https://australianfriend.org/tags/spiritual-life/
Nurtured by the Landscape, Supported by the Community
1312 December 2013 3 Responses »
Dec 01 2013
Susan Clarke, Queensland Regional Meeting
This past year I have lived at Silver Wattle Quaker Centre, volunteering as cook for our small permanent community of four, the Friends in Residence, Elders, course facilitators, participants in courses, and guests for the occasional venue hire.
When I arrived in January, I had the intention to heal and grow in the Spirit. I was going to read, study, write, have lots of in-depth discussions with spiritual Friends, buff up some edges and head off into the sunset, all sorted out and shiny. The reality has been somewhat different.
I didn’t anticipate the three months of grieving I would undergo for all that I’d left behind and for the past. Things I’d believed were resolved returned, and wounded inner children came back into my life with all the hurts and resentments they carried, and I realised there was more healing to do than I had imagined. One night, I was advised by a Friend, “You are here to walk, work and heal,” and I relaxed, knowing that I had the permission and support to do what I needed to do.
One of my early challenges was to get my body moving again. Having been relatively inactive for some time, I needed to walk, and Silver Wattle is the perfect place to start walking. On my three previous visits I hadn’t walked far at all – down to the tiny, whimsical cottage on the lake’s shore and once to the old boat shed, only a short distance from the homestead. I’d never walked up the escarpment, or to the water tanks. Physical challenges were emotionally distressing to me; I was scared of being out of breath, and felt ashamed at my level of fitness.
The day I walked to the lower water tank, I felt a small sense of achievement and enjoyed the view. I could see over the top of the rooftops for the first time and enjoyed seeing the greens and golds of summer in the landscape. The next time I walked to the top tank and was excited because I’d huffed and puffed and enjoyed it all the way to the top, where the view was even more spectacular. Every now and then after the evening meal when it was still light, a resident Friend would say something like, “It would be a nice time to walk right now,” and I would set off with my camera. It was the kind of gentle encouragement I needed to get moving; to exercise for the pleasure of movement, the scenery and communion with nature; not because I should lose weight or get fit.
Within a few weeks I made it to the top of the escarpment. Exhilarated by the experience and the breathtaking view I thanked God, as I have many times since, for bringing me to this place for the nurturing and support that was helping me to remember who I was and discover who I could be. From then on, I regularly went out to explore and found spirit everywhere, especially out on the lakebed.
At first I was nervous because of the long grass from the tree line to the dry shoreline. There are snakes in the grass, I would tell myself, and I would attempt to walk and couldn’t go far at all. I wanted to experience the lake at night, then one night by the full moon, with my heart in my throat I made it through the grass to the flat surface of the lakebed. I didn’t go far but I had overcome the fear to see the cosmos in all its glory and was grateful and awestruck. Since then I have been out at night many times, marvelling at the meteors, some orange with fiery tails, the Milky Way, and the moon in all its phases.
In May, a good friend came to stay as Friend in Residence for a week and we explored much of the property together. He had been surprised to find that when you lie on the lakebed there are no ants to bother you, no insects or irritants to disturb the peace. One foggy Sunday morning before Meeting For Worship, I set out along the fence line so I didn’t get lost and headed out to the middle of the lake. It was a mystical experience, with disembodied kangaroo faces peeking at me with curiosity as I walked to a spot where I lay down, cocooned by the mist. There was nothing to disturb me, no sound, no danger, no people, only the mist to see; just me, the earth and Spirit at one.
Over the next few months, I was able to heal and integrate several child selves through a spiritual practice I called YOTLing or Yelling On The Lake, which I named during the Silent Retreat. If I was upset, I was often led to head out in any direction on the lakebed and talk out loud. Sometimes I would begin by identifying which wounded part of me was present by asking Who are you? Why are you here? What are you here to teach me? and a conversation would begin that could lead to insight and ultimately healing with God’s help. At other times it would involve nonviolent communication, a process that helps me to observe and question the less helpful thoughts that are causing my suffering. The process would involve making an observation about what was happening, without judgement or evaluation. Then identifying the feelings being triggered, the needs that weren’t being met, and finally, making requests to myself and God that would meet those needs, which were often about clarity or support. I would shout questions like, What is it you want me to do? or Help me to understand or Show me who I need to be and in the silence and solitude that followed, answers would come. Sometimes if I was particularly activated I would YAROTL, which is Yelling And Running On The Lake, and I felt exhilarated by my strongly beating heart and the exertion in my limbs as I ran from shadow to shadow or one landmark to the next. With each healing, playfulness and joy bubbled to the surface and I would return to make the soup in the late afternoon feeling happy, nurtured and peaceful.
The lake is women’s business, I was told recently. It is the womb, giving life, renewal and rebirth. In times before settlement there was a river that emptied into it that indigenous people saw as the umbilical cord leading them to the Mother. Knowing that, I am not surprised that my inner children have found peace in my wanderings, cradled by the belly formed by the surrounding mountains, nurtured in an ancient place of women’s dreams and knowing.
The Sorrow Tree
Sometimes melancholy leads me to the Sorrow Tree. Towards the northern end of the property are grassed “rooms” as I call them at the base of the escarpment, each with its own character and scenes with features like granite outcrops and particular arrangements of vegetation. The Sorrow Tree is a large dead branch on the ground that looks to me like a twisted man with facial features marked by burns from long ago. He can’t look at the lake and seems to be twisted in shame or guilt, two familiar emotions to me. One of his arms invites me to sit, and I climb up easily to sit and talk to him, feet dangling like a small child, watching as the shadow of the scarp spreads out across the lakebed as the sun sets in the late afternoon. His spirit is comforting, he understands suffering, and I am moved to feel compassion for him and feel it returned as he holds my sorrow with tenderness and understanding.
The Silver Wattle community, which for me includes the landscape, has nurtured and healed me to the point I am ready to begin the next phase of my life with faith and equanimity. I have reconnected with my inner child and nature, and the spirit in everything around me. I have found playfulness and joy, love and peace, and feel grounded and centred for the first time in my life. I know who I am, that home is within, and that with faith and my Inner Guide I have all that I need.
I feel intense gratitude for the gift of being accepted for myself, and the encouragement to find my way in the spirit without judgement or interference, while being offered guidance and truth when I’ve requested it.
Tagged with: Silver Wattle, spiritual life
Mandala
1312 December 2013 No Responses »
Dec
01
2013
Julie Webb's Mandala for AF
While on a week-long silent retreat, I gradually opened myself to possibilities. One morning I woke with the feeling that I would make a mandala. While I created it with a sense of purpose, I did not know what the outcome would be. As I worked towards the centre of the mandala it became symbolic of my journey for the week. I chose to make the mandala in an open but quiet space and I felt nurtured by the people around me as they went about the business of the Meeting for Learning Retreat. Julie Webb
Mandala, MfL, 2012 Bee Beeby
I drew the mandala on the silent day at Meeting for Learning, and it symbolises the group and connections between each other, as well as light within darkness and space for silence and stillness. The leaves represent nature as a source of spiritual nurture and nourishment. Bee Beeby
Tagged with: Mandala, spiritual life
Let Your Life Speak: Your Spiritual Autobiography as a Tool for Deepening Your Life in the Spirit.
1306 June 2013, Issue 2 Responses »
May 29 2013
Adrian Glamorgan, Fremantle Meeting.
A well-lived spiritual life is of greater importance to practicing Quakers than any worldly success. How can we reflect on our journey? First and foremost, we can directly go into stillness to seek insight and direction. Additionally, every Friend has readily at hand our Advices and Queries, to help examine the spiritual life, both in specific aspects of each day, and in the patterns of a lifetime. Less well known, the insights posed by Howard Brinton (1884-1973) in his Quaker Journals can help us reflect on consistent patterns in one’s lifelong spiritual encounters with the Truth. This article is a reminder of these resources, with a particular encouragement to Friends to embark on writing a spiritual autobiography – as a contribution to your own process of discernment, as well as enrichment for others.
The invitation to review in Advices and Queries
Our Advices and Queries invite us to the conscious patterning of our daily life as well as our life journey. Let your life speak! (A&Q 29) More specifically, we are asked to bring the whole of our life into the ordering of the spirit of Christ (A&Q 2), and learn from Jesus’ life (A&Q 3), suggesting that there is some template available to us. We are also encouraged to the cherishing of one another’s life in marriage (A&Q 25), and living in the virtue of that life and power taking away the occasion of all wars (A&Q 33). We are called to consider the life and witness of other communities of faith (A&Q 6), and avoid prejudiced judgments about the life journeys of others (A&Q 24). We are recommended to exercise our own spiritual learning throughout life (A&Q 7). From these advices and queries, it seems one’s spiritual life over time is as worth attending to and reflecting upon as it might be on any single day.
Discerning Steps in Religious Experience over a lifetime
In Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience among Friends (Pendle Hill Publications, 1972), Brinton turns to three hundred spiritual autobiographies, (usually called “Journals”) dating from the beginnings of Friends to the twentieth century. Allowing for differences, Brinton details a common spiritual path amongst Friends, through the writing of Quaker women as well as men:
· Initial encounter with the inward light in childhoodJune IMG_1273
· Self-indulgence in youth
· Struggle of a divided life
· Ultimate unification of that division through silence and insight
· Later conversion or acceptance of the light
· Adopting the plain style of life
· Speaking in meeting
· Restricting business activities
· Concern with testimonies/social action
· Working with dreams
Brinton finds a common consistency in Quaker encounters with spirit. Do you find steps in your own Quaker journey in his list?
What your Spiritual Autobiography is, and isn’t
Reviewing our life through writing a spiritual autobiography can be a unique opportunity to reflect on the workings of the Spirit in your own life, and help pose constructive questions how to best attend to spiritual opportunities ahead.
This worth has nothing to do with whether you believe you have done little in the world worth recording. This is not about your profile in the world: it is an invitation to a spiritual autobiography. It is a review of your relationship with the transcendent and immanent, not a record of your worldly achievement.
The focus on your spiritual path may often not correspond with any milestones in your passing worldly fame, fortune or notability. A spiritual autobiography might pass wordlessly pass over these details, much as analytical psychologist Carl Jung failed to note in his autobiography a meeting with Doctor Goebbels when he is supposed to have vehemently denounced the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. If an episode doesn’t add to your review of your spiritual development, best leave it out.
You might start out thinking you know what belongs in your spiritual autobiography – but there could be surprises along the way!
Getting Started on your Spiritual Autobiography
Begin the task each session with mind and heart prepared. Writing like this requires sustained practice, a set time per week, for example, with enough space for the spirit to work through and with you, and time for you to mull over what is raised. Allow for a walk before or after writing – you will soon learn what works best.
These questions may help to get you started.
Journal Entry 1: As a child, how did I experience the inward light? In what circumstances was I more or less likely to experience the inward light? (Give details of how you felt closer to or further away from this inward light)
Journal Entry 2: In what ways did I lose this connection? (Note specific occasions. Try and be specific about what happened)
Journal Entry 3: In what ways did I experience a divided life? (Again, think of particular times and places.)
Journal Entry 4: What happened to help unite body and soul (the temporal) with the Spirit (eternal)? What role has silence and stillness had in this?
Journal Entry 5: Am I converted? From “what” to “what”? Is this “acceptance of the light”?
Journal Entry 6. How has this acceptance become manifest? (Be specific about the ways this feels divinely guided, rather than worldly directed)
Journal Entry 7. In what ways does a plain style of life work in you?
Journal Entry 8. Describe times when you have spoken in meeting? What has been your experience of this, before, during and after? If you have never, or rarely, spoken, what forces have been at work both in favour of and against speaking in meeting?
Journal Entry 9. How has life in the Spirit affected your perceptions and practice of working in the world? What ways in business (practices and occupational categories) are now closed to you? In what ways do success in worldly affairs bring you closer to or further away from God?
Journal Entry 10. How has the presence of love and truth in your hearts led you into action in the world, through particular testimonies?
Journal Exercise 11: Keep a dream journal as part of your spiritual biography. Are there are recurrent dreams that visit you? Do you regard it as “an accessible channel” to the divine? In what ways are you open to as well as cautious in interpreting your dreams as offerings of leadings or directions to your life?
Journal Entry 12: Is there anything you sense is coming towards you, in early formation?
Conclusion
At each Yearly Meeting, we gear testimonies to the grace of God in lives now passed. With each Friend gone, we remember the richness that has been amongst us, and is now lost, sometimes feeling the raw regret at conversations and learning now impossible. Spiritual autobiographies can partially remedy this loss. Encourage Friends to write – investigate – their own lives through this practice. Help their lives speak. And consider your own spiritual autobiography, a chance not just to hear your own life speak, but to listen to the way the spirit may have been speaking to you all along.
Tagged with: inward light, spiritual autobiography, spiritual life
Participatory Spirituality
1206 June 2012 No Responses »
May
20
2012
Ian Hughes, New South Wales Regional Meeting.
Review of Heron, J. (2006). Participatory Spirituality: A Farewell to Authoritarian Religion. Morrisville: Lulu Press.
This book, first published in 2006, remains innovative and creative. John Heron has constructed a collage of overlapping texts, each presenting a view of human spirituality as participating co-creatively in the life divine. We are invited to explore the text like a conceptual virtual reality, roaming among chapters and pages, progressively growing our comprehension of the whole. Presentations include manifesto, personal story, theology, metaphysics, epistemology, pathology, psychology, and practice.
John Heron gifts his intellectual property rights, inviting us to appropriate and adapt his ideas integrating them into our own spiritual vision. In this spirit of co-creation, I open the book at the ninth perspective to engage with ‘situational spirit’. I read that feeling the presence here and now is the root of participatory awareness, that ‘we directly sense our interconnectedness with whom and what is in our world’ (p. 42) and share presence to engage divinity in this local time and place. Heron is describing my experience of Quaker Meeting for Worship.
Heron goes on to explore the way participatory decision-making integrates autonomy, co-operation and hierarchy; how each person integrates their individual experiences and preferences; how people start to think and speak integral proposals that honour diversity-in-unity; then the co-operative phase of expressing an agreed decision. He could be describing Quaker decision making process (at least when we do it well). He writes: ‘this is a profound practice: exhilarating, liberating, and challenging participants with intermittent discomforts of ego-burning’ (p. 45).
Heron sees himself as part of a participatory turn in spiritual praxis which is an expression of an emergent participatory worldview. In my view Quakers started on our journey towards this participatory worldview more than 300 years ago when Quakers rejected spiritual authority vested in a human hierarchy. We turned from indoctrination by teachers, traditions or texts to a spiritual seeking guided towards transforming outcomes by the inner light in a gathered presence of collaborating peers. Heron describes the participatory turn away from one-sided revelation through grace or scripture towards spiritual knowing as a co-creation between person and spirit; away from individual personal salvation towards collaborative transformative action for the flourishing of human and planetary life; and a turn away from knowing that spirit as wholly transcendent to a knowledge of spirit as immanent in embodied life, transcendent in the more-than-human world, and simultaneously situated in a co-created presence between immanent and transcendent.
We started making this turn more than 300 years ago, but I don’t think we are there yet. I am not sure that John Heron has fully realised the peaceable kingdom either. This book places a welcome and challenging emphasis on co-operative inquiry to realise participatory spirituality. He calls for a holistic praxis, overcoming the dualities grounded in the enlightenment and modernism, but maybe he, and we, are still caught in a cultural and psychological split between the inner sacred realm and an outer realm of practical action. Perhaps we face a challenge to overcome this duality, bringing our ethical action for peace, social justice and earthcare and participatory spirituality into a single domain.
Click here for your electronic copy of Participatory Spirituality: A Farewell to Authoritarian Religion free to online readers of The Australian Friend.
Click here to purchase a paperback copy of Participatory Spirituality: A Farewell to Authoritarian Religion direct from the publisher. Also available from Amazon.com or ordered through your local bookstore.
Tagged with: Quaker, religuon, research, spiritual life
Is Quakerism a ‘Religion For Atheists’.
1206 June 2012 5 Responses »
Mar
28
2012
Review of Alain De Botton (2012) Religion for Atheists. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Ian Hughes, New South Wales Regional Meeting.
Alain De Botton 'Religion for Atheists'Alain De Botton 'Religion for Atheists'
I have heard interviews on radio and watched interviews on television. I’ve also read reviews in newspapers, and now wonder if Quakerism might be the religion for atheists that De Botton is looking for.
Reading the book, I was left with an impression that De Botton is nostalgic for a bygone age when religion held communities together, enabling whole villages and towns to lead ethical and transcendent lives. It is an easy book to read, with gems of insight and even wisdom.
De Botton claims that, in the West, ‘we have allowed religion to claim as its exclusive domain areas of experience which should rightly belong to all mankind’ (p. 15). He thinks religions have combined theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, health and other everyday concerns in ways which no secular institution has managed. He proposes a new secular religion of wisdom without doctrine, with secular temples which aim to raise the human spirit, with secular schools and universities which teach morality, not just facts and theories. In short, he proposes a religion without God.
I kept wishing that De Botton had dome some research into existing religions, such as Buddhism, Taoism and Indigenous Australian Religions. I would like him to read Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World and Towards the True Kinship of Faiths, both by the Dalai Lama. He might inquire how Hinduism has many Gods, which some scholars understand as projections of human minds rather than independently existing supernatural beings. De Botton limits his discussion to the Abrahamic Religions, and even here he seems unaware of the acceptance of non-theists in some Jewish and Christian congregations.
Alain De Botton is an atheist brought up by non-observant parents from a Jewish family with a long and proud heritage. He was educated in Anglican boarding schools and at Cambridge University. De Botton writes that ‘for some atheists, one of the most difficult aspects of renouncing religion is having to give up on ecclesiastical art and all the beauty and emotion therein’ (p208). I speculate whether De Botton is worried that a public commitment to atheism means forgoing his Jewish heritage.
This leads me to wonder: ‘Should I tell De Botton about Quakers?’
For more than 300 years many Quakers have not believed in the God described by mainstream Catholics and Protestants. Non-theism is openly discussed and accepted by liberal unprogrammed Meetings in the United States, Britain and Australia. We have the wisdom without doctrine that De Botton seeks, and we bring ethics and transcendence to unity.
But we don’t have some of the other things which De Botton looks for, the sacramental genius of the Mass, the splendour of religious art, the inspiring cathedrals and uplifting music or the Jewish family rituals. Perhaps he would be disappointed by the quiet simplicity of Quaker Worship.
Quakerism may not provide what De Botton is seeking, but my personal hope is that we are and continue to be a religion for atheists.
Links
Click here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oe6HUgrRlQ ] for video of Alain de Botton talking about this book. For different opinions about this book visit The Guardian, Huffington Post or New Statesman
Tagged with: atheism, Book review, religion, spiritual life
How can Friends realize the Kingdom of God?
1203 March 2012 No Responses »
Feb 16 2012
By Valerie Joy, Queensland Regional Meeting, FWCC/AWPS secretary.
The world has changed remarkably since the Fifth World Conference of Friends in 1991, both for good and for ill. The 6th World Conference to be held this year has as part of its theme Friends living the Kingdom of God, when we will unpack what this actually means. How can we bring the “Kingdom of God” into reality- to live the amazing gospel of Christ as was done by the early Quakers in the first decade of our Society from 1652-1662?
Luke 17: 21 neither shall they say, ‘Lo here!’ or, ‘lo there!’ for, behold, the Kingdom is within you. Gerry Guiton has renamed the Kingdom of God as “The Covenant of Love”, which he sees as an ongoing and non-violent revolution. It is within, among and for all people and we unveil it with God’s help. The Kingdom is where Love happens.
We are called to realize this.
Our politicians are letting us down badly. Not in my name are drones, cluster bombs, stealth bombers and other smart weaponry being used to keep us “safe”. For all our pre-occupation with safety, it appears that we are now less safe than before 9/11. The US is increasingly unpopular, meaning that we are all less safe.
Martin Luther King said, “The large power blocs of the world talk passionately of pursuing peace while burgeoning defence budgets bulge, enlarging already awesome armies, and devising even more devastating weapons.”
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death”.
So how can Friends realize “The Kingdom of God”?
What if all the trillions spent on war were spent on human rights, on development of poorer countries, relief of poverty, increase in education spending, hospitals, a free press and the practice of the rule of law?
In 1865, Lincoln spoke of the causes of the American Civil War- where the South wanted to perpetuate slavery and the North fought not to eradicate slavery, but to contain its expansion. Lincoln stated that both sides read the same Bible, and that each prayed to the same God for victory.
He referred to Matthew 18, where Jesus said unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven and the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven is the one who humbles himself and becomes like this child. Also, whoever welcomes in my name one child such as this, welcomes me. What would Lincoln say today? I believe he would again quote Matthew 5:9 blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Reliance on military might is a far cry from Quaker traditions!
Slavery was eventually defeated through the efforts of relatively powerless people like Wilberforce and countless Quakers over decades. Lincoln came from a poor background and yet God used him mightily. In short God tends to do the unexpected and uses the most unlikely cast of characters.
Our situation today is that there are deep reservoirs of outraged young people around the world, and I believe we have an obligation to them to awake to the Kingdom, and to assist in its realization. Our politicians glorify war and it is a very strong individual who will speak out against it. But grounded within the Kingdom it is not just an individual that speaks out, but rather the prophetic voice, the one that we are all called to utter.
We can bring our influence to bear in supporting those who have a strong moral conscience.
The current Wall St non-violent demonstrations against greedy economic policies are confronting the powerful, and politicians and business people are being forced to listen to the prophetic voices of the ordinary people.
In Matthew chapter 11, John the Baptist preached on the coming of the Kingdom of God. Opposition to the political powers of that time led to his imprisonment and death. Herod who ordered his death seemed to get away with his murder. But God’s judgement comes upon all who commit atrocities. Look at the fall of Nazism and the fall of Stalinism. Look too at the apartheid regime of South Africa, and the peace that is coming in Rwanda and Burundi following terrible atrocities committed on their people.
God uses the humble and insignificant to bring about the Kingdom of God. The metaphors of Salt and Light, of the tiny mustard seed, the poor widow, and the shepherd, all point us to the way forward.
Jesus called twelve very humble people, who turned the world upside down.
So is our struggle to realize the Kingdom in vain? Sometimes with all the brutality around us, we wonder “Is God listening”? The Kingdom has nothing to do with military, political or economic power. God hears the cries of good people. We need to develop a greater confidence in the goodness and power of God.
Suffering for the sake of doing good is a recurring theme in the Bible. An example of this being if the will of God be so that you suffer for well doing, rather than for evil doing [1Peter, 3:17]. God is faithful. The suffering of post-civil war America has made it a stronger nation; post-apartheid South Africa is stronger as well.The Korean Quaker Ham Sok Hon developed a theology named Minjung theology, which is based on the suffering Christ, who suffers along with his people today.
Many of Jesus’ parables are about money and possessions. God cares very deeply about the stewardship of the good gifts given to individuals and nations. In thinking about stewardship, we must use what we have been given wisely and lovingly as told in Matt 25: 14-30 Take the talent from him who has 1 talent and give it to him who has ten.
The gulf grows daily between rich and poor and all of this destabilises humankind.
We have to be better stewards of our wealth.
The US budget commits 60% of its budget on defence and the military, but less than half of 1% on international aid. In Australia, every week, around $3.30 in taxes from each of us pays for our aid program—about the cost of a cup of coffee, or around 1% of our budget.
Denmark spends approximately 7% of its budget on development aid and for such a small nation it has done remarkable things in developing poorer nations.
I have no doubt that if there were changes in our priorities, not only would huge strides be made towards reducing the inequalities in the world but also the world would be made a safer place in future. Peace in our time would become a reality- the Kingdom of God will become realized.
Indeed Lincoln’s closing remarks in his second inaugural address are apposite:
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
It will only be through charity, firmness in doing right, binding of international wounds or inequities and care for the destitute of the world, that a just and lasting world peace, and therefore freedom, may be achieved and the Kingdom of God will be amongst us.
Friends, we are just the group to help this to come about. We have looked at the stupidity of increasing our military budget even though the cost will almost certainly be – more suffering. An American peace activist Kathy Kelly said “One way to stop the next war is to continue to tell the truth about this one.” Let us unite as Quakers in finding The Kingdom of God in our hearts and on earth. One way to do this is to support the efforts by FWCC to discern new ways forward for Friends to bring about change and renewal in the wider world.
Reference:
Gerry Guiton (2009) The Revolutionary Politics of the Kingdom of God (Covenant of Love), Quaker Studies.
Tagged with: spiritual life
Soulful Discernment
1203 March 2012 3 Responses »
Feb
14
2012
Grace Verity, Western Australia Regional Meeting.
image
I have made some spectacularly bad decisions in my life, and at other times, apparent miracles have fallen into my lap. The unpredictable results of my decision making processes has led me to give this area of my life some serious, committed attention, and look for more reliable indications of the calling of Spirit.
From this work, I have come to think that tuning into the voice of soul is what a successful discernment process is about. I’m not coming at this from a theoretical perspective, rather, I’ve muddled my way through to a point where I am starting to grasp an understanding of what works for me, and what really, really doesn’t.
One way of describing the part of myself I am calling soul is the bridge between the everyday part of me, my personality if you like, and the divine Presence that infuses all of creation. My rational, personality-self doesn’t have a language to approach divinity. Neither does it have the inclination, convinced it is clever enough to run the world single handed… But my soul yearns for closeness to divinity, and offers small, quiet, but clear signs of the way to allow the divine more room in my life.
However, these promptings of soul can seem completely crazy to my rational self. Invisible, illogical, unwilling to argue, soul simply speaks its truth, holds out its light and gently, appealingly, looks my way.
This kind of quiet insistence is easily discounted, ridiculed, ignored by my practical side. It doesn’t defend itself. And yet even my practical side has been persuaded through experience.
I have experimented over and over… until I have reached a point where I have become very reluctant to override the prompting of soul. (Some of my failures have been very spectacular…) Now, from sheer self-preservation, I have become willing to keep a symbolic ear cocked for soulful input, and even though it pains me to refuse an apparently sensible path, and follow what seems like a whim from soul… I cannot deny it works astonishingly well.
I have found to my surprise that the voice of soul is always present to me, and has always been so. I just haven’t known how to recognize it. It is such a small, yearning voice: an inclination, an idea with liveliness, a gentle prompting, that it is easy to override, ignore, shout down with ‘Good Reasons’.
I picture myself at a crossroads, when it is time to use discernment. There are a number of paths I can choose. Some are well signposted, wide, and easy to see down. One is a small, simple track which turns and becomes obscured; I cannot see far down that one, it is not predictable, it bears no signpost.
It is risky, and somehow enticing.
Quietly, that is the way I want to go. I feel a rising joy when I consider the prospect. The broad, well-trampled road is clearly signed. That is the road I ‘should’ take. But, my heart sinks at the prospect.
And, by a process of trial and error, I have come to conclude if I choose against that small inclination, and head down the broad path, unexpected obstacles arise. It can get me where I felt I ‘Should Go’, but at high cost of effort.
All the good reasons I had collected seem to unravel, somehow, on the way, and I am left with tangled rags, and I am hot and dusty, without enough water.
On the other hand, if I take the small winding track of my yearning, I find as I travel that there are fabulous reasons to have gone this way, that were initially hidden from my view.
What’s more, I feel at ease, there is pleasure as I travel, wonderful coincidences occur. I meet other travelers who offer gifts that ease my way. All ‘flows’, and my soul sings.
I think that the voice of soul prompts me to go in the direction of my true life, where Spirit would lead me, as opposed to my very busy, important life that I make up on my own, that somehow is missing sweetness, even though everything looks right.
Given what valuable guidance comes through soul, and how helpful it is on a practical level, I am surprised how little I have been taught about recognizing its style—that it constantly offers the guidance of small yearnings. I don’t remember being taught that rich fulfilment and blessings beyond compare would regularly come into my life if I discerned direction from Spirit, through soul, on a daily basis.
It didn’t occur to me that this approach, related to the hippy mantra: ‘Follow your bliss’, might be a serious and viable answer to the questions of what life is all about, why we are here, and how can we make it work better…
It is said that every blade of grass has its own angel, leaning over it and whispering: ‘Grow! Grow!’ Jesus talked about the lilies in the fields. Yet despite these teachings, in the past I felt it was silly and irresponsible to think there was a heavenly someone up there looking out for me.
I have since come to know that somehow, in this beautiful and ordered universe, there is help for little old me, every moment of every day. I don’t understand how it works. But I know, experimentally that if I listen, and befriend and honour the voice of soul, instead of scoffing… If I allow that perhaps there is a great, creative force within me, as a tiny part of the whirling grandeur of the cosmos, and that this force has a wisdom I cannot understand, I can choose to follow its small tugging from within. Then, somehow the world falls at my feet.
All is well.
I am guided into joy, and I find myself living in deep, loving peace.
Tagged with: spiritual life
What is a Friend?
1203 March 2012 2 Responses »
Feb
10
2012
Mark Johnson, New South Wales Regional MeetingFriendship by William Blake (Wikimedia Commons)
A book I recently read, Sources of the Self, The Making of Modern Identity by philosopher Charles Taylor, maps some of the paths which have led to contemporary understandings of identity as realised throughout the Western world. Over-arching themes of reason and of feeling dominated this history, both of which indicate the pivotal turn to inwardness which has typified the constructions of Western identities.
In reading this work I ‘listened’ to some of the ways that the identities of Friends may have been shaped.
In contemporary Western cultures we largely build identities on constructs of the individual, and those freedoms and pleasures we desire so to flourish. The Society of Friends has not been immune to the larger cultural frameworks in and by which the larger society has developed.
I am led to ask ‘upon what grounds are Friends to be understood?’
Friends may have long been regarded as a ‘peculiar people’. Does this translate to a peculiar identity or are we so thoroughly Western that what has shaped the broader culture and its frameworks largely shapes and defines us too?
I answer to these questions with both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. ‘Yes’ in that we have been greatly influenced by successive waves of broader understandings of notions of the human being, reason, world, thought and feeling. And ‘no’, (and it is this I want to focus upon), in that there are actual foundational charisms to being part of the Society of Friends which paradoxically define by stripping us of definition.
Practices and encounters which enable us to fall through the cracks of the obsessive need to name, identify and classify are at the heart of being Quaker.
I suggest that this elusiveness is the result of coming-to-be within the flux and fluidity of relationships, that the Society of Friends is inherently about relationship.
I will now turn to two aspects of this.
The terms Friend and Quaker, perhaps now so commonplace to our hearing that we no longer listen to them, have been largely shaped by the broader society’s need to classify and order. These nouns have been used by others to label us, and by us to identify ourselves.They are a hedge, as are all identities, but in this case not intended to obscure but to reveal, to let us be seen by the gaze of a broader culture that needs to label and demarcate so to see.
And in that seeing in fact obscuring.
Our language assists this by being a ready to hand tool for naming. We let ourselves be defined by nouns, and we use nouns to name ourselves. But if we need to define ourselves, shouldn’t we be verbs? Beyond all language and its use to pin life under the harsh and needle-like gaze of reason’s misuse, is the foundational fact that we are called to the dynamism of relationship, called to Friend.
The Gospel of John is an important text for those that Quake and Friend. Verse 12 of chapter 15 gives us the commandment to love, not in an abstract way, because all of the previous verses of this chapter, and much of the Gospel itself, ground the commandment within that relationship of love between the Johannine Jesus and his Father. An abiding relationship in which others who love, come to be friends [Jn15:14-15]. This is not a static relationship between finite identities, rather this love springs into being insofar as we are actively participating in that eternal relationship to which we are invited, and to which we invite others.
This is friendship as eternal response and participation, too large for the limitations of identities to hold or comprehend.
According to Fox’s autobiography, it was magistrate Bennet ‘who was the first to call us Quakers, because I bade them tremble at the word of the Lord’. Whether or not we still visibly quake, we are still moved by the inner Light. Our worship together is a gathered, collective response. We come-to-be in relationship, especially in that space of Silence in which the Light searches our deepest recesses. Silence comes within the forest of language and discourse as a welcome, liberating, sunlit clearing that exposes the limits of naming.
Despite the emphasis of contemporary Western culture upon identity and the trivialisation and commodification of friendship in such social media as Facebook, and in advertising and the like, Friending is not something we initiate, control, and end at will. So too if our worship be a Friending of Spirit, it is not something we initiate and control at our whim. The twentieth century’s Sandra Cronk (1942-2000), as spiritual heir to Samuel Bowman (1676-1753) pointedly reminds us – in perfect continuity with our participatory relationship as Friend – that it is not ‘we’ who allow God to enter our domain. It is God that invites us (Cronk 1991)! So too as Quaker,it is not God that enters our presence, but we, in that sacred infinity of Silence, who come into the presence of God having relinquished our usual clutter of small identities and excuses.
We who identify as Quakers, we who together participate in a relationship known as Friendship, are involved, at heart, in a relationship without identity; a relationship in which we come-to-know through unknowing the categories of static definition which we use (or used) to construct our rigid selves,fixing us and others in place. We responding to invitation and embrace in which we are realised anew within relationship with that unknown we call God. From there we invite others to Friend
References
Sandra Cronk (1991)Dark Night Journey: Inward Re-patterning Toward a Life centred in God, Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill, 1991. pp.47-49.
George Fox (1694) George Fox: An Autobiography, Street Corner Society, Available from http://www.strecorsoc.org/gfox/title.html
Charles Taylor (1989) Sources of the Self, The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Tagged with: friends, spiritual life
Studying to Create God in Our Own Image?
1112 December 2011 7 Responses »
Nov
29
2011
Ivan Himmelhoch, Victoria Regional Meeting
It is always profoundly humbling to visit a person in a hospice at the end stage of their life’s journey. Such encounters have also made me reflect very deeply as to why that shrivelled, yellow-skinned human being before me, who has led a life of deep quiet service to so many without show or fuss, who has the gift of being able to listen to the other at all levels, never sought honours or revenge, have at what ‘should’ be their middle stage of life, notwithstanding medical progress, be suffering so much uncontrolled pain, discomfort, – and yet remain more concerned about others than themselves? How could a loving God allow this, I have asked myself.
There is no definitive answer of course. Over time though, it has become ever clearer to me, that if we ‘blame’ their situation on God, – a God who also ‘lets’ humanitarian workers die in plane crashes, ‘allows’ poverty and wars, ‘permits’ children to be run over – surely what we are really doing is trying to create God in our own image, rather than the other way round?
As a Quaker who last year completed a university Masters of Divinity with Honours, it was suddenly during a unit on ‘Christology’ that I felt that here too, there was this very same human ‘God-branding’ problem present.
Why did I experience this connection? Simply since a ‘traditional’ (sic) theological academic rigorous study of the way Christianity developed, with the many casuistic debates about creedal statements from the early Church Councils and continuing today, supplemented by diverse precisely delineated meanings of sacraments formed, and also argued about, – was surely essentially just a sad narrative illustrating how humans have been sculpting God in an image that they have created, that they have rules for, and that they feel everyone else must, as we say, experientially accept? Not to mention the way I experienced during the degree, what can only be described as a 2000 year and beyond drive to develop with words for Jesus just who he is, what relationship he should have with God, how divine he should be, and what his career path really was!
Nothing of the above is meant flippantly. I maintain a great fondness, love and appreciation for the many deeply caring professors who were at all times acting true to their own Light.
So back to basics. Why would a Quaker ever be studying theology at this level? I have drawn a connection between the hospice and what is taught, but is there any nexus with Quakerism?
Certainly in our Advices and Queries we read: –
… Study the Bible intelligently, using the help available from modern sources. Make every effort to understand the Christian faith … while remaining faithful to our Quaker insights, seek to understand the contributions to Christian thought and action made by other branches of the church.
Yet I would like to share additional quite recent developments within the paradigm of theological academic study that I cannot but help seeing as a new and challenging creative link with Quakerism, as well as a way that would allow increasing Quaker involvement in. These lie in the developing schools of Applied Theology (or Angewandte Theologie as it is better known in Germany) – and Political Theology, not to be confused with ‘Liberation Theology’.
I stand corrected if wrong, but surely our fundamental testimony that ‘Christianity is not a notion, but a way’, together with the way that we are advised in so many different ways and sources to help alleviate poverty, injustice, take social responsibility at home and abroad – not forgetting our most fundamental witness against war, really just another way of describing both ‘Applied’ as well as ‘Political’ theology? And if so, should we not seek more actively in the S/spirit of the excerpt from our Advices and Queries above, to inform ourselves through peer reviewed journals in these two branches of theology whether, and in what way they may speak our to condition?
And taking this a step further, is it not time that we should as Quakers, from a Quaker tradition, also perhaps feel comfortable contributing to the development of these areas of study?
Just maybe then in the future, I would in a benign and friendly way not be told in front of a full class: “Ivan, Quakers do not really like theology do they” as I was!
This is an interesting thought.
Tagged with: spiritual life, theology
Primary and secondary messages within Quakerism
1112 December 2011 1 Response »
Nov
29
2011
Cat-Religion Sue Doessel, Queensland Regional Meeting
The early Quakers found that that it was possible to have direct experience of God, and to use that to guide their lives. I would see this as the primary message of Quakerism. It is possible to live as the early Quakers sought to live, seeking deep communion with the Divine, and guidance as to what we are meant to do with our lives. It’s possible, but it isn’t easy.
It’s not easy for many reasons. It’s not easy to take the risk of writing the Sacred an open cheque, to say ‘Thy will be done’, and mean it. Where might that take me? What might I be asked to do? Might it be something that my family, friends or partner might not understand? Might I be asked to go in a completely new direction? To leave my comfort zone? To do something that scares me half to death? Would I have the courage? What would it cost me? Would it be worth it?
These are some of the fears we meet if we seek to live by the primary message of Quakerism, that it is possible to be in direct relationship with the Source, and to live our lives in accordance with guidance from there. None of these fears are new. They are the classic fears on the spiritual path. But they are not all that we meet. In seeking to live open to the Goddess, with each deepening of the connection we taste the sweetness of coming home to our true selves. The leadings which come to us make intimate sense in terms of the circumstances of our own lives.
As we find the courage to follow our leadings we take inner and outer actions that are as individual as we are. Through this we have precious moments of knowing we are doing what we are here for. We experience a sense of inner alignment that sustains us, in a way that the world cannot. We may come to know, from experience, that we do not have to rely on second-hand accounts of the mystical experiences of earlier Friends, but that such experiences are available, fresh, to us here and now.
The early Friends began by ‘waiting in the Light’. As this led to spiritual truth, they sought to witness these truths in their lives. Hence the testimonies, which I would regard as the secondary message of Quakerism. The testimonies have become another way that we describe or define ourselves as Quakers. Referring to our testimonies raises fewer eyebrows in a secular society than saying that as Quakers we seek direct experience of God, and guidance as to how to live our lives from there.
We may also use the testimonies as a sort of formula to guide our actions in the world, along the lines of ‘I’m a Quaker. We have testimonies to peace, justice, equality, simplicity, earthcare. So what can I do for peace, justice, equality, simplicity, earthcare?
This approach was exemplified by the booklet prepared for the Summer School on the testimonies at 2008 AYM. The section on each testimony concluded with the heading ‘Getting involved: some action-related organisations’ followed by a list of organisations we could join, and the question ‘Can you suggest others?’ The subtext appeared to be that the testimonies give us the answers as to how to act in the world. We begin with a testimony, brainstorm possible actions or groups to join, and then take action.
But there are issues in using the testimonies as a ready-made answer to what we are to do with our lives, as if they are a short-cut to determining the will of God. The most obvious issue is that this use of the testimonies omits the step of cultivating a direct connection with the Divine, and seeking guidance for our lives from there. In that sense, it bypasses the primary message of Quakerism. We have then put the testimonies between us and the Sacred, where the priests used to be.
Another issue is that when used as a means of defining what it is to be a Quaker, or a good Quaker, the testimonies can lead to a subtle or not so subtle sense of a hierarchy of concerns within the Meeting. This can lead to some members feeling less valued because the concerns to which they give their time do not appear to slot neatly into the testimonies.
A further risk comes from the fact that the expression of our testimonies is generally seen to require lots of action, working for peace, social justice, earthcare etc. When our focus, or our definition of ourselves, is based on outward action, we risk down-playing the importance of turning inward to seek guidance. We might even resist setting aside the time, or just find that we are forever too busy. This decreases the chance that what we do will actually be what the Goddess wants of us.
A further concern is that work for peace or social justice, for example, can be undertaken in a way that is self-righteous and judgmental of others, seeing all fault ‘out there’. Action, even for peace, can proceed out of a place that is anything but peaceful. The more we are focused on ‘doing’, and the less on ‘being’, the more these subtleties may elude us (while being clearly visible to others.)
Another cost of putting the focus on ‘doing’ at the cost of ‘being’ is that it is in spending time ‘being’ that we may come up against the blocks to more Light and love flowing through us. Such blocks reside at the places inside us where it is scary to go. Keeping busy (including doing good works) protects us from going deep enough inside to find these scary places. Learning how to go there, and hold our fear and pain in the Light, opens us up to receiving guidance more easily. It also leads to healing, which enables more love and Light to flow through us, whether we are ‘doing’ anything or not.
Then there is the issue of playing it safe. Determining how to act by reference to the testimonies may lead us to act in relatively familiar ways, whereas spiritual reality may actually want to stretch us, to ask us to do something for which we do not feel adequate, which leaves us asking ‘Who, me?’ Getting to the point of accepting our rightness for the task may be just what we need for our growth, and to enable us to bring something only we can bring into the world.
So what is the alternative? We can see the testimonies as spiritual truths to live by, rather than as ready-made answers to the question of what we are meant to do in the world. Instead, we can deepen our connection with the Divine through Meeting for Worship, silence, prayer and other spiritual practices. We can take the risk of writing the Sacred an open cheque, and ask for guidance as to what we are meant to do with our lives. We can deal with our fears about where that might take us. We can fine-tune our awareness of the particular ways we are ‘tapped on the shoulder’ by a leading. We can schedule spiritual conversations with one another. We can invite others to support us through Meetings for Clearness.
In these and other ways we can hold one another in the Light, to assist each of us to find our own authentic path, and the strength to follow it. We can abandon any preconceptions as to how that might look. What results might look like a life fashioned to demonstrate the testimonies to the world. Or it might not. I think it’s important that either be equally fine with us.
Tagged with: spiritual life
Quaker Essentials— A Study on Quaker Holiness
1112 December 2011 No Responses »
Nov
29
2011
Cat-Religion Glennda Susan Marsh-Letts and Barbara Lumley, New South Wales Regional MeetingWorshipping Group at study
In 2010 the Upper Blue Mountains Worshiping Group began a study program concentrating on ‘The Essential Elements of Quaker Holiness’. The study program was inspired by Carole Dale Spencer’s book Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism; An Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition (2007). Now, why study the ‘Essential Elements’ of Quakerism? Well, all of the participants in our worshiping group were either ‘converts’, attenders, or friends, i.e. none had been brought up as Quakers (birth-right members of the Religious Society of Friends). Some had joined Quakers thinking that they were a unified religion, only to discover the wide diversity that exists in the loosely allied network of Quaker Meetings world–wide. It therefore seemed appropriate to address the question of identity (i.e. ‘What is a Quaker?’) by going back to first principles, instead of looking at the present diversity of outward structures and causes. Hence, the creation of this study program with an emphasis on the ‘defining’ elements of Quakerism.
In her book, Spencer identified the defining ‘elements’ of early Quaker holiness as:
Scripture,
Eschatology,
Conversion,
Charisma,
Evangelism,
Mysticism,
Suffering, and
Perfection.
We devoted one study session a month to each ‘element’. Our plan was to study and discuss what each ‘essential element’ may have meant to early Friends, and then to relate that experience to our own spiritual experience. This process quickly separated what was non-essential in Quaker religious practice from what was essential, and it also revealed that what was essential for Friends was also probably universal, i.e. found in all religious practice.
1. Scripture
In looking at the role of scripture in Christian worship we shared our different experience of scripture. Some had little emphasis on scripture in their Christian education; others had seen scripture used as a divisive tool to separate the right -thinking from the wrong -thinking. An important insight gained through the sharing of some of our members’ experiences with scripture was the realization that God could speak through scripture into our own experience in a personal way.
2. Eschatology
Our study of the early Quakers’ understanding of eschatology (the study of final events or humanity’s future) took us back to a time when religious ideas were hotly debated in England, and when there were deep divisions in Christian understanding of the ‘end times’ or the ‘second coming’. Quakers initially awaited a literal second coming, but then changed their interpretation of the Gospels to say that Christ had come spiritually, within each person, like a seed of love within. Several of our group brought forth in our discussion the visual image of Jesus knocking on a door that must be opened from the inside, i.e. from the centre of our being.
3. Conversion (Convincement) and Perfection
Although Spencer used the more modern term ‘conversion’, we liked the older Quaker term ‘convincement’. Convincement was an essential experience for the early Quakers. You became a Quaker not through your infant baptism into the state religion (the established church, the Church of England), but through your own adult religious conversion/convincement. We also explored the meaning of other old terms, such as Fox’s use of ‘experimental’, which then had a meaning closer to ‘transformative’. Convincement we found was not only a radical, transformative, change of the heart for the early Quakers but also for many of our group. Indeed, everyone in the group told of a personal encounter with the Divine. One said that in ‘one moment’ she ‘knew she was committed’. Another said that ‘some agreement came into his life between himself and God’ while another ‘called out in anguish’ and the call was answered when the person was ‘enveloped’ with the Spirit of God. Some in the group had a less dramatic conversion, calling it ‘continuous conversion’, but saying that it was a process which moved them towards ‘one moment of peace, unity and oneness’. Another member of the group described this more measured conversion by saying ‘When the seed was right the soul began growing and ever since became central to who I am’.
From our discussions on conversion flowed some discussion of the early Quaker’s ideas on perfection, ideas that few Quakers seem to discuss these days, but which actually distinguished early Friends from other protestant groups. Convincement (used in the sense of Salvation) was conceived as a return to the original unity of creation. Therefore perfection was possible, once you were ‘convinced’, i.e. saved. This may be the reason that one occasionally hears Friends say that Quakers do not believe in the concept of original sin.
4. Charisma and Evangelism
Early Quakers found that inward conviction often led the newly convinced/converted Friend to evangelistic fervour. It may be surprising to many modern Friends to learn that early Quakers believed in converting others, both from nonbelievers and from other churches. Furthermore, this was a fervent evangelism where religion and politics (equality and social justice) were not separated. It was their contemporaries the Puritans and the Presbyterians who were not evangelizers, since they believed in predestination and the salvation of the elect. Furthermore, these early Quakers not only were so filled with the Spirit that they did indeed quake in their worship, but they believed that what we would call a Pentecostal experience should be/is the norm for all true Christians.
6. Suffering
When discussing the topic of suffering we looked at early Quaker testimonies, early Quaker martyrs, and also how early persecution may have helped to forge an identity for the Society. Our own meditations on suffering showed how suffering can be changed to joy and peace. If we ourselves, or others, are suffering, then bringing them or ourselves to the Light (i.e. showing empathy with suffering and holding the suffering person ‘in the Light’) allows the healing force of love to let the suffering be borne, and it can even change suffering to joy and peace.
7. Mysticism
Two sessions were devoted to Mysticism, as we found the definition of mysticism a challenge, and as we had so much to say of our own mystic experiences. Mysticism as a term was contemporary with early Quakers, but in the 17th century it was used to describe the communal prayer of monks (from the French, ‘la mystique’) not individual spiritual experience, so although we do not have evidence of the early Friends using it to describe their own worship, they would have agreed with the contemporary meaning of mysticism as communal spiritual worship. [1]
Several definitions of mysticism were put forward by Spencer. We were more inclined to go with the definition of Mysticism put forward by McGinn, who defined it as ‘a consciousness of the direct presence of God’, and also by Rufus Jones, who defined it as an ‘immediate direct experience of God’.[2] We had some reservation with Louth’s and Katz’s arguments that there are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences’[3]. Rather than mysticism characterized as a ‘search for … immediacy with God’, some of us have experienced this encounter with the Sacred as being initiated by God, a ‘Surprised by Joy’, encounter. We also had our doubts that all mystical events were processed or mediated through ‘extremely complex epistemological ways. Rather, the mystical experience was unmediated and then interpreted according to one’s cultural and religious tradition, which may, unfortunately, lead to a diminution of the encounter itself. Nor does this idea of all mystical events being processed through these, ‘extremely complex …ways’, sit very well with the mystical experiences of young children before they have had a chance to be conditioned by all the, ‘historical, linguistic, social and theological contexts’, mentioned by Katz.[4]
Conclusion
As our study progressed we were drawn together as we explored both our own religious heritage and shared our experience of the Divine. However, instead of our intellectual and spiritual thirst being satisfied by our discussions, our curiosity increased as we moved along this path of study together. Mysticism, in particular, we felt should receive further study, meditation, and contemplation, as it appeared to be at the heart of Quaker worship. Therefore we have now embarked on a new study that we are calling ‘Exploring Mystical Traditions’, wherein each member will present their research on a tradition they have special knowledge of, or interest in, perhaps looking and finding in our studies the essential unity of the Divine amidst the variety of human experience.
[1] Spencer, C.D. (2007). Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism. MiltonKeynes:Paternoster, p.29
[2] McGinn, B.C. (1991). Foundations of Mysticism; Origins to the Fifth Century. New York: Crossroad, pp. xv-xvii, as cited in Spencer, Ibid, p. 29.
[3] Katz, S. (1983). Mysticism and Religious Tradition. New York: Oxford, p. 4; Louth, A. (1981). The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. xv, both as cited in Spencer, Ibid, pp. 29-30.
[4] Ibid.
Tagged with: spiritual life
Tasmania’s Meeting for Learning
1106 June 2011 No Responses »
Jul
06
2011
By Fiona Gardner, Victoria Regional Meeting.
The Meeting for Learning Retreat offers Friends a year-long program with a week retreat at the beginning and end of the year. The program provides a structure within which Friends can explore and nurture their own spiritual journey, supported and enabled by each other and the facilitators.
This year the retreat week is in Hobart from Monday to Sunday, 12 — 18 September at the Maryknoll Retreat Centre at Blackman’s Bay.
Felicity Rose is half way through her year-long program, a good place to reflect:
The retreat week opened up the idea of ‘listening into being’ to me in a gentle, inspiring and loving way.
The rhythm of days of the retreat week was just right. We practised deep listening in small groups, had periods of worship,
discussion, time to relax, reflect, rest, walk on the beach and socialise.
By the time we left, we were well versed in ways to make our year between retreats a ‘growthful’ experience, and I was keen to keep the Meeting for Learning thread going. Each of us chose one of the facilitators to help us with any problems that might come up.
Many people have asked me about the one-to-four ‘projects’ we are asked to do during the year. At first, I interpreted this
in a practical way and decided to clear out old ‘stuff’ from my work area (to clarify for myself that I really have retired) and do a University of the Third Age course. Over the silent day in the middle of the retreat week these began to look more like New Year’s resolutions than what I wanted to take forward from my retreat.
I decided that it seemed more like a focus than a project: I am working towards being able to articulate why I am a Quaker and how I live it. Two off-shoot themes are to learn more of Quaker history and thought and to find the ways that this will inform my living the Quaker way in our community — the theme of the second retreat this September.
We were asked to form a support group; three to six people were suggested, to meet once a month for the year. Members of this group listen closely to what the participant is moved to share out of a preliminary silence. Participants lay down guidelines for whatever they feel will work best for them. I am most comfortable with a meeting of about one hour where, after a brief ‘hello’, we go into silence. When what I want to share has taken shape, I speak. After this, we resume our silence then usually I invite the group to ask questions or make comments. Each contribution is followed by silence, which may prompt me to share again, and so on. I don’t allow the gathering to become a discussion or a ‘fix-it’ session. I am finding it really moving and affirming to be listened to in this way, it is a great privilege.
One difficulty in having a group that can actually meet once a month is our busy lives; most of us go away quite often. At first, I (shyly) limited my group to two. By January, they were both away so I didn’t have a meeting. Now I have two more people in my group so for the next six months I should be able to have a meeting. I am very moved by the way people respond so generously.
For more details of the Meeting for Learning retreat, including costs, contact David Barry on email David.Barry.TLUD (at) gmail.com or telephone 0425 29 2288.
To explore your interest in Meeting for Learning, contact Fiona Gardner, coordinator for the facilitators: f.gardner (at) latrobe.edu.au or 03 54469951.
If you would like to read more from participants, more stories are on the Quaker Learning Australia website, http://www.qla.quakers.org.au.
Nurtured by the Landscape, Supported by the Community
1312 December 2013 3 Responses »
Dec 01 2013
Susan Clarke, Queensland Regional Meeting
This past year I have lived at Silver Wattle Quaker Centre, volunteering as cook for our small permanent community of four, the Friends in Residence, Elders, course facilitators, participants in courses, and guests for the occasional venue hire.
When I arrived in January, I had the intention to heal and grow in the Spirit. I was going to read, study, write, have lots of in-depth discussions with spiritual Friends, buff up some edges and head off into the sunset, all sorted out and shiny. The reality has been somewhat different.
I didn’t anticipate the three months of grieving I would undergo for all that I’d left behind and for the past. Things I’d believed were resolved returned, and wounded inner children came back into my life with all the hurts and resentments they carried, and I realised there was more healing to do than I had imagined. One night, I was advised by a Friend, “You are here to walk, work and heal,” and I relaxed, knowing that I had the permission and support to do what I needed to do.
One of my early challenges was to get my body moving again. Having been relatively inactive for some time, I needed to walk, and Silver Wattle is the perfect place to start walking. On my three previous visits I hadn’t walked far at all – down to the tiny, whimsical cottage on the lake’s shore and once to the old boat shed, only a short distance from the homestead. I’d never walked up the escarpment, or to the water tanks. Physical challenges were emotionally distressing to me; I was scared of being out of breath, and felt ashamed at my level of fitness.
The day I walked to the lower water tank, I felt a small sense of achievement and enjoyed the view. I could see over the top of the rooftops for the first time and enjoyed seeing the greens and golds of summer in the landscape. The next time I walked to the top tank and was excited because I’d huffed and puffed and enjoyed it all the way to the top, where the view was even more spectacular. Every now and then after the evening meal when it was still light, a resident Friend would say something like, “It would be a nice time to walk right now,” and I would set off with my camera. It was the kind of gentle encouragement I needed to get moving; to exercise for the pleasure of movement, the scenery and communion with nature; not because I should lose weight or get fit.
Within a few weeks I made it to the top of the escarpment. Exhilarated by the experience and the breathtaking view I thanked God, as I have many times since, for bringing me to this place for the nurturing and support that was helping me to remember who I was and discover who I could be. From then on, I regularly went out to explore and found spirit everywhere, especially out on the lakebed.
At first I was nervous because of the long grass from the tree line to the dry shoreline. There are snakes in the grass, I would tell myself, and I would attempt to walk and couldn’t go far at all. I wanted to experience the lake at night, then one night by the full moon, with my heart in my throat I made it through the grass to the flat surface of the lakebed. I didn’t go far but I had overcome the fear to see the cosmos in all its glory and was grateful and awestruck. Since then I have been out at night many times, marvelling at the meteors, some orange with fiery tails, the Milky Way, and the moon in all its phases.
In May, a good friend came to stay as Friend in Residence for a week and we explored much of the property together. He had been surprised to find that when you lie on the lakebed there are no ants to bother you, no insects or irritants to disturb the peace. One foggy Sunday morning before Meeting For Worship, I set out along the fence line so I didn’t get lost and headed out to the middle of the lake. It was a mystical experience, with disembodied kangaroo faces peeking at me with curiosity as I walked to a spot where I lay down, cocooned by the mist. There was nothing to disturb me, no sound, no danger, no people, only the mist to see; just me, the earth and Spirit at one.
Over the next few months, I was able to heal and integrate several child selves through a spiritual practice I called YOTLing or Yelling On The Lake, which I named during the Silent Retreat. If I was upset, I was often led to head out in any direction on the lakebed and talk out loud. Sometimes I would begin by identifying which wounded part of me was present by asking Who are you? Why are you here? What are you here to teach me? and a conversation would begin that could lead to insight and ultimately healing with God’s help. At other times it would involve nonviolent communication, a process that helps me to observe and question the less helpful thoughts that are causing my suffering. The process would involve making an observation about what was happening, without judgement or evaluation. Then identifying the feelings being triggered, the needs that weren’t being met, and finally, making requests to myself and God that would meet those needs, which were often about clarity or support. I would shout questions like, What is it you want me to do? or Help me to understand or Show me who I need to be and in the silence and solitude that followed, answers would come. Sometimes if I was particularly activated I would YAROTL, which is Yelling And Running On The Lake, and I felt exhilarated by my strongly beating heart and the exertion in my limbs as I ran from shadow to shadow or one landmark to the next. With each healing, playfulness and joy bubbled to the surface and I would return to make the soup in the late afternoon feeling happy, nurtured and peaceful.
The lake is women’s business, I was told recently. It is the womb, giving life, renewal and rebirth. In times before settlement there was a river that emptied into it that indigenous people saw as the umbilical cord leading them to the Mother. Knowing that, I am not surprised that my inner children have found peace in my wanderings, cradled by the belly formed by the surrounding mountains, nurtured in an ancient place of women’s dreams and knowing.
The Sorrow Tree
Sometimes melancholy leads me to the Sorrow Tree. Towards the northern end of the property are grassed “rooms” as I call them at the base of the escarpment, each with its own character and scenes with features like granite outcrops and particular arrangements of vegetation. The Sorrow Tree is a large dead branch on the ground that looks to me like a twisted man with facial features marked by burns from long ago. He can’t look at the lake and seems to be twisted in shame or guilt, two familiar emotions to me. One of his arms invites me to sit, and I climb up easily to sit and talk to him, feet dangling like a small child, watching as the shadow of the scarp spreads out across the lakebed as the sun sets in the late afternoon. His spirit is comforting, he understands suffering, and I am moved to feel compassion for him and feel it returned as he holds my sorrow with tenderness and understanding.
The Silver Wattle community, which for me includes the landscape, has nurtured and healed me to the point I am ready to begin the next phase of my life with faith and equanimity. I have reconnected with my inner child and nature, and the spirit in everything around me. I have found playfulness and joy, love and peace, and feel grounded and centred for the first time in my life. I know who I am, that home is within, and that with faith and my Inner Guide I have all that I need.
I feel intense gratitude for the gift of being accepted for myself, and the encouragement to find my way in the spirit without judgement or interference, while being offered guidance and truth when I’ve requested it.
Tagged with: Silver Wattle, spiritual life
Mandala
1312 December 2013 No Responses »
Dec
01
2013
Julie Webb's Mandala for AF
While on a week-long silent retreat, I gradually opened myself to possibilities. One morning I woke with the feeling that I would make a mandala. While I created it with a sense of purpose, I did not know what the outcome would be. As I worked towards the centre of the mandala it became symbolic of my journey for the week. I chose to make the mandala in an open but quiet space and I felt nurtured by the people around me as they went about the business of the Meeting for Learning Retreat. Julie Webb
Mandala, MfL, 2012 Bee Beeby
I drew the mandala on the silent day at Meeting for Learning, and it symbolises the group and connections between each other, as well as light within darkness and space for silence and stillness. The leaves represent nature as a source of spiritual nurture and nourishment. Bee Beeby
Tagged with: Mandala, spiritual life
Let Your Life Speak: Your Spiritual Autobiography as a Tool for Deepening Your Life in the Spirit.
1306 June 2013, Issue 2 Responses »
May 29 2013
Adrian Glamorgan, Fremantle Meeting.
A well-lived spiritual life is of greater importance to practicing Quakers than any worldly success. How can we reflect on our journey? First and foremost, we can directly go into stillness to seek insight and direction. Additionally, every Friend has readily at hand our Advices and Queries, to help examine the spiritual life, both in specific aspects of each day, and in the patterns of a lifetime. Less well known, the insights posed by Howard Brinton (1884-1973) in his Quaker Journals can help us reflect on consistent patterns in one’s lifelong spiritual encounters with the Truth. This article is a reminder of these resources, with a particular encouragement to Friends to embark on writing a spiritual autobiography – as a contribution to your own process of discernment, as well as enrichment for others.
The invitation to review in Advices and Queries
Our Advices and Queries invite us to the conscious patterning of our daily life as well as our life journey. Let your life speak! (A&Q 29) More specifically, we are asked to bring the whole of our life into the ordering of the spirit of Christ (A&Q 2), and learn from Jesus’ life (A&Q 3), suggesting that there is some template available to us. We are also encouraged to the cherishing of one another’s life in marriage (A&Q 25), and living in the virtue of that life and power taking away the occasion of all wars (A&Q 33). We are called to consider the life and witness of other communities of faith (A&Q 6), and avoid prejudiced judgments about the life journeys of others (A&Q 24). We are recommended to exercise our own spiritual learning throughout life (A&Q 7). From these advices and queries, it seems one’s spiritual life over time is as worth attending to and reflecting upon as it might be on any single day.
Discerning Steps in Religious Experience over a lifetime
In Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience among Friends (Pendle Hill Publications, 1972), Brinton turns to three hundred spiritual autobiographies, (usually called “Journals”) dating from the beginnings of Friends to the twentieth century. Allowing for differences, Brinton details a common spiritual path amongst Friends, through the writing of Quaker women as well as men:
· Initial encounter with the inward light in childhoodJune IMG_1273
· Self-indulgence in youth
· Struggle of a divided life
· Ultimate unification of that division through silence and insight
· Later conversion or acceptance of the light
· Adopting the plain style of life
· Speaking in meeting
· Restricting business activities
· Concern with testimonies/social action
· Working with dreams
Brinton finds a common consistency in Quaker encounters with spirit. Do you find steps in your own Quaker journey in his list?
What your Spiritual Autobiography is, and isn’t
Reviewing our life through writing a spiritual autobiography can be a unique opportunity to reflect on the workings of the Spirit in your own life, and help pose constructive questions how to best attend to spiritual opportunities ahead.
This worth has nothing to do with whether you believe you have done little in the world worth recording. This is not about your profile in the world: it is an invitation to a spiritual autobiography. It is a review of your relationship with the transcendent and immanent, not a record of your worldly achievement.
The focus on your spiritual path may often not correspond with any milestones in your passing worldly fame, fortune or notability. A spiritual autobiography might pass wordlessly pass over these details, much as analytical psychologist Carl Jung failed to note in his autobiography a meeting with Doctor Goebbels when he is supposed to have vehemently denounced the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. If an episode doesn’t add to your review of your spiritual development, best leave it out.
You might start out thinking you know what belongs in your spiritual autobiography – but there could be surprises along the way!
Getting Started on your Spiritual Autobiography
Begin the task each session with mind and heart prepared. Writing like this requires sustained practice, a set time per week, for example, with enough space for the spirit to work through and with you, and time for you to mull over what is raised. Allow for a walk before or after writing – you will soon learn what works best.
These questions may help to get you started.
Journal Entry 1: As a child, how did I experience the inward light? In what circumstances was I more or less likely to experience the inward light? (Give details of how you felt closer to or further away from this inward light)
Journal Entry 2: In what ways did I lose this connection? (Note specific occasions. Try and be specific about what happened)
Journal Entry 3: In what ways did I experience a divided life? (Again, think of particular times and places.)
Journal Entry 4: What happened to help unite body and soul (the temporal) with the Spirit (eternal)? What role has silence and stillness had in this?
Journal Entry 5: Am I converted? From “what” to “what”? Is this “acceptance of the light”?
Journal Entry 6. How has this acceptance become manifest? (Be specific about the ways this feels divinely guided, rather than worldly directed)
Journal Entry 7. In what ways does a plain style of life work in you?
Journal Entry 8. Describe times when you have spoken in meeting? What has been your experience of this, before, during and after? If you have never, or rarely, spoken, what forces have been at work both in favour of and against speaking in meeting?
Journal Entry 9. How has life in the Spirit affected your perceptions and practice of working in the world? What ways in business (practices and occupational categories) are now closed to you? In what ways do success in worldly affairs bring you closer to or further away from God?
Journal Entry 10. How has the presence of love and truth in your hearts led you into action in the world, through particular testimonies?
Journal Exercise 11: Keep a dream journal as part of your spiritual biography. Are there are recurrent dreams that visit you? Do you regard it as “an accessible channel” to the divine? In what ways are you open to as well as cautious in interpreting your dreams as offerings of leadings or directions to your life?
Journal Entry 12: Is there anything you sense is coming towards you, in early formation?
Conclusion
At each Yearly Meeting, we gear testimonies to the grace of God in lives now passed. With each Friend gone, we remember the richness that has been amongst us, and is now lost, sometimes feeling the raw regret at conversations and learning now impossible. Spiritual autobiographies can partially remedy this loss. Encourage Friends to write – investigate – their own lives through this practice. Help their lives speak. And consider your own spiritual autobiography, a chance not just to hear your own life speak, but to listen to the way the spirit may have been speaking to you all along.
Tagged with: inward light, spiritual autobiography, spiritual life
Participatory Spirituality
1206 June 2012 No Responses »
May
20
2012
Ian Hughes, New South Wales Regional Meeting.
Review of Heron, J. (2006). Participatory Spirituality: A Farewell to Authoritarian Religion. Morrisville: Lulu Press.
This book, first published in 2006, remains innovative and creative. John Heron has constructed a collage of overlapping texts, each presenting a view of human spirituality as participating co-creatively in the life divine. We are invited to explore the text like a conceptual virtual reality, roaming among chapters and pages, progressively growing our comprehension of the whole. Presentations include manifesto, personal story, theology, metaphysics, epistemology, pathology, psychology, and practice.
John Heron gifts his intellectual property rights, inviting us to appropriate and adapt his ideas integrating them into our own spiritual vision. In this spirit of co-creation, I open the book at the ninth perspective to engage with ‘situational spirit’. I read that feeling the presence here and now is the root of participatory awareness, that ‘we directly sense our interconnectedness with whom and what is in our world’ (p. 42) and share presence to engage divinity in this local time and place. Heron is describing my experience of Quaker Meeting for Worship.
Heron goes on to explore the way participatory decision-making integrates autonomy, co-operation and hierarchy; how each person integrates their individual experiences and preferences; how people start to think and speak integral proposals that honour diversity-in-unity; then the co-operative phase of expressing an agreed decision. He could be describing Quaker decision making process (at least when we do it well). He writes: ‘this is a profound practice: exhilarating, liberating, and challenging participants with intermittent discomforts of ego-burning’ (p. 45).
Heron sees himself as part of a participatory turn in spiritual praxis which is an expression of an emergent participatory worldview. In my view Quakers started on our journey towards this participatory worldview more than 300 years ago when Quakers rejected spiritual authority vested in a human hierarchy. We turned from indoctrination by teachers, traditions or texts to a spiritual seeking guided towards transforming outcomes by the inner light in a gathered presence of collaborating peers. Heron describes the participatory turn away from one-sided revelation through grace or scripture towards spiritual knowing as a co-creation between person and spirit; away from individual personal salvation towards collaborative transformative action for the flourishing of human and planetary life; and a turn away from knowing that spirit as wholly transcendent to a knowledge of spirit as immanent in embodied life, transcendent in the more-than-human world, and simultaneously situated in a co-created presence between immanent and transcendent.
We started making this turn more than 300 years ago, but I don’t think we are there yet. I am not sure that John Heron has fully realised the peaceable kingdom either. This book places a welcome and challenging emphasis on co-operative inquiry to realise participatory spirituality. He calls for a holistic praxis, overcoming the dualities grounded in the enlightenment and modernism, but maybe he, and we, are still caught in a cultural and psychological split between the inner sacred realm and an outer realm of practical action. Perhaps we face a challenge to overcome this duality, bringing our ethical action for peace, social justice and earthcare and participatory spirituality into a single domain.
Click here for your electronic copy of Participatory Spirituality: A Farewell to Authoritarian Religion free to online readers of The Australian Friend.
Click here to purchase a paperback copy of Participatory Spirituality: A Farewell to Authoritarian Religion direct from the publisher. Also available from Amazon.com or ordered through your local bookstore.
Tagged with: Quaker, religuon, research, spiritual life
Is Quakerism a ‘Religion For Atheists’.
1206 June 2012 5 Responses »
Mar
28
2012
Review of Alain De Botton (2012) Religion for Atheists. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Ian Hughes, New South Wales Regional Meeting.
Alain De Botton 'Religion for Atheists'Alain De Botton 'Religion for Atheists'
I have heard interviews on radio and watched interviews on television. I’ve also read reviews in newspapers, and now wonder if Quakerism might be the religion for atheists that De Botton is looking for.
Reading the book, I was left with an impression that De Botton is nostalgic for a bygone age when religion held communities together, enabling whole villages and towns to lead ethical and transcendent lives. It is an easy book to read, with gems of insight and even wisdom.
De Botton claims that, in the West, ‘we have allowed religion to claim as its exclusive domain areas of experience which should rightly belong to all mankind’ (p. 15). He thinks religions have combined theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, health and other everyday concerns in ways which no secular institution has managed. He proposes a new secular religion of wisdom without doctrine, with secular temples which aim to raise the human spirit, with secular schools and universities which teach morality, not just facts and theories. In short, he proposes a religion without God.
I kept wishing that De Botton had dome some research into existing religions, such as Buddhism, Taoism and Indigenous Australian Religions. I would like him to read Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World and Towards the True Kinship of Faiths, both by the Dalai Lama. He might inquire how Hinduism has many Gods, which some scholars understand as projections of human minds rather than independently existing supernatural beings. De Botton limits his discussion to the Abrahamic Religions, and even here he seems unaware of the acceptance of non-theists in some Jewish and Christian congregations.
Alain De Botton is an atheist brought up by non-observant parents from a Jewish family with a long and proud heritage. He was educated in Anglican boarding schools and at Cambridge University. De Botton writes that ‘for some atheists, one of the most difficult aspects of renouncing religion is having to give up on ecclesiastical art and all the beauty and emotion therein’ (p208). I speculate whether De Botton is worried that a public commitment to atheism means forgoing his Jewish heritage.
This leads me to wonder: ‘Should I tell De Botton about Quakers?’
For more than 300 years many Quakers have not believed in the God described by mainstream Catholics and Protestants. Non-theism is openly discussed and accepted by liberal unprogrammed Meetings in the United States, Britain and Australia. We have the wisdom without doctrine that De Botton seeks, and we bring ethics and transcendence to unity.
But we don’t have some of the other things which De Botton looks for, the sacramental genius of the Mass, the splendour of religious art, the inspiring cathedrals and uplifting music or the Jewish family rituals. Perhaps he would be disappointed by the quiet simplicity of Quaker Worship.
Quakerism may not provide what De Botton is seeking, but my personal hope is that we are and continue to be a religion for atheists.
Links
Click here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oe6HUgrRlQ ] for video of Alain de Botton talking about this book. For different opinions about this book visit The Guardian, Huffington Post or New Statesman
Tagged with: atheism, Book review, religion, spiritual life
How can Friends realize the Kingdom of God?
1203 March 2012 No Responses »
Feb 16 2012
By Valerie Joy, Queensland Regional Meeting, FWCC/AWPS secretary.
The world has changed remarkably since the Fifth World Conference of Friends in 1991, both for good and for ill. The 6th World Conference to be held this year has as part of its theme Friends living the Kingdom of God, when we will unpack what this actually means. How can we bring the “Kingdom of God” into reality- to live the amazing gospel of Christ as was done by the early Quakers in the first decade of our Society from 1652-1662?
Luke 17: 21 neither shall they say, ‘Lo here!’ or, ‘lo there!’ for, behold, the Kingdom is within you. Gerry Guiton has renamed the Kingdom of God as “The Covenant of Love”, which he sees as an ongoing and non-violent revolution. It is within, among and for all people and we unveil it with God’s help. The Kingdom is where Love happens.
We are called to realize this.
Our politicians are letting us down badly. Not in my name are drones, cluster bombs, stealth bombers and other smart weaponry being used to keep us “safe”. For all our pre-occupation with safety, it appears that we are now less safe than before 9/11. The US is increasingly unpopular, meaning that we are all less safe.
Martin Luther King said, “The large power blocs of the world talk passionately of pursuing peace while burgeoning defence budgets bulge, enlarging already awesome armies, and devising even more devastating weapons.”
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death”.
So how can Friends realize “The Kingdom of God”?
What if all the trillions spent on war were spent on human rights, on development of poorer countries, relief of poverty, increase in education spending, hospitals, a free press and the practice of the rule of law?
In 1865, Lincoln spoke of the causes of the American Civil War- where the South wanted to perpetuate slavery and the North fought not to eradicate slavery, but to contain its expansion. Lincoln stated that both sides read the same Bible, and that each prayed to the same God for victory.
He referred to Matthew 18, where Jesus said unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven and the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven is the one who humbles himself and becomes like this child. Also, whoever welcomes in my name one child such as this, welcomes me. What would Lincoln say today? I believe he would again quote Matthew 5:9 blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Reliance on military might is a far cry from Quaker traditions!
Slavery was eventually defeated through the efforts of relatively powerless people like Wilberforce and countless Quakers over decades. Lincoln came from a poor background and yet God used him mightily. In short God tends to do the unexpected and uses the most unlikely cast of characters.
Our situation today is that there are deep reservoirs of outraged young people around the world, and I believe we have an obligation to them to awake to the Kingdom, and to assist in its realization. Our politicians glorify war and it is a very strong individual who will speak out against it. But grounded within the Kingdom it is not just an individual that speaks out, but rather the prophetic voice, the one that we are all called to utter.
We can bring our influence to bear in supporting those who have a strong moral conscience.
The current Wall St non-violent demonstrations against greedy economic policies are confronting the powerful, and politicians and business people are being forced to listen to the prophetic voices of the ordinary people.
In Matthew chapter 11, John the Baptist preached on the coming of the Kingdom of God. Opposition to the political powers of that time led to his imprisonment and death. Herod who ordered his death seemed to get away with his murder. But God’s judgement comes upon all who commit atrocities. Look at the fall of Nazism and the fall of Stalinism. Look too at the apartheid regime of South Africa, and the peace that is coming in Rwanda and Burundi following terrible atrocities committed on their people.
God uses the humble and insignificant to bring about the Kingdom of God. The metaphors of Salt and Light, of the tiny mustard seed, the poor widow, and the shepherd, all point us to the way forward.
Jesus called twelve very humble people, who turned the world upside down.
So is our struggle to realize the Kingdom in vain? Sometimes with all the brutality around us, we wonder “Is God listening”? The Kingdom has nothing to do with military, political or economic power. God hears the cries of good people. We need to develop a greater confidence in the goodness and power of God.
Suffering for the sake of doing good is a recurring theme in the Bible. An example of this being if the will of God be so that you suffer for well doing, rather than for evil doing [1Peter, 3:17]. God is faithful. The suffering of post-civil war America has made it a stronger nation; post-apartheid South Africa is stronger as well.The Korean Quaker Ham Sok Hon developed a theology named Minjung theology, which is based on the suffering Christ, who suffers along with his people today.
Many of Jesus’ parables are about money and possessions. God cares very deeply about the stewardship of the good gifts given to individuals and nations. In thinking about stewardship, we must use what we have been given wisely and lovingly as told in Matt 25: 14-30 Take the talent from him who has 1 talent and give it to him who has ten.
The gulf grows daily between rich and poor and all of this destabilises humankind.
We have to be better stewards of our wealth.
The US budget commits 60% of its budget on defence and the military, but less than half of 1% on international aid. In Australia, every week, around $3.30 in taxes from each of us pays for our aid program—about the cost of a cup of coffee, or around 1% of our budget.
Denmark spends approximately 7% of its budget on development aid and for such a small nation it has done remarkable things in developing poorer nations.
I have no doubt that if there were changes in our priorities, not only would huge strides be made towards reducing the inequalities in the world but also the world would be made a safer place in future. Peace in our time would become a reality- the Kingdom of God will become realized.
Indeed Lincoln’s closing remarks in his second inaugural address are apposite:
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
It will only be through charity, firmness in doing right, binding of international wounds or inequities and care for the destitute of the world, that a just and lasting world peace, and therefore freedom, may be achieved and the Kingdom of God will be amongst us.
Friends, we are just the group to help this to come about. We have looked at the stupidity of increasing our military budget even though the cost will almost certainly be – more suffering. An American peace activist Kathy Kelly said “One way to stop the next war is to continue to tell the truth about this one.” Let us unite as Quakers in finding The Kingdom of God in our hearts and on earth. One way to do this is to support the efforts by FWCC to discern new ways forward for Friends to bring about change and renewal in the wider world.
Reference:
Gerry Guiton (2009) The Revolutionary Politics of the Kingdom of God (Covenant of Love), Quaker Studies.
Tagged with: spiritual life
Soulful Discernment
1203 March 2012 3 Responses »
Feb
14
2012
Grace Verity, Western Australia Regional Meeting.
image
I have made some spectacularly bad decisions in my life, and at other times, apparent miracles have fallen into my lap. The unpredictable results of my decision making processes has led me to give this area of my life some serious, committed attention, and look for more reliable indications of the calling of Spirit.
From this work, I have come to think that tuning into the voice of soul is what a successful discernment process is about. I’m not coming at this from a theoretical perspective, rather, I’ve muddled my way through to a point where I am starting to grasp an understanding of what works for me, and what really, really doesn’t.
One way of describing the part of myself I am calling soul is the bridge between the everyday part of me, my personality if you like, and the divine Presence that infuses all of creation. My rational, personality-self doesn’t have a language to approach divinity. Neither does it have the inclination, convinced it is clever enough to run the world single handed… But my soul yearns for closeness to divinity, and offers small, quiet, but clear signs of the way to allow the divine more room in my life.
However, these promptings of soul can seem completely crazy to my rational self. Invisible, illogical, unwilling to argue, soul simply speaks its truth, holds out its light and gently, appealingly, looks my way.
This kind of quiet insistence is easily discounted, ridiculed, ignored by my practical side. It doesn’t defend itself. And yet even my practical side has been persuaded through experience.
I have experimented over and over… until I have reached a point where I have become very reluctant to override the prompting of soul. (Some of my failures have been very spectacular…) Now, from sheer self-preservation, I have become willing to keep a symbolic ear cocked for soulful input, and even though it pains me to refuse an apparently sensible path, and follow what seems like a whim from soul… I cannot deny it works astonishingly well.
I have found to my surprise that the voice of soul is always present to me, and has always been so. I just haven’t known how to recognize it. It is such a small, yearning voice: an inclination, an idea with liveliness, a gentle prompting, that it is easy to override, ignore, shout down with ‘Good Reasons’.
I picture myself at a crossroads, when it is time to use discernment. There are a number of paths I can choose. Some are well signposted, wide, and easy to see down. One is a small, simple track which turns and becomes obscured; I cannot see far down that one, it is not predictable, it bears no signpost.
It is risky, and somehow enticing.
Quietly, that is the way I want to go. I feel a rising joy when I consider the prospect. The broad, well-trampled road is clearly signed. That is the road I ‘should’ take. But, my heart sinks at the prospect.
And, by a process of trial and error, I have come to conclude if I choose against that small inclination, and head down the broad path, unexpected obstacles arise. It can get me where I felt I ‘Should Go’, but at high cost of effort.
All the good reasons I had collected seem to unravel, somehow, on the way, and I am left with tangled rags, and I am hot and dusty, without enough water.
On the other hand, if I take the small winding track of my yearning, I find as I travel that there are fabulous reasons to have gone this way, that were initially hidden from my view.
What’s more, I feel at ease, there is pleasure as I travel, wonderful coincidences occur. I meet other travelers who offer gifts that ease my way. All ‘flows’, and my soul sings.
I think that the voice of soul prompts me to go in the direction of my true life, where Spirit would lead me, as opposed to my very busy, important life that I make up on my own, that somehow is missing sweetness, even though everything looks right.
Given what valuable guidance comes through soul, and how helpful it is on a practical level, I am surprised how little I have been taught about recognizing its style—that it constantly offers the guidance of small yearnings. I don’t remember being taught that rich fulfilment and blessings beyond compare would regularly come into my life if I discerned direction from Spirit, through soul, on a daily basis.
It didn’t occur to me that this approach, related to the hippy mantra: ‘Follow your bliss’, might be a serious and viable answer to the questions of what life is all about, why we are here, and how can we make it work better…
It is said that every blade of grass has its own angel, leaning over it and whispering: ‘Grow! Grow!’ Jesus talked about the lilies in the fields. Yet despite these teachings, in the past I felt it was silly and irresponsible to think there was a heavenly someone up there looking out for me.
I have since come to know that somehow, in this beautiful and ordered universe, there is help for little old me, every moment of every day. I don’t understand how it works. But I know, experimentally that if I listen, and befriend and honour the voice of soul, instead of scoffing… If I allow that perhaps there is a great, creative force within me, as a tiny part of the whirling grandeur of the cosmos, and that this force has a wisdom I cannot understand, I can choose to follow its small tugging from within. Then, somehow the world falls at my feet.
All is well.
I am guided into joy, and I find myself living in deep, loving peace.
Tagged with: spiritual life
What is a Friend?
1203 March 2012 2 Responses »
Feb
10
2012
Mark Johnson, New South Wales Regional MeetingFriendship by William Blake (Wikimedia Commons)
A book I recently read, Sources of the Self, The Making of Modern Identity by philosopher Charles Taylor, maps some of the paths which have led to contemporary understandings of identity as realised throughout the Western world. Over-arching themes of reason and of feeling dominated this history, both of which indicate the pivotal turn to inwardness which has typified the constructions of Western identities.
In reading this work I ‘listened’ to some of the ways that the identities of Friends may have been shaped.
In contemporary Western cultures we largely build identities on constructs of the individual, and those freedoms and pleasures we desire so to flourish. The Society of Friends has not been immune to the larger cultural frameworks in and by which the larger society has developed.
I am led to ask ‘upon what grounds are Friends to be understood?’
Friends may have long been regarded as a ‘peculiar people’. Does this translate to a peculiar identity or are we so thoroughly Western that what has shaped the broader culture and its frameworks largely shapes and defines us too?
I answer to these questions with both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. ‘Yes’ in that we have been greatly influenced by successive waves of broader understandings of notions of the human being, reason, world, thought and feeling. And ‘no’, (and it is this I want to focus upon), in that there are actual foundational charisms to being part of the Society of Friends which paradoxically define by stripping us of definition.
Practices and encounters which enable us to fall through the cracks of the obsessive need to name, identify and classify are at the heart of being Quaker.
I suggest that this elusiveness is the result of coming-to-be within the flux and fluidity of relationships, that the Society of Friends is inherently about relationship.
I will now turn to two aspects of this.
The terms Friend and Quaker, perhaps now so commonplace to our hearing that we no longer listen to them, have been largely shaped by the broader society’s need to classify and order. These nouns have been used by others to label us, and by us to identify ourselves.They are a hedge, as are all identities, but in this case not intended to obscure but to reveal, to let us be seen by the gaze of a broader culture that needs to label and demarcate so to see.
And in that seeing in fact obscuring.
Our language assists this by being a ready to hand tool for naming. We let ourselves be defined by nouns, and we use nouns to name ourselves. But if we need to define ourselves, shouldn’t we be verbs? Beyond all language and its use to pin life under the harsh and needle-like gaze of reason’s misuse, is the foundational fact that we are called to the dynamism of relationship, called to Friend.
The Gospel of John is an important text for those that Quake and Friend. Verse 12 of chapter 15 gives us the commandment to love, not in an abstract way, because all of the previous verses of this chapter, and much of the Gospel itself, ground the commandment within that relationship of love between the Johannine Jesus and his Father. An abiding relationship in which others who love, come to be friends [Jn15:14-15]. This is not a static relationship between finite identities, rather this love springs into being insofar as we are actively participating in that eternal relationship to which we are invited, and to which we invite others.
This is friendship as eternal response and participation, too large for the limitations of identities to hold or comprehend.
According to Fox’s autobiography, it was magistrate Bennet ‘who was the first to call us Quakers, because I bade them tremble at the word of the Lord’. Whether or not we still visibly quake, we are still moved by the inner Light. Our worship together is a gathered, collective response. We come-to-be in relationship, especially in that space of Silence in which the Light searches our deepest recesses. Silence comes within the forest of language and discourse as a welcome, liberating, sunlit clearing that exposes the limits of naming.
Despite the emphasis of contemporary Western culture upon identity and the trivialisation and commodification of friendship in such social media as Facebook, and in advertising and the like, Friending is not something we initiate, control, and end at will. So too if our worship be a Friending of Spirit, it is not something we initiate and control at our whim. The twentieth century’s Sandra Cronk (1942-2000), as spiritual heir to Samuel Bowman (1676-1753) pointedly reminds us – in perfect continuity with our participatory relationship as Friend – that it is not ‘we’ who allow God to enter our domain. It is God that invites us (Cronk 1991)! So too as Quaker,it is not God that enters our presence, but we, in that sacred infinity of Silence, who come into the presence of God having relinquished our usual clutter of small identities and excuses.
We who identify as Quakers, we who together participate in a relationship known as Friendship, are involved, at heart, in a relationship without identity; a relationship in which we come-to-know through unknowing the categories of static definition which we use (or used) to construct our rigid selves,fixing us and others in place. We responding to invitation and embrace in which we are realised anew within relationship with that unknown we call God. From there we invite others to Friend
References
Sandra Cronk (1991)Dark Night Journey: Inward Re-patterning Toward a Life centred in God, Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill, 1991. pp.47-49.
George Fox (1694) George Fox: An Autobiography, Street Corner Society, Available from http://www.strecorsoc.org/gfox/title.html
Charles Taylor (1989) Sources of the Self, The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Tagged with: friends, spiritual life
Studying to Create God in Our Own Image?
1112 December 2011 7 Responses »
Nov
29
2011
Ivan Himmelhoch, Victoria Regional Meeting
It is always profoundly humbling to visit a person in a hospice at the end stage of their life’s journey. Such encounters have also made me reflect very deeply as to why that shrivelled, yellow-skinned human being before me, who has led a life of deep quiet service to so many without show or fuss, who has the gift of being able to listen to the other at all levels, never sought honours or revenge, have at what ‘should’ be their middle stage of life, notwithstanding medical progress, be suffering so much uncontrolled pain, discomfort, – and yet remain more concerned about others than themselves? How could a loving God allow this, I have asked myself.
There is no definitive answer of course. Over time though, it has become ever clearer to me, that if we ‘blame’ their situation on God, – a God who also ‘lets’ humanitarian workers die in plane crashes, ‘allows’ poverty and wars, ‘permits’ children to be run over – surely what we are really doing is trying to create God in our own image, rather than the other way round?
As a Quaker who last year completed a university Masters of Divinity with Honours, it was suddenly during a unit on ‘Christology’ that I felt that here too, there was this very same human ‘God-branding’ problem present.
Why did I experience this connection? Simply since a ‘traditional’ (sic) theological academic rigorous study of the way Christianity developed, with the many casuistic debates about creedal statements from the early Church Councils and continuing today, supplemented by diverse precisely delineated meanings of sacraments formed, and also argued about, – was surely essentially just a sad narrative illustrating how humans have been sculpting God in an image that they have created, that they have rules for, and that they feel everyone else must, as we say, experientially accept? Not to mention the way I experienced during the degree, what can only be described as a 2000 year and beyond drive to develop with words for Jesus just who he is, what relationship he should have with God, how divine he should be, and what his career path really was!
Nothing of the above is meant flippantly. I maintain a great fondness, love and appreciation for the many deeply caring professors who were at all times acting true to their own Light.
So back to basics. Why would a Quaker ever be studying theology at this level? I have drawn a connection between the hospice and what is taught, but is there any nexus with Quakerism?
Certainly in our Advices and Queries we read: –
… Study the Bible intelligently, using the help available from modern sources. Make every effort to understand the Christian faith … while remaining faithful to our Quaker insights, seek to understand the contributions to Christian thought and action made by other branches of the church.
Yet I would like to share additional quite recent developments within the paradigm of theological academic study that I cannot but help seeing as a new and challenging creative link with Quakerism, as well as a way that would allow increasing Quaker involvement in. These lie in the developing schools of Applied Theology (or Angewandte Theologie as it is better known in Germany) – and Political Theology, not to be confused with ‘Liberation Theology’.
I stand corrected if wrong, but surely our fundamental testimony that ‘Christianity is not a notion, but a way’, together with the way that we are advised in so many different ways and sources to help alleviate poverty, injustice, take social responsibility at home and abroad – not forgetting our most fundamental witness against war, really just another way of describing both ‘Applied’ as well as ‘Political’ theology? And if so, should we not seek more actively in the S/spirit of the excerpt from our Advices and Queries above, to inform ourselves through peer reviewed journals in these two branches of theology whether, and in what way they may speak our to condition?
And taking this a step further, is it not time that we should as Quakers, from a Quaker tradition, also perhaps feel comfortable contributing to the development of these areas of study?
Just maybe then in the future, I would in a benign and friendly way not be told in front of a full class: “Ivan, Quakers do not really like theology do they” as I was!
This is an interesting thought.
Tagged with: spiritual life, theology
Primary and secondary messages within Quakerism
1112 December 2011 1 Response »
Nov
29
2011
Cat-Religion Sue Doessel, Queensland Regional Meeting
The early Quakers found that that it was possible to have direct experience of God, and to use that to guide their lives. I would see this as the primary message of Quakerism. It is possible to live as the early Quakers sought to live, seeking deep communion with the Divine, and guidance as to what we are meant to do with our lives. It’s possible, but it isn’t easy.
It’s not easy for many reasons. It’s not easy to take the risk of writing the Sacred an open cheque, to say ‘Thy will be done’, and mean it. Where might that take me? What might I be asked to do? Might it be something that my family, friends or partner might not understand? Might I be asked to go in a completely new direction? To leave my comfort zone? To do something that scares me half to death? Would I have the courage? What would it cost me? Would it be worth it?
These are some of the fears we meet if we seek to live by the primary message of Quakerism, that it is possible to be in direct relationship with the Source, and to live our lives in accordance with guidance from there. None of these fears are new. They are the classic fears on the spiritual path. But they are not all that we meet. In seeking to live open to the Goddess, with each deepening of the connection we taste the sweetness of coming home to our true selves. The leadings which come to us make intimate sense in terms of the circumstances of our own lives.
As we find the courage to follow our leadings we take inner and outer actions that are as individual as we are. Through this we have precious moments of knowing we are doing what we are here for. We experience a sense of inner alignment that sustains us, in a way that the world cannot. We may come to know, from experience, that we do not have to rely on second-hand accounts of the mystical experiences of earlier Friends, but that such experiences are available, fresh, to us here and now.
The early Friends began by ‘waiting in the Light’. As this led to spiritual truth, they sought to witness these truths in their lives. Hence the testimonies, which I would regard as the secondary message of Quakerism. The testimonies have become another way that we describe or define ourselves as Quakers. Referring to our testimonies raises fewer eyebrows in a secular society than saying that as Quakers we seek direct experience of God, and guidance as to how to live our lives from there.
We may also use the testimonies as a sort of formula to guide our actions in the world, along the lines of ‘I’m a Quaker. We have testimonies to peace, justice, equality, simplicity, earthcare. So what can I do for peace, justice, equality, simplicity, earthcare?
This approach was exemplified by the booklet prepared for the Summer School on the testimonies at 2008 AYM. The section on each testimony concluded with the heading ‘Getting involved: some action-related organisations’ followed by a list of organisations we could join, and the question ‘Can you suggest others?’ The subtext appeared to be that the testimonies give us the answers as to how to act in the world. We begin with a testimony, brainstorm possible actions or groups to join, and then take action.
But there are issues in using the testimonies as a ready-made answer to what we are to do with our lives, as if they are a short-cut to determining the will of God. The most obvious issue is that this use of the testimonies omits the step of cultivating a direct connection with the Divine, and seeking guidance for our lives from there. In that sense, it bypasses the primary message of Quakerism. We have then put the testimonies between us and the Sacred, where the priests used to be.
Another issue is that when used as a means of defining what it is to be a Quaker, or a good Quaker, the testimonies can lead to a subtle or not so subtle sense of a hierarchy of concerns within the Meeting. This can lead to some members feeling less valued because the concerns to which they give their time do not appear to slot neatly into the testimonies.
A further risk comes from the fact that the expression of our testimonies is generally seen to require lots of action, working for peace, social justice, earthcare etc. When our focus, or our definition of ourselves, is based on outward action, we risk down-playing the importance of turning inward to seek guidance. We might even resist setting aside the time, or just find that we are forever too busy. This decreases the chance that what we do will actually be what the Goddess wants of us.
A further concern is that work for peace or social justice, for example, can be undertaken in a way that is self-righteous and judgmental of others, seeing all fault ‘out there’. Action, even for peace, can proceed out of a place that is anything but peaceful. The more we are focused on ‘doing’, and the less on ‘being’, the more these subtleties may elude us (while being clearly visible to others.)
Another cost of putting the focus on ‘doing’ at the cost of ‘being’ is that it is in spending time ‘being’ that we may come up against the blocks to more Light and love flowing through us. Such blocks reside at the places inside us where it is scary to go. Keeping busy (including doing good works) protects us from going deep enough inside to find these scary places. Learning how to go there, and hold our fear and pain in the Light, opens us up to receiving guidance more easily. It also leads to healing, which enables more love and Light to flow through us, whether we are ‘doing’ anything or not.
Then there is the issue of playing it safe. Determining how to act by reference to the testimonies may lead us to act in relatively familiar ways, whereas spiritual reality may actually want to stretch us, to ask us to do something for which we do not feel adequate, which leaves us asking ‘Who, me?’ Getting to the point of accepting our rightness for the task may be just what we need for our growth, and to enable us to bring something only we can bring into the world.
So what is the alternative? We can see the testimonies as spiritual truths to live by, rather than as ready-made answers to the question of what we are meant to do in the world. Instead, we can deepen our connection with the Divine through Meeting for Worship, silence, prayer and other spiritual practices. We can take the risk of writing the Sacred an open cheque, and ask for guidance as to what we are meant to do with our lives. We can deal with our fears about where that might take us. We can fine-tune our awareness of the particular ways we are ‘tapped on the shoulder’ by a leading. We can schedule spiritual conversations with one another. We can invite others to support us through Meetings for Clearness.
In these and other ways we can hold one another in the Light, to assist each of us to find our own authentic path, and the strength to follow it. We can abandon any preconceptions as to how that might look. What results might look like a life fashioned to demonstrate the testimonies to the world. Or it might not. I think it’s important that either be equally fine with us.
Tagged with: spiritual life
Quaker Essentials— A Study on Quaker Holiness
1112 December 2011 No Responses »
Nov
29
2011
Cat-Religion Glennda Susan Marsh-Letts and Barbara Lumley, New South Wales Regional MeetingWorshipping Group at study
In 2010 the Upper Blue Mountains Worshiping Group began a study program concentrating on ‘The Essential Elements of Quaker Holiness’. The study program was inspired by Carole Dale Spencer’s book Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism; An Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition (2007). Now, why study the ‘Essential Elements’ of Quakerism? Well, all of the participants in our worshiping group were either ‘converts’, attenders, or friends, i.e. none had been brought up as Quakers (birth-right members of the Religious Society of Friends). Some had joined Quakers thinking that they were a unified religion, only to discover the wide diversity that exists in the loosely allied network of Quaker Meetings world–wide. It therefore seemed appropriate to address the question of identity (i.e. ‘What is a Quaker?’) by going back to first principles, instead of looking at the present diversity of outward structures and causes. Hence, the creation of this study program with an emphasis on the ‘defining’ elements of Quakerism.
In her book, Spencer identified the defining ‘elements’ of early Quaker holiness as:
Scripture,
Eschatology,
Conversion,
Charisma,
Evangelism,
Mysticism,
Suffering, and
Perfection.
We devoted one study session a month to each ‘element’. Our plan was to study and discuss what each ‘essential element’ may have meant to early Friends, and then to relate that experience to our own spiritual experience. This process quickly separated what was non-essential in Quaker religious practice from what was essential, and it also revealed that what was essential for Friends was also probably universal, i.e. found in all religious practice.
1. Scripture
In looking at the role of scripture in Christian worship we shared our different experience of scripture. Some had little emphasis on scripture in their Christian education; others had seen scripture used as a divisive tool to separate the right -thinking from the wrong -thinking. An important insight gained through the sharing of some of our members’ experiences with scripture was the realization that God could speak through scripture into our own experience in a personal way.
2. Eschatology
Our study of the early Quakers’ understanding of eschatology (the study of final events or humanity’s future) took us back to a time when religious ideas were hotly debated in England, and when there were deep divisions in Christian understanding of the ‘end times’ or the ‘second coming’. Quakers initially awaited a literal second coming, but then changed their interpretation of the Gospels to say that Christ had come spiritually, within each person, like a seed of love within. Several of our group brought forth in our discussion the visual image of Jesus knocking on a door that must be opened from the inside, i.e. from the centre of our being.
3. Conversion (Convincement) and Perfection
Although Spencer used the more modern term ‘conversion’, we liked the older Quaker term ‘convincement’. Convincement was an essential experience for the early Quakers. You became a Quaker not through your infant baptism into the state religion (the established church, the Church of England), but through your own adult religious conversion/convincement. We also explored the meaning of other old terms, such as Fox’s use of ‘experimental’, which then had a meaning closer to ‘transformative’. Convincement we found was not only a radical, transformative, change of the heart for the early Quakers but also for many of our group. Indeed, everyone in the group told of a personal encounter with the Divine. One said that in ‘one moment’ she ‘knew she was committed’. Another said that ‘some agreement came into his life between himself and God’ while another ‘called out in anguish’ and the call was answered when the person was ‘enveloped’ with the Spirit of God. Some in the group had a less dramatic conversion, calling it ‘continuous conversion’, but saying that it was a process which moved them towards ‘one moment of peace, unity and oneness’. Another member of the group described this more measured conversion by saying ‘When the seed was right the soul began growing and ever since became central to who I am’.
From our discussions on conversion flowed some discussion of the early Quaker’s ideas on perfection, ideas that few Quakers seem to discuss these days, but which actually distinguished early Friends from other protestant groups. Convincement (used in the sense of Salvation) was conceived as a return to the original unity of creation. Therefore perfection was possible, once you were ‘convinced’, i.e. saved. This may be the reason that one occasionally hears Friends say that Quakers do not believe in the concept of original sin.
4. Charisma and Evangelism
Early Quakers found that inward conviction often led the newly convinced/converted Friend to evangelistic fervour. It may be surprising to many modern Friends to learn that early Quakers believed in converting others, both from nonbelievers and from other churches. Furthermore, this was a fervent evangelism where religion and politics (equality and social justice) were not separated. It was their contemporaries the Puritans and the Presbyterians who were not evangelizers, since they believed in predestination and the salvation of the elect. Furthermore, these early Quakers not only were so filled with the Spirit that they did indeed quake in their worship, but they believed that what we would call a Pentecostal experience should be/is the norm for all true Christians.
6. Suffering
When discussing the topic of suffering we looked at early Quaker testimonies, early Quaker martyrs, and also how early persecution may have helped to forge an identity for the Society. Our own meditations on suffering showed how suffering can be changed to joy and peace. If we ourselves, or others, are suffering, then bringing them or ourselves to the Light (i.e. showing empathy with suffering and holding the suffering person ‘in the Light’) allows the healing force of love to let the suffering be borne, and it can even change suffering to joy and peace.
7. Mysticism
Two sessions were devoted to Mysticism, as we found the definition of mysticism a challenge, and as we had so much to say of our own mystic experiences. Mysticism as a term was contemporary with early Quakers, but in the 17th century it was used to describe the communal prayer of monks (from the French, ‘la mystique’) not individual spiritual experience, so although we do not have evidence of the early Friends using it to describe their own worship, they would have agreed with the contemporary meaning of mysticism as communal spiritual worship. [1]
Several definitions of mysticism were put forward by Spencer. We were more inclined to go with the definition of Mysticism put forward by McGinn, who defined it as ‘a consciousness of the direct presence of God’, and also by Rufus Jones, who defined it as an ‘immediate direct experience of God’.[2] We had some reservation with Louth’s and Katz’s arguments that there are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences’[3]. Rather than mysticism characterized as a ‘search for … immediacy with God’, some of us have experienced this encounter with the Sacred as being initiated by God, a ‘Surprised by Joy’, encounter. We also had our doubts that all mystical events were processed or mediated through ‘extremely complex epistemological ways. Rather, the mystical experience was unmediated and then interpreted according to one’s cultural and religious tradition, which may, unfortunately, lead to a diminution of the encounter itself. Nor does this idea of all mystical events being processed through these, ‘extremely complex …ways’, sit very well with the mystical experiences of young children before they have had a chance to be conditioned by all the, ‘historical, linguistic, social and theological contexts’, mentioned by Katz.[4]
Conclusion
As our study progressed we were drawn together as we explored both our own religious heritage and shared our experience of the Divine. However, instead of our intellectual and spiritual thirst being satisfied by our discussions, our curiosity increased as we moved along this path of study together. Mysticism, in particular, we felt should receive further study, meditation, and contemplation, as it appeared to be at the heart of Quaker worship. Therefore we have now embarked on a new study that we are calling ‘Exploring Mystical Traditions’, wherein each member will present their research on a tradition they have special knowledge of, or interest in, perhaps looking and finding in our studies the essential unity of the Divine amidst the variety of human experience.
[1] Spencer, C.D. (2007). Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism. MiltonKeynes:Paternoster, p.29
[2] McGinn, B.C. (1991). Foundations of Mysticism; Origins to the Fifth Century. New York: Crossroad, pp. xv-xvii, as cited in Spencer, Ibid, p. 29.
[3] Katz, S. (1983). Mysticism and Religious Tradition. New York: Oxford, p. 4; Louth, A. (1981). The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. xv, both as cited in Spencer, Ibid, pp. 29-30.
[4] Ibid.
Tagged with: spiritual life
Tasmania’s Meeting for Learning
1106 June 2011 No Responses »
Jul
06
2011
By Fiona Gardner, Victoria Regional Meeting.
The Meeting for Learning Retreat offers Friends a year-long program with a week retreat at the beginning and end of the year. The program provides a structure within which Friends can explore and nurture their own spiritual journey, supported and enabled by each other and the facilitators.
This year the retreat week is in Hobart from Monday to Sunday, 12 — 18 September at the Maryknoll Retreat Centre at Blackman’s Bay.
Felicity Rose is half way through her year-long program, a good place to reflect:
The retreat week opened up the idea of ‘listening into being’ to me in a gentle, inspiring and loving way.
The rhythm of days of the retreat week was just right. We practised deep listening in small groups, had periods of worship,
discussion, time to relax, reflect, rest, walk on the beach and socialise.
By the time we left, we were well versed in ways to make our year between retreats a ‘growthful’ experience, and I was keen to keep the Meeting for Learning thread going. Each of us chose one of the facilitators to help us with any problems that might come up.
Many people have asked me about the one-to-four ‘projects’ we are asked to do during the year. At first, I interpreted this
in a practical way and decided to clear out old ‘stuff’ from my work area (to clarify for myself that I really have retired) and do a University of the Third Age course. Over the silent day in the middle of the retreat week these began to look more like New Year’s resolutions than what I wanted to take forward from my retreat.
I decided that it seemed more like a focus than a project: I am working towards being able to articulate why I am a Quaker and how I live it. Two off-shoot themes are to learn more of Quaker history and thought and to find the ways that this will inform my living the Quaker way in our community — the theme of the second retreat this September.
We were asked to form a support group; three to six people were suggested, to meet once a month for the year. Members of this group listen closely to what the participant is moved to share out of a preliminary silence. Participants lay down guidelines for whatever they feel will work best for them. I am most comfortable with a meeting of about one hour where, after a brief ‘hello’, we go into silence. When what I want to share has taken shape, I speak. After this, we resume our silence then usually I invite the group to ask questions or make comments. Each contribution is followed by silence, which may prompt me to share again, and so on. I don’t allow the gathering to become a discussion or a ‘fix-it’ session. I am finding it really moving and affirming to be listened to in this way, it is a great privilege.
One difficulty in having a group that can actually meet once a month is our busy lives; most of us go away quite often. At first, I (shyly) limited my group to two. By January, they were both away so I didn’t have a meeting. Now I have two more people in my group so for the next six months I should be able to have a meeting. I am very moved by the way people respond so generously.
For more details of the Meeting for Learning retreat, including costs, contact David Barry on email David.Barry.TLUD (at) gmail.com or telephone 0425 29 2288.
To explore your interest in Meeting for Learning, contact Fiona Gardner, coordinator for the facilitators: f.gardner (at) latrobe.edu.au or 03 54469951.
If you would like to read more from participants, more stories are on the Quaker Learning Australia website, http://www.qla.quakers.org.au.
