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As regular readers will no doubt be aware, I invite those who wish to support this blog to subscribe to my Patreon. I’m gratified by the support that some of you have given – it lets me know that people value what I’m writing, as of course do comments, shares and so on. You can be sure that I also look at my page views and see when a post is popular, which usually means that people have shared it more widely, which is great.

Financial support is not more important to me than that sort of moral support, but is, obviously, different. It means I can spend more time on the blog, and it can mean that my financial situation is a little less precarious, all my sources of income being variable and not entirely within my control. So when you support me and my blog financially, you make a practical difference to my life, as well as encouraging me to write more.

The Limits of Quaker Universalism

I am, as regular readers will no doubt realise, a proponent of Quaker Universalism – the idea that a person’s underlying theology can take a wide range of forms, and still be a Quaker. This is not, however, a matter of ‘anything goes’. It can’t be.

For starters, it’s never a matter of “believe what you want”; it can only be “believe what you believe”. But while that is the most common error in talking about Quaker Universalism – often derisively – it is not the most fundamental limit. No, that most fundamental limit comes from the essence of Quaker practices.

Everything about how Quakers do things, especially in the Liberal part of our Religious Society, but not uniquely to it, is based on the idea of direct revelation – the idea that God, the Spirit, or whatever-you-call-it, can tell us things, give us guidance. Burning bushes are rare, but a still small voice is accessible to all. A personal theology, whether it involves a theistic God or not, must allow for this, or Meeting for Worship makes no sense. It is the usual centre of our spiritual life and the foundation for all other key Quaker practices and liturgy (yes, in practice we have liturgy, but that’s a matter for another day), and it is fundamentally based on the idea that we are prompted by something to speak, and that something is capable of doing something different from our ordinary, every day personal mind.

Reflection on Aphorism 6: It Is Not Faith That Sustains Us

“It is not faith that sustains us; the Spirit sustains us, and the exercise of faith and discipline facilitates this process.”
–Aphorism 6

This one is a little more mystical, more metaphysical perhaps, than is usual for me. I find it quite difficult to engage with because it doesn’t fit terribly well with how I conceptualise my relationship with the Divine. And yet I wrote it down, because I was called to do so.

I do not see the Spirit as something essential without the person, but as an essential essence of each person that is connected to that in others; a series of Divine shards, if you will, that joins us together and makes up a greater whole – though ‘shards’ conjures the image of these pieces having once been an undivided whole that was broken, which isn’t how I see it.

On Ministry and Clear Sight: A Reflection on Imperfect Divine Reflection

Copper alloy mirror, Turkey, circa 500 BCE

I was recently given written ministry to which I gave the title On Ministry and Clear Sight. It flowed as easily as any ministry I have ever given, and came as unexpectedly – a strong, clear leading to write or say certain things. As the ministry itself expresses, of course, there is much of myself in that ministry; it is an imperfect reflection shaped by what one might call, from the language of that ministry, as the ‘landscape of my mind’. In any case, it hit me hard, and I felt the need to think about it and give my own reaction to it.

The first, possibly most immediate point being that we have no sure way to know that any ministry offered is not genuinely drawing on the Spirit. Something might be so antithetical to our understanding of Quaker values and philosophy that we cannot countenance the idea that the Spirit gave it forth, yet still it did. Our task is to understand the possibilities of how it might have been inspired, let the ministry teach us about the Divine, about the world, and about the person who is speaking. We have to live with the discomfort that someone can say something we consider horrific in ministry, and yet there is some truth to it.

Remembrance, Performativity, and Sincerity

The Cenotaph, Whitehall.
Photo by Matt Brown

Today is the 11th of November – Armistice Day. When many people around the world remember that active fighting ceased, in Europe, on this day in 1918, at 11am (creating the easy to remember, and date-format friendly, time and date of 11am 11/11) local time. Many say the armistice was signed at 11am, but this is incorrect; it was signed earlier that day, after some negotiation, and communicated initially around 9am in Paris; the 11am time was that specified in the armistice for cessation of hostilities, and the troops had notice of it some time before that – and in many cases, carried on fighting quite close up to the minute specified, especially artillery units (who didn’t want to have to shift their ammo back home) and those who were in sight of a strategic target, whose officers were thinking ahead to the possibility that the armistice might fail. However, by 11am people had pretty much stopped fighting (in Europe), and the armistice did not fail – the war being formally ended with the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.

I clarify ‘in Europe’ because, communication not being globally instantaneous in 1918, it took a while for the news to reach those fighting in Africa. About two weeks later, they got news, and the local commanders had to make their own arrangements for an armistice ceremony and cessation of hostilities in Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia).

But this isn’t a history blog. It’s a Quaker blog. You might think, from the text above and a little knowledge of Quakers, that I’m about to get into Quaker pacifism, the wastefulness of the so-called Great War (now commonly known as the First World War), or, perhaps, how our public observances of Remembrance have taken on characteristics of glorification of war and the military. All of those would be valid things to post here, but that’s not what I’m up to right now. No, as those of you who’ve paid attention to the title of this post will have gathered, I want to take this opportunity to talk about performativity.