Toward Spiritual Optimism

Following the Examples of Saint Paul and George Fox

If I weren’t a person of faith, I would probably be a dark-spirited pessimist. However, my faith—supported by the integration of my contemplation of Scripture and my learnings from the hopeful examples of Saint Paul and George Fox—gives me hope in God’s unfolding plan of salvation.

The Context of Humanity Within Reason Alone

While a person without faith might reasonably be optimistic about the likely success of a project to be finished in the immediate future, natural hope seems insufficient to sustain an optimistic attitude about our planet’s long-term future. Consider a few of the major discouraging events over the last 175 years.

The United States has engaged in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Africans brought to the United States suffered in slavery for over 200 years and a civil war was fought to secure their freedom. The United States was assaulted on 9/11/2001, and the assault led to wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the latter of which lasted 20 years. Russia and Ukraine are currently at war. Some fear nuclear weapons could be used in the conflict. Israel and Hamas are at war, a war that could spread throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Some in the United States desire to militarize space. The police forces in some U.S. cities are equipped with military-grade weapons. Additionally, U.S. citizens are legally permitted to own military-grade weapons. There were over 600 mass shootings in the United States during 2023. Between the years 2000 and 2020, more than 800,000 people died by suicide in the United States, with firearms being among the leading means.

Further, our planet is facing a severe climate crisis as evidenced by intensified hurricanes, tornadoes, and rising temperatures. The summer of 2024 was the hottest summer ever recorded. Rising sea levels are a threat to coastal communities around the world. Yet the 2023 report regarding progress toward the climate goals set in the Paris Climate Agreement warned governments that the world is not on track to meet the long-term goals of the Agreement.

Religious institutions, historically a stabilizing social factor, are losing influence. In March 2024, the Public Religion Research Institute issued a report that found that 26 percent of American adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, a five percentage point increase since 2013. Given the influence of age displacement—as elderly religiously affiliated Americans die and are replaced by younger religiously unaffiliated Americans—the percent of the religiously unaffiliated will continue to rise.

It’s said that hope dies last. Most people have a natural hope that the future will turn out well. I don’t discount such hope. However, if asked to make a prediction based on reason alone about the chances of humans surviving the twenty-first century, I’d have to say that I’m extremely pessimistic.

The Context of Humanity from a Faith-based Perspective

If we hope to move beyond the pessimism triggered by the realities of the modern world, we need a faith that gives rise to a theological hope. For me, such hope is nurtured in the coincidence of mediated experience (contemplation of Scripture and the example of ancestors who have lived hope-filled lives) and my immediate experience in the stillness of prayer.

The observable world is not the only context of our life. A person of faith lives life in the context of “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1 [NRSV]). We live with an assurance that God’s plan of salvation is unfolding toward a recapitulation of all creation (Rom. 8:15–25). We might imagine history as pointed toward a return to the Garden of Eden prior to the Fall of Adam. George Fox entertained such a thought in his time.

Hope is about the future. “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:24–25). What do we hope for? Saint Paul tells us:

With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth (Eph. 1:8b–10).

It’s a tall order to live in hope of a plan to be realized in the fullness of time. Hope is our trust in God extended into the future. Whether I’ve trusted God or not in the past will determine whether I trust God in the future. My present faith will mark the level of my hope for the future.

Scripture presents hope as a firm conviction. The Epistle to the Hebrews describes hope as “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Heb. 6:19). It goes on to exhort us to hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering because God who has promised is faithful (Heb. 10:23). Saint Paul says much the same thing when he writes that “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Rom. 5:5). Paul further says that “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). A more optimistic statement has never been uttered.

If we hope to move beyond the pessimism triggered by the realities of the modern world, we need a faith that gives rise to a theological hope. For me, such hope is nurtured in the coincidence of mediated experience and my immediate experience in the stillness of prayer.

The Examples of Two Hopeful Ancestors: Saint Paul and George Fox

Saying that things will work together for good for those who love God doesn’t mean life will be free from trials and tribulations. In fact, Saint Paul tells the Romans to boast of their afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Rom. 5:3b–4).

Paul was no Pollyanna. He tells us in multiple places of his trials. When “boasting” of his apostolic ministry, Paul writes that he is a better minister than others because he endured “far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death” (2 Cor. 11:23).

Yet Paul was able to rise above his tribulations. In Second Corinthians, he writes that he was “content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities” (2 Cor. 12:10). He learned to be self-sufficient in whatever situation he found himself, for he knew he could do all things through God who strengthens him (Phil. 4:11b–13).

George Fox, like Saint Paul, faced enormous obstacles as he lived out the truth of his ministry. In his Journal, we read that as early as 1649 he experienced rage and scorn, heat and fury. He suffered blows, punching, beatings, and imprisonment. He reports that in the town of Mansfield Woodhouse, people fell upon him with their fists. They threw him against walls; they punched and set him in stocks; they threw stones at him. He was so bruised that he could not turn in bed. In addition to all this, Fox was jailed multiple times. In 1651, he reports that his most recent imprisonment lasted just three weeks shy of one year in four different prisons.

Nonetheless, Fox was able to reach the same degree of contentment as Paul. As he later recounted in his Journal, his jailers in the Derby dungeon in 1651 faced uncertainty as they tried to resolve his case that “their good report and bad report, their well or ill speaking was nothing to me; for the one did not lift me up, nor the other cast me down, praised be the Lord.”

How were Paul and Fox able to achieve such spiritual optimism in the face of such difficulties?

The answer is that both men were grounded in mystical experience. With regard to Saint Paul, he tells the Galatians that his gospel was not of human origin. He didn’t receive it from a human source, nor was he taught it, but he received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. Although he had persecuted the church of God, God was pleased to reveal his Son to him so that he might proclaim Christ among the Gentiles (Gal. 1:11–16). Elsewhere, without wanting to boast about his personal mystical experience (or even write in the first person), he writes to the Corinthians:

I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows.  And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses (2 Cor. 12:1–5).

In 1647, at age 23, George Fox struggled with how he might become a true minister of God, rather than one simply educated about God at Oxford or Cambridge. He heard a voice that caused his heart to leap for joy: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” He went on to note:

And when at any time my condition was veiled, my secret belief was stayed firm, and hope underneath held me, as an anchor in the bottom of the sea, and anchored my immortal soul . . . causing it to swim above the sea, the world where all the raging waves, foul weather, tempests, and temptations are.

As a result of Fox’s mystical awakening, the contingencies of life—described as “raging waves, foul weather, tempests, and temptations”—failed to sway him. His secret belief and the hope underneath it anchored him. His experience lifted him above the ups and downs of life and enabled him to be a spiritual optimist even in the face of life’s difficulties.

A Spiritual Practice Rooted in General and Individual Revelation

When discerning how I might develop a hope as discussed in Scripture (general revelation) and exemplified by Saint Paul and George Fox (in their own individual revelations), I have sought to integrate scriptural revelation and the example of earlier mystics into my own experience of the presence of God.

As a help to me, I, like many people, seek a level of stillness by slowly repeating phrases such as: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10); and “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord” (Ps. 27:14); and “Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him; do not fret” (Ps. 37:7); and the phrase “his steadfast love endures forever,” a phrase which is repeated 27 times in Ps. 136.

For future assistance, I recall that Jesus includes a mini sermon as a part of his Sermon on the Mount in which he exhorts us not to worry:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. . . . Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?. . . But seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matt. 6:25, 27, 33).

If we’re worrying, we aren’t still. We are allowing surface level storms to disturb our inner peace. We’re not waiting patiently with courage for God. Our efforts need to be toward a deep level of stillness in order to encounter the Divine within.

Quaker practice of silent worship is geared toward this stillness, toward an encounter with the God within. We seek to encounter the Lord’s Light and Spirit present in that still point at the ground of our being. George Fox was critical of meetings where the congregation did not sit to wait upon God to gather their minds together to feel God’s presence and power. His letter to Lady Claypole reads in part:

[B]e still a while from thy own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires and imaginations, and be stayed in the principle of God in thee, to stay thy mind upon God, up to God; and thou wilt find strength from him and find him to be a present help in time of trouble, in need, and to be a God at hand.

Fox, of course, was not the first person to offer instruction in discovering the image of God within. He may well have been aware of the guidance offered in The Book of Privy Counseling, written by the same anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In the former book, the author writes:

When you go apart to be alone for prayer, put from your mind everything you have been doing or plan to do. Reject all thoughts, be they good or be they evil. Do not pray with words unless you are really drawn to this; or if you do pray with words, pay no attention to whether they are many or few. . . . See that nothing remains in your conscious mind save a naked intent stretching out toward God. . . . [K]eep only the simple awareness that he is as he is. Let him be thus, I pray you, and force him not to be otherwise. . . . [R]est in this faith as on solid ground. . . . [L]et grace unite your thought and affection to him, while you strive to reject all minute inquiry into the particular qualities of your blind being or of his.

When I’m able to follow this counsel, whether in meeting or in private, I become detached from my worries and am able to accept in faith whatever is happening in my life. I’m able to give up my anxious care. By being still, and waiting patiently on the Lord, my worries cease.

Theological hope is our trust in God’s fidelity to God’s plan of salvation revealed in Scripture. Our task is to trust in God’s general plan being worked out in our individual lives. By seeking to live out God’s general revelation in our individual lives, with the help of imitating the examples of past mystics like Saint Paul and George Fox, we can be spiritually optimistic.