“In those days, I will also pour out my Spirit on the male and female slaves.”
All about Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883)
Today we celebrate the prophetess Sojourner Truth, who died on November 26th, 1883 at the age of 86. She is remembered for her relentless, Spirit-filled work as an abolitionist, women’s suffragist, and evangelist.
She was sold as a child into slavery in New York. She worked on a farm and often retreated into the woods nearby where she prayed to God by a “temple of brush” that she had made. In her twenties, she obeyed a vision from the Lord to take her baby, Sophia, and walk away from the family that enslaved her. It was a frightening experience for her to live out on her own, and she considered going back to work on the farm, but Jesus appeared to her in a vision and prayed for her, giving her the strength to continue.
After these and other experiences with God, she saw her life and ministry as uniquely situated to be a leader involved in two movements in the United States: the abolition of slavery, and the right of women to vote. As a woman leader and a former slave, she saw her gifts of leadership and freedom from slavery as something that God wanted for all women and all people who were enslaved. She used her life story and experiences with God as the basis for her political and theological views.
She is also remembered fondly for her straight-gazed challenges to live by faith. When some other notable abolitionists were advocating for violent uprisings to end slavery, Truth asked them the question: “Is God gone?”
Quotes
If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.
And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the “Peculiar Institution?” If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system – which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her minsters and churches – we wish to be shown where it can be found.
More
Nice resources from her home town memorial association in Battle Creek: [link]
Have mercy on those who doubt. Save some by snatching them from the fire.
All about Lucretia Mott (1793-1880)
Lucretia Mott became a Quaker minister at 25. Her whole adult life was devoted to church reform, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery.
In her bid to end the evil of slavery, she and others refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar, and other slave-produced goods as part of their protest. In 1833 Mott, along with Mary Ann M’Clintock and nearly 30 other female abolitionists, organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She later served as a delegate from that organization to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, her Pennsylvania home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. In 1866, Mott became the first president of the American Equal Rights Association.
In 1848 Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton held the Seneca Falls Convention advocating rights for women. Stanton remembered after she died, “When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin and John Knox had, it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth.” Mott was admired by followers and opponents for her clear thinking, passion, uncompromising convictions and courageous action.
At the convention, Mott presented the “Declaration of Sentiments,” [Fan favorite in light of recent events: “He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.” The resolutions attached included equal including property rights, the right to divorce, increased access to education, and the right to vote.
The last sentiment, voting rights, divided the convention; however, it was ultimately included in the Declaration and became the foundation of the women’s suffrage movement. It was forty years after Mott died before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote in 1920.
Mott’s fight for women’s rights included education. Her most famous work: Discourse on Woman, was published in 1849. She led the founding of Moore College of Art and the Medical College of Pennsylvania, both in Philadelphia. She was one of the founders of Swarthmore College.
Quotes:
We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.
It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her.
The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
Any great change must expect opposition, because it shakes the very foundation of privilege.
I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity.
It is time that Christians were judged more by their likeness to Christ than their notions of Christ. Were this sentiment generally admitted we should not see such tenacious adherence to what men deem the opinions and doctrines of Christ while at the same time in every day practice is exhibited anything but a likeness to Christ.
More
Lucretia Mott at Roadside
Explore PA History supplies a good bio giving background for the historical marker at the site of “Roadside” (Old York Rd. and Latham Park in Elkins Park). The Mott family moved from 1316 Chestnut to this country house in 1857 and Mott died there. It was torn down by a developer in 1912.
“Lucretia Mott, the Brazen Infidel, ” a bio from the Unitarians [link]
Video from series on Philadelphia Women:
What do we do with this?
Lucretia Mott is such an inspiring example. What movement is God starting with us? Will we have the faith and courage to follow through?
Mott was among those who were disappointed the 15th Amendment gave the right to vote to black men, but not women. Radical and conservative reactions to that event divided the suffragist movement until it reunited in 1890. Have you ever been in a social action movement that divided and failed? James notes how common this is: “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it, so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have because you do not ask. “ (James 4:1-2)
Name the evil against which you should be organizing. Take the lead, or join in.
Now when the Lamb opened the seventh seal there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. — Revelation 8:1 (NET)
All about Thomas Keating (1923–2018)
Thomas Keating, was an American, Roman Catholic monk and priest of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists). He was born into affluence and privilege in Manhattan, walked away from it all when he entered an austere monastic community in Rhode Island, and was rewarded with spiritual riches. As he told the story:
“At 5, I had a serious illness. I heard adults in the next room wondering whether I’d live. I took this very seriously, and at my first Mass bargained with God: ‘If you’ll let me live to 21, I’ll become a priest.’ After that, I’d skip out early in the morning before school and go to Mass. I knew my parents wouldn’t approve, so I never told them.”
Keating was known as one of the principal developers of a contemporary method of contemplative prayer called centering prayer that emerged from St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. Over the years, his thoughts crystallized into what friends said became one of his favorite sayings: “Silence is God’s first language. Everything else is a poor translation.”
Keating went to the Buckley School, a private school on the Upper East Side, and Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts before entering Yale. As he studied Christianity, he was drawn to the mystics and came to believe the Scriptures call people into a personal relationship with God. Eager to explore his spirituality, he transferred from Yale to an accelerated program at the Jesuit-run Fordham University in the Bronx. He graduated in 1943. He expected to be drafted in World War II but received a deferment to enter the seminary. In 1944, at the age of 20, he entered the strict Cistercian Monastery Our Lady of the Valley in Valley Falls, R.I. He was ordained a priest in 1949.
“I felt the more austere the life, the sooner I would achieve the contemplative life I sought,” he continued. “I spent the next five to six years observing almost total silence.” In 1950, while Father Keating was in Rhode Island, the monastery burned down and the monks moved to St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, in central Massachusetts. He left Spencer in 1958 to help start a new monastic community, St. Benedict’s, in Snowmass, Colo., not far from Aspen. In 1961 he was elected abbot at St. Joseph’s and returned to Massachusetts, where he served in that capacity for the next two decades.
In 1971, after the Second Vatican Council, at which Pope Paul VI encouraged priests and religious scholars to renew the Christian contemplative tradition, Father Keating was invited to Rome. This led him, along with William Meninger and Basil Pennington, to develop the practice of centering prayer.
But his enthusiasm for this approach led to tensions within the abbey, and a vote on whether he should remain as abbot was evenly split. He decided he did not want to remain in a house so divided and moved back to Snowmass. It was a liberating move for him. He began organizing conferences with representatives of other religions, including the Dalai Lama, imams and rabbis.
During this period he focused more on centering prayer, holding workshops and retreats to promote it to clergy and lay people. In 1984, He helped found Contemplative Outreach, a network of people who practice centering prayer, and was its president from 1985 to 1999. “Centering prayer is all about heartfulness, which is a little different from mindfulness,” the Rev. Carl Arico, a co-founder of Contemplative Outreach. “It goes to the relationship with God, who is already there. It’s not sitting in a void.”
“A Big Experiment“: A brief history of the beginnings of the Snowmass Conference and the Eight Points of Agreement that came out of the initial years of dialogue.
Check out the work of Thomas Keating preserved in the work of Contemplative Outreach. Here is a link to their guides for contemplative practice.
Prayer Keating’s “Welcoming Prayer:”
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within.
Amen.
Robinson with Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese on a TOPS card.
Bible connection
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also….
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. — Matthew 5:38-9, 43-45 (KJV)
All about Jackie Robinson (1919-1972)
The movie 42and celebrations of the centennial of Jackie Robinson’s birth allowed Americans to remember his great achievements on the baseball diamond — including helping the Dodgers win the 1955 World Series and having his number retired by every Major League Baseball team in 1997. But mostly it helped everyone focus on the impact he had on ending segregation and helping to spur the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s.
Robinson died of a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 53. His famous quote is etched on his tombstone at his Brooklyn gravesite: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
Robinson’s impact on others continues to this day. His .311 lifetime batting average and 1962 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame rank him among the best ballplayers in history. But of even greater impact was his historic integration of the Great American Pastime. His courageous, faith-driven acceptance of this role made him the target of racist taunts from spectators and by many unwilling to accept that a Black man should play alongside white players.
While growing up in Pasadena, California, Robinson was influenced by a minister named Karl Everitt Downs, of Scott Methodist Church where Robinson’s mother, Mallie, attended. Mallie believed in God, and she instilled in the importance of faith in her son. She also taught him to be proud of his God-given blackness. When telling the Genesis creation story to her children, Mallie depicted Adam and Eve as black-skinned, explaining that their skin turned pale after they sinned. “Karl was the father that Jack didn’t have,” Rachel Robinson (Jackie’s wife) said. “Jack was so close to him. He kept saying that Karl changed his life.” We know that Robinson’s passionate sense of justice had gotten him into trouble earlier in life. But the patient mentoring of Karl Downs convinced him that Christ’s command to “resist not evil” wasn’t a cowardly way out but a profoundly heroic stance. Those relationships led him to Christ and made him a believer.
Historians and academics have pointed out how pop culture, sports journalism and Hollywood have often left Robinson’s religion out of his life story. For example, the movie 42 spends very little time exploring it. A four-hour Robinson documentary directed by Ken Burns barely mentions faith. Here’s the main mention in 42:
The Brooklyn Dodgers owner, Branch Rickey, was a “Bible-thumping Methodist” who refused to attend games on Sunday. Robinson was also a Methodist. They both on faith to overcome threats when they decided to end racial segregation in baseball. Rickey sincerely believed it was God’s will that he integrate baseball and saw it as an opportunity to intervene in the moral history of the nation, as Lincoln had done. A deep-rooted bond formed between the men. Robinson and Rickey were genuine Christians, muscular Christians certainly, but fully Christian in their concern for their fellow human beings. It was no act when Rickey read the passage from Giovanni Papini’s The Life of Christ to a skeptical Robinson at their historic first meeting in Brooklyn on August 28, 1945 (see today’s Bible reading).
“When I came to believe that God was working with and guiding Mr. Rickey,” Robinson wrote, “I began to also believe that he was guiding me.” And Rickey chose Robinson because of the young man’s faith and moral character. There were numerous other Negro Leagues players to consider, but Rickey knew integrating the racist world of professional sports would take more than athletic ability. The attacks would be ugly, and the press would fuel the fire. If the player chosen were goaded into retaliating, the grand experiment would be set back a decade or more.
Following his retirement, Robinson became more public about his faith. In 1962, during a speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Robinson said, “As the first Negro in the majors, I needed the support and backing of my own people. I’ll never forget what ministers like you who lead [the] SCLC did for me.” There’s little doubt that faith played a significant role in this success.
Jackie Robinson had a habit of kneeling for nightly prayers. The self-discipline he maintained changed the world in significant ways. Check your own.
Robinson grew up with a personal moral code taught by most white and black Protestants in the early 20th century—no smoking, no drinking, no premarital sex. But he was also shaped by the social witness distinct to the black church, believing that Christians had a responsibility to combat racism in American society, that anti-racism was a mark of true Christianity, and that many white Christians were failing to practice what they preached. How do you relate to those elements of his faith?
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Get up early in the morning, confront Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me, or this time I will send the full force of my plagues against you and against your officials and your people, so you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth. For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth. But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. You still set yourself against my people and will not let them go. Therefore, at this time tomorrow I will send the worst hailstorm that has ever fallen on Egypt, from the day it was founded till now.
All about Rosa Parks (1913-2005)
Civil rights activist Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. She died on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92 in Detroit, Michigan. Her death was marked by several memorial services, among them lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., where an estimated 50,000 people viewed her casket.
Most people know the story of the seamstress who helped ignite the civil-rights movement, but many people don’t know that Rosa Parks was a devout Christian, and that it was her faith that gave her the strength to do what she did that day in 1955.
In her book, Quiet Strength, Parks says her belief in God developed early in life. “Every day before supper and before we went to services on Sundays,” Parks says, “my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton in the fields. Prayer and the Bible became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put my trust in God and to seek Him as my strength.”
Parks’ husband, Raymond, had been an early activist in the fight for civil rights, and Rosa joined him in his work. But she says she never planned to be arrested for breaking a racist law. On December 1, 1955, Parks was sitting on a bus in the front row of the section reserved for blacks. But when a white man got on, there were no more seats in the white section, so the bus driver told Parks to move back.
Parks was convinced that to move would be wrong—and she refused to get up. “Since I have always been a strong believer in God,” she says, “I knew that He was with me, and only He could get me through that next step.”
Parks was not the first black person to refuse to move to the back of the bus. Earlier that year, a woman had been carried off the bus clawing and kicking. Another woman had used profanity during her arrest. But the local NAACP declined to rally behind these women.
Parks’ behavior throughout her arrest was above reproach. Because of this, and because of her well-known exemplary character, Alabama civil-rights leaders thought Park’s arrest signaled the right time to act. They launched the famous year-long Montgomery bus boycott, and the rest is history.
Rosa Parks is another example of how faith in Jesus played a major role in the civil-rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. turned the other cheek in the face of violence. Jackie Robinson’s Christian faith was what led Branch Rickey—another devout Christian—to choose him as the man to break the color barrier in baseball.
Although she had become a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks suffered hardship in the months following her arrest in Montgomery and the subsequent boycott. She lost her department store job and her husband was fired after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or their legal case. Unable to find work, they eventually left Montgomery and moved to Detroit, Michigan. There, Rosa made a new life for herself, working as a secretary and receptionist in U.S. Representative John Conyer’s congressional office. She also served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
In 1987, with longtime friend Elaine Eason Steele, Rosa founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The organization runs “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours, introducing young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country.
In 1992, Rosa published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography recounting her life in the segregated South. In 1995, she published Quiet Strength which includes her memoirs and focuses on the role that religious faith played throughout her life.
“From my upbringing and the Bible,” Parks wrote, “I learned people should stand up for rights just as the children of Israel stood up to the Pharaoh.”
Despite all she endured at the hands of some whites, Rosa Parks never fell to judging the whole race by the behavior of a few of its members, however appalling. In later years she would tell of the kindness of an old woman near her grandparents farm who used to take her bass fishing with crawfish tails as bait—an old white woman who treated her grandparents as equals. Even as a girl she appreciated that it was northern white industrialists with names like Carnegie, Huntington, and Rockefeller who were responsible for financing many of the Tuskegee Institute’s exquisite redbrick buildings. And she never forgot the white World War I Yankee doughboy who came to town and patted her kindly on the head in passing, an unheard-of gesture in the South. Her Christian faith only made her feel sorry for the white tormentors who called her “nigger” or threw rocks at her as she walked to school. Reading Psalms 23 and 27 early on had given Rosa McCauley the strength to love her enemy.
There is always a new Pharaoh clawing for dominance, isn’t there? Consider the oppressors of today and how Jesus might be calling you, or us, to respond.
Pray, in particular, for all the people simply saying, “black lives matter.” In a world so deformed by racism this obvious truth is still a rallying cry and a hope, a way to oppose the powers that be.
In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.
All about William J. Seymour (1870-1922)
William Joseph Seymour was born May 2, 1870 in Centerville, St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. His parents, Simon Seymour (also known as Simon Simon) and Phillis Salabar were both former slaves.
After Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Seymour’s father enlisted in the Northern Army and served until the end of the Civil War. He may have contracted malaria or another tropical disease in the southern swamps. Simon never fully recovered.
William Seymour, the oldest in a large family, lived his early years in abject poverty. In 1896 the family’s possessions were listed as “one old bedstead, one old chair and one old mattress.” All of his mother’s personal property was valued at fifty-five cents. He also suffered the injustice and prejudice of the reconstruction south. Violence against freedman was common and groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized southern Louisiana.
Many accounts of Seymour’s life say he was illiterate. This is not true. He attended a freedman school in Centerville and learned to read and write. In fact, his signature shows a good penmanship. Fleeing the poverty and oppression of life in southern Louisiana, Seymour left his home in early adulthood. He traveled and worked in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and other states possibly including Missouri and Tennessee. He often worked as a waiter in big city hotels.
In Indianapolis, Seymour was converted in a Methodist Church. Soon, however, he joined the Church of God Reformation movement in Anderson, Indiana. At the time, the group was called “The Evening Light Saints.” While with this conservative Holiness group, Seymour was sanctified and called to preach. After a near fatal bout with smallpox, Seymour yielded to the call to ministry. The illness left him blind in one eye and scarred his face. For the rest of his life he wore a beard to hide the scars.
In 1905, Seymour was in Houston, Texas where he heard the Pentecostal message for the first time. He attended a Bible school conducted by Charles F. Parham. Parham was the founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement, a “tritheist,” also a member of the KKK and arrested as a pedophile (see Goff, James R. Jr. (1988). Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 1-55728-025-8). Because of the strict segregation laws of the times, Seymour was forced to sit outside the class room in the hall way. Nevertheless, he soon picked up all of Parham’s teaching, though not the gift of tongues. Parham and Seymour held joint meetings in Houston, with Seymour preaching to black audiences and Parham speaking to the white groups. Parham hoped to use Seymour to spread the Apostolic Faith message to the African-Americans in Texas. He and Seymour are both called the the father of the modern Pentecostal/Charismatic revival.
Neely Terry, a guest from Los Angeles met Seymour while he was preaching at a small church regularly pastored by Lucy Farrar (also spelled Farrow). Farrar was also an employee of Parham and was serving his family in Kansas. When Terry returned to Los Angeles, she persuaded the small Holiness church she attended to call Seymour to Los Angeles for a meeting. Her pastor, Julia Hutchinson, extended the invitation.
Seymour arrived in Los Angeles in February 1906. His early efforts to preach the Pentecostal message were rebuffed and he was locked out of the church. The leadership were suspicious of Seymour’s doctrine, but were especially concerned that he was preaching an experience that he had not received. He joined a prayer group in which his host was involved. On April 9, that man was baptized in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues. News of this event spread and a powerful outpouring followed. Over the next few days hundreds gathered. The streets were filled and Seymour preached from the porch. On April 12, three days after the initial outpouring, Seymour received his own Spirit baptism.
The group quickly outgrew the home. Seymour wrote:
In a short time God began to manifest His power and soon the building could not contain the people. Now the meetings continue all day and into the night and the fire is kindling all over the city and surrounding towns. Proud, well-dressed preachers come in to “investigate.” Soon their high looks are replaced with wonder, then conviction comes, and very often you will find them in a short time wallowing on the dirty floor, asking God to forgive them and make them as little children. ― The Azusa Papers
They found a bigger place at 312 Azusa Street. The mission had been built as an African Methodist Episcopal Church, but when the former tenants vacated, the upstairs sanctuary had been converted into apartments. A fire destroyed the pitched roof and it was replaced with a flat roof giving the 40 X 60 feet building the appearance of a square box. The unfinished downstairs with a low ceiling and dirt floor was used as a storage building and stable. This downstairs became the home of the Apostolic Faith Mission. Mismatched chairs and wooden planks were collected for seats and a prayer altar and two wooden crates covered by a cheap cloth became the pulpit.
On April 17, The Los Angeles Daily Times sent a reporter to the revival. In his article the next day, he lampooned the meeting and the pastor, calling the worshippers “a new sect of fanatics” and Seymour “an old exhorter.” He mocked their glossolalia as “weird babel of tongues.” However, his article was published on the same day as the great earthquake in San Francisco. Southern Californians, already gripped with fear, learned of a revival where doomsday prophecies were common.
Immediately an itinerate evangelist and Azusa Street participant published a tract about the earthquake. Thousands of the tracts, filled with end-time prophecies, were distributed. Soon, multitudes gathered at Azusa Street. One attendee said more than a thousand at a time would crowd onto the property. Hundreds would fill the little building; others would watch from the boardwalk; and, more would overflow into the dirt street.
With the help of a stenographer and editor the mission began to publish a newspaper, The Apostolic Faith. Seymour’s sermons were transcribed and printed, along with news of the meetings and the many missionaries that were being sent forth. Circulation for the little paper soon passed 50,000.
To Seymour, tongues was not the only message of Azusa Street: “Don’t go out of here talking about tongues: talk about Jesus,” he admonished.
An expression of the Spirit as notable as tongues was how blacks and whites were in one church at Azusa St. Seymour rejected racial barriers that plagued the Church at that time. Blacks and whites worked together in apparent harmony under the direction of a black pastor, a marvel in the days of Jim Crow segregation. One commentator said: “At Azusa Street, the color line was washed away in the Blood.”
What’s more, Seymour installed women as leaders (notably Lucy Farrow, a formerly enslaved woman and the niece of Frederick Douglass), which was almost universally opposed at the time. Seymour dreamed that Azusa Street was creating a new kind of church, one where a common experience in the Holy Spirit tore down old walls of racial, ethnic, and denominational differences.
Seymour quotes
I can say, through the power of the Spirit that wherever God can get a people that will come together in one accord and one mind in the Word of God, the baptism of the Holy Ghost will fall upon them, like as at Cornelius’ house.
So many today are worshiping in the mountains, big churches, stone and frame buildings. But Jesus teaches that salvation is not in these stone structures–not in the mountains—not in the hills, but in God.
The Pentecostal power, when you sum it all up, is just more of God’s love. If it does not bring more love, it is simply a counterfeit.
Many people today are sanctified, cleansed from all sin and perfectly consecrated to God, but they have never obeyed the Lord according to Acts 1, 4, 5, 8 and Luke 24: 39, for their real personal Pentecost, the enduement of power for service and work and for sealing unto the day of redemption. The baptism with the Holy Ghost is a free gift without repentance upon the sanctified, cleansed vessel. “Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God, who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts” (2 Cor. 1: 21-22). I praise our God for the sealing of the Holy Spirit unto the day of redemption
A great theater note on the Gospel at Colonus enlightens us about ecstatic spiritual gifts. [link]
What do we do with this?
Seymour would probably simply ask us to consider his observation: “Many people today are sanctified, cleansed from all sin and perfectly consecrated to God, but they have never obeyed the Lord according to Acts 1, 4, 5, 8 and Luke 24: 39, for their real personal Pentecost, the enduement of power for service and work and for sealing unto the day of redemption.” What would you say about yourself?
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
All about Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)
Nouwen was born on January 24, 1932 in Nijkirk, Holland. He became widely respected internationally as a pastor and professor of theology and psychology. Nouwen experienced a sheltered and strongly Catholic upbringing. Even as child he felt called to become a priest. Before his ordination in 1957, he studied theology at the Minor Seminary in Apeldoorn and then the Major Seminary in Rijenburg. Afterwards, he went on to study psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegan.
Nouwen developed a strong interest in the integration of psychology and theology. He moved to the United States in 1964 to study at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. While in the United States, he became interested in the civil rights movement and joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 march from Selma to Montgomery. He also spent two years teaching clinical psychology courses at the University of Notre Dame before returning, in 1968, to the Netherlands, where he worked at the Amsterdam Joint Pastoral Institute and the Catholic Theological Institute of Utrecht. In 1971 Nouwen again travelled to the United States, this time responding to an invitation to teach at Yale Divinity School.
1972 – The Wounded Healer.
In 1974, Nouwen spent seven months living, worshiping, and working alongside the Trappist monks in the Abbey of the Genesee in Piffard, New York.
1975 – Reaching Out
1976 – The Genesee Diary
He went on to explore various other groups, teaching positions, and missions in a desire to discover where his calling was leading him.
1981 – The Way of the Heart
This search included work with Maryknoll missionaries in Peru and Bolivia.
1983 – Gracias!: A Latin American Journal
His search also led to his involvement with L’Arche, a movement of communities for the disabled, first in France. Nouwen eventually moved to L’Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada in 1986, where he lived for the rest of his life.
1989 – In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership
1992 – Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
1992 – The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming
1994 – Here and Now: Living in the Spirit
He died on September 21, 1996 while travelling through his homeland, Holland. During his life Henri Nouwen authored more than forty books, which have sold more than seven million copies and have been translated into over twenty languages.
Henri’s transparency, intelligence and faith brought him many readers. He has led many of us to deeply value solitude and contemplative practices. In this excerpt from The Way of the HeartHenri reflects on the call to solitude that led the Desert Fathers and Mothers (and us, still today) to understand their gifts by fleeing the shipwreck of the society of their day:
Our society is not a community radiant with the love of Christ, but a dangerous network of domination and manipulation in which we can easily get entangled and lose our soul. The basic question is whether we ministers of Jesus Christ have not already been so deeply molded by the seductive powers of our dark world that we have become blind to our own and other people’s fatal state and have lost the power and motivation to swim for our lives.
Quotes:
“As soon as we are alone…inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics
“Aren’t you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: ‘May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.’ But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.” ― Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
“Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.” ― Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
“For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.
Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.” ― The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming
More
The Henri Nouwen Society can tell you everything: [link]
His books in chronological order with descriptions [link]
On Nouwen’s struggles with celibacy and orientation: [link][link]
What do we do with this?
Nouwen is famous for encouraging self-reliant and denial-ridden Christians to accept their neediness and self-delusion. He taught that healers are wounded, like Jesus.
Are you avoiding solitude because your outer distractions are helping you avoid your inner turmoil and the struggle of spiritual development? Probably. We hope your church is devoted to going deep with God. If so, they’ll be dealing with many people who are determined to stay shallow. Let God pull you under. Be receptive to being loved. Don’t get stuck avoiding the dreadful thought that you don’t love enough or are not loved well enough.
The Spirit of God came on Azariah son of Oded.He went out to meet Asa and said to him, “Listen to me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin. The Lord is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.For a long time Israel was without the true God, without a priest to teach and without the law.But in their distress they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, and he was found by them.In those days it was not safe to travel about, for all the inhabitants of the lands were in great turmoil.One nation was being crushed by another and one city by another, because God was troubling them with every kind of distress.But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.” — 2 Chronicles 15:1-7
All about Johnny Cash (1932-2003)
John R. “Johnny” Cash born February 26, 1932. He is widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century and is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 90 million records worldwide. Although primarily remembered as a country music icon, his genre-spanning songs and sound embraced rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel. His crossover appeal won Cash the rare honor of being inducted into the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Gospel Music Halls of Fame.
Cash was known for his deep, calm bass-baritone voice, a rebelliousness coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor, free prison concerts, and his trademark attire, which earned him the nickname “The Man in Black.” He traditionally began his concerts with the simple “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” followed by his signature Folsom Prison Blues.
Much of Cash’s music echoed themes of sorrow, moral tribulation and redemption, especially in later life. During the last stage of his career, Cash covered songs by several late 20th century rock artists, most notably Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (video below).
Cash was raised by his parents as a Southern Baptist. He was baptized in 1944 in the Tyronza River as a member of the Central Baptist Church of Dyess, Arkansas.
A troubled but devout Christian, Cash has been characterized as a “lens through which to view American contradictions and challenges.” He wrote a Christian novel, Man in White, which showcases his theological studies. It is is a portrait of six pivotal years in the life of the apostle, Paul. In the introduction Cash writes about a reporter who, once tried to paint him into a corner, baiting him to acknowledge a single denominational persuasion at the center of his heart. Finally, Cash laid down the law: “I—as a believer that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, the Christ of the Greeks, was the Anointed One of God (born of the seed of David, upon faith as Abraham has faith, and it was accounted to him for righteousness)—am grafted onto the true vine, and am one of the heirs of God’s covenant with Israel….I’m a Christian. Don’t put me in another box.”
He made a spoken word recording of the entire New King James Version of the New Testament. Cash declared he was “the biggest sinner of them all”, and viewed himself overall as a complicated and contradictory man. Accordingly, Cash is said to have “contained multitudes,” and has been deemed “the philosopher-prince of American country music.”
Cash’s daughter, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, once pointed out that “My father was raised a Baptist, but he has the soul of a mystic. He’s a profoundly spiritual man, but he readily admits to a continual attraction for all seven deadly sins.”
“There’s nothing hypocritical about it,” Johnny Cash told Rolling Stone author Anthony DeCurtis. “There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I’m the biggest sinner of them all.” To Cash, even his near deadly bout with drug addiction contained a crucial spiritual element. “I used drugs to escape, and they worked pretty well when I was younger. But they devastated me physically and emotionally—and spiritually … [they put me] in such a low state that I couldn’t communicate with God. There’s no lonelier place to be. I was separated from God, and I wasn’t even trying to call on him. I knew that there was no line of communication. But he came back. And I came back.”
“Being a Christian isn’t for sissies,” Cash said once. “It takes a real man to live for God—a lot more man than to live for the devil, you know? If you really want to live right these days, you gotta be tough.”
What’s more, he was intimately aware of the hard truths about living God’s way: “If you’re going to be a Christian, you’re going to change. You’re going to lose some old friends, not because you want to, but because you need to.”
”I’m thrilled to death with life,” he told Larry King during an interview. “Life is—the way God has given it to me—was just a platter. A golden platter of life laid out there for me. It’s been beautiful.”
“I don’t give up … and it’s not out of frustration and desperation that I say ‘I don’t give up.’ I don’t give up because I don’t give up. I don’t believe in it.”
What do we do with this?
Johnny Cash was a celebrity, which usually equals trouble. He had plenty of trouble. But he also had plenty of conviction that lasted his whole life. In many ways he is an “everyman” who stubbornly tried to do his best, often standing with the downtrodden. Notably, he risked his career early on to speak out on behalf of Native Americans. He used his capabilities and his notoriety for more than his own pleasure and profit.
Cash sang these words in one of his last songs, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” recorded in 2003 in the final months of his life and released posthumously in 2010: “When I hear that trumpet sound, I’m gonna rise right out of the ground. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down. … Well, meet me, Jesus, meet me. Meet me in the middle of the air. And if these wings don’t fail me, I will meet You anywhere.”
Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. — 1 Corinthians 2:6-13
All about Madeleine L’Engle (1918 – 2007)
“A Wrinkle in Time
saved me because it so captured the grief and sense of isolation
I felt as a child. I was eight years old when it came out, in third grade,
and I believed in it—in the plot, the people and the emotional truth
of their experience. This place was never a good match for me,
but the book greatly diminished my sense of isolation as great books
have done ever since. I must have read it a dozen times.”
—Anne Lamott
Formidable in personality and far-ranging in accomplishments, Madeleine L’Engle wrote more than 60 books, including novels, poetry, memoir, essays, sermons, commentaries, and creative nonfiction. She is best known for A Wrinkle in Time, the first novel in the Time Quintet, but she may be best loved for Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, her breathtaking opus on the creative process. In it, she writes, “We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions.”
L’Engle refused to be forced into “either/or.” Her life and work reflect her determination: Icon and Iconoclast, Sacred and Secular, Faith and Science, Religion and Art, Fact and Fiction. She showed a clear preference for risk over certainty, narrative over affirmation, and questions over answers.
L’Engle’s refusal to be pigeonholed had a tumultuous effect on her life and career. The mixed reception of A Wrinkle in Time is one example. Wrinkle is clearly, unequivocally Christian, enough to make non-religious readers squirm. Lois Lowry, a celebrated children’s author, has expressed doubt that the book would even be published today. “In the world of literature, Christianity is no longer respectable,” wrote L’Engle. “When I am referred to in an article or a review as a ‘practicing Christian,’ it is seldom meant as a compliment.”
But censorship of her work from Christian critics has been just as ferocious. A Wrinkle in Time has been labeled “spiritual poison” and banned by believers who accuse her of promoting witchcraft, goddess worship, divination, and a host of similar heresies. Similar criticism was aimed at C. S. Lewis. Both have been denounced by people of faith, scorned by the literati, and banned from libraries. Both worked as lay evangelists and apologists. Both reclaimed myth and championed the arts. Both wrote in multiple genres, and both remain notoriously difficult to categorize.
Another comparison is important to share. Both Lewis and L’Engle wrote in reaction to the prevailing assumptions of modernism. Biographer Sarah Arthur observes:
To combat [modernist assumptions], Lewis mined back into the riches of tradition—the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche for his novel Till We Have Faces, for instance, or from Plato and Aristotle’s universal moral law in The Abolition of Man—in order to glean insights about God and human nature that had been dismissed or forgotten. L’Engle, by contrast, pressed forward into the mysteries of scientific discovery. …She engaged science to show just how small, how relative, how limited our view of God has been in light of the wonders of an astonishing universe.
Although she once considered herself an atheist, after L’Engle became a Christian she had a daily practice of reading the Bible and praying. Her granddaughter said L’Engle’s coming to her faith was a slow “acceptance of what she had always known to be true,” rather than a sudden conversion moment. “She was a Christian because she was deeply rooted in its traditions and language, and she was moved by and trusted in its stories.” Although L’Engle did not like denominational labels, she mostly attended Episcopal churches, serving for four decades as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
Quotes:
If we are willing to live by Scripture, we must be willing to live by paradox and contradiction and surprise.
Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
A video (one of a set) on L’Engle talking about faith and doubt. [link]
Hollywood made sure there was little God and certainly no Jesus in the movie:
What do we do with this?
L’Engle loved the childlike qualities, still resident in all of us, that could be called upon to meet the wonder of being creatures of a loving God. We have offered her quote to our churches during Advent, even making art from the quote: This is the irrational season, when love blooms bright and wild. / Had Mary been filled with reason, there’d have been no room for the child.
As you explore her work, even the little snippets on this page, let yourself be full of the child, both child and Child. She spent her life meditating for us and provides a wonderful resource for our own deeper journey. Slow down with her and let yourself go deeper.
Lucretia Mott became a Quaker minister at 25. Her whole adult life was devoted to church reform, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery.
