Trio Watson
I’d like to thank Keith Wilson for his exploration of one of my favourite passages from Quaker Faith & Practice — Isaac Pennington’s advice to “give over thine own willing”. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my copy is rather clean looking for a book that should have had much more use, but Keith has encouraged me to try a little harder to appreciate the rich cultural inheritance we have from our Quaker forefathers.
I share with Keith the pleasure and the frustration of Pennington’s phrasing, and decided I would set myself a humorous exercise: to translate Pennington-speak into the language I enjoy in the deeply thoughtful work of the Crash Test Dummies, a Canadian rock band who wrote one especially good album in the 1990s called God Shuffled His Feet. Translation is optimism in the face of the impossible: an effort to catch a wind blowing through the neural forests of one mind, and blow it through an entirely different one. Sometimes we gain sometimes we lose in the process. Not something to take too seriously, perhaps.
Quakers sometimes say that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”. So here (after Isaac Pennington’s original) is my offering!
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.
Isaac Pennington, 1661
Our many understandings, and doubts about the future that lies before us, form an ocean. In the soil of our being, a place we can’t see, we can believe ourselves stuck right out in nature, and in that place be more than just one thing. Breathing parts connect inside us, unseen. Such night drives make it nicer when we do arrive.
Trio, 2022 / Crash Test Dummies, 1993
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 514 • February 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW