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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.