24 January
Absalom Jones
6 November 1746—13 February 1818
To Arise Out of the Dust
The vestry of Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church decided that it was time to act. One of the few integrated churches in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, St. George’s black membership had increased many times over thanks to the active evangelization of two black parishioners, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. So in November 1787, an alarmed vestry voted to require black members to sit in the church balcony during worship services. When Jones heard about the decision, he knew he had to defy it. On the following Sunday, he sat in the front pew of the church and was promptly thrown out. He and Allen left the church, taking most of the black parishioners with them, and founded the Free African Society (FAS).
The FAS was intended to be both an alternative nondenominational gathering of black worshippers and a relief society that offered aid financial assistance to freed slaves. Jones knew something about slavery. Born in bondage in Delaware, he was sold to a Philadelphia shopkeeper when he was sixteen. He learned to read and write by attending the night school for blacks run by Quaker Anthony Benezet and eventually managed to purchase his freedom as well as that of his wife.
In 1794, FAS members established themselves as the First African Church of Philadelphia and voted to affiliate with an official denomination. Jones and his followers decided to go with the Episcopal Church, while Allen and his followers opted for the Methodist one. Jones and his people were accepted by the Episcopal diocese—their congregation was renamed the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas—and Jones was ordained a deacon in 1795. Nine years later, he became the first black Episcopal priest, and he ministered to St. Thomas until his death.
From the very beginning, the congregation of St. Thomas, under Jones’s leadership, was defiant of slavery and racial discrimination. One of the church’s founding documents records the determination of its members “to arise out of the dust and shake ourselves, and throw off that servile fear, that the habit of oppression and bondage trained us up in.” Jones’s sermons regularly denounced slavery as a sin, urged slave owners to free their human chattel, and tried to persuade lawmakers to offer protection for runaway slaves looking to find freedom north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But Jones carried on his crusade against slavery outside of the church as well. Working with his old friend Richard Allen, he lobbied against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, a law that stripped fleeing slaves of basic human rights; petitioned Congress in 1800 to abolish the slave trade; cofounded Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee twelve years later to aid runaways and protect them from slave catchers; and campaigned strenuously against plans to exile free slaves to Liberia. In everything he did to help his people, his guiding principle was that nonviolently speaking truth to power was the key to resisting oppression.
Jones was well named: Absalom means “Father of Peace.”
25 January
Rufus Jones
25 January 1863—16 June 1948
Building the Beloved Community
The American Quaker Rufus Jones not only wrote important scholarly as well as popular books about mysticism. He was a mystic himself. His life was punctuated by three experiences that he believed were dramatically immediate contacts with the divine. But in addition to traditional mystical experiences, he was convinced that traces of God could be discerned in the everyday lived world and by looking within to discover the “inner light” so valued by the Friends. There was, he believed, only the thinnest of membranes between us and the Divine. “There is a Beyond, a More yet, within us, and it appears to be akin to us.”
What this meant for Jones is that all of reality is a “spiritual Society—a blessed community—which includes God and the cooperative souls, who with Him form the growing Kingdom.” Jones was especially attuned to seeing every human he encountered—including some particularly nasty ones he encountered in Nazi Germany when he went there on a mission, while in his seventies, to rescue Jews—as members of this blessed community, bound to them through the “More yet” within.
For the first half of his adult life, Jones was a prolific writer, journalist, editor, lecturer, and professor. He continued most of these activities in the second half of life—he was a man of unbounded energy—but in 1917, with the founding of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a relief organization that embodied Quakerism’s gospel-based advocacy of nonviolence, Jones the mystic became an activist as well. Between the wars he worked with the AFSC to bring economic and humanitarian relief to war-torn Europe. He traveled to Asia, met Gandhi during a visit to India—the two men were equally impressed with one another—and traveled the United States as head of the AFSC to drum up support for its mission. A year before his death, the AFSC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Jones’s wise steerage of the organization for thirty years was largely responsible for the honor.
Jones once wrote, “I assume that the major business we are here for in this world is to be a rightly fashioned person as an organ of the divine purpose.” Being rightly fashioned for Jones meant cultivating the mystic’s biblical faith, personal conversion, and inner yearning for God while at the same time working in the world for imaginative social transformation that lessens poverty, injustice, and warfare. Doing so honors the More yet within and our fellow humans without. It builds the beloved community.
26 January
Thomas Gumbleton
26 January 1930—
Peace Prelate
In late March 2003, a Roman Catholic prelate was led away in plastic handcuffs by Washington DC police. Along with other religious leaders and two Nobel Peace Prize recipients, he had been protesting the Iraq War in front of the White House. His arrest shocked many Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic, both those who opposed and those who supported the war. But for Thomas Gumbleton, Auxiliary Bishop of Michigan, it was nothing new. He’d been arrested once before, in 1999, also for peace witnessing at the White House.
The official Roman Catholic position on warfare—a position shared by all Christian denominations except a handful of historic peace churches—is that all wars are regrettable but some are morally justifiable if entered into for the right reasons and fought in the right way. But Gumbleton, a longtime pacifist who champions “peacemaking as a way of life,” rejects this position despite being a member of the ecclesial hierarchy. He is one of the few prelates of the Church willing to take a public anti-war stance, much less to be arrested for his convictions.
Gumbleton was consecrated bishop in 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War, and he immediately took advantage of his new position to urge American withdrawal from a conflict that eventually killed fifty thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. At the time, he was the only Catholic bishop who publicly opposed the war.
Also while serving as bishop, Gumbleton became one of the founders of the American branch of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace organization, as well as Bread for the World, an organization that addresses the problem of world hunger. As president of both organizations, he frequently traveled around the world to meet with victims of war and economic injustice. He has consistently spoken out for the protection of human rights and in support of international disarmament, particularly of nuclear weapons. One of his continuous messages is that Christians are confronted with a fundamental choice between what he calls “pax Americana” and pax Christi. The first entails “bombing, killing, wherever we decide.” The second means heeding the life and message of Jesus as revealed in the gospels: “you listen to what Jesus says, you watch how He acts; you follow His life. If Jesus didn’t reject violence . . . you may as well say you know nothing about Jesus of Nazareth. He rejected violence for any reason, any reason whatsoever.”
Gumbleton’s