Reading Thomas Kelly

Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion opens my heart and soul every time I turn to it. I am carried along by its sacred words, which lodge in my unevenly pumping heart, then penetrate my blood and aging skin. I own an original edition, published in 1941, two years before I was born. Its paper cover, reddish-brown, is in tatters. Should I chuck the falling-apart paper cover? Not yet.

The volume opens with Kelly quoting Meister Eckhart: “As thou art in church or cell, that same frame of mind carry out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness.” The book then proceeds to offer dramatic testimony about how we – both Kelly and the rest of us – can live continuously in a place of amazing worship.

In a quotation well-loved by Friends, Kelly writes, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself.” Throughout his Testament of Devotion, Kelly urges the reader to listen for this Voice of homecoming, to turn toward this Divine Center. This urging becomes Kelly’s mantra, his faith in action, upholding him through times of brokenness and failure, even his failure to pass the oral exams for a Ph.D. at Harvard.

As I heed Kelly’s insistence to follow the Light Within, I begin to believe that I might be able to bring my heathen and doubting self into alignment with the Holy Spirit’s call to come home. I collaborate with Kelly and the Spirit Within, singing hymns of wholeness and delight. I enter these prayers in my body and its own knowing. These seep into my soul, tap into its longings, provide a pathway, a craving to be whole. I am enthralled. My heart beats in time with the Spirit.

It’s like riding a powerful waterfall from top to bottom, plunging into the spray and rapids, merging into the cool water-stream, and finally, complete immersion. The longing and crying and struggling for air are insistent, for this is a different way of knowing and being. Its reality is visceral, compelling the body to know through watery submergence, then re-emergence, gasping for breath.

The journey makes a sort of baptism. I emerge from it ready to embrace the present moment, its newness. The air smells sweeter. I drift into another pattern of breathing, fuller, more focused, more open. In Quaker worship, I wait with other Friends. The waiting, the drifting beneath the surface of the words, allow for a different hearing and seeing and being. I become an absorptive vessel.

Kelly also writes about Holy Obedience. “The wholly obedient life is mastered and unified and simplified and gathered up into the love of God and it lives and walks among men in the perpetual flame of that radiant love. . . Then indeed do we love our neighbors.” This inner obedience means that I can embrace contradictions. I can be myself, locating the experience in my body, and I can forget myself, locating the experience in unity with God. It is here that I find wholeness – where God uses me as an instrument. ~~~

Stanford Searl is working on a memoir, The Black River in Vermont: A Memoir and a book stimulated by his gathered meeting research, Becoming Quaker: Broken Pieces and Celebrations. He is a member of Santa Monica Friends Meeting (PacYM).