Daily Inspiration Quote by Elias Hicks

A blade of grass is doing heavy theological work here: it drags God out of the vaulted sanctuary and plants the divine in the most disregarded corner of the everyday. Hicks, a Quaker minister and a famously controversial one, isn’t offering a nature-poem so much as a doctrinal jailbreak. “Fulness of the godhead” echoes Pauline language (“the fullness of the Godhead”), a phrase typically reserved for Christ’s unique status. Hicks reroutes that cosmic exclusivity into radical immanence: not just God present in creation, but God fully resident in the ordinary, the smallest, the disposable.

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Pastoral, because it reassures hearers that access to the sacred doesn’t require intermediaries, sacraments, or polished theology; it’s as close as the ground underfoot. Polemical, because it quietly undercuts hierarchical religion: if divinity dwells in grass, it can’t be monopolized by clergy, creeds, or institutions. That’s classic Quaker energy - the Inner Light extended outward, collapsing the distance between Creator and created, between worship and perception.

The subtext is also ethical. If every blade carries “fulness,” then exploitation - of land, of labor, of people - becomes a spiritual failure, not just a social one. In Hicks’s era, when American Protestantism was hardening into respectability and doctrinal gatekeeping, the line reads like a dissenting whisper with a sharpened edge: holiness isn’t rarified. It’s ubiquitous, and that ubiquity is an accusation.