Keith Wilson
Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion.
(QF&P 26.70 – Isaac Penington 1661)
At the start of this new year I’ve been thinking that, when they’re formulated just right, goals and targets – resolutions if you like – are very useful in encouraging us to try harder. But if they ask too much, they can be discouraging and demotivating. For me, Isaac Penington’s exhortation to “give over thine own willing …” asks too much. I note that he doesn’t say “try to do these things”; he presents them as imperatives – in modern parlance, he says “just do it!” I’m sorry, Isaac, I can’t. I am not that Quakerly.
Do Penington’s words mean nothing to me? That’s not at all what I’m saying. I feel the need to try to respond to God’s will, but I have no hope of reaching the level of submission Penington seems to demand. That probably makes me a very bad Quaker, but I am a Quaker nonetheless, and in my everyday life, I do try to feel some purpose and to respond, albeit in very small, even trivial ways to God’s will.
Perhaps I’ve achieved some success in my efforts to see “the other side of the story”. When I’m presented with a situation where someone seems to have behaved badly or irrationally, I try very hard to understand why they may have acted in the way they did. I’ve been gifted with a lively imagination, so I can usually come up with suggestions that are at least potentially credible. And often that gives me a whole new outlook on the matter, which I can sometimes share with others.
I’m much less successful in other areas of submission to God’s will, such as frugality. I’ve tried for a long time to reduce my energy consumption, to print fewer sheets of paper, not to waste food and so on. I’m still conscious that I could do more, however, and one of the few positive things about lockdown was that it made me think very carefully about minimising waste, as everything was so much harder to replace.
I can’t really count seeing all people as equal among my successes because I’ve felt this to be true for as long as I can remember. Nevertheless, I know that I have no room for complacency; recognising my own prejudices is no trivial task.
When it comes to truthfulness, I would again claim a modicum of success, but certainly no more. I know that, like all Quaker testimonies, it’s far from being as simple to put into practice as it sounds. Without deliberately trying to be contentious, I believe that there are situations where a lie is probably a better reflection of God’s will than the truth.
To sum up, I can’t do the big things Penington requires of me; I don’t think I will ever be able to “give over mine own willing” and “giving over mine own desiring” is definitely out of the question! So, in 2022 I’ll have to content myself with responding in small ways while always being conscious that I must strive to do better. I hope that’s enough to make my life a little more purposeful, and to provide some small justification for my hope of being a Quaker in more than name alone.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 513 • January 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW