From The Inner Life, Inner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel.

God wants to bestow an indestructible harmony upon our inner life, a harmony that shall have an effect outwardly in mighty melodies of love. Power to act results from the energy born of inner gathering. The gathering of hearts leads to the gathering of a people who show in their industrious work that the kingdom of God is justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

With respect to this life-task – this call from Christ – it is important to emphasize once more today that our capacity for work is sure to become exhausted and mechanical, our strength sapped at the core, if no deepening is given to the inner life in stillness and quiet. As soon as inner quiet is lost, the holy springs of the inner world that bring life-giving water to our spiritual life must fail at the very source. Like a man dying of thirst, the overburdened people of today long for their inner life to be strengthened and quickened because they feel how miserably they will die otherwise. The inner strength that comes from the Source and in tranquil silence lets God himself speak and act, leads the believers away from sinking in death to rising in life, to a life that flows outward in streams of creative spirit, without losing itself in externals. This strength as “active stillness” leads believers to work for the world in such a way that they do not become “worldly,” and yet they never become inactive.

Matthew J. Cutter, Meditation. Used by permission.

These are times of distress; they do not allow us to retreat just because we are willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks that press upon human society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation, as implied by Eckhart’s sayings (which are liable to be misunderstood, to say the least). We are thankful that the highly mechanized nature of world economics today does not allow this pious selfishness anymore, for it gives us more protection from self-deception than we had in earlier times. But the lack of vital and effective action shows us when our striving after detachment has not penetrated to the inmost springs of creative power. Where this power is at work in us, there is a detachment that is a thorough letting go of self and therefore a freedom for the hardest work; this gathers believing people into the most living kind of community. Their love to all people now presses forward out of all isolation to the ends of the earth, and yet they will never be able to give up the common gathering at the focal point of strength.

To those who are responsible in their consciences, the only thing that could justify withdrawing into their inner selves to escape today’s confusing, hectic whirl would be that their fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with the eternal powers, that strength of character which is ready to be tested in the stream of the world, the strength that alone can cope with the demands of this age. Not flight but gathering for attack is the watchword. We must never withdraw from the rushing stream of present-day life into a selfishness of soul that makes our love grow cold in the face of need and the countless paths of guilt connected with it. Our detachment, turned into coldness of heart, would then reach such a height of injustice that it would exceed the injustice of the world. Unless we share the distress and guilt of the world, we fall prey to untruthfulness and lifelessness, to eternal and temporal death. And those who are prepared to share only the inner need of others, and not their outer need as well, fully and completely, are cutting life into halves. They are thereby losing the inner half of life, the very part they were supposed to be gaining or preserving. For they have forgotten Jesus Christ, who took on outer need just as much as inner need: in his eyes the two are inseparably one. It is possible to share lovingly and militantly in the life of our times only when we respond with every fiber of our being to the work demanded, when in every drop of our heart’s blood we feel the distress, and want to share in suffering it and thereby in actively overcoming it. It is in quietness that we find the way to give this help.

Source: Eberhard Arnold The Inner Life, Inner Land: A Guide into the Heart of the Gospel, Volume 1, (Plough 1975, 2019) 12–15.