Three Christians hailed for combining
deep spirituality and action for justice
Winn profiles a lone abolitionist, a "noisy
monk," a woman of substance
by John Filiatreau, Presbyterian News Service
LOUISVILLE -- 8-March-2001 -- Albert C. Winn devoted
his Greenhoe Lecture series to admiring profiles of three extraordinary
Christian writers who in his mind exemplify the ideal balance between
"deep spirituality" on the one hand and "radical social
concern" on the other:
John Woolman, an obscure
18th-century Quaker minister who raised his lonely voice against slavery
in the American colonies; Thomas Merton, a
best-selling Trappist hermit who over three decades issued "a flood
of articles and essays dealing with the great social issues of the
time"; and Elizabeth O'Connor, a
latecomer to Christianity who served and chronicled a mold-breaking
ecumenical church in Washington, D.C., and founded a program that
provides low-cost, decent housing to poor people.
Winn, 79, was a featured lecturer during the Festival
of Theology and Reunion 2001, a three-day event at the Louisville
Presbyterian Theological Seminary (LPTS) that commenced on Monday, March
5. He is a former LPTS president (1966-1973) and professor of systematic
theology ('60-'73), an emeritus for whom a campus building is named.
The annual Greenhoe Lectures are named for Dr.
Theodore M. Greenhoe, an LPTS graduate who served as pastor of
Presbyterian churches in Michigan and Indiana.
John Woolman
In introducing Woolman, Winn said, "I found it
possible to graduate from a first-rate college and a first-rate seminary
without ever hearing that name."
Woolman, born in 1720, was an itinerant preacher who
devoted much of his ministerial career to 41 journeys through the
colonies, from the Carolinas to Massachusetts, during which he dropped
in on Society of Friends meetings and called for the eradication of
slavery, which was widely practiced among the Quakers of his day.
One of the ways Woolman made his living was by writing
wills and bills of sale. A task of that sort occasioned what Winn called
Woolman's "first test of conscience":
"My employer, having a Negro woman, sold her, and
desired me to write a bill of sale. ... The thing was sudden; and though
I felt uneasy at the thought of writing an instrument of slavery for one
of my fellow-creatures, yet I remembered ... that it was my master who
directed me to do it, and that it was an elderly man, a member of our
Society, who bought her; so through weakness I gave way, and wrote it;
but at the executing of it I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said
before my master and the Friend that I believed slave-keeping to be a
practice inconsistent with the Christian religion."
Whereupon Woolman decided that he would no longer
write bills of sale regarding slaves -- and would never again violate
his principles "through weakness."
Living in slave-owners' homes during his journeys also
"roused his conscience":
When I ate, drank, and lodged free-cost with people
who lived in ease on the hard labor of their slaves, I felt uneasy. ...
I saw in these southern provinces so many vices and corruptions
increased by this trade and this way of life, that it appeared to me as
a dark gloominess hanging over the land; and ... the consequences will
be grievous to posterity.
"A remarkable prophecy, made in 1746, over a
hundred years before the Civil War!" Winn said. "Later that
year he wrote a manuscript concerning the keeping of slaves. For some
reason he did not publish it until 1753. I surmise that it was hard for
him to face the opposition that he knew it would arouse. Woolman prized
friendships and liked to be liked. ... His journal is punctuated with
cries and prayers of deep distress."
On later journeys, Winn said, Woolman always
"carried with him a number of small coins and insisted on leaving
them on payment to the slaves, which of course violated the canons of
hospitality and was taken as an insult by those who entertained him. As
a result he had to engage in long and difficult explanations everywhere
he went."
Woolman also shared in the Quakers' opposition to war.
When a tax was imposed to pay for the French and Indian war, he refused
to pay it, writing: "To refuse the active payment of a tax which
our Society generally paid was exceedingly disagreeable; yet to do a
thing contrary to my conscience appeared yet more dreadful." He was
an early draft counselor, arranging for some young men of conscience to
be excused from military service. He gave up retailing, his most
lucrative source of income, because he objected to selling alcohol and
other "superfluities" to the poor. Longing for a life
"more free of outward cumbers," he opposed "wearing too
costly apparel," shunned overly ornamental furniture, and refused
to drink from silver vessels or wear dyed clothes. On a voyage to
England, he would not take a cabin, where he had spied
"superfluities of workmanship," but traveled in steerage
instead. "Every degree of luxury," he wrote, "hath some
connection with evil."
Woolman died of smallpox in England in 1772, during
the last of his journeys. Within 20 years of his death, all Quakers in
the colonies had emancipated their slaves. By the turn of the century,
Britain no longer had merchant ships engaged in the slave trade.
Two things were particularly important in Woolman's
spiritual quest, Winn said: Bible reading and prayer, both of which he
took up very early in life. "Before I was seven years old,"
Woolman wrote, "I began to be acquainted with the operations of
Divine love." In prayer, he often "retired" or
"withdrew" into "private places," where he
"besought the Lord to take me wholly under his direction, and show
me the way in which I ought to walk," and practiced the discipline
of silence so that he could listen for "the voice of the true
Shepherd."
Winn said a vision Woolman had "illustrates
better than anything else he ever wrote, the combination of deep
spirituality and social passion that marked his life": "In a
time of sickness ... I was brought so near the gates of death that I
forgot my name. Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of
matter of a dully gloomy color between the south and the east, and was
informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they
could be and live; and that I was mixed with them, and that henceforth I
might not consider myself as a distinct or separate being."
Winn pointed out that Woolman's journal, published
after his death in 1774, "has never been out of print,""
adding modestly, "I report this as the author of six books -- all
of which are out of print."
Thomas Merton
Winn called Woolman "a simple man, almost a
transparent man"; by contrast, he said, Merton was "a complex
man, a riddle, whose life was marked by bewildering twists and
turns."
He noted that Merton's life divides neatly into two
27-year periods: a dissolute youth and a maturity marked by "a
deep, sincere desire to devote himself entirely to contemplative
prayer" -- the first period ending and the second beginning with
the publication of his best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey
Mountain.
Merton hoped "to become a quiet, contemplative
monk, to find peace," Winn said, "but ... he had a writer on
his back, and his superiors were in league with that monster. When they
found out he could write, they assigned him for his work, instead of
labor in the fields, hours at the typewriter."
Merton's internal journey, Winn said, was a quest to
understand and practice contemplative prayer, which he once defined as
"a deep and simplified spiritual activity in which the mind and
will rest in a unified and simple concentration upon God, turned to Him,
intent upon Him and absorbed in His own light."
While Merton "was never sure that he had
experienced the mystical union," Winn said, "others who
observed him in his final days felt that he had. Some of the Buddhists
who met him felt he was an incarnation of the Buddha."
Meanwhile, Winn said, Merton was evincing "a
social passion one would not expect of a cloistered monk." While
Merton's attitude toward creation when he entered the monastery was
dismissive -- in Winn's telling, he considered the world
"corrupt," "hated it" and "was glad to escape
it" -- his attitude changed during a 1957 visit to Louisville, when
he was "suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all
those people, that they were mine, and I theirs. ... It was such a
relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud."
"It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the
human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one
which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself
gloried in becoming a member of the human race! ... If only everybody
could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of
telling people that they are all walking around shining like the
sun."
This newfound investment in the humanity led Merton to
take an interest in social issues, notably including nuclear warfare,
race relations, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Many of his opinions
on such issues were controversial and brought him into conflict with his
superiors, who censored his work, held up publication for months or
years and ultimately silenced him altogether. (Eventually times changed
and Merton resumed his public witness.)
Merton devoted a lot of thought to the balance between
spirituality and social passion. "Far from being essentially
opposed to each other," he wrote, "interior contemplation and
external activity are two aspects of the same love of God."
Winn concluded that Merton "remains a puzzling,
fascinating, inspiring example of the combination we are stressing in
these lectures."
Elizabeth
O'Connor
Elizabeth O'Connor was raised outside any religious
tradition by parents who were embittered ex-Catholics. Her spiritual
life began in her 30s, when she was dragged to church by a friend and
heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount by a young Baptist minister,
the Rev. Gordon Cosby, in the church Cosby co-founded in 1947 in
Washington, D.C., the Church of the Savior.
This non-denominational church of "gifted"
lay people was evangelistic and deeply committed to social justice. It
spun off more than a handful of like-minded churches in the Washington
area and around the country. Small "mission groups" of 10 or
12 members of the Church of the Savior created programs for poor
children and families, orphans and foster children, alcoholics and drug
addicts, troubled children, the homeless, the unemployed, residents of
public housing. Dozens of these programs are still in operation today.
O'Connor was particularly devoted to The Potter's
House, a coffeehouse and bookstore whose purpose was to draw "unchurched"
people into conversation about the Gospel and eventually to convert them
to Christianity.
Later she founded Sarah's Circle, which she had
envisioned as an apartment house where single, aging women (like
herself) could live in dignity and safety. For practical reasons it
became a community for both genders and more than one age group.
O'Connor and her supporters raised $1 million for the program, and when
Sarah's Circle opened, they moved in. O'Connor died there in 1998.
"Like every story of creation the story of
Sarah's Circle is one of agony and ecstasy, of pain and hope. ... Some
days I have wanted to close the door on Sarah's Circle and walk away
forever. What does it matter how good and beautiful are the visions that
stir our imaginations when they take us into waters that appear too
stormy to our frightened selves. ... The intergenerational community we
found in our circle included not only those frail and vulnerable old,
but drug dealers, alcoholics, battered wives and abused children."
O'Connor maintained what were essentially three
full-time jobs. She was a devoted church worker, a group therapist who
commuted to New York for sessions, and a writer. The fuel she burned was
equal parts Bible study and prayer.
"From the very first the Church of the Savior had
insisted that its social passion should always be matched by a spiritual
quest. ... There was a great temptation, as they faced the insistent,
often emergency needs of the poor, to omit Bible study and prayer and
devote that time to action. If they never did, I have the feeling that
it was due to Elizabeth O'Connor."
In prayer, she turned more and more in Merton's
direction, reading the works of the great contemplatives and mystics and
developing a keen interest in contemplation; but late in life, when she
was crippled by arthritis, she "went back to simple petitionary
prayer.
"In Scripture she experimented with memorization,
committing the whole Letter to the Ephesians to memory," Winn said.
"She tried staying with one book for a whole year. Exodus became a
favorite with her; again and again she returned to the story of Moses,
every time with fresh insights. But her books are studded with
quotations and allusions to all parts of Scripture. She was saturated
with it."
Winn said O'Connor recommended "the practice of
meditation," explaining: "This is the practice of reading the
bible, not to do something to it -- to outline it, to find grist for a
sermon you are preaching or a class you are teaching, to find support
for your views in an argument -- but to let it do something to you, to
listen to it as God's word."
O'Connor noted that when the Potter's House
"prayer hour" from 5 p.m. to 6 went well, the atmosphere was
warm and wonderful for the rest of the night; but when it didn't go well
the atmosphere was strained and difficult.
"When the work of prayer has been done, we can
see and hear in each other what otherwise comes to us distorted, or is
entirely blotted out. We do not have to find a place for ourselves in
the scheme of things. Prayer frees us to be for the other person. It is
preparation for the event of community."
O'Connor had a conscience that Woolman would have
recognized: For many years, she struggled with the question
"whether as a single person she should prudently provide for her
old age, or give away most of her savings and salary, live in poverty
herself, and trust God." According to Winn, the question became
"a recurring agony" for O'Connor.
... and Al Winn
"I have tried to introduce to you three of my
close friends, mentors, models," Winn concluded. "... All of
them combined deep spirituality and social passion in a marvelous way.
By the singular beauty of their lives, each lures you and me to attempt
the same combination. May God strengthen us in that resolve."
Asked whether he has managed that combination in his
own life, Winn laughed and replied: "Well, I try. But I'm no
model."
