THE SECRET OF RADIANT LIFE (W E Sangster), London: H&S 1957

Here’s the best 20th century book on practical Christ-like holiness in the English language, published twenty years before Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. W E Sangster, commonly acclaimed as the ‘greatest Methodist since Wesley’ was a unique pastor/scholar/saint, and one of the first ‘Protestants’ in Great Britain to popularize insights from many sources – especially the Catholic mystics (as did A W Tozer in the U.S. in the same era). These days, the most-read writer in this genre is Richard Rohr. (See 25 Books Every Christian Should Read for more on all that).

The Secret of Radiant Life has all you need to know to live a balanced and rewarding Christian life. Citing stories and quotes about the life-struggles of famous-to-ordinary people, it is replete with Biblical insights, meditations and wise pastoral advice on everything from contemplative prayer, the best use of time, dealing with resentment etc., to ‘the secrets why some Christians are – or aren’t – happy/joyful/radiant’.

The only warning I would give as you read this, little by little, through an entire year (yes! perhaps together with Eugene Peterson’s The Message) is that Sangster uses 1950s non-inclusive language (and some words which have broadened their meaning – like ‘gay’!): all that grates these days, but live with it! (Occasionally in these jottings I’ve translated his wisdom into contemporary 21st century language). There are gems of wisdom on every one of the 272 pages in this small book (it will fit into your pocket to carry with you everywhere).

On the first page is his thesis: ‘This book begins with the deep conviction that our healing and wholeness are in God.’ Here’s some timeless wisdom that jumped out of the pages to challenge my ‘walk with God’:

• So you were born (say some) sanguine or phlegmatic or choleric or melancholic? You don’t have to be ‘trapped in your temperament’ – the phlegmatic can sparkle, the choleric can be urbane, the melancholic can bubble with joy… The radiant life is not finally determined by health, temperament or circumstances, or fitness, fame and fortune…

• Augustine said some fifteen hundred years ago on the first page of his famous Confessions: ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it finds rest in Thee’.

• Carl Jung: ‘Among all my patients in the second half of life… there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life’.

• ‘The very hairs of your head are all numbered’. If God cares that much, nothing else ultimately matters.

• We have only 13 of Paul’s letters. Yet… with many important things to say, he says one thing over and over again. In Christ! In Christ! IN CHRIST! If you add sister-phrases like ‘in Him’, ‘in the Lord’ etc. Paul uses the expression 164 times, according to the eminent German scholar Dr. Adolf Deissmann.

• ‘Attitude’ is a compound of thought, feeling and will. Logic is not the only way to ‘know’ something. Some things we know – unprovable in logic – by intuition. Some things we know by experience (to ‘know’ how to swim you have to get into the water!). Then add Jesus’ obedience mandate: ‘Whoever does the will… shall know the doctrine!’ In a simple prayer-conversation with God each day He will make Himself known to you, and carry you beyond all doubting that He is there and He is kind.

• He who made the foul-mouthed Peter radiant, and the blood-stained Paul, can make you radiant too!

• For Christ to really inhabit your life some things will have to go. The past must be forgiven. Nobody can be a radiant personality who is not forgiving. If Christ comes into your life, He must come in as Master: not as a servant, but as the Lord. And He comes in for good (in both senses).

• Inward peace and outward radiance ought not to be something you want for your own selfish enjoyment. Both are by-products of God in the soul – but God in the soul involves service and sacrifice. The Divine law is ‘Give, and it shall be given to you…’ Radiant Christians are never self-consciously so… ‘Freely to all ourselves we give, /Constrained by Jesus’ love to live, /The servants of mankind’.

• ‘He was one of those grim-looking men who sometimes hold office in the church. (Nobody doubts their integrity, but nobody wants to be like them). All the lines of his face seemed to run down at acute angles, as though he lived… with an unpleasant odour under his nose…’

• John Wesley: ‘I could no more worry than I could curse or swear…’

• Pride is worse than lust, or cruelty, or greed… An old lady listened approvingly to a sermon on the Pharisee and the Publican and glowing with inward virtue said to her friends: ‘Well, thank God, I’m not like them Pharisees!’ Pride is the deadliest disease of the soul.

• There’s a ‘homesickness of the soul’, a longing in us for the eternal, until we are at ease with God. Jesus lived three years with unbroken peace – ‘Toil, unsevered from tranquillity’ – and died bequeathing that peace to his friends.

• Dr Adler sometimes concluded his lectures with ‘I wish you all a creative inferiority feeling’. God does not love us for anything – because we are good, or clever, or industrious. He loves us for ourselves alone. (So if we cannot love ourselves, cannot we at least be friendly and kind?’). Christ invites you to be a son/daughter of God – not merely a servant: that ought to end your feelings of inferiority, and root out the self-despisings from your mind!

• Jesus always advised people to settle their differences at once. ‘Agree with your adversary quickly’. The Capulets and Montagues are found among all people.

• Jealousy: it’s the people we know best, who move in the same circle, and who just surpass us, who unconsciously set the trap into which we fall. Jealousy explains why it is easier to ‘weep with those who weep’ than to ‘rejoice with those who rejoice’.

• Sam Harrison was almost killed three weeks before the war ended. He was 27 months in hospital, and had 33 surgical operations… But he never moans, and spends his Saturday afternoons cheering the men in the military hospital. At his office he holds letters firm with the four-inch stump at his left shoulder, and signs them neatly with a pen held in the two fingers of his right hand… No self-pity; no moans. Just quiet gratitude for numberless mercies and an iron resolution to go bravely on. (So why do others of us succumb to self-pity?). ‘Life is good’, says Jesus. Run out and embrace life with the ‘beasts of the field and the birds of the air: learn with them that the first thing about life is to enjoy it. And at the last, the meek inherit the earth!’

• The mass of mankind, not having too much money or possessions, still believe that wealth and joy go together. Only the wealthy know that that isn’t necessarily so. (John Camden Neild who inherited a fortune from his father was a miser, who lived frugally so as not to lose any of it. When he died he left it all to the richest woman in the land – Queen Victoria!).

• Professor W E Hocking argued that we cannot have a sound society unless we have a sufficient number of leaders who can’t be bought.

• There is no instance in the New Testament of Christ being guilty of bad temper. But he does blaze with anger when most people would be quite indifferent or mildly disapproving.

• Remember Jesus was born among a people who took a low view of women. So it’s no wonder the little fragment of gospel narrative about Jesus saying to the adulterous woman ‘Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more’ found it hard to secure a firm place in the canon. It must have happened.

• A meditation: Go somewhere alone. Let all tension go. Be quiet in the presence of God. Then when you’ve ‘centred down’ say slowly to yourself: ‘In Christ I am filled with love. In Christ I am filled with joy. In Christ I am filled with peace’ etc. Dedicate yourself afresh to God every day. Say with Philip Doddridge, ‘That vow renewed shall daily hear’.

• ‘Purgation/catharsis’ is sometimes good for you. Women more commonly ‘feel better after a good cry’ but there is also something very moving in the tears of a man. The problem with many of us is that we claim to be forgiven but still carry our sins – selfishness, pride, envy, self-pity, resentment and negativism among them. Listen: God has forgiven you. Let no one accuse you – not even yourself!

• Covetousness is not always wrong: it’s only wrong when directed to a wrong end. Paul exhorts us to ‘Covet earnestly the best gifts’. What are they? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, self-control.

• The best sustained prayer always includes adoration, thanksgiving, confession and intercession. The best prayer does not necessarily include too much personal petition – ‘Give me, give me, give me’. The concentration is on God. Have a prayer list, to pray for certain people and situations regularly. And emphasize prayer for those we ‘kindle against: only saints, and the bovine, can say there is no one they dislike, and it was not always true of the saints’. You cannot hate people you pray for. Pray for those who have injured you. It is probably the greatest triumph of intercessory prayer. And when you are weighed down with someone’s great need, go on (as George Macdonald said) ‘thinking of God and them together!’

• God guides in various ways: through the Bible, through our reason, through the church, through circumstances, by our conscience, and by an inner light or voice. Some uncertainty may attach to any of these taken alone, but when they corroborate each other, no doubt need be felt.

• Take an inventory of time lost every day, not in the friendly courtesies of common life, but in idle talk.

• If God permits what appears to be a disaster to overtake you, there must be the possibility of great good as its fruit. All things work together for good to them that love God!

• An ‘ordinary person’ who was actually a saint, had the habit of offering herself as a channel of God’s love to everyone she encountered every day – mostly directing her thoughts to canalise the stream of God’s love to others. She said: ‘I sometimes feel that I have in my hands the nozzle of great Love, and, each in turn, I pour the love of God over them’. Look on people (as George Fox always tried to do) ‘in the love of God. The love will reach them – though you may not say a word.’ (My note: Frank Laubach, the great 20th century mystic, also used to do this sort of thing).

(These notes are from my journal. And can be found here also: http://jmm.org.au/articles/30083.htm )

Rowland Croucher
May 2012.