conscious and embarrassed, I could not go on; nor could I go back to Traer.
Now I despised them and myself. For days I walked alone out on my beloved prairie, cut off from Christ and myself, cut off too from the people I had denounced. Neither self pity nor fantasy brought relief.
Our small western Kansas community had much in common with any insulated culture. Vocational opportunities tended to stratify. The store-owner’s son grew up to assume his father’s place; the farmer’s son to take over the farm; the hired man’s son to be a hired hand. When I tried to borrow money from the banker, who had known me and my family all our lives, he said quite sincerely and even kindly that the son of a farm hand was not a good risk. There seemed no possibility that I could ever go to college, even though some of my teachers had encouraged the dream.
With the drought and the depression, there was no work at home, and I could no longer preach. Dad was a farm hand with six of us to finance on $40 a month. When I told him I was going east to look for work, he said nothing. He dug into his pockets as though to give me some money, if there had been any there. Mother wept, but gamely supposed that I would find something. Carrying a razor, harmonica and Bible, wrapped in a change of clothing, I started walking to the nearest town twenty miles away. Hitch-hiking, with its thumb-bending stance, was not my art. I just walked along, not looking at the passing cars, but hoping to be given a ride. I felt purposeful now—just any feeling of purpose at all was good. I walked the twenty miles. After drinking a quart of milk and eating a sweet roll, I went to the cemetery and slept in the shelter of the monument to those killed in the last Indian raid.
Next morning, after shaving at a gas station, I set out again. A traveling salesman picked me up and took me to Kansas City. He bought my lunch and supper, and, finding that I had little money, gave me some and wished me well.
The City was depressing with its long lines of unemployed men and its thousands of impersonal faces. When I left home, my vague and secret intention was to lose myself in some kind of fling there, but growing hunger and a couple of nights sleeping on park benches dashed my kite to the ground. I sat in a park for hours. No one paid any attention. I couldn’t have asked for food or a job even if I had known where to go. All I wanted was to go home, but I could not.
The purpose of my life became flight from Kansas City. I had eaten but a candy bar that day, but vision of open country put a spring into my stride, and I walked through the city, stopping now and then to get a drink of water and to turn the holes in my socks. By midnight I was out in a dreamed-of-field with haystacks standing like home in the moonlight. I burrowed into one of them and slept until the sun was high.
Though I had never begged for anything before, I walked up to the farmhouse and knocked on the back door. The woman who opened it had a kind face. I told her I would work long and hard for something to eat. She turned to her husband and said, “This boy wants to work for something to eat, but I am going to feed him first.” In all those months of wandering, I was seldom turned away from a farmhouse.
I worked when they would let me. Sometimes I was paid a little. But there came a time at each place when I felt that I was becoming an object of charity, and so, with the feeling of leaving home again, set off. Many a good man and wife pled with me to return home, but I could not.
One morning, after sleeping in the open, I started to get up and fell back from dizziness. I knew I had a high temperature, and lay still, unable to move or think what to do. I felt cut off, not only from people, but from the ground beneath me, and from myself. Gradually there crept into some nook of consciousness the assurance that I was not alone. I lay motionless, not quite believing, and, not daring to move, closed my eyes and waited. There came over me such a feeling of security that I fell asleep. When I awoke again the sun was much higher and a farmer was standing over me. He had stopped his hay wagon to investigate. I felt weak, but explained quite calmly to him that I had felt ill but was all right now. He looked at me suspiciously but invited me to climb on the wagon and we drove to his house. I must have been very pale because his wife immediately began giving motherly directions about putting me to bed. Reassured by her practical acceptance of me, the farmer ordered me to bed and her to fix some broth. Those dear people took me, a total stranger, into their home and cared for me until the bout of tonsillitis was over. They even offered to pay my bus fare home, but I could not accept.
My thoughts turned more frequently to God. I sometimes felt again that I was not alone, much as that morning in the field. This quiet reassurance was not unlike the earlier presence of Jesus, but any images now were fleeting and subject to skepticism. Nevertheless, I became less lonely when the God-thought occurred. There was no image. He was simply there, or here. Almost, there was an inward face, as though of someone I knew but could no longer visualize. I would screw up my mind’s eye to look; no, the eye was watching me. I would try to return to the moment when thought turned to God. That was it! How I longed to stay where there was no here or there. Sometimes I would just sit until hunger or cold moved me on.
When summer came, I was able to save sufficient money working in the harvest to feel that I could go home for a while. I wore new clothes and new pride; rides came easily and I covered what had seemed an age of distance separating me from home in less than a week.
I got a job teaching in a one-room country school, with twelve pupils and eight grades. The school was high on a windy plain with no trees. The families in the district were desperately poor and included one gypsy family that lived in a house wagon. In the winter the children came to school, poorly clothed, frostbitten, little to eat in their lunch pails. I came to care deeply for these youngsters whose outlook for the future was so dim. I saw something of myself in them. Loving them was like reaching out to find the way in the dark; there was so little I could do for them. For the first time I was aware of caring as much about what would happen to someone else as for what might become of me.
After the year of teaching, I had not been asked back and once more was settling into the hopelessness of not being wanted. A high school classmate, enrolled in a small denominational college, told the president about me. He telephoned my pastor to get me there as quickly as possible if I wanted to come. I couldn’t believe it. Dad said, “It’s up to you.” Mother just began getting my things ready.
Then began the absorbing, exciting life in college. What had been doubtful eccentricities at home became interesting assets. Working my way, sleeping little, living in an unheated room, missing meals, seemed no hardships at all. Energy for all demands flowed freely in this all-consuming life into which I had so unexpectedly been thrust. Now reality surpassed all fantasy of the past. I loved the faculty, the students, everyone, and they responded.
Before long a cloud appeared as I heard from the folks that there had been no snow and the winter wheat crop had blown out again, and Dad was losing his job. There was no WPA yet, and he would “rather starve than go on relief.” The charity baskets we had received on Thanksgivings and Christmases, instead of raising our spirits, had brought a sting of failure and our resentment more than our gratitude. There seemed nothing for them to do but go to California to “work in the fruit.” Dad owed money everywhere in town, but he went from place to place asking them to trust him and to consent to his leaving.
When college was out in the spring, I went home. We sold what little we had that could not somehow be tied onto our old car, and started west. We drove across the dried-up creek, now filled with tumbleweeds, and watched with parched eyes until we could no longer see the old wind blown cottonwoods that stood by the barn.
The story of such treks is now classic. We got to California in about a month and found work near Fresno. An old rusty stove at the edge of the field was our kitchen. Mother and the girls slept in the tent, the rest in the open. From daylight to dark we stooped to pick up fallen dried figs. We were camped in the midst of Mexican and Portuguese families who sang all night, worked in the mornings and slept through the afternoons, and still picked circles around us. We avoided other white Americans, seeing our shame in them. At the end of the summer, I felt that I should stay and help the folks, yet we seemed to be going down together. It was not so much just making enough to eat, or not having a house to live in, but the hopelessness of a life without choice or voice. I hitch-hiked back to college.
College was different that year. The cloud did not disperse. I was driven as much by it as by the previous year’s joy. There was less spontaneous energy now. Each full moment was hollowed by pangs of anxiety. When summer came I felt that I must go out to the folks and talked my roommate into “riding the rails” with me.
We caught a fast freight for the west. It was moving at a good clip when we ran to get on, and the force of its motion slammed me back against the side of the car so hard that I nearly lost my grip. We had climbed to the top of an automobile carrier, about two feet higher than the other cars, so there was no protection from the chill night wind. Whitey jumped nimbly and landed well onto the next car. After much persuasion from him, I half-jumped and fell between the cars. In that instant a panorama of remorse for unloving thoughts and acts seemed to sweep back as far as memory could go. I landed on the coupling between the cars, stunned but holding on somehow, even though the coupling was bruising me brutally with every motion of the train. Whitey had to climb down to me before I could let go. We struggled back to the top and down into an ice compartment. We tried to get comfortable but my bruises did not fit the corrugations of the floor. We spent the night recalling all that we had ever felt guilty about. Over and over, I gave thanks for the evidence of life in my throbbing aches.
That summer a feeling of detachment prevailed. Between fruit-picking jobs, I spent whole nights lying awake under the stars—not knowing their names, but feeling close to all of them. I felt most real then. The shock of myth-shattering knowledge which had bombarded me that year in college had driven me inward in search of security. Now I did not belong at home, at college, or anywhere, only with the night and the stars. I overheard my parents talking anxiously about me. Over and over again I relived the fall from the train, trying to recapture the feeling of being given another chance, trying to fit “another chance” into the seeming unreality of the world around me—returning to fantasy in the darkness. There I could feel the distant horizons of the earth to which I was bound merge with the infinite expanse of the stars. Gradually, and all the while resisting, I felt the boundaries pull apart until I knew that they did not become one, but met endlessly. It was then that the images of a poem which took shape years later began to form:
The prairied night commands no hands to hold the gyral sky; no feet to walk its certain flight; no border’s end where earth and heaven monologue in wordless bond. Plunged by event from rapture’s figment of exception, the trackless lands despond until the cadent word implanted in their roots dares to respond with honest stammering the double cry that meets parturient dark with unbent light’s descent.
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath put into perspective the tragic events that led to and resulted from my family’s migration from Kansas to California. The goal of our lives had been to climb, somehow, into the advantaged class. Now, my ideals were focused in wresting the advantage from those who had it and giving it to those who did not. Anger welled from all the stored-up hurt of the past: bitter anger for the years of poverty, for the ignorance and superstition of the people of Traer, for the shame and suffering of my parents, for the starved futures of my pupils in the one-room schoolhouse, for the fallow faces of migrant fruit pickers. There was a welcome pain from admitting that I belonged to all of them!
Face of my heart, let anger
stab the limit raw between.
Break blood across the chasm.
Graft nerve to pain.
Let no quick cure of hurt
shut heart from heart again.
Each year the college church held a series of revival meetings. The revivalist had worked hard to bring everyone to the altar, without complete success. Again and again, he asked all who were saved to stand up. On the last night, we were standing as usual to sing a hymn, when he stopped the singing and asked all who were “saved” to sit down. The few of us who remained conspicuously standing were denounced.
Members of the church said nothing to me about this incident. I was more affected by their silence than by the public indictment. Some members of the faculty and those with whom I was left standing persuaded me briefly that this was a courageous act. However, I felt no triumph on my part, only a defeat for the church.
I attended church now and then, but became uncomfortable in singing the hymns and participating in worship that did not seem to be sincerely felt or to reach the deep door of my longing. I wanted to sweep it all away to get to the bottom of what could be honestly believed; to start over again with the Truth, or without it, if that proved necessary; to be myself; to begin with freedom.
I reveled in the unlimited scope of abstract and logical thought. Philosophy, science and psychology became compelling interests. This was a bright time of devotion to reason and what it would unfold. I felt in a position now to plumb the meaning of God. Fearlessly, I set out to develop a rational proof that he did or did not exist, wanting the truth more than his survival. Step by step there developed an enabling understanding. In brief, this is what I wrote to an agnostic friend at that time:
The modern mind, conditioned brilliantly, as yours is, to accept only what can be proved rationally, has broken down in its ability to picture the whole, the beginning or the end. Do you recall our long discussion of Myth as the whole-telling of man’s fullest awareness of the reality of his being? The Myth is reality when its truth is not rationalized. Rationalization is not a process to be religiously avoided in order to preserve the reality of the Myth. It is a gift of reality as well, but it is a brilliant instrument, not reality itself. It cannot create Myth! It can be a preparation for rediscovering the Truth of Myth.
The God Myth is renewed eternally in the inward experience of each person who finds within, and himself within, a reality upon which his being is ultimately dependent. This experience of reality is the truth communicated by the God Myth, which is not fabricated by the individual, but is a social product by which the person is able to picture and communicate the Truth he feels about creation. The character of the God Myth is taken from the lives and teachings of persons who arise in every culture to purify and renew the Myth, and around whom the Myth is regathered. It is thus that God is specially revealed in just such persons!
Later, in graduate study, with the help of some of the finest teachers I have known, my perspective on the church and the Bible was greatly enlarged, but I remained disillusioned about finding a visible existing church in which to feel completely at home. I felt with William Law that
this is the greatest evil that the division of the Church has brought forth: it raises in every communion a selfish partial orthodoxy, which consists in courageously defending all that it has and condemning all that it has not … and yet I venture to say that if each Church could produce but one man apiece that had the piety of an apostle and the impartial love of the first Christians in the first church of Jerusalem, that a Protestant or a Papist of this stamp would not want half a sheet of paper to hold their Articles of Union, nor be half an hour before they were of one religion …
In the present divided state of the Church, truth itself is torn and divided asunder; and therefore he can be the only true Catholic who has more of truth and less of error than is hedged in by any divided part … And thus in uniting in heart and spirit with all that is holy and good in all Churches, we enter into the true communion of saints and become real members of the Holy Catholic Church, though we are confined to the outward worship of only one particular part of it.
At the finish of college, my sense of personal responsibility to do something to help avert the looming war took precedence over graduate study, or the promise to myself to do something to help organize migrant farm workers. These duties would have to wait until the more immediate threat was over.
This was a time, too, of discovering the Society of Friends, which offered both the dimensions and the discipline I so much needed for intellectual and spiritual growth, and helped to meet the need to belong to others.
I volunteered to work in the emergency peace campaign. There followed two years of hitch-hiking from college to college, calling on students and faculty to wake up to the imminence of war. The many searching talks on the subject convinced at least one person of the necessity to break completely with all war effort, including conscription. However, when the draft call came, I accepted assignment to civilian work of national importance, provided by law for conscientious objectors. This was for me a compromise that resulted in several years of diminished clarity with which to meet daily choices. Even though the decision had been made out of consideration for others, there was a loss of motive power.
John was severely depressed. Negro, youngest son of a successful family, he was afraid of failure. He felt without hope for his future. He was a sensitive, highly intelligent man who had been under therapy for years but had given up. He knew a lot about himself and stated flatly that there was no use trying to convince him that he should learn to accept his life or to trust a god. I was apprehensive about what he might do and offered to stay the night with him, even did not arouse his disapproval when I called to arrange an appointment with a psychiatrist for the next morning. I knew I had not reached him, but reassured that my availability would hold him, let him go alone to the corner drugstore for a pack of cigarettes. I never saw him again, alive.
In the pre-war years of work with the American Friends Service Committee I gave up previous ideas of vocation and sought to follow the way of obedience to whatever, in prayer and waiting, was presented to me to be done. This was not an easy decision, since I had been strongly drawn to a life of scholarship in New Testament study. Critical study of the Bible had restored my devotion to this literature, and had challenged me with the central importance understanding of it holds for mankind.
During the years of the war, some of us became convinced of the necessity to rebuild Christian community from the roots, if Christian values in society were to be conserved. We moved our families to a cooperative farm project, intended to involve us in mutual economic and spiritual responsibility for one another. After a year, our economy broke down, as did the attempt to over-limit our feeling of responsibility for the world around us. The experiment was over. I worked as a carpenter and painter to support my family. There was a solid, almost neutral tone to the waiting this time, none of the turbulence and impatience of earlier years. There was little temptation to rationalize away the disillusionment and insecurity. Neither outward goal nor inward comfort was given, nothing but the necessity to wait. I remember being kinder and more attentive to those around, marveling at the patience and understanding of my wife, enjoying the children.
I had been prepared for the devastation I was to see in Europe after the war, but I was not prepared for what I was to feel there. All the horror, suffering, stupidity, evil, hopelessness of humanity poured into and engulfed me. Inward and outward worlds fused and exploded leaving a raw floundering spirit in a sea of debris. I dimly recall going through the motions of meeting officials whose thanks touched no emotion, nor did the lines of mothers and children waiting in the cold, nor the endless calculation of how much, and how much longer, relief. I neither thought nor felt, ate from weakness more than hunger, slept from exhaustion more than sleepiness. There was neither past nor future, and the present was bound to the awful equation: no food equals death.
Green shoots of hope began to grow again, but not from inward initiative: rather, from watching the tenderness of aged young mothers for their babies. When an old old man asked bitterly, “Why do you keep us alive?” I could not tell him then, but suddenly I knew that deep within me, so deep that it had not been destroyed, hope still lived. I remember my unbelieving astonishment that this was so! I walked out into the ruins with mingled awe and doubt. Could this seed of hope be God? The utter simplicity, purity and certainty with which I knew! There was no rational structure to support such knowledge, just as there had been no way to rationalize the undeniable evil of the war. There was no clear enabling idea for the future, but I felt that this was no limited or lonely dispensation.
I do not remember feeling joy or sorrow, only relief and peace and devotion. If I spoke to anyone, I wept. Some mistook my emotion for symptom of cracking up. Little did they know how unbrittle I had become. As I continued to feel and to respond with feeling, faces, long frozen with hopelessness, sometimes melted.
If it had not been for the daily responsibilities of family and work, in the years that followed, my time might well have been absorbed in contemplation. No botanist could care more tenderly for a rare plant, nor a mother for her child, than I did for the gift of hope. Adoration grew as it grew stronger. Here, at last, was the One who could never be taken from me. Here was the One true source of my life and being, who had dwelt with me all the while, but only half-way and intermittently recognized, and then, usually when projected onto an outer image. I marveled at the necessity for projected images as preparation for seeing face to face. I gave thanks for the early projection onto the figure of Jesus, and for what I now felt as his witness and continuation of the One in me. How fortunate that our projections are seldom quite total, and therefore do not completely cut us off from the One!
The ancient Jesus is no longer strange and distant, but sits on the facing benches and gives his character to the great gathering of the inwardly visible faces of everyone who has known the One God. Surely, every visible face becomes our hope and teacher when in it appears the invisible face of the One who holds all in His love, and gives us love for one another. Each of us holds the gift of the One who waits to be born into conscious life. We are that child that is carried in us. Each word becomes a renewed word, as though first uttered, each encounter a first encounter, each moment of being a new being, each one becomes the One in whom all ones are gathered.
Becoming a member of my family has been a continuous awakening. Over and over again, after a long search for the meaning of what was happening to us, having reached a time of discovery, I have been anxious lest Rosalie, my wife, feel left out, only to find that she was already there.
Summertime has been family time as we have camped out in 48 states, Mexico and Canada. A few years ago, as we were camping our way across the country we telephoned from Missouri to Rosalie’s folks in California for a report on her father who had been ill, to find that he was near death. At dawn we put her on the train to Kansas City where she could catch a plane. Three-year-old April was quite brave when the train pulled out. When we stopped at a wayside table to prepare breakfast, she sat by herself and began crying quietly. When I spoke to her, she shook with sobs. Our efforts to comfort her were no use. I have never seen a more desolate little figure. There was nothing I could do. The boys and Kathy tried to be brave. Not until we were all overcome and huddled together, weeping in chorus, could April join us and be comforted in our common tears.
Discoveries during the ten years at Pendle Hill have been increasingly in relationship with others. I sometimes feel Pendle Hill’s history in my own journey. Many journeys meet here. I think of it as a crucible in which we can be melted down to just what we are. We become open thereby to life together as the gift of God.
Part Two
An enabling way prevails. I call it an opening way.
Inasmuch as the knowledge of God is the height of all treasured possessions, (For this is the life that endures, to know the one God and the Savior.) the means of obtaining this end should be known and believed in the first place.
—From William Bacon Evans
A Briefer Barclay
The discipline of keeping open to truth wherever it is given begins not with evidence alone, but with the hypothesis that truth is no respecter of persons or peoples. I strike the tuning fork of my being and its pitch leads me into truth. Vibrations of truth, from wherever they come, enhance hearing of the perfecting pitch.
Obedience to the way in which life engages me begins with a moment of freedom, not with the security of the past. It is necessary to let go of previous images, fears and abstractions to discover that what is most real is already given. For me, an open way is not an attempt to find, somewhere in the world, another ready-made life in which to settle, nor is it the way of synthesizing the best from everywhere; it is not to “have one’s own way,” but to follow the way one is given for his own. It is a way of rediscovering the rock from which I am hewn. It is the rebirth of the tradition within, thus bringing the full chords of the past into harmony with the melody of one’s own mind and being.
A frequent apprehension about keeping open is that it is without commitment; that it is a vague, general, ambiguous, scattered kind of broad-mindedness that requires little actual responsibility for taking a stand in the crises of human faith. There are such dangers. Refugees from a too-narrow background may resist engaging life again in a fully responsible relationship within a particular group. He who faithfully seeks knowledge of God will become aware that it was precisely the unfulfilled longing for being joined with a people with whom he could in full integrity be committed that led him in the first place into exile.
When our soil becomes encased between root-stunting hardpan, beneath, and growth-thwarting crust, above, a breakthrough is vital. Some deeply concerned individuals today seek to strengthen the roots by concentrating on them. Others devote themselves to saving the plant by organization. Still others attempt to transplant into ground that is alien to them, or to live as air-plants.
In our time, the interaction of cultures has been intensified. In this flux, many an individual is left only partially rooted, and sometimes uprooted. Left without a nurturing soil, he must turn within for survival. He must look to the kernel of his being for a new beginning.
There seems always to be a warring between those who emphasize the necessity to find the way back to the primitive soil and those who stress the need to break through the overlaying crust, all the while remaining divided against their common enemy who wants no change. When I defend, it is usually when I am frustrated or uncertain. In anyone who has accepted the enabling way of Truth that was in Jesus, there is a hunger and an openness for the confirming and correcting witness of all others to the same Truth.
I think of my anguish over the death of one of my critics with whom I had not found deep reconciliation, and my peace of mind over the tragic death of a friend, with no lingering fear between us, even though we had never reached agreement. When others go, I pray the sorrow will ring clear and true in the depth of being in which we have met.
An opening way maintains a humility that comes from knowing it must ever be renewed in the Source and Giver of life. Lest the new experience be forced to fit the limited mould from which it was poured, it must be melted down by the fires of inward renewal, in which the mould itself is recreated. Each venturing forth is as from “a new heaven and a new earth.” This is the most exclusive way of all because it demands full-time vigilance and obedience. It cuts across all established lines of human organization. Discoverers of love’s opening way recognize one another, whatever their affiliations. Whenever a folk song from any strange land gives wings to my spirit, it is no longer alien, but has become mine.
Trusting love, I find spontaneous responses most likely to hold the hope of an encounter. Courage is required to trust the integrity of such responses, whether in anger, or in affection. I recall a morning when I felt high and lifted up, in rapture over the day, the bright sunshine, the freshets flowing in me, when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of my best wood drill being misused by our two little boys to make holes in the ground. I spoke angrily to them. My heavenly cloud precipitated. I saw the anger in me and the little boys in them.
When there is no self-idol to defend, sharp and unkind words, once so carefully controlled, sometimes come without warning. Child-like response seems to leave us at the mercy of varying moods. It also leaves us more open to be present to others before the ever-ready stereotypes draw a curtain between us. The goal is the overcoming of the contradictions we experience, not seeking our end and satisfaction outside them.
Trying to be saintly is second in deadliness only to not being willing to be, spontaneously and unselfconsciously. The discipline of open response trusts the “spirit that delights to do no evil” to overcome the spirit of fear and hostility. The discipline of responding freely and of learning from the results is the way of openness. Rationalism and authoritarianism are ways of measured response, calculated in advance as to their possible consequences.
The power of imagination to project results is a wonderful gift to be exercised to the maximum. However, the posture of any moment should be that of trusting a whole response to the encounter, rather than imposing the particular sequential frame in which reason stands. Contrary to the usual fear that commitment to spontaneity leads to rashness, the most spontaneous response becomes full attention.
All suns must marvel at the pace the sons of earth outleap their journey’s age, outrun their place on evolution’s page.
The suns declare these splendid ones a solar race who dare dominion over time and space, who excavate the sky, unscroll its burned out stones, wash subterranean clouds from memory’s springs— inoculate their sons from cosmic whisperings of time’s fulfillment in the moment’s tones.
Dedication to the moment purifies it and renews hope. Old impatience at the slowness with which change follows renewal diminishes. There is less straining to improve, even though room for it moves out to infinity. Old habits of fatigue and loss of courage are slow to leave, but they don’t matter so much. Sorrow deepens about our tragic human neglect, we become more humble about the failures of ourselves and others, and more ready to be of practical help. Humility loses importance. It is not so much a goal to be sought as a gift that comes and goes when we are not looking. There is not so much mortification about ego exposure, or anxiety about criticism. There is less feeling of pressure to be available in general all the time and more hope to give full attention at the time.
The self-authenticating evidence the moments hold leads to a leap of faith that lights the path ahead.
When the family and I were camping far out in the woods one night, I had an unexpected attack of asthma, with no medication along. I got up to walk outside, but rain and chill increased the distress. Momentarily expecting suffocation, I climbed into the car, wrapped a blanket around me, and waited. The strangled feeling continued, but so did the breathing. Each breath was followed by another even though this seemed impossible. I became absorbed in the gift of each breath, and wakened hours later from deep sleep. The asthma was gone.
Sometimes, there comes a flip of consciousness, like rolling over from a face-down-in-the-mud view to lying face upward looking at the sky. How marvelous the sky—the fact that we can see it at all. The sky’s-eye view sees our struggles as amazing: earth and death-bound creatures with aspirations? with yearning to break through the haze of half-consciousness to see more fully? Look how they respond, then fall back, but get up again! See the energy with which they defend their ideas! How foolish, and yet what potential in the raw! That one needs picking up and comforting, that one humbling, that one freedom, and that one to learn obedience. There! One has broken through for a moment! Now, another! With what power the same fuel that has driven their fears and hate is transformed into the nuclear release of love!
Back to man’s eye view. How magnificent is creation and its creator! How tender is our maker to our times and condition. What perfect gifts of imagination and response, of being able to get up each day for a new beginning! How we marvel at the inexplicable persistence with which those who are weighed down with physical and mental suffering still make the effort! There goes one who claims no faith, who nevertheless lives with some trust in the day and in those around him! How continuously we are sustained even though we so seldom and so halfheartedly acknowledge the fact!
What is real is God. I become real as God is born into consciousness. But I am also a compound of images that are never descriptions of reality but simply point toward it. I have never fully known my father. I have a different image of him than he has of himself, or than anyone else has of him. But he is my father. “Person” is a symbol calling attention to the complex of life that comprises a human being. “Father,” “person” are poems about the beings to which “I” respond as such. No image literally holds all my conscious response to another being. In the moment of encounter, the images do not disappear, but in consciousness their content is changed, even though habits of earlier response may linger. Presentations of reality in new consciousness have no words, only exclamations. In the exclamation “Oh, God,” the “Oh” is the response. “God” is the afterthought of previous associations that flow in to give identification and content to the response.
At the moment of confrontation, even the “Oh” is not there.
The eye cannot see itself, but can be aware that it is seeing. This is the moment of being the eye that is seeing. The being of eye is then the eye of being that is seeing. To see seeing, feel feeling, hear hearing, know knowing, is to be being. Thus are the senses purified. The half-dumb, half blind, unknowing state in which we mostly live is an exile from God. We only come truly alive when we trust the winnowing power of our minds to bring the melding power of our feelings into open consciousness.
The discipline of openness is one of the most difficult of all, and the most demanding. It requires continuous attention. It leaves no area of life untouched or finished. Attention is not automatically given, but is an act of turning toward. It is not self-consciousness; it is the act of being conscious of the whole self. True inwardness is not the looking into the self, but being aware of what is going on from the perspective of being inside oneself. Self consciousness is like being shut outside the self and uncomfortably away from home. The self’s consciousness is the eyesight of the self that sees what is going on. It is not the self that we are longing to see, but the ability of the self to see the whole of its each particular involvement. It is not the groveling of the self at the door of God, but the doorway of God through which to see life.
The self has many windows, all the ways of knowing and experiencing. What is seen through any one of the windows is but a part of the whole picture. The doorway in which one can stand, and from which can be seen a fuller view, will open whenever we knock. It is the door that, at once and in the same motion, opens into God, and that opens from God into life.
The door that opens into the more abundant life, opens when we are open. But it does not open when we think we are most open. Never admitting the closed state we are invariably in with each thought, act, response, word, is to be shut off from the opening. We are confined to our illusion of openness, and are thereby shut off until our closed state comes into consciousness.
The return each day to the time of remembering and not remembering gives the tone to the whole day. The hours have been filled with feelings, reactions, ideas, duties, but there has been a sustaining background music even in the midst of the lapses in kindness, the ego-suffering, and the endless pressures that clamor for attention. With an inward smile the unresolved tension is often tucked away, to be recalled later when fully present.
Being present is like sitting at night in the house, turning off all the lights in order to see out; like the holding of breath under water until every cell cries out for air; the split second before sleep, but still staying awake; the unexpected hush in the hubbub of a crowded banquet hall; the stark instant of snapping back into a night street after the symphony or a great play. It is like the flash-back of life in the moment of expected death, that moment when all that is inward pours outward and meets all that is outward pouring inward.
Contemplation moves conscious thoughts wholeward. It plows the deep soil of consciousness, making its fertility available. It climbs us to a mountain top where we become the meek who inherit the power to meet earthly responsibilities. It joins the longing Godward with longing humanward.
It keeps watch for mankind for new openings from love into faith and freedom. Listen to these verses from The First Letter of John as translated into modern English by J. B. Phillips: “We know that we have crossed the frontier from death to life because we do love our brothers.” “If we live like this, we shall know that we are children of the truth and can reassure ourselves in the sight of God, even if our own hearts make us feel guilty. For God is infinitely greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” “The man who does obey God’s commands lives in God and God lives in him, and the guarantee of his presence within us is the Spirit he has given us.” (Chapter 3, verses 14, 19-20, 24.)
Fervour not to dwell in ecstasy aflame:
No man is cast to solo fate or single fame.
He shares the common lot of life’s demand
who grasps with passion’s pain
the shaping hand that holds the tool
to mould the happening whirlpool of everyday
from which we’re never taken.
About the Author
Dan Wilson is a member of Providence Road Friends Meeting in Media, Penna. He is Director of Pendle Hill, where he has been on the staff since 1950. Born on a Kansas farm, he studied at Kansas Wesleyan University and later at the Pacific School of Religion. While in college he was active in the Student Christian Movement and the National Council of Methodist Youth. In 1942 he joined Whittier Friends Meeting in California and served the Meeting, California Yearly Meeting and the Five Years Meeting on various committees. He has been on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee for a total of ten years in a number of capacities, including college secretary, Elkton Civilian Public Service Camp director, fund raiser, and European relief representative. At present he serves on committees of the American Friends Service Committee, the Friends World Committee and Friends Central School. Dan and Rosalie Roney Wilson were married in 1939 and have four children.
© 1961 by Pendle Hill (now in public domain)
This piece was originally published as Pendle Hill Pamphlet #113 in 1961, ISBN 978-0-87574-679-1. You can purchase a physical copy of this pamphlet from the Pendle Hill Bookstore.
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