The Need of the Spirit of the Age

Elined Kotschnig-Prys

 

Some of us have been surprised to discover this summer how intensely others are feeling the need of training in the inner life. At Pendle Hill a nucleus of us tentatively found each other—at the All Friends’ Conference we expanded—by no plan of ours, but by those “chance” conversations which are the leading of the Spirit. We represented America and Britain, Europe and the Antipodes—an illustration of the fact that our concern is no localized one, but a need of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

We are impressed by the many signs in the world today of this sense of need to reach the “central depth” of the soul, and there touch the Universal—be united with God. The white race, one sometimes feels, has almost forgotten how. Some of its efforts to do so today remind one of the man of business pathetically trying in middle age to recapture a feeling for nature or for music which he has neglected for half a lifetime. They are primitive and naive and mistake the first crude success for mastery, often with painful results to others and later needless disillusionment to themselves.

We have heard of others, necessarily far fewer in numbers, with a profound understanding of the sickness of modern civilization, who are taking heroic measures, spending two hours a day in private meditation and two hours a day in group meditation. How do they do it? most people will ask aghast. We who meet in these pages may echo, How? but at least we shall not ask, Why? The necessity that goads them we too feel, however fainthearted and unfaithful in the quest some of us know ourselves to be.

As Friends we have maintained an unbroken tradition of group worship and meditation, and its practice has provided its own training. But the private meditation on which it depends for its richness has been left too much to chance and the individual. We lack the experienced help given to their adherents by the Catholic “spiritual director” or the Indian Guru. That some, even among Friends, have had to seek what they need from psychology or from Eastern practice is a sign that as a body we are not sufficiently awake to our responsibilities and our possibilities. In as far as that is so, our group worship must needs languish too. The Inward Light must shine in the ground of the soul when alone with God, if It is to shine in purity in the soul of the group.

Our fathers had, without perhaps talking much about it, a mode of private devotion common to all Protestantism—prayer and Bible-reading and meditation upon it. For better and for worse the regular habit of these things has greatly diminished among us. Our interests and sympathies have widened to include much more that the Bible in our religious reading, but they have tended to become shallower and more diffuse perhaps.

Modern educational methods have omitted “learning by heart” on the ground that it was mere “learning by rote”. Maybe we have to rediscover that “heart” was no accidental term, and that our worship and meditation is often poor and unrewarding because we have no sufficient store of the accumulated divine wisdom of the ages to well up in our minds in tranquility and gain there new lustre and meaning. And prayer—what is it? Perhaps we need to come into the experience of a different mode of prayer, and that for a lack of having discovered it, our devotions seem sterile and dull and ineffectual. Perhaps the fact that we have been talking of “meditation” rather than of “prayer” is a clue to the change required.