By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome. Here’s a Lincoln quote for you:

“We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and in what we preserve.”

In other words, Lincoln would agree with James Baldwin and the powerful voices in our time who say that America’s racial injustices are not the responsibility of Black Americans to fix. White Americans must address systemic injustice built by White Americans.

This week’s quote comes from Lincoln’s message to Congress on December 1, 1862. This lengthy address came in the midst of Lincoln’s eroding political support. His Republicans had lost seats in five populous Northern states. He had announced that the Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect on the first day of 1863. The war would now be about freeing slaves as much as saving the Union.

So, he addressed Congress with a long and elaborate argument in support of emancipation for the good of the war effort, the good of the country and the good of humanity. His message that day was 8,400 words. His hand-written text of it ran across 86 pages of stationery!

(EDITOR’s NOTE—You can see page 85, which accompanies this column below, by clicking on the image to enlarge it. Or, you can see more of the context surrounding the brief, highlighted quote today by reading the text at the bottom of this column. If you want to wade into the whole address, here is a complete transcript of the message.)

As Lincoln reaches the conclusion of his long address, he is winsome and dramatic.

He begins with the word “We” and then punctuates his text with dashes and underlining to ensure that he stresses: even we here! He wants his audience to clearly understand that his call to action is aimed directly at these men sitting in Congress.

Lincoln is emphasizing that moral agency belongs to those who hold the power. “We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility.”

“We”—the White men in Congress at that moment and, if we truly are listening to Lincoln, White Americans today—bear this responsibility, not because we are good, but because we are the responsible party. We created this mess and we are supposed to fix it.

But that is only half of the remarkable spiritual wisdom of Lincoln here. The other half is what we, the Whites, are going to get out of this effort. Lincoln declares that in giving freedom—we assure our own freedom. We preserve freedom as our shared value.

At that moment, Lincoln is telling White power brokers that they are going to receive the very thing they are also giving away: freedom.

Lincoln knows that his White world will never be free, will never have the assurance of freedom, as long as Black people are enslaved. A nation cannot hold its democratic values together through violence, oppression, cruelty and injustice.

A system wherein a privileged class eats the bread from the sweat of another’s labors can never maintain itself without violence. And, Lincoln says, violence is ultimately destructive of two things: honor and democracy.

Honor. Lincoln frames this whole argument around the word honor. What is honor but the ability to trust the goodness of oneself and each other? In Lincoln’s language, trust based on honor is what democracy itself requires. There must be a basic minimum of individual trust, goodness. Law and order require equality and justice, Lincoln knows.

So he is pragmatic and also spiritual. We see that as he describes giving what we receive, and at that time freedom was something to give. Nowadays, however, the issue is equality and justice. The question we all face today is: Who holds the power to correct the systems of inequality that have crippled America in the 158 years since slavery officially ended? Who, now, is responsible for addressing those toxic systems? We must assume, as Lincoln did, that it is most assuredly the White institutions and the mentality of the people who run them that hold the power and bear the responsibility.

That was also the challenge laid down by James Baldwin who said: You are the problem. Don’t try to make it about me. He wrote, “I am not your Negro.”

To Lincoln equality is to be assumed. Equality must be in the air, an assumption as much as a fact. We must come to a point where all Americans truly share in this truth. Lincoln’s assumption follows the same spiritual logic that we heard from Martin Luther King when he preached that the purpose of non-violent resistance was two-fold: It called forth a wrong as it demanded it be righted—and, it named the White person’s evil. It made the White person see and feel just who he or she had become. That untwisting of a moral distortion was the gift that Black non-violent action so painfully gave to the rest of us.

This is what makes Lincoln a spiritual leader as much as a political leader. He felt deep down that the system of Black slavery held him—and the nation—in bondage to a tragically and morally flawed system. If he could let slaves go free—he could free the nation of captivity from this self-inflicted evil.

So, today, we are in a different chapter of American history. Our flawed systems of racial injustice have different shapes, although they are as deeply entwined in the structure of our nation than they ever were. Restoring our proclaimed American values will be nearly as traumatic today as it was in Lincoln’s era. And that is why we keep turning to Lincoln for spiritual wisdom in facing such complex moral, spiritual and systemic challenges.

We are no longer debating emancipation as Congress was in 1862. No one suggests that Lincoln’s specific policies should guide us in our era. He kept changing them himself to adapt as events around him changed. Not even Lincoln himself wound up adopting the convoluted emancipation proposal he included in that 1862 message to Congress. Lincoln is not on the ballot today, nor should he be. What millions of Americans are protesting, today, are entirely different forms of these bars and chains that are the legacy of slavery.

The reason millions of Americans still look to Lincoln as “the soul of America” is because of the spirit that guided him—that opened up such a compelling vision of America’s purpose and potential. And, today, the timely truth Lincoln calls us to remember is our responsibility to act.

The recognition of the equality of another human being is a timeless, spiritual truth. The recognition of our responsibility to assure that freedom is a spiritual calling. As Lincoln said in this same 1862 address to Congress: We must shed the myths and biases and injustices of the past. His words were: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” That line that could be uttered in our streets today.

We must wake up to the realities we face, Lincoln said. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

And, if our heads and hearts do clear—then, we shall begin to glimpse the tasks ahead of us. For White Americans, it is the power and responsibility for correcting injustice—because, even in our day, “we—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility.”

This is Duncan Newcomer, and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

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Care for More Context?

In understanding our brief passage from page 85 of Lincoln’s hand-written text, it may help to read a bit more from this concluding portion of his message:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

“Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.

“We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it.

“We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail.

“The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

 

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you. In the script for the movie Lincoln Tony Kushner pictures an encounter on the steps of the White House between Lincoln and his wife’s dress maker and confidante, Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley. He is coming back at night, heavy-hearted, from the War Office.

They begin to talk seriously.

He asks her, “Are you afraid of what lies ahead? For your people? If we succeed?”

She replies, “White people don’t want us here.”

Lincoln replies, “Many don’t.”

She says, “What about you?”

Lincoln confesses, “I—I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley. … I assume I’ll get used to you. But, what you are to the nation? What’ll become of you once slavery’s day is done? I don’t know.”

And he didn’t. Lincoln hated two things. He hated slavery and he hated not-knowing something. This was a teaching moment for Lincoln, a moment for him to learn.

In this scene we see Lincoln at the nexus of his ignorance of Black people. He admits he doesn’t know her, doesn’t really know her.

This is a piercingly honest statement for Lincoln to make—a painful admission for Lincoln—because Keckley had been a part of the Lincoln’s household since 1861, when she began not only making dresses for Mary Todd Lincoln but also became a close friend, advisor and an overall guide in navigating current styles in the cut-throat social world of Washington D.C. As one of Washington’s best-known dress designers, Mrs. Keckley is credited with upgrading the sophistication of Mary Todd’s gowns and personal appearance. Mary Todd came to rely on her for emotional support, as well.

Mrs. Keckley became so close to the family that she often had conversations with both Lincolns in the family’s private rooms. It was Keckley who introduced Sojourner Truth to Lincoln. She had enough resources and organizational skill to establish and run a nonprofit to help newly freed slaves—and the Lincolns actively supported her work. She was with Lincoln when he made his fateful visit to Richmond after the South’s defeat.

On December 12, 2018, The New York Times published a long-belated obituary summarizing Keckley’s life (using the alternate spelling of her name “Keckly”). This was part of the Times’ “Overlooked” project, dedicated to publishing in-depth obituaries of men and women the staff has overlooked throughout its long history.

Nancy Wartik’s obituary of Keckly says, in part: “The path that had led Keckly to become a first lady’s most trusted friend was almost unimaginable. She survived rape and years of beatings, going on to start her own business and eventually buying her way out of captivity. Then she earned a place as one of the reigning couturiers of high society in Washington. One of a relatively small number of literate slaves, Keckly was also among the first African-American women to publish a book. Her memoir is now considered one of the most important narratives of the Lincolns’ domestic life.”

So, in the Lincoln film, when Lincoln says, ““I—I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley”—that is truly a startling line for Kushner to put in his mouth. And, I believe, it is an honest expression of what Lincoln was suddenly encountering in this new world that was emerging.

That line—that admission—carries a huge weight, because we know that Lincoln hated not knowing things. As a boy he told how he would pace and fret at night in the log cabin when someone has used a word he did not understand or expressed a concept he had yet to fathom. It burned him not to know and he would not rest until he did.

When ideas were mastered, they were etched as if in steel on his mind. His memory was an iron forge.

So pictured as standing dumbfounded before the stately Mrs. Keckley, Kushner puts Lincoln in the classic White person’s position—sad to say, not only at the end of the Civil War but to this very day in many communities. In this encounter across races, Lincoln admits that he doesn’t know who is standing in front of him.

There is a lot to ponder in that scene—and to discuss with family and friends who may watch this film with you.

Are you thinking of streaming the film, or borrowing it from your library? Overall, I can say: I like this film very much. I also caution viewers: The movie makes it look like the Constitutional end of slavery with the 13^th Amendment was a sudden legislative idea cooked up by some suddenly good White men being pressured by the President. Of course, there was a very long history of many people—Black and White—hating slavery.

I would also caution viewers, as I have in earlier Quiet Fire episodes: No one suggests that Lincoln’s personal assumptions about Black Americans—or specific policies he was pursuing throughout his presidency—should guide us in our era. Our time is changed. For a long time, Lincoln thought that Black people were a problem to be fixed. He supported “colonizing” Black people back to Africa. He was surprised—when proposing this idea of a Black colony, Liberia,  to a group of Black ministers from Chicago—to hear them say, “Mr. Lincoln we are not Africans. We are Americans.”

In this unforgettable scene in the Lincoln film, it’s not what Lincoln knows that is so important to us today—it’s what he admits he doesn’t know, as hard and embarrassing as it was for him.

We do know: Lincoln hated slavery and he hated not knowing things and in his passion to fill that darkness he has been lighted down in honor, as may we, to the latest generation.

This is Duncan Newcomer, and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

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Do you hate not knowing things, too?

ARE YOU JUST DISCOVERING ELIZABETH KECKLEY (KECKLY)?

START WITH WIKIPEDIA: There’s an extensive article on her, including many fascinating links to go even further in learning about her life and legacy.

READ THE TIMES OBITUARY: Here’s the 2018 piece on Keckly.

READ HER BOOK: As of July, 2020, it’s only 99 cents in the Kindle version, which easily can be read on most smartphones and tablets.

IN THE BARDO, TOO: I’m not alone in recommending Keckley’s own text. In his Man-Booker-Prize-winning 2018 novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders quotes from her autobiography to open his second chapter.

READ HER 2003 BIOGRAPHY: Historian Jennifer Fleischer’s 2004 biography is Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, also available from Amazon.

WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY FILM: You’re looking for The Life and Times of Elizabeth Keckly, a documentary that currently is not on Amazon’s or Netflix’s streaming list. However, the film is available through library systems and also through Apple TV.

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

 

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER and DAVID CRUMM
In the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you: “The election was a necessity.” That’s part of what Abraham Lincoln said on November 10, 1864, two days after the astonishing completion of a national election in the midst of a Civil War.

Just completing the election was a miracle! Lincoln was as proud of that as he was that he had won a second term.

Lincoln would have been justified in crowing at his victory over this particular opponent. After all, he had defeated Gen. George McClellan who had said terrible, hateful things about Lincoln over the years. Despite McClellan’s behavior, Lincoln was not bitter. In fact, reporters for major newspapers who were waiting for Lincoln to finally humiliate his defeated foe admitted their surprise at the president’s refusal to gloat.

Instead, he said there should be a “statute of limitations” on political rivalries. And he added from his vast capacity for kindness, and familiarity with Shakespeare, that “so long as I have been here: I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.”

The clarity of Lincoln’s vision did not permit him to spend even a moment gazing at the fallen form of the vain and stubborn general who had been a thorn in his bosom for many years. He sincerely did not care about McClellan—because the greater lesson in the election of 1864 was larger than either candidate. The lesson of 1864 was that Americans could manage to hold an election in the middle of all-out war!

Of course, Lincoln was right in his assessment. Not many Americans, these days—aside from Civil War buffs—even remember McClellan.

The defeated bully didn’t matter much, even then, Lincoln realized. What mattered was the example of American democracy to the rest of the world.

As Lincoln reflected on the election in his brief public remarks on November 10, he stressed that the whole world had been watching as Americans passed through this seemingly impossible test of our democratic institutions.

As he addressed some of his supporters on that evening, Lincoln urged them to focus on that more enduring lesson. This election itself had been the real test, he said. “It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence in great emergencies. On this point the present rebellion brought our republic to a severe test; and a presidential election occurring in regular course during the rebellion added not a little to the strain.”

Before the election, Lincoln himself had admitted his doubts about winning and, at the same time, committed himself to the election date without wavering. He had no choice, he said. If his vision of America was right and true—there was no other course than holding that election as planned and scheduled.

Here’s how he said it to his supporters on November 10: “The election was a necessity. We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego—or postpone—a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”

The University of Virginia’s Miller Center is a national repository of scholarship for our political history. About that election, the Miller Center’s website tells visitors: “The amazing fact about the election of 1864 is that it occurred in the first place. In the middle of a devastating civil war, the United States held its presidential election almost without discussion about any alternatives. No other democratic nation had ever conducted a national election during times of war. And while there was some talk of postponing the election, it was never given serious consideration, even when Lincoln thought that he would lose.

“The second noteworthy fact about the election is that Lincoln won with a huge Electoral College victory and a substantial popular vote of 55 percent. Up to the very eve of the election, Lincoln was doubtful about his chances, and most of his key advisers had been warning him through the summer of 1864 to expect the worst.”

Lincoln did not waver. He knew he could not waver. That’s the lesson of November 1864. Lincoln’s faith in America defined his path toward an election day he thought might very well end in his defeat. As much as he wanted to prevail for a second term—and as much as he feared the looming election—he could not consider anything but to proceed to election day.

On November 10, relieved by what had happened on election day, he ended his remarks this way: “The election, along with its incidental, and undesirable strife, has done good too. It has demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”

May Lincoln’s clarity of vision continue to light us down in honor to the latest generation—and the latest election.

This is Duncan Newcomer, and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm collaborated with Duncan on this week’s column.

 

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

 

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“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a valuable—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”

Lincoln echoes Thomas Jefferson’s declaration of the right to revolution and Jefferson’s later call to on-going revolutions. Natural Law was, to Jefferson, reason enough for such a human right. Lincoln, who could choose words as carefully as Jefferson, calls it a sacred right.

Can there be sacred politics?

The quote is from a speech Lincoln delivered in 1848 to the U.S. House of Representatives. Europe was aflame with revolutions—especially France and Hungary. Lincoln was serving is in his one term in Congress.

His thinking is both global—and limited. In this speech, when Lincoln calls for the sacred right of revolution he is thinking of white men, not black slaves, and he is not thinking about Southern secession in the U.S. This is a limited and secular political speech, given potency by the word “sacred.”

Soon the U.S. Congress would be addressed by the traveling Lajos Kossuth, famous leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Lincoln sponsored a celebration for Kossuth in Springfield in 1851. Kossuth gave a speech in Ohio in 1852 saying, “The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people, and all by the people. Nothing about the people without the people.”

Lincoln would have liked that, no?

Later Lincoln would wear a Kossuth-style hat in his disguise when he clandestinely snuck into Washington as President Elect, avoiding  assassination plots. Kossuth, somewhat like Lincoln, learned English by reading Shakespeare, and was said to be the greatest orator of his day.

But why would Lincoln use the word sacred in this 1848 speech on revolution? Is this stained-glass window dressing?

We, who are pursing here the spiritual life of Lincoln in this Quiet Fire series, need to know what is sacred about a seemingly secular political speech by Lincoln.

Religions tell us that the Sacred is something beyond the here and now, the place and time of our lives. It is something universal and eternal. Those are the truth claims of the sacred, and here Lincoln is making a universal claim saying, “any peoples anywhere” have this right to revolution. His belief that there is something sacred about his secular point of view is a built-in multiplier.

Lincoln scholar John Burt has praised Lincoln’s mind and spirit for the implications embedded in his values. These unfolding implications are the hallmark of spiritual values. It is why they lead to both transformation and tragedy. There exists within values “a penumbra of implications that stretch off into shadow.” Burt concluded in his book, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism.

In this Quiet Fire series, we have called it Lincoln’s Yonder vision and it leads through the valley of the shadow of death. Such values reach beyond the here, reach everywhere, and beyond the now, into the eternal. They involve us in the will of God, greater than the will of any one people or person. That is, in part, the irony of American history. More is going on than we know or even think.

The poet Robert Penn Warren once said that evil is what happens on the way to doing good. Sacred values take us beyond our secular capacities to bring them to life. We are only partial beings and we create evil—like civil war—on the way to creating something good—like union and freedom.

High ideals have high costs, partly because when something is trans-human it can also easily become inhuman. “But we only know the meaning of political ideas once we have lived our way into them” adds John Burt.

Who could have dreamed that Jefferson’s ideas of equality would be re-proclaimed by Lincoln, then re-spoken by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, then Martin Luther King, Jr., and then in the spirit of LGBTQ rights? But we have lived that and are living more.

Sacred doesn’t just make something beautiful, real or good. It makes something apocalyptic and God-given, transformative.

This is how the spiritual life of Lincoln is beyond the national life of America. Lincoln has this Yonder vision of human equality, the precious quality of people as people.

Lincoln could not prove that this right to “revolutionize” was sacred. But Jefferson couldn’t prove that revolution and equality were from Natural Law either. He would use the idea of natural law to express his ideas about a natural law. We use sacred imagination to express the meaning of Lincoln’s idea of sacred rights in secular history.

Sacred imagination is what we get when we combine intuition, common sense, and a good dash of psychology and theology. This is our task now, to find the eternal in the temporal, and the universal in the useful, just as Lincoln did.

Values, such as equality, contain within them unpredictable consequences. Only by living them, in the action and passion of our time, does more light shine from those values and more implications come out of the shadows.

Our moral investment in each other becomes a consequence of this sacred point of view. We don’t know what further good might unfold in the midst of action and reaction, on both sides.

When we celebrate the values in Lincoln’s spiritual life we tend not to calibrate the consequences of his murder. But certainly in his life most things just didn’t work out as planned. They worked out over time and sometimes they didn’t work out at all. Life with a Living God, his last term for God, is simply a work in progress. Tragic conflicts and consequences happen. Freedom is still being defined today, in the life of a living God and in the spiritual life of those who care.

In the spiritual life of Lincoln the most important words Lincoln ever uttered were these three, “a Living God.”

As far as I know he only uses these words a few times. Once was when he repeats them after Dr. Gurley his Presbyterian minister uses them in sharing the Gospel news with Lincoln that his dead son Willie is with the Living God.

To Lincoln this means, that like Lincoln himself, Willie is still within the realm of life because God is a living God. Lincoln applies theologically what he learned logically from Euclid: if one thing is equal to another thing, that is itself equal to a third thing, then that first thing is also equal to it.

If Willie is with the Living God, and God is a living God, then as I live with a Living God, I also live with Willie.

But even more, it is a Living God that Lincoln reveals in his Second Inaugural. Such a Living God is in the events of this history. Lincoln comes to the Biblical place: God is a Living God and we are judged and then are tasked with mercy, charity, for a rebirth of justice, freedom and peace with all nations.

The spiritual life of Lincoln takes him through the tragic consequences of sacred values, and such a spiritual life can take us to the threshold of rebirth.

This is Duncan Newcomer and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

 

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

 

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

If you have been following our series, then you know that the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln has been a mystery. Not because it was not there, but because most of his biographers didn’t know how to find it.

It was like a treasure buried in a field. But who had the map and where was the dark-inked “X”?

We who care about this meditation called Quiet Fire, The Spiritual Life of Abraham Lincoln are among the “almost chosen few” who share in this quest to explore Lincoln’s spiritual life—using his phrase “almost chosen” because we are not sure how we came to this quest.

The map and compass for discovering the spiritual life of Lincoln did not exist in his time. Even his most capable observer Walt Whitman said it would be a long time—a long and spacious time before Lincoln’s greatness would be, could be, seen and fully understood. Whitman himself had already identified Lincoln’s religious nature. Whitman had said he was of an amble, a deep-rooted, a lofty and superlative nature.

Another poet, the modern poet Robert Lowell, helped greatly with the discovery of the map and the X when he located Lincoln’s spiritual life within the Christian tradition but not in any church’s Christianity. In an essay on Lincoln’s legacy, Lowell posed this as a question: “Is it possible that the fury of war changed Lincoln, the freethinker, into an instinctive Christian?”

Lowell described the Gettysburg Address as a Christian message that did not belong to Christianity.

That might not have been that hard to know since Lincoln himself was raised within Christianity, and was a regular worshipper in two Presbyterian Churches, each with a superlative minister. But then he never joined a Christian congregation by profession or confession of faith. He did rent a pew, however, and at least one of his sons, but not himself, was baptized.

About the time when Lincoln was becoming a Congressman from Illinois in 1848, there was a theologian, a “map maker” we could say over in Denmark who was doing just as Robert Lowell did—separating “Christian” from Christianity.

This funny looking little slip of a man, with tall hair and a crooked back, wrote scathingly about the modern official church of his native Denmark.

He was as melancholy as Lincoln. He fiercely turned his pen to attacking the church as a formal fraud of the very treasures it had been given. His name was Soren Kierkegaard and he lived in the same era of religious redefinition and had much the same kind of spiritual journey. Lincoln lived from 1809-1865, Kierkegaard from 1813-1855. They never met. Lincoln was not even aware of the theologian’s writings, which were not widely translated and did not become globally popular until the early 20^th century.

But—these two men shared a central passion. Kierkegaard once described his life’s work in just nine words: “to make people aware of what is essentially Christian,” an essence that he felt was conspicuously missing in organized religion. Had they met, would Lincoln have warmly agreed? Consider this often-repeated Kierkegaard quote that could have been uttered by Lincoln: “I have worked for a restlessness oriented toward inward deepening.”

Both men were aiming at the subjective individual life, not the objective life found in the state church. They were looking for a personal, intimate, inward life. That was where the spiritual truth lay buried.

The paradox of Lincoln is that he took this inward spiritual life into the middle of statecraft and national life.

And that is the map now used to find and define the spiritual life of Lincoln.

This map to the inner life is not the same as psychology because it has to do with just the spiritual, what we call the sacred, not with brains per se or the mind-body. Spiritual life is also not the same as emotions, because it has to do with truth and commitment as well as feelings. It is not the same as ethics because it has to do with a higher loyalty than even the good or the law. It has to do with the very term that Lincoln came finally to use; it has to do with the Living God. That is how Lincoln supported his judgments on the evils of slavery and the justice of God’s wrath in the Civil War, the ancient but Living God.

This was God as he had come to know him in his private meditation of the divine will, an essay he wrote for himself. He sought that through his prayer life and his Bible reading life, and through his emersion in culture, especially Shakespeare, and then in his actions through politics and war, and all the anguish and agony therein.

Of course Lincoln’s inner life came roaring out into national life. But as President he never lost the inner compass he had first used to find the X where he began digging for God.

This is Duncan Newcomer and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

 

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

 

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a reflection on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you: “He kept the Bible and Aesop’s always within reach, and read them over and over again.” This is from a childhood friend, David Turnham.

Lincoln would memorize many of Aesop’s fables. Among his favorites was The Old Man and His Sons in which a wise old man asks his sons to break a bundle of sticks. They can’t—until the old man explains that they should have started by taking the bundle apart. Individual sticks are easy to snap.

Here’s the moral at the end of one English version of the fable: “Nothing is more necessary towards completing and continuing the well-being of mankind than their entering into and preserving friendships and alliances. The safety of government depends chiefly upon this; and therefore it is weakened and exposed to its enemies, in proportion as it is divided by parties. A kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.”

Of course Aesop knew where that maxim came from, “the best man that ever lived” he says at the end of another fable. Lincoln was most likely about ten years old when he first read these stories. His favorites were The Bible, Aesop’s Fables and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

We come to Abraham Lincoln divided against ourselves in many ways. One of his most remarkable abilities was how well he housed things divided. He was liberal in his goals but conservative in his methods. He was secular in his intellect yet often religious in his language.

Lincoln, however, did not sacrifice his passion in order to accommodate the divisive wars going on inside him and ‘round about him. Rather with his own quiet fire and intense concentration he found a bright point of transcendence, a third alternative, to many of the darkly irreconcilable conflicts of his era.

We study Lincoln, his intellect and his spirit, hoping to understand more how to hold our house together, spiritually and politically. As he became President many Americans were talking past each other in languages that deepened division. Christian piety was strong in the country and yet some preachers increasingly mined the Bible for an ore to forge into steel for war. The self-righteous used religious language, North and South.

Not an orthodox Christian in any traditional sense, Lincoln’s own fiery furnace yielded a nearly biblical theological language that we hold as almost sacred and certainly unifying. We have wide religious differences and wonder what sacred canopy covers us. Much of his language can hold us.

As he grew to become one of our more literate and eloquent Presidents, much of the educated elite was leaving evangelical religion for the modern fields of science and rational enlightenment. Science fueled industry, reason seemed to erode the religious moral core, and educational and economic divisions grew.

Poor and formerly uneducated, Lincoln learned practical science and enlightened reason well. But he could, in fact he did, see a religious moral vision beyond them. We have trusted technical progress and higher education and can wonder if religion holds any practical or moral vision for our time.

Lincoln had two points of reference that stood outside of the liberal-conservative, secular-religious, views of his time. One point of reference was that he saw the American experiment as a beacon to the peoples of the world. In that sense he shared in a secular way the original Puritan vision of an experiment set like a beacon on a hill.

In fact, unknown to him, six generations back, in the late 1630’s, his ancestors had moved from Hingham, England, a hot bed of Puritan revolt, to Hingham, Massachusetts in the Bay Colony. Throughout Lincoln’s struggle to hold the American proposition together, to prove itself to a doubting world, he had in mind a light for the common peoples of the world, especially old Europe and benighted Russia. He felt deeply that America was crucial to the world.

His second point of reference was simply this: He felt that American was important to God and that God was crucial to America. He didn’t go into his life believing things like that. In fact it was only fate and necessity that he first believed in. But fate—from the view of the fiery trial he lived in his last five years—took on the face of God, and necessity took on the hand of God’s justice and judgment, calling for God’s mercy.

With these two perspectives Lincoln could take a political stand greater than that held by either side in the war, and he had a moral means for the goal of union. The defeat of the Southern rebellion was a win for America in his mind, and a win for American was a win for the real freedom of the world’s peoples who had been ruled by despots for years. The eventual moral means of conducting the war—emancipation—became his theological stand and a necessary response to the demands of God’s justice. Not only was the world watching him and the American experiment, but God was as well. Lincoln would say in his Second Inaugural, sounding like a Biblical Prophet, that God could compel justice by imposing suffering for the mutual evil of slavery.

The things that divided the house he presided over did not divide him because he had these two greater points of view, the world and God. Opposing forces, however, seemed to settle on Lincoln’s shoulders like gigantic birds of prey.

But, as historian Allen Guelzo says in his book Redeemer President, Lincoln actually had an increasingly Calvinistic notion of God’s providence. It led him to stay with a war policy that extended the war. “Lincoln had to step outside liberalism and surrender himself to the direction of an overruling divine providence whose conclusions he had by no means prejudged.” What unified Lincoln more and more in the end was his conviction of divine providence as the just cause of the extended suffering.

Guelzo attributes Lincoln’s depth and resiliency, his “great resources,” to this cohesion. He followed neither bird of prey, abolitionist nor unionist, on either of his stooped shoulders. Yet he ended up fulfilling the abolitionist and the unionist hopes, despite them not because of them. He had this third way, and in anyone less skeptical and thoughtful it would have seemed like religious fanaticism.

 

 

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