A sermon by Dr. Albert Curry Winn

for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

May 7, 2006

Dr. Winn was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1945 after graduating from Davidson College and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. He spent half his ministry in the pastorate and half in academia at Davidson and Stillman College, a historically black liberal arts college in Alabama. He was also president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. He lives in Winston-Salem.

The pursuit of spirituality and the actions to which our social passion leads – can they coexist in one person, or does one exclude the other? Are they allies or adversaries? That’s a question that will occupy us this morning. Spirituality is a very slippery term. It’s used by New Age enthusiasts and by cloistered monks and everyone in between. Robert Wuthnow, who studied the spirituality of Americans during the last half of the 20th century, offers this definition: “All the beliefs and activities by which individuals attempt to relate their lives to God or to a divine being or to some other conception of transcendent reality.” That definition is broad enough, I hope, even for Unitarians.

Social passion needs no definition in this church. You know, as well as I do, that social passion involves feelings of sympathy and empathy and compassion – suffering with – for all people who suffer oppression, and injustice, and whose lives are miserable as a result, people trapped in poverty. It involves actions to treat their wounds, by giving bread to the hungry and drink to the thirsty and clothing to the naked and welcome to the stranger, the alien, the outsider, the immigrant, visiting the sick and those in prison. But it involves more: It involves trying to change the system that made those wounds in their lives.

Whenever I have tried to change the system in Winston-Salem – and that’s been too infrequent because I’m too old – but one group that I knew I could count on to be present, to be on my side, was the Unitarian Universalists. I salute you for that, and I feel it an honor to be invited to speak to you.

I’m concerned that many who have social passion are critical of those who pursue spirituality. They cannot see spending precious time in prayer, worship, spiritual reading, fasting, spiritual direction, contemplation, and all those things. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we must use every minute in actions designed to prevent that.

Likewise, many who pursue spirituality are critical of social activists. Action can be unwise and unproductive if we do not take time to journey inward, to get our bearings straight, to tap the power that is in the spiritual life.

I have been struck with the fact that all those people who are an inspiration to me – mentors and monarchs, people whom I would like to imitate in my life – combine the pursuit of spirituality with active social passion.. To illustrate the way that I believe each can strengthen the other, I want to sketch briefly the spirituality and social passion of John Woolman. John who? I attended a reasonably good college and an excellent seminary, and I never heard his name. It was only afterward that I had the good fortune to hear a lecture by Douglas Steere about John Woolman, and I got the book, published in 1774, and never out of print since then. That’s amazing! Seven of my eight books are already out of print. One reading, and John Woolman became my favorite mentor and saint.

He was born in 1720, long before the American Revolution, in the colony of West Jersey, of Quaker parents. There were many children in the family, and all could not inherit the farm, so he was apprenticed to a merchant in a nearby town. He went there to be the merchant’s bookkeeper, but before long he found himself in charge of the store, and eventually he became the owner. Let me read his own words, regarding why he left that:

 Through the mercies of the Almighty, I had in a good degree learned to be content with a plain way of living. I had but a small family [a wife and one daughter], and on serious consideration believed truth did not require me to engage in cumbering affairs . . . The increase of business became my burden. Although my natural inclination was toward merchandise, yet I believed the truth required me to live more free of outward cumbers, and there was now a strife in my mind between the two. In this exercise my prayers were put up to the Lord, who graciously heard me and gave me a heart resigned to his holy will. Then I lessened my outward business and, as I had opportunity, told my customers of my intentions so that they might consider what shop to turn to. And in a while I wholly laid down merchandise and followed my trade as a tailor by myself, having no apprentice.

He deliberately turned his back on a great opportunity to make lots of money. How un-American can you get? But he confined himself to tailoring, where he could make his own appointments and control his own time. He had a little apple orchard, and he was a scrivener. There were few lawyers in the colonies, and so amateur lawyers made small income by writing wills and bills of sale and that kind of thing.

Woolman‘s spirituality was typical Quaker spirituality. As he says, he kept regularly to meetings, sitting there in silence, listening to the words of others who felt moved by the spirit to speak. He tells about the first time he felt prompted to speak and how he spoke too long and what he said was too mixed with his own preferences and prejudices.

Being sensible of my error, I was afflicted in mind some weeks without any light or comfort, even to that degree that I could not take satisfaction in anything. I remembered God and was troubled, and in the depth of my distress he had pity upon me and sent the Comforter. I then felt forgiveness for my offense. My mind became calm and quiet, and I was truly thankful to my gracious Redeemer for his mercies. About six weeks after this, feeling the spring of divine love opened and a concern to speak, I said a few words in a meeting, in which I found peace. I had felt that rise which prepares the creature to stand like a trumpet through which the Lord speaks to his flock.

His ability to speak to the heart of things led his local meeting to license him as a preacher, not a paid one, though some modern Quakers have done that, but simply one who was set free to visit other meetings anywhere in the Colonies and to speak as the spirit moved him. As a typical Quaker, his spirituality was also a spirituality of simplicity. He dressed simply, he spoke simply, he lived simply, he wrote simply. One interesting detail, for instance: He decided not to wear a hat made of dyed fur because the dye did not increase its usefulness in doing what a hat was supposed to do, it was hard on the fur and it was dangerous to the people who worked with the dyes. He said that he noticed that many of his fellow Quakers shy of him because they regarded this as an eccentricity, but he stuck to it. As a typical Quaker, his spirituality was a spirituality of peace. He refused to pay war taxes. He counseled the young men in his visit and not to volunteer for the militia. His spirituality, you see, passed into social action.

Now, to move to the other pole, the major focus of Woolman’s social passion was the abolition of slavery. The reading we have just heard illustrates how the evil of slavery grew upon him at a time when few, even the most devout Christians, ever questioned this institution which had been a part of human history as far back as history could be remembered. It also illustrates his method of working for its abolition – not a condemnation of the slaveholders but a confession of his own scruples. “I told him in a friendly way,” he wrote, “that I could not write any instruments by which my fellow creatures were made slaves without bringing trouble to my own mind.” As the writer of the introduction to one of the many editions of the journal wrote, Woolman loved the slaves, but he did not stop loving the slaveholders.

He began to use his license and travel. The journal mentions 41 journeys, all up and down the colonies on the east coast. He came to North Carolina and visited the New Garden meeting of Friends. That’s still meeting, on the edge of Greensboro. But there was no Greensboro then, and no Guilford College, just a Quaker meeting.

There were no planes or trains or buses. He made these long journeys on foot. There were no Holiday Inns. He stayed free charge with fellow Quakers, which was the universal custom among Quakers. But he was disturbed when servants waited on him and who were not paid for their service. So he took coins and he paid the slaves. Now this was against all the customs of hospitality, and his hosts felt insulted. He spent hours in explaining to them, not telling them they were wrong but insisting that his mind was not easy to be served by slaves. He was especially concerned with the southern colonies: “I saw in these southern provinces so many vices and corruptions, increased by this trade and this way of life, that it appeared to me as a dark gloominess hanging over the land. And though now many willingly run into it, yet in the future the consequence will be grievous to posterity. I express it as it hath appeared to me, not once, nor twice, but as a matter fixed on my mind.”

What a remarkable prophecy, made over a century before the Civil War. He wrote a pamphlet on the keeping of slaves, showing the cruelty to the slaves and the resulting corruption of the slaveowners. He found himself speaking again and again in all the meetings that he visited about the evils of the system. He felt moved by the spirit to go northward. He went all the way to Newport, Rhode Island, which was a leading port for the importation of slaves. And there he found Quakers who did not own slaves but who were deeply involved in the slave trade. As one boat after another discharged its cargo of newly captured Africans and the bodies of many who died in the Middle Passage. There, the Quakers were playing a part in all of that.

Now that cooked it. That wrecked it. He turned to church polity. He introduced resolutions in local meetings, in quarterly regional meetings, in annual national meetings, and he got them passed. Minutes of those meetings were sent all over the Colonies. Slowly but surely, Quakers began to give up slavery.

He felt moved to go to England, which he rightly judged to be the center of the slave trade. He obtained certificates from his local, regional, and annual meetings. He found a Friend who had booked a passage to England and engaged a cabin, so he joined him. But his scruples about simplicity made it impossible for him to stay in the cabin. It was luxurious, with fancy, unnecessary carved work and other decorations. So he slept in the steerage with the sailors. There he became so moved with sympathy by the plight of these young men who were apprenticed as sailors that he wrote another pamphlet warning parents not to apprentice their sons as sailors simply to collect the money that they were paid. The voyage took 39 days. When the ship beat its way against the wind up the Thames and anchored at London, he learned that the annual meeting of English Quakers was in session right there in London. He rushed off of the ship without any paying attention to his appearance. So into the London meeting, here came Davy Crockett and his undyed hat, probably unshaven, clothed in dirty, undyed homespun cloth and reeking from 39 days in the steerage, and he presented his certificates. At first, there was great difficulty in getting a certificate from them to speak in the meeting of Friends in England. One of the elegant London Quakers who had grown quite wealthy, partly from the slave trade, moved that the Friend from the Colonies be told that his mission had been accomplished, that he had come to the meeting and that arrangements should be made at the earliest possible moment for his return to the Colonies.

Woolman simply sat in silence and wept. After a time, he rose and said that he was not easy to go back, that he had a mechanical trade as a tailor and he would stay there and make them suits and clothes but he would not return to the Colonies. Then, after another long silence, he felt that rise that prepares the creature to stand as a trumpet through which the Lord speaks to his people, and he rose and spoke – after which the man who made the original motion moved that he be given a certificate to speak anywhere, in any Quaker meeting in England.

From the day he landed in June until October, Woolman attended meeting after meeting after meeting. He traveled on foot because, although there was quite a good stagecoach system, the drivers drove their horses so hard that many horses died of exhaustion before they could be unhitched. He was not easy to do that.

In October, Woolman, exhausted himself from going on foot, crisscrossing England, caught smallpox and died. He was 52 years old. He was buried inYork, far from home.

You need to hear the rest of the story. By 20 years after his death, no Quaker in the Colonies owned slaves, and shortly thereafter no British ship transported slaves.

Within his own community, this one man, with loving persuasiveness, achieved what took the rest of the nation the bloodiest, most costly war in our history to achieve, a war that left us with resentments and prejudices that have not yet been healed.

Very occasionally, Woolman’s spirituality took the form of dreams and visions. “In a time of sickness,” he writes, “I was brought so near the gates of death that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy color between the south and the east. I was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be and still live, and that I was mixed with them, and that hencefort I might not consider myself as a being separate and distinct from them.”

The mystics, those quintessential pursuers of spirituality, desire above all else the union of the soul with the Creator. John Woolman desired that too, but what was given him was the union of the soul with all that God had created. He wrote that even in his youth, still living at home, he understood “that as the mind was moved by an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible Being, so, by the same principle, it was moved to love God in all his manifestations in the visible world; that, as by his breath the flame of life was kindled in all animal sensible creatures, to say we love an unseen God, and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by life derived from him, was a contradiction in itself.”

The goal of deep spirituality is union with God, where we no longer think of ourselves as distinct and separated from God. And the goal of social passion is union with and love for our neighbors on this planet, all of God’s creatures and especially our human brothers and sisters who live in oppression and misery. It was given to John Woolman to experience both unions, to obey both of the great commandments. May it be given in some measure also to you and to me. Amen.

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For more by and about John Woolman access:

            http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1772woolman.html

            http://www.strecorsoc.org/jwoolman/title.html