Selected with and Introduction by Kerry Walters (289.6 JON)
At his birth in Maine in 1863, Rufus Jones’s Aunt Peace said of him, “This child will one day bear the message of the Gospel to distant lands and to peoples across the sea.” And so, he did. By the time he was four years old, he said that he “had formed the habit of using corporate silence in a heightening and effective way.” In his undergraduate years at Haverford College, he studied religion, philosophy, and history, and wrote his senior thesis on mysticism. In 1917, he was one of the founding members of the American Friends Service Committee, a relief organization that embodied the Quaker tenet of non-violence in times of war. For Jones, “the whole significance of the Quaker movement was its revolt from theories and notions and its appeal instead to experience.” Jones considered himself, and was considered by others, a mystic; he referred to himself as a “practical” or “conative” mystic, in the Christian tradition — “the original mystical experience feels like a thrust from beyond.” Indeed, his personal experience, along with scriptural authority, convinced him of the reality and presence of the inner Light, which he called “the Beyond within” or “the More,” which allowed for a “mutual and reciprocal correspondence” between God and humans. And so, he talked often of “this Over-world of Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love,” a world beyond the material one we are bound up in.
Jones writes of Gandhi’s “soul-force” and the Indian mystical tradition, including the Upanishads, and the well-known “That are thou,” which refers to the identification of “the inmost being of [one’s] own self with the inmost Reality in the universe.” He writes also, in this regard, of Emerson’s Over-soul. The soul, for Jones, “accumulates and interprets facts and processes of experience, not experience as it is felt.” Still, the essential fact of religion for Jones is “love, and life is impossible apart from relationships.” Furthermore, we must not expect to find God apart from spiritual relationships. Somewhat like the Hindu concept of Brahman and Atman, the Self and the self, Jones says that our relationship with God is our limited self with God’s infinite Self. God is both transcendent and immanent. And this is where Jones’s understanding of worship comes in: “worship seems to me to be direct, vital, joyous, personal experience and practice of the presence of God (italics his).” “We cannot explain our normal selves,” Jones continues, “or account for the best things we know—or even for our condemnation of our poorer, lower self — without an appeal to and acknowledgment of a Divine Guest and Companion who is the real presence of our central being.” Indeed, the Quakers in the 17th century, as Jones reminds us, were the first organized body of Christians to build a faith on the principle that “something of God is in every man.”
But how to understand the concept of God? Quakers believed, and believe, that “God is essentially Spirit. He is Life and Thought and Love and Goodness in unceasing revelation and action.” And all this is a fact of experience — “something seen and felt and known” — not simply something derived from traditional authority. We do not, then, need “to go ‘somewhere’ to find God. We only need to be something.”
For Jones, everyone is a potential mystic. He argues that, as children, we all had the capacity for surprise and wonder, referring to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” “To see the eternal in the midst of time,” writes Jones, “to feel and to enjoy the infinite here in the finite, is one of the greatest blessings life has to offer.” The mystical experience means that the human spirit and the divine spirit have met and “are in mutual and reciprocal correspondence.” Therefore, “both life and religion are rooted in mystical experience, mystical process,” and Christianity is, for him, “at its very heart a mystical religion.” That being said, Jones distinguishes between “negation mysticism” and “affirmation mysticism,” the former making vision the end of life, the latter making it the beginning.
Imagination is a crucial ingredient here — “Getting your imagination captured is almost the whole of life. […] The way to become the architect of your fate, the captain of your soul, is to have your imagination captured.” All this talk of the individual, however, should not blind us to the fact that the primary fact of human life is the group that makes the individual possible. It is an organic way of life, “where each lives for all and where the interpretation of the Life of the Whole is the business and at the same time the joy of each unit-member.” The corollary to this is that “the kingdom of God is something men [sic] do—not a place to which they go.” This also means that this kingdom is here and now, not in some realm of the afterlife.
Talking of prayer, Jones writes that it must “rise above [its conception] as an easy means to a desired end.” The point of prayer is to turn to God “as the completeness and reality of all we want to be, the other Self whom we have always sought.” This means, also, that we must want only what everybody can share, that we must seek blessings which have a universal application.
Jones also addresses one of the primary Quaker testimonies, that of simplicity, relating it to sincerity, genuineness, and being honest with oneself.
He goes on to distinguish between unity and uniformity, pointing out that uniformity, depending on a mechanistic rather than a spiritual organization, “levels down instead of up.” Unity, on the other hand, has to do with a growing organism.
Finally, Jones points out that Quakers have been primarily doers — “they believe strongly in the laboratory method. They try their experiment and then proceed to interpret it. The words, the talk, come after the deeds.”