the Journal of George Fox

This book* by George Fox** is easily the most inspirational autobiographical work I've ever read. The title is somewhat misleading, as it isn't exactly a journal, being recorded day-to-day over his lifetime, but a dictated & transcribed recount of several decades of his life towards the end of it - but it's just as comprehensively thorough as you might expect of a daily journal nonetheless. It's also remarkable as a historical account of the origins of Quakerism direct from the mouth of the man most responsible for it*** which is cool; and the events described herein overlapping with the ongoing radical Reformation, the English civil war, the reign of Oliver Cromwell coming into being then giving way back to Charles II, it's just a fascinating collection of snapshots of views from the foothills in that outrageously turbulent period in English (even Western, as America was still a devoted colony of the motherland at that time) history. Of course, it's also an incredibly spiritually & religiously charged book, testifying with no hesitation that George Fox was a man of deep, astute & indefatigable faith, conscience & honesty, whose life & perspective & deeds & sufferings bear great witness to modern Christian challenges that still reverberate today.

   If you just want a solid picture of his biography, Wikipedia is probably a better bet than this book (as I say, having not read the Wikipedia page) but if you want a raw, throbbing self-portrait of the man's outlook & how it shaped his activity, this book is indispensably the answer to that itch. The "journal" includes full transcripts of many of Fox's letters, both personal & more general epistles to the communities of Friends, which add a great deal of colour & texture to the account.

   George Fox was born in 1624 & the earliest chapter of this account records his most sorrowful experiences of being a youth in love with God amongst a generation of wanton drunken sinners. His spiritual isolation was driven home by the reality of living within the radical age of the Protestant Reformation - while the Church of England was hegemonic, there were constant interruptions from the Independents, the Baptists, the Presbyterians, even the odd Papist who hadn't been burnt at the stake yet. Fox wandered lonely for his adolescence until he heard the word of God comfort him thus; "there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to your condition." And despite being uneducated (except for a familial devotion to the Bible) Fox came to see the true meaning of the outpourings of the Holy Spirit - accessible to all men, regardless of mediation by any church. As he puts it, "Christ has come himself to teach his people."

   Then proceeds the itinerant lifestyle as a preacher (all over Great Britain, then briefly Ireland, then either as an afterthought or a climax, even America via the Caribbean**** & finally Europe): for most of its runtime, the Journal reads much like the gospel of Mark - i.e. starting most sentences with "And" because so much is happening one thing after another - having meetings & making Friends***** -we get phrases like "the power of God came over all" or "many came into the Truth" (or variations thereupon) repeated dozens if not hundreds of times throughout. It actually gets quite repetitive. Fox would go to a new county/town - speak the word of the Light - be encouraged by newcomers under the Truth - be threatened by "rude" people who wanted to beat him up & escaped (remember Jesus' saying, to "turn the other cheek"? Fox took this quite literally, and when threatened with violence would do so, often simply scaring away his attackers in confoundment) - get charged with something by the legal authorities - get tried & acquitted, or jailed & later released - repeat. I mean it, this goes on for like 400 pages at least. The bulk of the reasons for his persecution (and it was a persecution for all the Quakers - many thousands were imprisoned and/or martyred for similar reasons) lay with issues around hats (aye, it was an Obligatory Protocol thing in the 17th century), pronouns****** & oaths (which, following Christ's teaching, he refused to swear, even in court). I actually learnt a couple of new words from all this back-and-forth persecution & propheticism - mittimus (which Fox's religious eloquence often helped him avoid outright) & praemunire (which he was often tried with & at least twice badly jailed for - the "foreign authority" to whom he appealed being the Kingdom of Christ). Fox was as prolific a preacher as he was predictable a victim of persecution. Make of that what you will.

   George Fox died in January 1691 of unknown, but natural, causes; his last words were "I am clear. I am fully clear." Paul wrote "imitate me, as I imitate Christ" (1st Corinthians 11: 1) - and I think not necessarily singularly but certainly notably George Fox took this to heart more than the vast majority of any Christian since the original apostles & followed it to its ultimate logical conclusion, living a persecuted, troubled, practically homeless & demonstrably jobless (it is not properly explained in the text but I would be intrigued to know where he kept getting enough money from*******) life, to the glory of God. What a man to learn from - which is saying something, given that he was so prolific a writer of tracts & pamphlets & entire books that are tragically lost to history, but we still get so much of his essence from this rough journal. So, this book. Fundamental reading for Quakers; recommended reading for Christians of any other stripe; interesting & challenging reading for all others.

* Not sure about the version I've linked here, but the edition I read includes an introduction by Geoffrey Nuttall, extracts from William Penn's preface, and for the latter years of Fox's life not covered in this autobiographical account the original summary by Thomas Ellwood as well as a more in-depth coverage by Henry Cadbury. All good stuff - but not as meaty as the main text, so you're not missing too much by getting the copy linked.

** Okay, he technically dictated it to a fellow Quaker toward the latter end of his eyesight & life, which is fair enough, but it's his words on the page.

*** Admittedly a number of others, most notably Margaret Fell (who was the financial & organisational backbone, and being widowed, later in 1669 became Fox's wife) & James Nayler (who provided much of the more radical inspiration for action, occasionally to Fox's admonishments) were instrumental in the origination of Quakerism, and both recur as side-characters throughout this journal; but Fox was the spiritual & ideological foundation for the impetus of the movement that became the Quaker interpretation of Christianity, I hope nobody would disagree.

**** The passage recounting their voyage across the Atlantic (recorded by one John Hull; Fox himself was extremely ill during this) is fascinating. Though far from the first thing I would ask him in the New Jerusalem, I would like to query of ol' George exactly what dolphin tastes like. During the journey there was apparently also a shipboard Friend who fasted & stayed awake for a full week, which is impressively unhealthy. Modern readers may also be interested to learn the difference between a sloop & a ketch. The references to the black slave population in these parts, while minimal, are also interesting seeds of Quakerism's later commitment to abolition. Also, in Fox's limited but generous interactions with Native Americans, it is noted that the Indian chief thinks Quakerism to be the best religion of the colonists that he has yet met, which is cool.

***** "Quakers" originated as an external derogatory term for people who called themselves & each other simply "Friends" - as Fox does throughout this account.

****** Of course, this being the 17th century, not the same pronouns issue which is ravaging Christendom today - Fox & his followers simply chose to refer to everyone using the informal "thee" & "thou", which was interpreted (not culturally wrongly, but spiritually hypocritically) as disrespectful to people in any degree of authority. It's fun to speculate how Fox would respond to today's pronouns debacle; I'm not confident I could predict which side of the aisle he would land in, but no doubt he would have a strongly-worded, powerfully-reasoned scriptural basis for wherever that was.

******* Henry Cadbury notes in the section covering Fox's latter years: "The sources of his capital are not known. Not only his wife's money, but that inherited from his parents, he seems to have left untouched." The Lord provides, I guess?

Grace Beats Karma

This book is a collection of letters written from prison* by Neal Cassady, primarily to his estranged wife, with excerpt ripoffs at the footers of each letter to be read to their kids; but also to his godfather who was in the Catholic clergy. We're only getting Neal's letters here, not the responses - if you need a reminder who he was, N.C. was a close friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, being immortalized by both as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and in various poetic referentialisms; little of Cassady's poetic writings survive in the world of Actual Publishing, but his impact as a personality is pivotally central to the whole generation of avant garde wordsmithery that followed in his wake.

   We forget too easily how deeply religious the Beat core founders were: Cassady and Kerouac devout catholics, Ginsberg a reformist Jew - as such, a considerable bulk of these letters is Neal talking on and around the history and understandings of his faith, trying to memorize the whole list of all the Popes** there's ever been while doing daily exercises in his cell and committing longer and longer passages of Scripture to memory.

   Ultimately it boils down to his inner wrestling with the transcendental realisations of dharma that he and his fellow poet-beats had 'discovered'*** the dharmic truths of Eastern religions, and were trying, through their business of poetry, to syncretize or harmonize these insights with Western Christendom; ultimately a task they were halfway successful in, but Neal paid for it with his life, being imprisoned by dint of his own trust in American libertarian amenities and losing his family soon after. These letters are not tragic - nor are they entirely pleasant reading; you can see the boredoms and hypocrisies and mental gymnastics he puts himself through each time his wife writes back - and the tidbits he feeds as half-truths to the kids make this an actually interesting case study book for psychologists looking into the neuroses of the archetypal charismatic leader of folks. Well worth a read if you're interested in modern American cultural history, or the roots of all Cool Poetic stuff since WW2.

Since grace, in real Christian life - really does beat karma, I'm going to take the timely opportunity here in this post to talk briefly about my exit from my home church, which I'd already given some intimations towards here and here.
   So, my home church, The Crowded House, has been hemorrhaging members for some years - often under legitimate pretences of planting new churches elsewhere, but also because something was rotten in the local Danish crown, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the dams holding back the leak or leaks of refugee testimonies burst - it made big news - and I don't entirely know where to look to for spiritual leadership now, as it kind of feels like waking up to the fact that Acts 29, the meta-church body of which I was a part, is no different from the personality cult megachurches where book sales and speaking tours take precedence over pastoral care for all in the flock.
   Others have said far more than I would like to say here on the whole messed up scenario, so rather than testify myself (which I have done, to the formal enquiry) I'm just going to linkdump a few things. Some have seen it as fishy since Driscoll days; signs of unchristian leadership were noted and undealt with a full decade ago; from 2016 red lights began popping up more and more - this was the same year both of my parents left TCH, forcing me to stay and decide whether I trusted them or my Elders more for my longterm spiritual welfare; and now, with all that has come to light having come to light - we need to be having serious conversations about what ministry looks like in the 21st century, dealing in Hard and Certain terms with celebrity status and bullying.

* Some policemen gave him a lift home once and he, well-spiritedly and not knowing they were cops, paid them for fuel in form of two or three jazzy cigarettes.

** He lists them, including their dates of popehood, in an appendix. Another appendix is a letter from Neal's long-suffering wife to Allan Ginsberg - or is it the other way around? In any case, it adds a good bookend.

*** "Disco inferno" I was, somewhere on the internet, told translated from Latin as "to learn through the fires of suffering" - but Google Translate didn't let me get away with this, and only by playing around with its phrasing to "discos infer no" which renders "bring no dishes" - which is arguably a Zenlightened kind of roundabout means of saying what I meant anyway.

Letters to a Young Poet

This book, a collection of letters written from Rainer Maria Rilke in response to one Franz Kappus, who was studying* at the same military academy Rilke had, and wanting to become a poet, reached out to his school's most famous-thus alumni: you can guess who. It is not super easy reading - Rilke was a master wordsmith as well as a pretty mentally troubled and emotionally complicated man, and while the overall tone of his letters is of an immense generosity of spirit and optimistic view of man, nature, art etc; the tortuous route he makes it sound like to truly go into and get to know oneself in objective truth at all enough to make a halfway interesting poet - it is, he repeatedly states, a role one can only take up by committing oneself endlessly to purity of perspective, to unlearning and relearning and revising and revolting, to solitude so deep that one's own thoughts burst out of you and onto a page with such urgent strength that to suppress them would be suicide. These letters are a potential goldmine for those who want to devoutly follow the classic (and dumb) trope of the 'tortured artist'; who prioritises their inner struggle above all else as it feeds their work; but however much he could've benefited and probably lived longer with a bit of therapy the general views offered here by Rilke are not, I don't think, supportive in themselves of this view, but are provocative, spiritual even, in ways that are challenging & ambiguous - and as a poet should know, Results on Readers May Vary.

* There is appended another longer essay, which may Rilke wrote to one 'Mr V.', entitled Letter from a Young Worker - which delves into much more sociopolitical critiques of the hegemonic repressive Christian ethics and expectations, especially around sexuality and personal expression; he rails against the hypocrisy and cultural stagnation he sees as being symptomatic of this deeper religio-philosophical malaise.

the Screwtape Letters

This book by Clive Staples Lewis is an indisputable classic of modern popular theology. It's comprised of a series of thirty-one letters* written from Screwtape to his nephew, named Wormwood - both being eternally employed in the demonic art of tempting humans into sinful states (seemingly an industrial effort concerned with harvesting souls for tortuous consumption by those same demons).

   All these letters comprise advice and criticism on Wormwood's work (he being a junior tempter) on the life a particular English everyman during the Second World War - Screwtape's advice, being the intentions of an efficient devil, reads with a topsy-turviness that is consistently disorienting yet refreshing in its clarity of perspective on human nature and weakness; it is as clever a book as it is simple, as funny as serious, and even through the backwardsness of this choice of voice Lewis's insight into spiritual-moral efforts in people's lives rings loud, warmly darkly and sharply challenging to the reader as the letter's contents penetrate so incisively the contours of the general conscience.

   I cannot recommend this book enough.** For Christian readers it will be an entertaining, humblingly realistic and intellectually playful reflection on the life of a disciple; for those of other faiths (or none) its meditations on the subtleties of influence and growth in personal harmony will still probably to a considerable degree still ring true, exposing the absurdities and dangers of leaving ourselves on auto-pilot.

* Plus final text of a speech Screwtape makes to a dinner party audience of fellow senior tempters; an elaborate toast to the capacities of human tendencies to make their work so much easier than it could be.

** Quite literally, it seems.
   This is the third time I've read this book (previously when aged fifteen and nineteen) but the fourth copy of it I've owned - it's one of those which I recommend with such enthusiasm, and which other people have heard is worth reading so much, that they keep getting lended and forgottenly kept. Fortunately copies are commonly attainable from the second-hand section of Christian bookshops for £2 or less, which makes this process of occasional informal spiritual resource dissemination actually pretty viable on the whole.