A Salutary Prayer

Do not give me certainty.
It is seductive and comforting, but it closes my mind.

Give me curiosity.
The desire to know and understand experiences other than my own.

Give me scepticism,
So I challenge what I hear, what I see, and what I know.

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 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.

Belief, Experience, Conception, Communication, Understanding

In an excellent blog post, Craig Barnett (no relation) recently wrote about the limitations of thinking of faith in terms of belief; rather than a conventional, simplistic view of belief leading to action, a better description – especially for Quakers – is of a cycle, practice leading to experience leading to community leading back to practice. Personally, I think that cycle should be bi-directional, but generally I think this is a good model, as far as it goes.

People, however, have a habit of thinking about things, not to mention talking about things (even if sometimes they don't do it in that order). It is when we talk about our experiences that our language, our choice of words and what we mean by them, our choice of phrases and references, brings something else to the fore, which we tend to refer to as “belief” – how we refer to God/the Divine/the numinous/the Spirit/whatever, the characteristics implicit in the terms we use, create the picture of what the speaker believes in.

For many liberal Quakers, however, theology – questions of the nature of the Divine – is a nebulous thing. I have heard many take a partially agnostic view, that whatever the Divine is in incomprehensible to us, fundamentally unknowable, which is a position with which I agree. The words we use don't reflect the kind of certainty that “belief” implies, when used in a religious context; rather, they are our groping after meaning that reflects our experience and attempts at understanding, indefinitely provisional. They are the shadows on the wall of the cave. So, if they don't reflect belief, what do they reflect?

Pantheons and Archetypes: Wisdom

In an earlier post, I wrote about the role of pantheons in various faiths, and how liberal Quakers might find them useful in their own spiritual approach and practice. This post is the first of what I hope will be a series – if there is enough interest in them – of looking at specific cases of this principle, specific archetypes and the deities that evoke them in various pantheons. This will include ways that Friends might find meaningful to incorporate these ideas in their own practice, if they feel so inclined.

In this first such post, I will consider the archetype of the wisdom deity. Wisdom is, in this case, distinct from knowledge, and somewhat distinct from intellect – in that some examples we will consider see the ideas of wisdom and intellect as more interconnected, and some less. Wisdom is not related to the acquisition of knowledge, but may be related to the ability to put together information to come to an appropriate conclusion, and is generally related to the ability to determine the right course to take beyond a simple optimisation of the outcome – looking past immediate objectives to peripheral or longer-term results.

Pantheons and Archetypes

Quaker tradition is rooted in, incontrovertibly derives from, Christian tradition. Much of our traditional language was alien to Christians of the time, but likewise much of it was reassuring and familiar, and many Quaker concepts derive directly from biblical sources – albeit rather unconventional interpretations of them. However, especially in the liberal branch of the worldwide Quaker family, we have also added insights, ideas and language from other traditions. Those that, in my experience, have most permeated British Quakerism in terms of language would be from Buddhism. “Mindful”, and words related to it, would seem a key example; these seem to drop from Quaker lips as readily as Christian references, and the practice of mindfulness has Buddhist roots, as well as being very much in vogue in the world of mental health and well-being. Other south Asian traditions get a look in as well, and there's a fair amount of non-specific nature-worship related ideas and language as well.

In this post, however, I will be focussing on the idea of pantheon-based faiths, and what we could draw from them. This isn't an area I hear or read much about in Quaker thought, but it often comes to mind for me. Of course, I live with someone who was massively into ancient Greek and Roman (mostly Roman) culture and mythology when she was a kid, and I have many friends and acquaintances who identify with or practice various neo-pagan faiths, so that may not be a surprise.

This is going to get a bit rambling, but please bear with me – it does all come around to add up to something in the end.