by Francis Hall
The world is in dire need of contemplatives! True contemplatives are necessary to the successful waging of the Lamb’s War, and if those who are concerned do not wage that war successfully, civilization may well be in its last century.
There is a spiritual atmosphere that encircles the earth, and that atmosphere is even more important than the physical atmosphere in which we live and move.
In using the word “spiritual” in this context I am not referring to the reality of Holy Spirit but to the essential nature of humankind—the spirit of persons who were created in the image of God but who lost that likeness long ago. Thus, spirit is a mixture of good and evil, light and darkness, love and greed, gentleness and violence, and that mixture is in all of us in varying proportions. And, in a manner that we do not understand, it creates an atmosphere around us.
We also experience the opposite. Anger builds up in a community until it explodes in a riot, and the spirit of hate and frustration permeates the area and catches up more and more persons. The mobs race around, set fires, break into buildings and loot, and beat up on innocent persons and perhaps even kill them. The mobs are overwhelmed by the atmosphere of darkness and death. Such darkness rises up in community after community until it grips a nation, and then we have a Hitler Germany or a McCarthy America or a modern Iran. It then rises up from nation after nation, and the world itself is in the grip of its forces and moves toward destruction—the Third World War or a nuclear holocaust. Those forces are fear, hatred, greed, and the lust for violence, and they encircle the earth. They will destroy the earth unless George Fox’s vision of the ocean of light and love overcoming the ocean of darkness and death becomes a reality. This is the call to the Lamb’s War, and this is the call to contemplation.
We also hear this call to contemplation in another way which we consider before exploring the nature of the contemplative life. We have come from God, we belong to God, and we must return to God. This realization is based on the knowledge that we have been created in the image of God and in our created life we have true freedom. We have the freedom to choose to obey the way of the light and the freedom to choose the way of darkness, the way that is contrary to God. The story of the Garden of Eden is a symbolic picture of that gift and of the choice that was made. The choice was disobedience and brought a profound separation between humankind and God, a separation that is the source of the evil that came into the world and is threatening the world. Nonetheless, the image of God remains—buried, stained, cracked—yet alive and still the source of the goodness that moves us. Fox again and again called people to that life that will raise up the image of God in us and bring us into the state that humans were in before the fall. This is the return to God, this is the life of the spirit, this is the life of contemplation.
How justified we are to quote Augustine in describing the meaning of life, ‘so God, thou has made us for thyself alone, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” We are meant to return to God in freedom of choice and in the dedication of our lives, and there is a divine hunger in us that presses us ever onward. Rufus Jones put it well: there is a double search. God calls us through the prophets and the saints, through Christ Jeus. and through holy visitations in our deep center. We hunger and seek for God because we are made in the divine image and discover again and again that there is no fulfillment Of this hunger in the things Of earth—not in wealth, in security, in job satisfaction, in a full stomach, in warm fellowship, even in the joy of a family of love. All of these meet needs, but deeper yet is a longing they cannot meet for they are finite and that hunger is for the infinite. Only God can fulfill that need. The wonder is, as The Cloud of Unknowing tells us, “God is sufficient to meet the needs of all the souls that ever were. This is the infinite marvelous miracle of love, the working of which will never end.”
The life of contemplation is the highest or deepest way into that utter harmony with God that gives us the food and drink which alone mean that we shall never hunger and thirst again. Thus, contemplation is both the way for finding the ultimate goal of life and the way of becoming instruments of peace and channels of the Holy Spirit in transforming the spiritual atmosphere of earth from darkness and death to light and love.
What is contemplation? It is a gift of the grace of God and comes when the Spirit of God grasps our attention and infuses our beings so that we are wholly caught up in the sense of the presence of God. We are lifted out of ourselves and feel the peace, joy, and love of the Holy Spirit. It is no longer we who live but Christ or the Spirit that lives in us. We have died to our small egos and we live to God. Most of us know it for a moment or are caught by it in part, but when we experience it fully we are changed at our roots. We long for that to come which is perfect.
The life of contemplation is the intentional disciplining of ourselves so that we become ever more truly open to the gift of contemplation. We ready ourselves, we prepare ourselves, we clear the inner channels of ourselves, and the primary way of this preparation is the practice of interior prayer. This is the inturning prayer of silence. Early Friends were used by God to affect the history of the Western world in a powerful way because they found their way into that “pure silence.” In such silence the pray-er is freed of all ideas, all concepts, all meditations, all words—and is simply and wholly present before God. It is a “naked intent of the soul,” a “cloud of unknowing,” an “alert passivity.” It is that interior silence to which Fox referred with his words:
Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts…. Be still awhile from thy own thoughts, searching, seeking, desire, and imaginations, and be stayed in the principle Of God in thee, to Stay thy mind upon God.
Into that silence there comes—perhaps quietly, perhaps overwhelmingly—the reality of the power of God. It is a transforming power, a power that can change the world, the only power that truly can. When it fills persons or a group, they become the instruments of peace and the channels of the Holy Spirit, and their work in the world and their prayers of intercession for the world transform the world. It is no longer they who work but God who works through them. In this is the hope of the world.
God is calling for a new host of contemplatives so that God may enter into them and flow through them and save the world from the principalities and powers that threaten its destruction. Some who are moved by God in contemplative prayer will go out to be valiant for the truth and love in proclaiming the word and in the work of social action. Some will become intercessors for the healing of the nations. God uses such people to do the work of the Kingdom. God uses them as channels of peace, joy, and love and of the power that will bring a society of peace on earth.
We are called to a life of contemplation.
Francis Hall served as co-director of Powell House in New York during its first 13 years and later at Quaker Hill Conference Center, Richmond, IN. Until shortly before his death December 26, 1981, he was one of the ministry team at West Richmond (IN) Meeting. The article, intended for Friends Journal, found among his papers.