{"id":2436,"date":"2022-01-26T20:23:21","date_gmt":"2022-01-26T20:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/?page_id=2436"},"modified":"2022-01-31T16:11:22","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T16:11:22","slug":"crash-testing-isaac","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/february-2022\/crash-testing-isaac\/","title":{"rendered":"Crash-Testing Isaac"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trio Watson<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Photo by SL Granum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019d like to thank Keith Wilson for his exploration of one of my favourite passages from Quaker Faith & Practice \u2014 Isaac Pennington\u2019s advice to \u201cgive over thine own willing\u201d. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

I share with Keith the pleasure and the frustration of Pennington\u2019s 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

Quakers sometimes say that \u201cthe letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life\u201d. So here (after Isaac Pennington’s original) is my offering!<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Isaac Pennington, 1661<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Trio, 2022 \/ Crash Test Dummies, 1993<\/p>\n

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Back to February 2022 Newsletter Main Page<\/a><\/p>\n

Forty-Three<\/em> Newsletter \u2022 Number 514 \u2022 February 2022
\n<\/strong>Oxford Friends Meeting
\n43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW<\/p>\n

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trio Watson I\u2019d like to thank Keith Wilson for his exploration of one of my favourite passages from Quaker Faith & Practice \u2014 Isaac Pennington\u2019s advice to \u201cgive over thine own willing\u201d. I\u2019m a bit embarrassed to admit that my copy is rather clean looking for a book that should have had much more use, … Continue reading Crash-Testing Isaac<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"parent":2408,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2436","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2436"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2544,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2436\/revisions\/2544"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}