This is a work in progress. It is a live draft of a workshop of a workshop that was offered 2024-12-15 at Toronto Monthly Meeting.
One of the greatest Christians I ever knew was Henry T. Hodgkin, an English Friend, medical doctor, a Christian scholar, and the first Director of Pendle Hill. He read widely and deeply and each morning of his adult life he spent an hour in religious concern — a third given to religious reading, a third to the exercise of prayer, and a third to writing in a journal or daybook. He did not simply record the simple events that happened the previous day but rather used the book to write his mind out on things that had come up in his prayer or reading or situations in which he was involved.
— Douglas Steere, On Speaking Out of The Silence: Vocal Ministry in the Unprogrammed Meeting for Worship (Pendle Hill Pamphet #182 p. 19)
For the last ten years, I’ve been playing with this discipline on-and-off1. To be frank, it has mostly been off. However, I’m a bookish person. My main way of learning about the world is to track down books, read them, and write about my reading. I’ve also kept a journal for a little over twenty-five years2. It’s no surprise then that this form of personal religious discipline appeals to me.
In this note, I’m going to share some thoughts about this discipline. I’ll give some suggestions about how to do practice it. Finally, I’ll end off with a bunch of ways of varying the discipline.
We search the world for truth; we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful,
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from the quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read.— Quoted from Miriam by John Greenleaf Whittier (1870)
Try reading the Bible. I know: it is big and scary. I’ve probably lost your serious consideration by even mentioning it. You can skip below for reading suggestions other than the Bible. However, I think that the Bible is a uniquely important document for Quakers. It is foundational to so much of our literature. The early Quakers, whom we are not obliged to revere or imitate, were steeped in its language. If you try to read the writings of Elizabeth Fry, Margaret Fell, Mary Fisher, Isaac Penninton, or George Fox, etc., at any length you will inevitably hit a wall beyond which you cannot pass, because their writing is so Biblical. (This is exactly the reason why I started reading the Bible. I wanted to make sense of early Quaker’s writings. I don’t consider the Bible to be special or magical. It’s a book among books.)
The Bible is a library, bound up as one book. It has a lot of poetry, legal documents, stories, and histories. You’re definitely not supposed to read it cover to cover. Our late Friend Sandra MacCallum said in a religious education talk on her daily Bible reading practice: “You learn the Bible like you learn about your own life: bit by bit, day by day.”
Here’s one way to read the Bible that’s compatible with the small time
allotment of Hodgkin practice: Get two to four bookmarks.
Put a bookmark in the Psalms, and one in a Gospel.
After that, you can distribute some more bookmarks according to your tastes.
I like the distribution: Wisdom, History, Gospel, and Prophets.
In any case, no matter how many bookmarks you have, you go to each bookmark, read a chapter there, and then advance the bookmark to the next chapter.
This keeps the readings varied.
Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.
— Advice and Queries (Britain Yearly Meeting)
Another great document worth reading is Advice and Queries (A&Q). This is a foundational collection of Quaker writing that was originally used as a sort of census or survey of Monthly Meetings. It began with questions like: “How many of your members are in jail? Who is being persecuted for the Truth’s sake?” Some Meeting still use it corporately. Over time it has evolved in to a document suitable for personal use. In recent editions, from BYM, the advices and queries are intermingled. I like to think that A&Q is a core message of Quakerism, handed down from generation to generation, and revised for the relevance to the current times. It is excellent reading for Hodgkin’s discipline.
The thing with reading A&Q privately is that it is tempting to nod along and feel content with your answers. Take this one, which feels especially relevant to Hodgkin:
Do you try to set aside times of quiet for openness to the Holy Spirit? All of us need to find a way into silence which allows us to deepen our awareness of the divine and to find the inward source of our strength. Seek to know an inward stillness, even amid the activities of daily life. Do you encourage in yourself and in others a habit of dependence on God’s guidance for each day? Hold yourself and others in the Light, knowing that all are cherished by God.
Reading this, I say inwardly to myself: “Yeah, yeah. Sure I do! I set aside time. And I love God’s guidance. Of course. Of course.” And then I quickly move along with my busy life. The text washes over me, and I’m left feeling smug and happy.
To be really concrete and honest our answers to the queries, it really helps to write things down. An American computer scientist, Leslie Lamport, has a great quote about this phenomena: “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.” If I look back at the quote from A&Q above, and write out my answer, I produce something like this:
It is worth exploring variations on the basic practice.
The earliest record of this in my journal is from: 2013-11-14. ↩︎
Since 2013, I’ve also kept an index of my journal. At the time of this writing, the statistics from the index are as follows:
Published: Dec 6, 2024
Last Modified: Dec 6, 2024
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about the content, please let me know. Anyone can contact me by email.