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Seek Spirit, Savor Intellect

by Patricia A. Williams

Pat finds no conflict between intellect and spirit. Indeed, she experiences them as complementary, for both engage the inner life. As a child, she found the spirit present through the liturgy of the Episcopal Eucharist. There she learned that the spirit is a spirit of simplicity. She also saw that God treats all people equally (and expects us to do the same), for all who approached the altar received the same gifts. There she also witnessed truth—that what was said was also done—and came to value it deeply. Through the Episcopal Church, God led her away from worldliness into a life of spiritual depth, related in her spiritual autobiography, Engagement with God: A Love Story.

There, also, she learned the great intellectual traditions of the church. She memorized the historical creeds, both Apostles’ and Nicene, and later also the ancient Athanasian Creed. She studied the thirty-nine articles, statements of faith for the Anglican/Episcopal church since the days of Henry VIII, reformer of the church in England. Her undergraduate honors paper centered on Thomas Cranmer, archbishop under Henry VIII. Her Master’s thesis dealt with Trinitarian controversies as they appeared in the English literature of 1710-1714.

And there in the church, she heard the Bible read. From those liturgical readings, she memorized most of the Gospel material. Through those readings, Jesus became a central influence in her life. She pondered the event of the young man who failed to follow Jesus because he possessed great wealth and, in her twenties, she gave away most of her possessions. Many years later, she studied the historical Jesus through seminars with the Biblical Archaeology Society and wrote a book about Jesus, describing in simple language the scholarly consensus. She titled it Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What You Can Do About It. Many readers have found this book personally rewarding.

She came to science late, her interest sparked not by formal education, but by the history of science, its wondrous intellectual flowering from the sixteenth century onward. She read about how people who believed the Bible literally, as did all persons in Christendom in the early modern period, found evidence that contradicted literal readings. She noted how the Bible itself led them to make scientific discoveries that called the biblical narratives into question, and how they wrestled honestly with the contradictions they discovered. It was clear to them and to her that the evidence was on the side of science. She presented the biological science in her simple introduction to evolution: Evolution Evolving: What Everyone Needs to Know. She explored relationships between evolutionary science and the Bible in her award-winning book, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin.

By then she had learned to rest her spiritual life on the spirit, not on the letter. From a spiritual perspective, science seemed a wonderful disclosure of the world God had created. She explored this creative God in her book, Revealing God: A New Theology from Science and Jesus. There she found God to be a generous, creative spirit, active, yet hidden, like the yeast that makes bread rise. Yeast, of course, is one of Jesus’ metaphors for God’s activity in the world. Active in the bread, yeast cannot be discovered, no matter how thin or tiny the bread is sliced. It works unseen, like God in the creation.

As her spiritual life expanded and deepened, she longed for greater simplicity. In her search, she found the silent Quakers and worshiped with them for a dozen years. Typical of her intellectual and spiritual curiosity, she explored their tradition in depth. Asked to teach a class in Quakerism to beginners, she found the standard text inadequate and outdated. So she wrote her own book, titled Quakerism: A Theology for Our Time. Here she presented the basic tenets of Quakerism, then showed how well modern science and biblical criticism fit with it. Indeed, they help substantiate the original Quaker theology of the seventeenth century. This simple theology, that God is in everyone, is compatible with most Christian traditions, from Catholic to Pentecostal.

For thirty years, Pat lived in the mountains of Virginia in a passive solar house she designed and built. She cut and split her own firewood and hiked the mountains, happy to find spirit in the forest, as she also does through many forms of worship, from Catholic to Quaker to Pentecostal. Truly, the spirit is both generous and humble. Moreover, she believes there is spirit within us all, available to all who seek. It is a spirit of simplicity and truth, which are fundamental attributes of science. Her lifestyle is to seek spirit, savor intellect. They are complementary and, pursued together, lead her to a rich and satisfying life.