ICDT 86: Living on Two Levels

Unhurried Living

A few years ago I read Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion. He put into eloquent prose a dynamic that I had experienced, but had not yet found words to describe.

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings. . . . In a deeply religious culture people know that the deep level of prayer and of divine attendance is the most important thing in the world. It is at this deep level that the real business of life is determined. . . . Between the two levels is fruitful interplay, but ever the accent must be upon the deeper level, where the soul ever dwells in the presence of the Holy One.

Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1941), 9.

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