Reflection on ‘Maxim 4’ (Fox is no authority)

“Fox is no greater authority than you or I, nor was his access to the true authority any greater than ours.”
–Maxim 4

I was not surprised that this one was controversial for some Friends. I suppose I wish I were surprised, but really I was more relieved that it seemed very few found it challenging.

George Fox is often spoken of as the founder of the Religious Society of Friends. He was certainly a charismatic leader (and for those into Christian theology, that applies in both the everyday and technical sense), and the proto-Quakers of the North West of England did coalesce around him. Yet it is in the very nature of what he taught – and he wasn’t the only one teaching it, mind you – that we not ascribe authority to other people. The message being shared by various spiritual teachers of the time, including Fox, was that we all had access to the ultimate source of teaching and authority. Not only did we not need intercessory priests, as asserted by Luther and Calvin, but every single one of us could sit down and find the still small voice within, and know some measure of God’s guidance and God’s will (at the time, there would have been no question as to whether or not it should be identified as such).

Quakers and ‘Paksworld’

Continuing the theme of my previous post, about the fictional setting of Valdemar in the context of Quakerism, I’m going to look at another fictional setting and see what parallels there might be. Today, you get to read my thoughts on Quakers and the setting of the ‘Paksenarrion’ books. This was introduced to the world through the three-volume fantasy novel The Deed of Paksenarrion (the volumes being Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, Divided Allegiance, and Oath of Gold), a Tolkienesque fantasy epic with a female protagonist, Paksenarrion (shortened to ‘Paks’), an asexual soldier (and yes, the asexuality is plot relevant, which is pretty good going for the late eighties), who goes on to bigger and better things (while still being a fighter) and saves, well, not the world exactly (at least not directly – that comes with other people in the sequels) but at least the way of life of people of her own culture. That’s a familiar line for those who would take people to war in the modern world, but she is not fighting against people of another culture, but for good against evil.

Reflection on ‘Aphorism 2’ (Reason and Light Combined)

“When you dwell in thought on important or profound matters, dwell also in the Spirit. Reason and Light combined give the truest fount of insight.”
–Aphorism 2

This is very simple advice, easy to understand in a literal sense, and making very little use of symbolism of imagery. Technically, ‘Light’ is imagery, but it is such standard imagery for Quakers that it barely counts; it is one of the terms we use, largely regardless of specific theological views, for the Divine, or an aspect of the Divine, or a way of looking at the Divine. Early Friends spoke of the “Light of Christ”, seeing it as an expression of the work of the Holy Spirit upon those who are open to it. Indeed, it is a clear reflection of the Pentecostal essence of the Quaker way, however different we might be now from those churches referred to as ‘Pentecostal’ today.

The idea of Pentecostal Christianity is a focus on the Holy Spirit’s work among Christians today, in reference to the events commemorated by the festival of Pentecost – the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles (and other followers of Jesus). This happened during the Jewish Feast of Weeks, Shavuot, commemorating Moses’ receipt of the law – the Torah – on Mount Sinai, as well as marking the wheat harvest in Israel. Shavuot occurs on the 50^th day after Passover (according to some traditions), and was thus also known in the language of the New Testament, Koine Greek (including by some Hellenistic Jews of the first century CE), as Pentēkostē, or ‘fiftieth’. That word is also used in the Septuagint, the key Koine translation of the Hebrew scriptures, to refer to the “year of Jubilee” that occurred every fifty years, but its use to refer to Shavuot is key to its importance as a term in Christianity. It was adopted to commemorate the events of Shavuot so long ago – counting the 50 days from Easter, which marks events that occurred at Passover, though Easter and Passover now no longer necessarily coincide.

Reflection on ‘Aphorism 1’ (Looking Out for the Divine)

“The divine may be found everywhere; one does not look for the divine so much as look out for it”
–Aphorism 1

This one is interesting. The essential statement of the first half is straightforward, on the face of it, and the second half is easily read in two (subtly) different ways. The difference hinges on the different senses people intend when they talk about “looking out” for something.

The straightforward reading of the first half is quite clear. If you believe in a theistic God, it could be seen as an expression of the idea of omnipresence. Whether or not you believe in such a thing, it can be taken as suggesting that, whatever the Divine is, it is in some sense everywhere, or at least reflected everywhere. Actually, that could do with some unpacking and elaborating, but let’s look more closely at the second half of the aphorism first.

A Quaker Rumspringa?

In an earlier post, I suggested the idea that a spiritual convincement experience, involving a direct experience of the Divine, might be something we could consider a prerequisite for membership. This was not to advocate it as an actual change we should undertake right now. There are lots of problems with the idea, though it is attractive in principle. One of the problems is the experience of those raised among Friends.

The thing is, when you taste something you have never tasted before, particularly if it is a strong flavour, it is strange, it's unmistakable. It grabs your attention and you really know you've tasted it. If, however, the flavour has been familiar to you since your childhood, you might barely be aware of it. This is a major factor in culinary culture shock, noticeable even in something as simple as an American and a Brit trying tomato ketchup made for the other market. To me, American ketchup tastes unpleasantly sweet, but to an American, British ketchup tastes like it's been spiked with vinegar. When you get into things that are even more different, like spices or seasonings that are characteristic of particular cuisines, it is even more pronounced. Consider for instance kimchi, or the Japanese umeboshi. For the European palate, east Asian food is particularly apt for examples.

Quaker Worship and Meditation

Those who are familiar with meditation, often from the popularisation of Buddhist meditation methods, but not with Quaker worship practices, often get the idea that they are very similar. I have read accounts of Quakers who first came to a Quaker meeting because they had been enjoying Buddhist meditation, but moved to an area with no sangha or meditation group, and were advised that what Quakers did was like meditation. There are, obviously, some superficial similarities – a whole bunch of people sitting in silence being the obvious one – and even some comparability of the inward practice, but there are fundamental differences that clearly separate the two experiences and practices. In this post, I'll be exploring the points of similarity and difference, and exploring the virtue of Friends maintaining both practices.

Divine Love

Love is so much more than the romantic sort. We have known this for a long time, but we tend to forget it. We have the love of family, of course, and that is well understood, but love without context generally refers to romantic love, or euphemistically to sex, as in physical “acts of love”. We have love songs, and love stories, and (more's the pity) Love Island.

Love is more than wanting to be with someone, more than caring deeply for some specific individuals. It is more than selfless devotion to a lover or a child. There is love in fast friendship, love in care for anyone. There is love throughout life, if we allow there to be.

Divine Justice

Justice is a primal drive. It finds many forms of expression – the desire to see good conduct rewarded and bad conduct punished, the reluctance to benefit from undeserved reward, and also the desire for revenge, to see people hoist on their own petard, and even, perhaps, schadenfreude.

Like any primal drive it can lead us to right action or to wrong action. What is just is not simple, nor possible to know in all circumstances. Indeed, even our basic urge to justice does not reliably lead to just outcomes, for while it is that drive that pushes us to vengeance, vengeance is rarely just.

Yet it also drives us to protect those who suffer unjustly, to stand against persecution and scapegoating. It causes us to wish to see credit given where it is due, and it drives us to let others know that we appreciate their work, their actions, indeed that we appreciate them as people.

Divine Wisdom

We treasure wisdom. Wisdom is not the amassing of knowledge and the ability to recall it at appropriate moment. Wisdom is not the understanding of diverse fields of study. Wisdom is not the ability to predict the outcomes of different courses of action. Wisdom is more, and less, than that.

Wisdom is not intellect, for great wisdom may come from those who cannot claim any great intelligence. It is not reason, for it need not follow any line of thought or logic. It is not intuition, for we can often see its sense once it is revealed.

The Personalness of Morality

Ethics and morality are odd things. Sometimes it's clear that an ethical belief is something we hold to be universal – that there can be no question that something is wrong. Sometimes it's clear that it's a personal thing – that we hold for ourselves that that thing is completely wrong, but do not expect others to share that belief.

This isn't just a matter of different beliefs fitting different categories, though. It's also a matter of different people or ethical systems having different views of relativism. Very few people would extend moral relativism to murder or slavery in the modern context (though there are those who do), but many people (though far from all) are ready to see ethical beliefs about drugs, alcohol or sex as matters of personal morality.

Flashes of Clarity

It is inescapably true that we see, as the quote goes, “through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12) or, in more modern translations, “in a mirror, dimly” – assuming glass to be in the old sense, as in “looking glass”, though there is debate as to which sense was meant by the author of the epistle. This is clearly true, from the evidence of modern neuroscience, of our perception of the mundane, everyday world. We see the reflection of the world that our senses and our complex neural circuitry manage to produce, and it fills in the blanks with reasonable assumptions all over the place. It finds patterns anywhere it can, so we see dogs and sofas in clouds. We miss far more of the world around us than we see.

Following Light, Purely?

I have heard it suggested that the most true and pure form of Quakerism would be to follow the Light “purely”, directly, with neither story, nor symbolism, nor any form of tradition. It certainly follows logically from the idea of our direct experience of the Divine (or God, Light, whatever you want to call it). In a sense, it might be the Platonic ideal of Quakerism.

The problem is, it isn’t really possible.

We do not live in a world of Platonic ideals. The ideal triangle, the ideal sphere, the ideal rock – all are beyond our grasp. The ideals of purely conceptual things are similarly beyond us (indeed, some would argue that all Platonic ideals are conceptual). We shall never attain ideal democracy, ideal equality, nor even ideal faith or ideal love.

So far, so general and dismissive, you might think. It is only fair to ask that I give more specific, concrete, practical reasons to object to such a theoretically laudable objective – for we would surely follow the Divine most faithfully if we were not impeded by preconceived ideas of its nature or how it might direct us. Of course, as the matters involved include cognition, my points will still be somewhat abstract, or at least not tangible, but they ought to be more concrete than “ideals are unattainable, therefore it can’t be done, quod erat demonstrandum” – which is, after all, not just snobbily dismissive, but also somewhat begging the question.

Membership, Convincement & Belonging

There are many ways of belonging to the Quaker family. There are those who are part of our community without identifying with our faith, fellow-travellers who participate in some, even all of our activities but do not consider themselves Quakers. There are those of fervent religious belief in the spirit of the early Friends. There are those who call themselves Quakers but deny the religious nature of the experience, or who recognise it as religious but are still patiently waiting for a direct experience of the Divine that they recognise. There is, of course, the division between member and attender, and other terms we throw around – newcomer and enquirer being quite popular ones.

We don't seem to have a coherent view, however, of these different dimensions of belonging, of being part of the Quaker community, of being a Quaker. In this post, I will be exploring some elements of this “belonging space”, to borrow mathematical terminology.

True Inspiration

Many Friends find great value in reading the writings of early Friends. This is understandable. Some of it inspiring, some is intellectually very interesting. Some borders on being incoherent, but overall the hit rate is pretty good.

It is important to treat such writings with some caution, however. As early Friends wrote in the heat of the new inspiration they had found, we may read them hoping to catch a little of that inspiration. While it may inspire us, however, it is nothing like the inspiration that led to those writings.

What Are "The Things Which Are Eternal"?

“Seek to know one another in the things which are eternal”. It's a popular phrase, made particularly well-known by it's inclusion in Britain Yearly Meeting's Advices and queries, number 18. It falls easily from our lips, and a lot of people seem to put a lot of emotional investment in the idea, but what does it mean?

In my experience, Friends often seem to use the phrase in a way that is rather non-specific. Much like “that of God in every one”, its meaning seems to be in the moment, in whatever form is useful to the speaker. Usually, it seems to add a sort of warm fuzz to the idea of getting to know one another, that it means getting to know one another in a deep sense, rather than a superficial one. You might know what someone does for living, but it is knowing them in a deeper way to find out that they paint landscapes, or write poetry. This is a reasonable distinction to make, and the idea that we, as Friends, should know one another well is a laudable one. Is this really “the things which are eternal”? Certainly, there's a degree to which meanings change with time and context, especially as society changes – or as our Religious Society changes.

Theology and "Notions"

Water baptism: a ritual Quakers have traditionally considered
an empty form, based on notions, rather than any true leading
of the Spirit.

A fair amount of my writing could be described as theology. Not high, formal, academic theology, perhaps, but it's theology – questions (and, to be fair, rarely answers) about the nature of God, or at least of what-you-will. I've known some to quibble with the idea of calling it “theology” if there's no theos involved, but there's no better term, so I'll use this one. Indeed, I'm hardly the first person to talk about theology in the context of a non-theistic worldview. So, if you are a purist in the meaning of that term, insisting that it only applies to theistic (some would say only Christian) contexts, I ask your forbearance. Also, to not argue with me about it on this post – as will become clear, a large part of what I will be discussing here is in the Christian context, indeed in the context of early Friends, and in any case it would be rather missing the point of the post overall. If you prefer to think of the wider idea as hierology, you may do so, but this isn't the place for a debate on what counts as theology and what as hierology.

The context of early Friends is important here, because one of the great criticisms of those early Quakers was against notions. All the haggling among the Church and its divisions, in the first millennium, over the nature of Christ, the question of the Chalcedonian formulation versus Miaphysitism – that is, whether Christ incarnate was of two natures, human and divine, united in a single hypostasis, or whether he was of one nature, wholly human and divine – is one example. Another, far more contemporary with the early Friends, would be detailed questions over the nature of the Trinity and the relationship between its members. The early Friends were, of course, strongly bible-believing Christians; though this was tempered by reliance on “the Spirit that gave them forth”, the bible was still important and a key tool of the early Friends. Because of this, they did not consider the basic idea of the Trinity to be a notion – it is clearly pointed to in scripture. Indeed, one of the members of the Trinity is of particular importance to Quakers, for it was said from quite early days that what moved them in worship was the Holy Spirit (among other terms). Precisely what the relationship is between the members of the Trinity, however, would be a notion.

What do Quakers Mean by "Holding in the Light"?

It is something of a pat phrase, among Quakers, to respond to the difficulty of others by offering to “hold them in the light”. I do not mean by this that we do not do anything else to help people in difficulty, or that such holding is not appreciated. Indeed, it is equally common, in my experience, for Friends to ask others to hold them in the light as they face adversity.

Like many Quaker phrases, however, it serves to obscure the divergence of understanding among liberal Friends. We do not explain what we mean when we use it, and rarely discuss what we mean by it at other times. It is clear that there are a range of meanings Friends ascribe to the saying, and even where people have similar conceptions of the Divine, they may not mean the same thing when they offer to hold someone in the light.

In this post I will explore some of the different interpretations of this phrase that I have come across, looking at what connects them and what differentiates them. I will also, naturally, explain my take on the matter.

"WHAT Do You Worship?": Worship as an Intransitive Verb

One fairly common response I've come across, when someone has heard an explanation of the silent Quaker Meeting for Worship, has been to ask “but what are you worshipping?” Well, some people phrase it as who, rather than what, but I tend to see it as essentially the same question.

Now, for some Friends, the answer is easy. They believe in a deity that they feel warrants veneration, and so they can say that is what they worship. And yet, they cannot say that and speak for all unprogrammed Quakers. While some may adore and venerate in the silence, not all do – and even for those that do, that is not all they do in the silence.

In this post, then, I shall look at this question, and how the Quaker usage of the word “worship” perhaps challenges received wisdom in terms of English grammar.

What We Do In Silence

From the outside, what happens in a Quaker Meeting for Worship is fairly simple, if unrevealing. We sit in silence, and at some point, someone may be moved to stand and speak. But there's a lot more to it than that.

As we sit in our “expectant waiting”, we are not generally entirely passive – not least because absolute passivity is not something that comes easily to people. For centuries, faith communities have developed strategies to help people learn various forms of passivity, leading their way towards it through prayers, mantras and meditation. Not only that, but not all Friends find the best way to make that contact with the Divine is through passivity at all.

In this post, I will be exploring what it is we do in the silence of worship – different ways we bring ourselves to the right state of mind, what that state of mind might be (different for different Friends), and what we do once we have reached it. That is a chronological order, and it might seem appropriate to explore things that way, but I find it most helpful to consider the state of mind first, before looking at how we reach it.

Outward vs Inward Silence

We can find the inward silence even at times of bustle and busyness.

Silence is a major feature of Quaker tradition; it features in the practice of all variations of Quaker practice, though most noticeably in unprogrammed Meetings. But what is this silence, as part of the Quaker way? Is it limited to the lack of noise, and a certain stillness, or does it go deeper than that? In this post, I shall try to explore this matter, and look at the difference between outward and inward silence.

I've previously published written ministry that touches on this, a short piece entitled Outward Silence, Inward Silence. It's very direct, with the general point that outward silence, while traditional and useful, is largely a tool to help us find inward silence. In this post, I will be exploring this idea in more detail, with practical examples and advice.