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To support the development of this site and the work of soul friendship you are invited to express your appreciation through the spiritual practice of Dana

John Woolman was among many who began the campaign to abolish slavery.  It was left to parliamentarians like William Wilberforce to make their long, spiritual and heart felt wish a reality for the many millions who suffered the passage to slavery

William Wilberforce began waging his forty-six yearlong campaign against the entrenched financial interests in slavery in 1787.  His Slave Trade Act of 1807 put an end to slavery in most of the British Empire, but it was not until 1833 that Britain completely abolished slavery. News of the abolition reached Wilberforce on his deathbed. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the United States in 1863 during a bitter Civil War between the free and slave-holding states.  

Radiant 

Spiritual Cinema

Learn more about William Wilberforce and his campaign to abolish slavery in an evening of spiritual cinema.

 Amazing Grace

Radiant Poetry

The Quaker of Olden Time

by John Greenleaf Whittier

The Quaker of the olden time!
How calm and firm and true,
Unspotted by its wrong and crime,
He walked the dark earth through,
The lust of power, the love of gain,
The thousand lures of sin
Around him, had no power to stain
The purity within.

With that deep insight which detects
All great things in the small,
And knows how each man's life affects
The spiritual life of all,
He walked by faith and not by sight,
By love and not by law;
The presence of the wrong or right
He rather felt than saw.

He felt that wrong with wrong partakes,
That nothing stands alone,
That whoso gives the motive, makes His
brother's sin his own
And, pausing not for doubtful choice
Of evils great or small,
He listened to that inward voice
Which called away from all.

O Spirit of that early day,
So pure and strong and true,
Be with us in the narrow way
Our faithful fathers knew.
Give strength the evil to forsake,
The cross of Truth to bear,
And love and reverent fear to make
Our daily lives a prayer!

 

 

 

The Light of the World - Holman Hunt

Mo Anam Cara – John Woolman

 Traveling in the Light 

“In a time of sickness…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 dully gloomy color, between the south and the east, and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be, and live, and that I was mixed in with them, and henceforth I might not consider myself as a distinct or separate being. 

I then heard a soft melodious voice, more pure and harmonious than any voice I had heard with my ears before…The words were – “John Woolman is dead.”  

I soon remembered that I once was John Woolman, and, being assured that I was alive in the body, I greatly wondered what that heavenly voice could mean… 

This language ...“John Woolman is dead,” meant no more than the death of my own will.

 The Journal of John Woolman, 1772

John Woolman, Quaker, small businessman, keeper of apple orchards, father, and mystic recorded his spiritual journeying and musings along that path living in the Light in his Journal. This extraordinary record of his soul’s journeying has great contemporary relevance and speaks directly to concerns that beset us today.

Born in 1720 Woolman grew up in the original Quaker colony, South Jersey, in the neighborhood of present day Burlington, New Jersey. This colony was founded in 1677 and both his grandfather and father were original settlers.

While his forbearers had taken care to pay both Lord Berkeley and the Leni Lenape for the privilege of settling in South Jersey, the incomers may have been less generous in their stewarding of that land. Woolman, who traveled extensively ‘in the Light’, traveled up the long Susquehanna River in 1763 to have discourse with Native Americans.  He did not undertake these journeys to convert but to listen, look and lean his spirituality to common ground.

A spiritual turning point came when he was a young apprentice. Woolman worked for merchant and was asked in the course of his clerical duties to write out the bill of sale for the purchase of another human being’s life and labor. An African slave in other words.  So conscience stricken was he by this act he had to speak with his employer and refuse to ever do such again on religious and spiritual grounds. Given that day’s religious justification for slavery it can only be the force of both his spiritual conviction and deeply felt remorse that could have moved his employer to accept his conditions. 

After his apprenticeship Woolman himself became what was known as a ‘dry goods’ merchant and tailor. He was moved by the plight of his less economically endowed neighbors who became indebted and ruined with the resulting financial anxiety.  In time, he gave up business because of the social damage he saw done by even ethical businessmen.

But the moving of the Spirit and his great concern for the enslaved became his guiding reason to travel in the Light.  Woolman was not a preacher. Rather, he strove to ‘speak truth in Love.’ He was by most accounts a gentle man who used the power of persuasion to change the hearts and minds of others. 

 He started by visiting other members of the Religious Society of Friends who lived in the southern colonies and were benefiting economically from slave labor. He spoke honestly of his own spiritual leanings and revelations of the Light. Then he calmly explained that he was thankful for the hospitality offered and that in good conscience he must pay all those who had given great service towards his comfortable stay. Not a rich man, the money paid to each slave would not have bought freedom, but would have given hope of freedom that his promptings from Spirit may have yielded in the hearts of those who kept them in bondage.

His concern for slavery eventually made him view the wider economic implications of trade. As a forerunner of both boycotts and fair trade he gave up wearing cotton clothing since it was the product of enslaved labor and he could not in good conscience support this economic system of exploitation. This lack of separation from all beings, led to his answering the call to Love in Action.

John Woolman’s final journey while ‘travelling in the Light’ was to England where he spoke against slavery, hoping to move Friends and parliamentarians to abolish the evil of slavery. He died of smallpox in York in 1772.

John Woolman was probably considered an outsider in his day with his plain flax garments of undyed cloth. Yet he did not feel like an outsider. His experience of spiritual emergence convinced him of his connection with all beings.

This lack of separation from all beings,  “a tenderness for all Creatures,” led to his answering the call to Love in Action for social justice. For Woolman this meant carefully considering all aspects of his life and how they might, even obliquely, be against the Truth and Love of God or condone evil.  Small acts in the daily round had wider implications and could cause the misery of others.  This conscious way of living, always being guided by the Light, is a steadying example for spiritual journeyers today.

©Bee Smith 2009

Another Soul Friend

"click on graphic below"

John O'Donohue is a man of the soul.  His scholarly meditation on the continuing relevance of Ireland's spiritual heritage has become a publishing phenomenon....  This poetic meditation has become a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic......  A lyrical epic prayer

The Times

From Review of Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom