‘All of life is a sacrament.’

One unusual feature of Quakerism is its rejection of traditional Christian ordinances such as water baptism and the Lord’s supper.  If you ask Friends to explain this, perhaps the most frequent answer will be that traditionally, Friends believe that “all of life is a sacrament,” and that such ceremonies are therefore superfluous.

This has been a standard explanation at least for several decades, and has passed into the wider culture’s understanding of Quakerism; it appears in secular reference sources such as the 1945 Americana Annual, for example.

Often, the idea is credited to early Friends, as in the introduction to the 2001 edition of the memoirs of David Ferris: “Friends had always held that all of life is a sacrament, that one could not have separate compartments for the economic, political, social, sexual, and spiritual aspects of life.”  Note that Friends’ understanding that all of life is a sacrament is offered here not just as an explanation for Friends aceremonialism, but as the basis for bringing a spiritual or religious approach to what many people would regard as mundane secular life.

One sometimes encounters variants of the phrase: “All of life is sacramental,” “The whole of life is a sacrament,” etc.  But the wording is so similar that one cannot help but suspect that these all derive from a single textual source, and not just from a common religious sensibility.  But unlike some Quaker proverbs, this is not one that one typically sees attributed to a particular author.

Where does it come from then?  Has this phrase been a commonplace of Quakerism since the beginning, as many Friends seem to believe?

In fact the earliest attestation of any variant of this phrase that I have been able to find is from 1902.  It is the first line of May Kendall’s article ‘On Sacraments’, in vol. V, no. 47 of the Quaker periodical Present Day Papers:

The whole of life is a sacrament.  The worst, the poorest and meanest, of us as well as the bravest and the noblest before our brief day darkens, have broken divine bread. If we believed it wholly, for others as for ourselves, we should have peace. Even now, the measure of our peace is our belief in it, and our forgetfulness of it is the measure of our unrest. To forget it utterly is despair. That the daily bread of human existence, with all its hope and joy, its agony and failure, is broken to men by no blind fate, but by an Eternal Wisdom that is Eternal Love,—this is the underlying faith that saves us from madness. But it is a faith that must be proved, and striven for, and actualised, hour by hour and day by day. We must grip it hard, if we are to recognise God’s sacraments as, one by one, they enter into our experience.

May Kendall (1861–ca. 1943) was a British poet, best known for That Very Mab (co-authored with Andrew Lang) and ‘Lay of the Trilobite’.  She worked closely with prominent Quaker John Wilhelm Rowntree on various social reform projects, and contributed regularly to Quaker publications.

Does anyone know of an earlier occurrence of this (or some similar) phrase?

Even if the adage that all of life is sacramental dates only to the early 20th century, one may ask whether the general belief or sentiment which it expresses might be older.  Here we run into thorny issues of interpretation: Exactly what do we mean by a “sacrament”?  Does the proverb simply mean that all of life is sacred, or is some closer analogy to traditional church sacraments intended?

I honestly don’t know whether early (17th century) Friends would have been comfortable with the idea that all of life is sacred (much less with the idea that all of life is a sacrament); but I will point out that they did not generally appeal to this idea in justifying the discontinuation of ceremonial baptism and communion.  Far more commonly, they pointed out the superfluity of such rites for those who already possessed the “substance” of them; argued that Christian worship was to be inward and “spiritual” (that is, performed in and by the spirit) rather than outward and ceremonial; and cited scriptural passages to the effect that water baptism and the Lord’s supper were not ordained in perpetuity.