Reflection on Aphorism 7: The Divine Can Only Guide Us If Willing

“As leaders can only lead with the consent of those led, however grudging that might be, the Divine can only guide us if we are willing to be guided.”
–Aphorism 7

Whatever your view on theology, it is clear that the Divine, however we conceive of it, is limited. If you believe in an omnipotent God, then this limitation is clearly self-imposed, for whatever reason. If one believes in a God that is good, one can only assume that it cannot or will not interfere in the world to maximise happiness (unless you go with the “best of all possible worlds” argument, which I always found sophistic). Other conceptions of the Divine are more obviously limited.

By analogy, this aphorism expresses one of those limitations – that while we can put our lives under the ordering of the Spirit, we have to be willing to do so. In fact, while it is not stated in the aphorism, I would go further – we have to work to do so. The Divine may be trying to speak to us all the time, but it cannot reach us without an open heart, or perhaps an open soul, and for most if not all of us, that takes work and practice. We have to learn to quiet the loud voices of our selves to hear the still small voice of God.

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.

Maxim 4

Aphorism 3

Aphorism 1

The Simple Good News of Friends

There is, in each of us, a part of the Divine.

Through this, each of us can know first-hand the guidance of God, whatever you might call it and however you might think of it.

By what it shows us, we might call it Love or Light.

We do not need special places or people to have access to it, no special rituals or forms of words.

In silent waiting we learn to recognise the promptings of this Spirit.

In waiting together we gain clarity and confidence in our discernment of how it is leading us.

Repentance and Forgiveness

Like much of our spiritual experience, the Quaker
confessional is inward.

Once upon a time, I habitually listened to Radio 4. For the Americans, this is broadly similar to NPR – I don't know a good point of comparison for any other countries. Basically, it's one of the nine “mainstream” national radio stations from the BBC (there's also a tenth specifically focused on British Asian communities, and local stations for the nations and regions), and it's focussed on talk content. Comedy, drama, in-depth current affairs, that sort of thing. It's very popular with Quakers. If your Quaker community has a trope about ministry coming from a radio station, we have the same thing with Radio 4.

In the last few years, I've listened to Radio 4 less and less. While it has some wonderful content that isn't related to current affairs, there's a huge amount that is – and current affairs has gotten rather depressing lately. It would be quite bothersome to put it on just for the programmes we want and change station every time a news bulletin comes on. Not that we avoid all news; we follow a lot of news online, consuming it when we want to, on our terms. Managing mental health is very important.

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.

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 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.

Spiritual "Zones of Proximal Development"

We have all of the ingredients we need for our
individual and collective development - we just
have to recognise them and work out how to
put them together.

Following some recent online discussions, I feel like it's worth spending another post exploring some learning theory, how it relates to Quaker practice – and what we can take from it to improve that practice. Previously, I wrote about communities of practice, and now I'll be looking at the idea of zones of proximal development.

ZPDs, as they are more concisely known, as a way of talking about what it is readily possible for a given learner to learn. There is what they already know, what they can already do, and there are those things that would be a struggle to attempt, and in between is the ZPD, the things that they can reasonably learn, or the things that they could do with help and guidance. This is a much simpler idea than communities of practice – in these last couple of sentences, the fundamentals of it are covered. Of course, there's more to it than that, but that's the basics all done. Given, in many spiritual situations, liberal Quakers' aversion to “teaching”, it might seem hard to apply this, but I think it has a particular application to spiritual development that doesn't require any sense of the didactic. It is this interpretation and application that I intend to explore in this post.

Everyone Can Draw Meaning From Christmas

The Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerard van Honthorst

As explored in my pantheons and archetypes series (which I hope to return to in the new year, when I decide which archetype to look at next), I very much believe that all Quakers, whatever their theological tendencies, can benefit from consideration of the ideas and stories from different faiths and traditions. When I say this, I don't just mean that Christian and non-theist Friends should look at ancient pagan traditions – I also mean that non-Christians should look at Christian traditions and stories. This time of year is a great opportunity to give an example of this, how the stories of Christmas can be spiritually meaningful to anyone, regardless of the extent to which they believe in them.

It's really quite a story, when you think about it. We're going to get into a bit of history for this, and I'm no expert on this stuff, so I've probably gotten some stuff subtly (or horribly) wrong, but the general sense should be accurate enough. The context is of a faith community and society that is living under a fair degree of repression, albeit sporadic, by a foreign power – and that has a history of oppression and forced migration present in both their written and oral histories. That foreign power, Rome, is habitually tolerant of the religious preferences of their subject and client populations, within certain limitations. One of the absolute limits was human sacrifice, which is not relevant here, but one of the practical limits was that the religion had to be somehow compatible with the Roman state religion. Monotheistic cultures could be okay, as they might acknowledge the validity of other deities while cleaving strongly to their own. The Jewish faith, however, resisted the idolatry they saw in even acknowledging other faiths, and while the Roman habit would be to let them have their faith, they found that exclusivity uncomfortable.

Liberal Quakerism as a "Self Religion"?

Shall we align our chakras with healing
crystals? The Quaker Way isn't just another
New Age mishmash.

One thing I have seen said, from time to time about liberal Quakerism is that it has become a “self religion”. Usually, this is said by way of criticism, often (but not always) by fairly traditionalist Friends. In this post, I'll be taking a look at what this term means, and the extent to which liberal Quakerism – as I've experienced it – fits that definition, and some thoughts on the extent to which it should.

The term itself is not used entirely consistently. It is widely used in a derogatory way towards “new age” spirituality, even identified with such things, and is also used by the less vociferous critics of Scientology to describe that faith. However, the underlying and original meaning appears to be religions or spiritual paths that aim for the development of the self, with specific reference to new age and other paths that developed in the 70s and 80s. A characteristic that is often derided in these faiths in extreme individualism, the ability to cherry-pick from a range of traditions in your attempt to perfect yourself – though reports rather suggest this is rather less true of Scientology, which is generally considered a self religion. Thus, I tend to feel that the main defining quality of a self religion is the goal of self-perfection – whether the faith says this leads to apotheosis, results after death, or a better life here and now. However, the implications of pick-and-choose are probably very important in the allegation that liberal Quakerism has become a self religion, so that must also be borne in mind.

So, here's the first question: does Quakerism aim for the perfection of the self? If so, how, and to what end?

What Is Ministry?

One of the hardest things, in my experience, about trying to explain Quaker practice to those unfamiliar with it, is getting down and detailed about Meeting for Worship. Okay, so we sit in silence, and wait for the spirit to move someone to speak; that much sounds simple. I've written before, in some detail, with thoughts on how to tell if the spirit is moving you to speak. After that, though, once someone is speaking, how do we understand what has been said in that spoken ministry? Even assuming that everyone who stands to speak is genuinely moved to speak, there are several ways to think about this.

The most obvious one is at one extreme, that these are genuine, literal messages from God/the Spirit/the Divine/whatever you're calling it. That the words themselves are chosen for you, and the speaker is merely a conduit, with no responsibility for what is said. At the opposite extreme, perhaps the Spirit only gives the germ of an idea, and the compulsion to share it. Then the words are the choice of the person speaking, as they try to express an idea, possibly a very nebulous idea, that has been placed into their mind. I have spoken to Friends who view ministry at each of those extremes.

As is usually the case, however, when there are extreme points of view, there's also the possibility of ideas that lie between them. I suspect that most Friends lie somewhere in that in-between space, as indeed do I, but there's a lot of variation possible. Ultimately, however, all such positions amount to something of the form that ministry is a collaboration between the individual and the Spirit.

First Conscious Contact with the Divine

My first conscious contact with the divine came a few years before I found Quakers.

My life until then, in the religious sense, had been one of seeking, though I would not have known to call it such. I found much that resonated with my condition and my experience in many faiths, and sought out opportunities to learn more of further traditions. At the same time, each generally had things that didn't ring true to me.

As a student, my house was visited by missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly referred to as Mormons – a convention I shall follow here, for brevity if nothing else. I wasn't actually in at the time, but a housemate and a friend were, and had arranged for a return visit to start hearing what they had to say; they did this not because they had any idea that they might be converted, being settled in their own beliefs, but because they thought it might be interesting. And so I heard about it, and arranged to be there when the missionaries came back.

On Sin and the Liberal Quaker

Sin isn't something you hear liberal Quakers talking about very much. I suppose that is largely our modern tendency towards non-judgementalism, as well as the increasing tendency to avoid religious language. As most people think of it, talking about “sin” is talking about things that you are religiously forbidden to do, and we don't tend to do that any more.

However, there have been several conceptions of sin, even just among Christian scholarship. The various major branches of the Christian church have their own formal, theoretical conceptions, and practices stemming from these, while theologians have expounded their own views at different points in history.

Thomas Aquinas held sin to be contrary to virtue; referencing Augustine of Hippo, his Summa Theologiae describes it as being “word, deed or desire contrary to the eternal law”, seeing this as superior to competing definitions of it as contrary to reason, or as an offence against God. I must admit, with limited background in Christian theology, I find many of distinctions made in this analysis baffling, but an important distinguishing point seems to be that sins are defined and differentiated by the “end and object”, or motive, for the sin. Adultery is differentiated from murder not by the difference in the acts, but in the difference in why they are committed, in what the sinner seeks to get, obtain or induce by committing the sin. However, it does not require that the sinner conceives their act as sinful, and that sin may come from a misplaced desire to do good. Really, the whole text is a work of philosophical logic applied to theology, as much theological writing is, and I wonder if this might be part of the source of the objection to rational approaches to faith among Quakers, now and historically. It is certainly cold to me, and seems vastly inferior to drawing our understanding of the Divine, and of right action, from lived experience. Reason has its place, but cannot supplant that experience. However, I digress…