Quakers and Mysticism by Jon R. Kershner

Author:Jon R. Kershner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030216535
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Resignation

Woolman was drawn to pious mystical writers who advocated a practical spirituality of obedience and surrender. He had little time for esoteric theories that were nothing more than what Bernard McGinn describes as a “special form of feeling and/or perception.”31 Instead, Woolman’s readings and devotional practices supported a consciousness of and preparation for a heightened spiritual immediacy and an assurance that he was capable of knowing and doing what God prescribed moment by moment.32

For Woolman, God was continually revealing God’s self to those who were “resigned,” or surrendered, to God’s will. Likewise, seeking after “resignation” strengthened and clarified God’s will and its applicability to everyday life. Woolman wrote that “the Mind in this true Resignation” led to “a right use of Things” and was “at Liberty from the Bands of a narrow Self-Interest.”33 The message discerned was nothing less than Christ’s words for the world revealed inwardly. Woolman wrote that “The Language of Christ is pure, and to the Pure in Heart, this pure Language is intelligible.”34 In the practice of spiritual surrender to God, Christ’s “Language” can be accurately interpreted and applied in one’s daily decisions. For Woolman, this “Language” was not vague; it was primarily a command of God that carried actual content for a new way of being within the world. Woolman looked to Jesus as the ultimate example of surrender to God, “whose prayers centered in resignation, ‘Not my will but thine be done.’”35

Woolman’s spiritual revelations resulted in practical new social, political, and economic convictions after a process of spiritual resignation to God’s will. For instance, in 1757 Woolman worried that his travels as a Quaker minister meant that he would tacitly support human slavery, because many of the Quakers he stayed with or visited along the journey owned slaves and to lodge with slaveholders meant to benefit from human enslavement. Through many spiritual “afflictions” and “great abasement,” he was helped “to sink down into resignation [to Christ]” and in that state of resignation “felt a deliverance from that tempest in which I had been sorely exercised, and in calmness of mind went forward, trusting that the Lord, as I faithfully attended to him, would be a counsellor to me in all difficulties.”36 As a result of this conviction, he was inspired and strengthened to pay slaves for their labor when he lodged at the houses of slave-owning Friends, an act he knew could offend his hosts.37

The process of “resignation” occurred as Christ’s presence “mortif[ied]” the fallen, carnal nature.38 Death to sin, pride, and carnal desires imitated Christ’s relinquishing of power in submission to the Father. “In being crucified to the world,” Woolman wrote, and “broken off from that friendship which is enmity with God, and dead to the Customs and fashions which have not their foundation in the Truth, the way is prepared to lowliness in outward living, and to a disentanglement from those Snares which attend the love of money.”39 The ideal of “mortification” has a long history in the spiritualist and mystical traditions, but the meaning of “mortification” varies according to the desired results.

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