In this my “Year of Review”, I have utterly enjoyed revisiting some readings which have been the most influential on me. There are a few not-so-long books that I have read, digested, and absorbed which are so very pithy that I chose not to even take the cap off my highlighter, for every single word is such gold and worthy of highlighting, that there was no point to do so. One such book which I am re-reading right now is A Testament Of Devotion by the 20th century Quaker Thomas Kelly, published in 1941.

I think I had somewhat forgotten just how much this little work has shaped me. Spending time in it again after several years away from it has gloriously reminded me of the deep resonance I originally felt with it, as well as the beautiful language therein which I adopted as wonderfully accurate descriptions of the Christ life.

Some books come along which present a bare-bones distillation of the Gospel, give the core truth of Christ, and the foundation of our faith so well and with no fluff, that you feel as if you could simply lodge there for many years and be absolutely content and better off for it. A central and repeated message of this particular book is the vital importance of listening to the living, speaking Spirit every moment in all circumstances.

So of course I need to give you an example, and I shall give a somewhat lengthy excerpt which I read last week and have been marinating in. This is from the chapter entitled “The Eternal Now and Social Concern”. For context sake, Kelly has been writing about how our sense of time is shifted after we truly discover that God is present in each moment, how right now holds eternity. Oh how poignantly lovely!

But now let us examine the ordinary experience of time, unrevised by this great discovery of the Eternal Life springing up within it. The ordinary man, busy earning a living, exercises care, caution, foresight. He calculates probabilities. He studies the past in order to predict and control the future. Then when he has weighed all his factors and plotted the outcome, with energy and industry he wills himself into persistent activity along the lines of calculated wisdom.

And much religious work is carried on in just this same way. With shrewd and canny foresight religious people study the past, examine all the factors in the situation which they can foresee, and then decide what is wisest to undertake, or what is most congruous with the Christian life described in the Gospels. Then they breathe a prayer to God to reinforce their wills and keep them strong in executing their resolve.

In this process, time spreads itself out like a ribbon, stretching away from the now into the past, and forward from the now into the future, at the far end of which stands the New Jerusalem. In this ribbon of time we live, anxiously surveying the past in order to learn how to manage the most important part of the ribbon, the future. The now is merely an incidental dividing point, unstable, non-important, except as by its unstaying migration we move ahead into the richer meadows and the greener pastures of the future. This, I fear, is the all-too-familiar world of all too many religious men and women, when a deeper and a richer experience is possible.

The experience of Divine Presence changes all this familiar picture. There come times when the Presence steals upon us, all unexpected, not the product of agonized effort, and we live in a new dimension of life. You who have experienced such plateaus of glory know what I mean….The sense of Presence!

In the immediate experience of the Presence, the Now is no mere nodal point between the past and the future. It is the seat and region of the Divine Presence itself. No longer is the ribbon spread out with equal vividness before one, for the past matters less and the future matters less, for the Now contains all that is needed for the absolute satisfaction of our deepest cravings. Why want, and yearn, and struggle, when the Now contains all one could ever wish for, and more? The present Now is not something from which we hurriedly escape, toward what is hoped will be a better future. Instead of anxiety lest the future never yield all we have hoped, lest we fail to contribute our full stint before the shadows of the evening fall upon our lives, we only breathe a quiet prayer to the Now and say, “Stay, thou art so sweet.” Instead of anxiety lest our past, our past defects, our long-standing deficiencies blight our well-intentioned future efforts, all our past sense of weakness falls away and we stand erect, in this holy Now, joyous, serene, assured, unafraid. Between the relinquished past and the untrodden future stands this holy Now, whose bulk has swelled to cosmic size, for within the Now is the dwelling place of God Himself. In the Now we are at home at last….

Instead of being the active, hurrying church worker and the anxious, careful planner of shrewd moves toward the good life, we become pliant creatures, less brittle, less obstinately rational. The energizing, dynamic center is not in us but in the Divine Presence in which we share. Religion is not our concern; it is God’s concern. The sooner we stop thinking we are the energetic operators of religion and discover that God is at work, as the Aggressor, the Invader, the Initiator, so much the sooner do we discover that our task is to call men to be still and know, listen, hearken in quiet invitation to the subtle promptings of the Divine. Our task is to encourage others first to let go, to cease striving, to give over this fevered effort of the self-sufficient religionist trying to please an external deity. Count on God knocking on the doors of time. God is the seeker, and not we alone; He is anxious to swell out our time-nows into an Eternal Now by filling them with a sense of Presence. I am persuaded that religious people do not with sufficient seriousness count on God as an active factor in the affairs of the world. “Behold I stand at the door and knock,” but too many well-intentioned people are so preoccupied with the clatter of effort to do something for God that they don’t hear Him asking that He might do something through them. We may admire the heaven-scaling desires of the tower-builders on the Plain of Shinar, but they would have done better to listen and not drown out the call from heaven with the clang of the mason’s trowel and the creaking of the scaffolding.