Blake Jerome Everitt's Blog (5)

Our time has been a failure. We are called to ‘the revolution of tenderness’ (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, p48), but we largely fail to respond. Ours is the violence of indifference towards the cry of the earth, the cries of countless creatures condemned in factory farms, those of refugees, those of victims of the Western world’s addiction to arms sales, and many others.

What has this ‘post-Christian’ era proclaimed? A ‘society orphaned of transcendence’ (Erik Varden, The…

In the desert liturgy of obedience to the Lamb, wrought in the wilderness of the Spirit, the engrafted Word and immortal Seed grow, waging the Lamb’s War, there where neither smell nor scent of time, flesh, or reasonings remain; and here all things are made new and one drinks freely from the well of the water of life. This experience of an invasive, desolating, purging Light is signified by the repeated phrasing, ‘And he carryed me awaye into the wilderness in the sprete’ (p541). Untouched…

The Lamb was the Light guiding early Quakers in worship, belief and practice. The contemplative collective state, like the War fought against self ends, carnal reasoning, and concupiscence (intellectual, social, political, linguistic, etc.), was part of what John Punshon called the offensive of the Lamb. This formed a unity of prayer and worship with its behaviour as people in but not of the world.

The Book of Revelation provides a key to this experiential baptism in the Lamb’s…

It is by subjection to the Light that ‘the exacter and violent doer in them might be thrown out: and they that had been hypocrites, might come to bring forth first fruits of repentance, and their mountain of sin and earthliness might be laid low in them…’ (George Fox, Journal, p32). This is a timely reminder of the obligation, set out by early Friends, to wage the Lamb’s war of resistance against the forces of violence, militarism, and hypocrisy. Some Liberal Quakers deflower the peace…

• Brutality of the world’s systematic or military-industrial scale concupiscence vs. Violence of the Lamb’s War 

The inward apocalypse of the Lamb’s War annihilated early Friends’ collusion with and submission to the outward violence of the World. As Lewis Benson writes, early Friends were “at war with society as it is organised apart from the wisdom and authority of God” (Catholic Quakerism p48). This meant that the early Quaker was a “man of war, and in…