Description
John Woolman offers us a detailed and continuing record, over many years, of inner motions and outer actions which connects with our own experience. The inner motions which he reports are much like the inner motions which many of us know and feel, and what he does in response to them is within the range of what we do, or at least consider doing. John Woolman is both mystic and activist or prophet. It is not an unheard of combination, else we would not respond to it in ourselves, but neither is it a common one in anything like the degree which I find in Woolman. His strengths as both mystic and activist have often been noted, yet I was surprised several years ago to learn that the combination has been celebrated in two stained glass windows, one in Boston, the other in San Francisco. It is hard to think of John Woolman enshrined in stained glass, but those who planned the windows thought fit to include him, and they put him in two different companies. In Muelder Chapel of Boston University School of Theology, he appears with Christian mystics – John of Damascus, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, William Law. In Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, he is among reformers and prophets – Amos and Jeremiah, Paul writing to Philemon, Bernard feeding the poor, William Wilberforce, Walter Rauschenbusch. (Boroughs, 364-5.) The only Quaker in either group, he is the only person found in both. And in both these roles, he is accessible to us. His mysticism is so much like what we experience in ourselves that we may not even think of it as mysticism. Only twice in The Journal does Woolman report experiences which involve hearing voices or seeing visions. We will come back to these two reports later, but they are clearly exceptions to the rule. The rest of the time he describes his inner motions in ordinary words – drawings, concerns, exercises, engagements, openings, and motions of love. Similarly, the actions he takes are actions we all know about – laboring with someone whose actions are disturbing us, putting ideas or experiences into writing, going on a visit or journey, or refusing to do something which seems wrong to us. The point I want to emphasize is that if Woolman is both mystic and activist, so are many of us, though we may never have thought of ourselves in these terms. Our inner motions may be less demanding and less powerful, our actions less courageous and less consistent, but in principle they are the same. We, therefore, are in a position not merely to admire Woolman as an interesting person from the past, but to learn from him. To grasp more fully what Woolman can teach us, we need to look at his writings very closely, with attention to those expository passages which reveal his beliefs, and those narrative accounts which tell us how he was inwardly moved and what he did.
