It's Not Meditation

He that reproves wickedness is with you; He that is pure is your peace; He that never consented to sin but stands as a witness against it—if you have such a Spirit in you, you have the Spirit of Christ the Savior. So take heed unto Him, believe in Him, mind His leading, and follow Him. If you part not from Him, He will be your everlasting peace and an overruling power to subdue your sins — James Nayler

I sometimes find friends who have adopted the belief that what Quakers do when we gather to worship is mere group meditation, which is a false statement if we are to take meditation as meaning the clearing on ones mind or focusing on inner parts of ourselves. Mere meditation in this manner has not been the method of our worship since the very beginning of the Society. The manner of true worship has always been gathered unity in the presence of Christ so that we may be taught by him.¹ Christ is the leader of his church.² To shift attention away from the presence of Christ is to reject our teacher whom has been with us from the beginning and was the very foundation that brought Quaker faith to the flourishing state it once lived in.

If the worship that the modern friends have adopted is mere meditation, what is being meditated on? I suspect that it’s the loose redefinition of Christ in the form of “that of God.” When the modern friend speaks on “that of God” they no longer mean the universal illumination of Christ made available to each person, it has instead been taken to mean something akin to a divine spark that each person owns inside of themselves. In this meditating, that is the meditating on the divine spark instead of waiting for Christ, we no longer find the powerful ministry of Christ that built the Society. In its place we find ministry of the ego with statements of “I feel, I believe, &c”

In the liberal meetings I have attended, I have seldom heard ministry on the transformation and the perfection that Christ and the early friends spoke of.³ Ministry on general self improvement or a desire towards peace, is not the ministry that was and is delivered from Christ. Fox and other early friends took those they spoke to and left them at the feet of Christ so that they could be led by Christ himself. The ministry given from Christ has the power to turn one from their fallen worldly state and draw them nearer to a state of spiritual perfection in which we become vessels of growth for good fruits. Turning from sin was the central message of Friends. Fox was disturbed by the apostacy around him and those whom only professed Christ with their mouth while their own lives results in bad fruits as a consequence of refusing to truly be taught by Christ in spirit.

It is a grave mistake to attribute “That of God” to something within ourselves that we own. The human ideas of goodness and peace are incapable of comparing to the spiritual blessings attributed to Christ according to the earliest of our Society. Our own understandings and our own ideas about what perfection is do not compare to the true illumination from Christ⁴, we need a solid foundation to stand on and for that foundation to be built, we need a shepherd ⁵ who posesses a higher understanding. That shepherd is only able to come from outside of ourselves. ⁶

For the modern Friend, Christ has been reduced to a vague idea of “goodness” and the inward dwelling of Christ has since been misunderstood as an inner goodness that belongs to man, this is however a great misunderstanding of the original meaning. The inward dwelling does not come from us. From the earliest days of the apostles and the revitalization of their faith through the movement of Fox, the understanding has been that the inward dwelling is the illumination we receive spiritually and inwardly from Christ. Although this inward dwelling leads to pleasant actions being done in the world, it is not our goodness and it is not from our own nature that goodness takes form. Our bodies are the channel that put God’s will to work, it is obedience to this illumination that brings goodness.⁷

There is a degree of humility that we must take before God so that we can be receptive to his Word, what better humility is there than understanding that we are in need of a shepherd. Fox bowed down to Christ and understood that Christ is unchanging.⁸ To subscribe to a quakerism that throws out the unchanging Christ as the head of the church is to make ourselves apostates in the same way that the Anglicans, Catholics, and Puritans were apostates in the days of Fox. To accept this dangerous doctrine is to accept that we too are turned by every wind just as they were.

While it is no doubt a beneficial thing to meditate on goodness, it is not what the original understanding of worship was, and it is not the spiritually sound practice that lifted the Society from few members into a blossoming group of believers whom had unity in what they were witnessing to the world. The early friends may have started as seekers of the Truth, but they did eventually find it. When those friends found the Truth, they walked in its power daily, this is what is meant by walking in the Light. They found the Light of Christ being shown inwardly to them and then relinquished their control to Christ. It is through that relinquishment that we are made clean. This is a fundamental belief of friends that comes directly from the holy scriptures.⁹

When Friends wrote of Christ, they meant what they said and were in unity with Christ. It is truly a sign of spiritual dryness that the friends of today are unable to live in the unifying power of Christ. I urge all to the study of the Holy Scriptures, George Fox, Robert Barclay, James Nayler, and Joseph Phipps. Read these men with the help of Christ, be cradled in the arms of our Lord as thee reads of his nature and all will be revealed in love. The power that moved the early friends is there to move thee, and that power is Christ.

Presence in the Midst - James Doyle Penrose

Footnotes