A student once asked one of the keepers what the Essenes believed about God. The keeper said: that there is one. The student waited for more. The keeper said: that is a great deal more than it sounds.
The confession that the Lord is one, which every pious Jew of the second temple recited morning and evening and which the desert community almost certainly recited at the dawn and dusk watches, is not a statement about arithmetic. It is a statement that reality is not divided against itself. There is not one god of the rain and another of the drought, one of health and another of sickness, one of the rich and another of the poor. There is one source, one will, one order, and everything that happens, happens within it.
From this the Essenes drew a conclusion that the historian found remarkable enough to record: that all things are in the hands of what he, writing for Greeks, called fate. The scrolls say it better. From the God of knowledge comes all that is and shall be. Before they existed he established their whole design, and when they come into being at their appointed times they carry out their work according to his glorious design, and nothing can be changed.
The Law in Nature
The fellowship calls this order the One Law, and we find it first in nature. The sun rises on its appointed day in its appointed place; the Essenes built their whole calendar on the certainty of it. Water runs downhill. Seed produces after its kind. A body deprived of air dies in minutes, of water in days, of food in weeks. These are not rules imposed from outside. They are the shape of things. One does not break the law of gravity by stepping off a roof. One breaks a leg.
The ancient writers tell us the Essenes were students of nature as well as of scripture, that they knew the properties of roots and stones and used them in healing. This was not a separate interest. A people who believed the whole creation to be one design would naturally expect the same order in the body as in the stars, and would read the healing of the body as obedience to the same Law that governs the heavens.
The Law in the Soul
The Essene insight, which the fellowship holds to be the first of all the teachings, is that the soul is not exempt. The same order that governs the body and the stars governs the inner life. Resentment nursed produces bitterness as surely as a seed produces a plant. Generosity practiced produces openness. Lies told to others become lies believed by oneself. Attention given to the Light increases the Light. These are not rewards and punishments handed out by a judge. They are consequences, as predictable as the sunrise, built into the design.
This is why the scrolls can say in one breath that all is determined by God and in the next command the member to choose the way of truth. The determination is of the Law, not of the outcome. God has fixed, with perfect certainty, that one who walks in truth will come to light and one who walks in falsehood will come to darkness. He has not fixed which road you will take this morning. That is the one thing in the universe that is yours.
Sin as Imbalance
From this the fellowship draws a way of thinking about sin that we find both older and kinder than the one most of us were raised with. Sin is not primarily the breaking of a rule that offends a ruler. It is the breaking of a balance that harms the one who breaks it and those around him. The Hebrew word most often translated sin means to miss the mark, as an archer misses. The archer is not punished by the target. He simply does not hit it, and if he wants to hit it he must learn.
The scrolls are full of penalties, and the fellowship does not pretend otherwise. But the penalties are medicinal, not retributive: reduced rations, exclusion from the pure meal for a season, the chance to be examined again. The aim was always restoration to the Unity. A member who had missed the mark was given time to learn to shoot.
Living in Harmony
If the Law is one, and the soul is under it, then the spiritual life is not a matter of winning God's favor. God's favor is the Law itself, offered equally to all, as the sun shines on the just and the unjust. The spiritual life is a matter of learning the Law and living in harmony with it, as a sailor learns the wind. He cannot change the wind. He can learn to sail.
The practices of the fellowship are all, at bottom, ways of learning the wind. The Morning Watch aligns the day with the sunrise. The Communions bring the attention, one force at a time, into contact with the design. The Noon Peace restores balance where it has been lost. The Still Lamp quiets the mind enough to feel which way the wind is blowing. None of these makes the Law any different. All of them make the student more able to live in it.
In Practice
A student who wishes to begin living this teaching might try one thing for a week: at the Evening Watch, instead of asking what you did wrong, ask what you did against the grain. Where did you push against the design, and what did it cost? Where did you move with it, and what did it give? Keep no score. Simply notice. The Law does not need your guilt. It needs your attention.
The Morning and Evening Watch page gives the form of the evening examination.