Actions not Principles - an introduction to the Quaker Testimonies

The Quaker testimonies are often misunderstood as a list of values or principles that Friends are expected to agree with, and then try to put into practice. Until very recently, Quakers had a shared understanding of our testimonies as actions that testify to our experience of reality. The testimonies are not values, principles, ideals or beliefs. Our testimony is our behaviour, as it witnesses to the truth of reality that we have experienced for ourselves.

Early Friends were clear that having the right principles or beliefs was of no use to anyone, without a personal insight into the reality that underlies all religious language:

“Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;' but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?"

(George Fox, quoted by Margaret Fell, 1694)

The focus of testimony for early Friends might seem surprising. George Fox's emphasis in his letters to early Quaker communities was above all on Friends' truthful use of language, and rejection of worldly customs and official religious practice.

“Friends, keep at a word in all your dealings without oppression.

And keep to the sound language, thou to everyone.

And keep your testimony against the world's vain fashion.

And keep your testimony against the hireling priests, and their tithes, and maintenance.

And against the mass-houses, and the repairing of them.

And against the priest's and the world's joining in marriage.

And your testimony against swearing, and the world's corrupt manners.

And against all looseness, pleasures, and prophaneness whatsoever.

And against all the world's evil ways, vain worships, and religions, and to stand up for God's.”

(George Fox, Epistle 263, 1668)

These testimonies were specific challenges to the social hierarchies and oppressive State-Church institutions of 17^th Century England. The 'sound language' included addressing everyone equally (as 'thou') regardless of their social position, refusing to use flattering honorific titles (such as 'Reverend', 'Your Honour' etc), refusing to swear oaths in court, and a commitment to absolute truthfulness and plain speaking, without social lies, exaggeration or equivocation.

Truthfulness was central for these early Quakers (one of their earliest names for themselves was the 'Friends of Truth'). For them, Truth was not an intellectual conviction, but an existential commitment to speaking and acting truthfully; refusing all participation in falsehood, and bearing witness ('testifying') to the reality of the world as they knew it in their own experience:

“Early Friends testified to the truth that had changed them by living their lives on the basis of that truth. The reality of their life (and of human life) shone through in their lives because they were open to that reality and lived in harmony with it. Lives lived in the truth would then resonate with how other people lived their lives, and more specifically with the deep sense within them that they were not living well, not living rightly. When Friends spoke honestly and truthfully to people, when they dealt with them as they really were, without pretence or projection, when they met violence with nonviolence and hatred with love, people knew at some level they were being confronted with the truth, whether they liked it or not.”

(Rex Ambler, The Prophetic Message of Early Friends, and how it can be interpreted today - full text available here)

Many early Friends also arrived independently at the rejection of violence – 'fighting with outward weapons'. For most Friends, this was not based on belief in a universal principle that 'all violence is wrong' - they accepted the right of government to use violence to suppress evil-doers and maintain public order. Instead, the first Quakers experienced a series of 'openings' – spiritual experiences of insight, that progressively revealed to them their own motivations and compulsions, as well as their fundamental connection to other people, to the living world and to the underlying spiritual reality of God. Through these experiences, Friends were discovering that they could no longer participate in exploitation or violence against other human beings. They found themselves in that spiritual condition, the 'covenant of peace that was before the world was', which freed them from the delusions, ambition and hatred that led to violence, oppression and war. They recognised that while most people were still not living in this condition, there was still a need for the State to use force to maintain law and order. Their public testimony and mission was aimed at bringing all people into the same 'covenant of peace', which would gradually make violence and oppression impossible for everyone.

The important thing about all these aspects of Quaker Testimony was that they were specific actions, discerned in response to specific circumstances. This is why the actions that have been considered 'testimonies' by Quakers have constantly changed over time, in response to changing social conditions and the new discernment of Friends. Some early testimonies have been abandoned, such as the testimony against music and the arts, which was originally a rejection of Restoration England's decadent aristocratic culture. New testimonies have also emerged in the areas of anti-slavery, temperance, anti-militarism, and most recently the commitment to become a sustainable, low-carbon community, and the practice of equal marriage.

It is only very recently that the concrete acts of Quaker testimony have been grouped together under the familiar set of headings, 'Simplicity, Truth, Equality and Peace' (or in the USA more usually Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality). The 'STEP' classification was invented in 1964 by Hugh Barbour in his book 'The Quakers in Puritan England', as a way of grouping together the great diversity of concrete Quaker testimonies into a few manageable themes. While this classification can be useful as an aid to memory, it has unfortunately had the effect of giving the impression that Quaker testimonies are a set of universal ethical principles or values that we are supposed to try to 'put into practice'. Trying, and inevitably failing, to live up to a set of principles of moral perfection is a fruitful source of guilt, but of little else. Fortunately, this is not what Quaker testimonies are.

The fundamental value of the corporate Quaker testimonies is as a guide to discerning our own leadings. By reminding us of the ways in which Friends have been led in the past, individually and collectively, the testimonies can help to sensitise us to the areas where the Spirit may be nudging us in our own lives and situations. By reflecting on the traditional Quaker commitment to plain and truthful speech, we might be become aware of a vague discomfort with the ways that we sometimes evade honest and open communication. Or by attending to the ways that Friends in the past have simplified their possessions and commitments in the service of a more spiritually unified life, we might feel drawn to the possibility of a less scattered and hectic lifestyle. These kinds of feelings are movements of the Spirit - 'the promptings of love and truth in our hearts' (Advices & Queries:1). They have a very different quality to feeling inadequate about all the ways that we fail to live up to absolute standards of ethical perfection. They are personal and unique; each of us will be led differently at different times in our lives, because each of us has our own experiences, talents and contribution to offer to the world. One of the gifts of being in community is that each of us brings something different, and that none of us has to try to do everything.

The Quaker testimonies can be a resource for all of us, to remind us of how the Spirit has worked and is working among Friends, and to point us towards the Inward Guide, to listen to how it is speaking to each of us in the depths of our hearts:

“Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by; but that all, with a measure of the light, which is pure and holy, may be guided: and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

(From the Epistle from the Elders in Balby, 1656)

Does anything go in Meeting for Worship?

We meet in silence in an unadorned room. On the surface it looks like you can bring bring your own spiritual tradition into the Meeting, since there is nothing nor no-one to indicate any different.

However, the lack of words and symbols is deceptive – for the purpose of Meeting for Worship is to take us to the place beyond words and symbols, the place where Quakers believe the truth will be found. And since it is truth beyond expression in words and symbols, no one can tell you what to look for or where to look for it.

But if you stay within your spiritual tradition, expressed in all manner of words and symbols, the truth that Quakers testify to will elude you. You will become an Anglican Quaker, or a Catholic Quaker, or a Pagan Quaker or a Buddhist Quaker or a non-theist Quaker or a Unitarian Quaker – whatever – unless you first let go of your spiritual tradition and wait expectantly in that place that Quakers say the truth will be found in. A place that we cannot talk about or describe, for to do that is to immediately constrain the truth in yet another tradition.

It is an accident of history that the Quaker testimony to truth emerged in a Puritan Western Christian tradition. George Fox could not say anything else but “There is one, even Christ Jesus, who spoke to my condition”. Until just a generation or two ago that historic witness was neither here nor there, since almost all people came to Quakers through Western Christianity. Now we embrace the diversity found in our society, and we can express 'that which speaks to our condition' in a myriad different ways, but the testimony remains – the truth is found beyond expression.

All this means that the pursuit of truth that we testify to requires a unique discipline that we must learn, over and above any discipline that we may have from our own spiritual tradition. Our tradition may take us a long way, and maybe even all the way, but we don't know – and cannot know – unless we first of all let go of all that we bring from our past life. And we learn this by experience, as George Fox did, and countless Quakers since, for there is no way to teach that which cannot be expressed in words – it can only be lived, in the Meeting for Worship, and even every waking – and dreaming – moment of our lives. For one of the first things that we discover is that all of life is sacred and has to be lived sacramentally if the the truth is to be constantly and fully open to us.

This is my experience – my spiritual tradition was evangelical Christianity, with both fundamentalist and charismatic overtones. I have not rejected this tradition out of hand, nor find it a burden. Instead, whereas my spiritual experiences in the past were caged by the bars of the rigid interpretation given to me by the preachers and evangelists, now I can say that the truth has set me free. The full depth of those experiences is now known to me and I can rejoice in the life that I have found. And the unique discipline needed to follow the Quaker Way continues to both deepen and broaden my spiritual understanding.

“To find your life, you must lose your life—and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:39; The Voice)

This post was prompted by Jan Arriens' review and critique of Rex Ambler's 'The Quaker Way – a rediscovery', which can be read here: http://thefriend.org/article/quaker-light-or-quaker-litearriens

Everything you ever wanted to know about Quakers, but were too afraid to ask

What is supposed to be happening in Meeting for Worship? How do Quakers make decisions? Who runs things in a Quaker Meeting? What are the 'Quaker Testimonies'?

'Quaker Basics' - a new series of Inner Quest sessions to find out all those things no-one ever explained about the Quaker Way...

After Meeting, 12-1pm on:
September 15      The Meeting for Worship and Personal Spiritual Discipline
October 20           The Testimonies
November 17        Quaker Structures and Key Roles in Meetings
December 15        Early Friends
January 19           The Quaker Business Method

Elders are encouraging anyone who is fairly new to Quakers, or who would like to know more about what the Quaker Way involves to come along if possible. Hope to see you there!

Priests, Kings and Managers

In a theocracy, the Priests tell you what to do.
In a monarchy, the King tells you what to do
In a technocracy, the Managers and Experts tell you what to do.

George Fox, founder of the Quakers, told us we don't need priests because the truth can be found within for ourselves.
Tom Paine, son of a Quaker, told us we don't need Kings because we can work out how to govern ourselves using the truth within.
John Macmurray, Quaker philosopher, told us we don't need managers and experts because we can work out what we need to do ourselves from the truth within.

George Fox:
“But as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition.”

Thomas Paine:
“There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required.”

John Macmurray:
“There is a curious idea abroad that only specialists and experts are capable of answering the fundamental questions at issue in modern society. This is the reverse of the truth.”

We listened to George Fox and got rid of the priests and no longer live in a theocracy.
We listened to Tom Paine and put our monarch beneath the constitution, and call our society a democracy.
When will we listen to John Macmurray, and stop thinking that because we live in a complex technological society, we must have managers and experts?

We thought we had the rich and powerful, who will do everything they can to find ways of ruling over us, on the run after ripping the grounds of religion and tyranny from under their feet, only to find that they have duped us into thinking that we must have managers and experts – who of course, are supplied and educated by the elite.

“No, but we will have managers and experts over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our managers and experts may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” 1 Samuel 8, 19-20, modified.

That of God in everyone?

When someone asks 'What do Quakers believe?' you often hear trotted out 'Quakers believe that there is that of god in everyone'.

This is a complete misrepresentation of what Quakers believe and what it means to be a Quaker.

This is what George Fox actually said:

“Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.”

What this says is that if you act in a certain way in the world – 'your carriage and life' - then you will experience something which will feel to you as a 'blessing' which will be reciprocated back to you by those you meet. It is this that George Fox describes as 'that of God in everyone'. It is not a belief but a way of describing the felt response in our hearts as a result of the way we act in the world. It is not a call to believe, but a call to action in the world in a certain way – 'be patterns, be examples'.

What Quakers do believe is that if we are to have any integrity at all then we must discover the truth in our hearts and minds for ourselves, and that the way that we do this is to come together in the gathered meeting and wait expectantly in silence. If we bring all our troubles and concerns, our joys and sorrows, to the place of silent waiting in our community, then we believe that the truth of our lives will be revealed, our 'condition' will be spoken to, as George Fox puts it - with both comfort and discomfort.

The truth that we discover and share in the gathered meeting will then be confirmed by the best of the teachings of scriptures and the words of the sages down the ages, but confirmed directly in the world as it is for us today.  

The gathered meeting is not a refuge from the world where we can contemplate 'that of god in everyone' to our hearts content, but rather a place of discovery, where the truth of our lives is revealed and where we discover that which we must do in the world.

The 'promptings of love and truth in our hearts' that come to us in silent waiting are calls to action with integrity which will result in us 'walking cheerfully over the world' no matter what may befall us. The rest – peace, equality, simplicity, community, follow from this.

Truth Carriers

If we are to discern the light within and discover there the truth, how then do we share that which we have discovered? How do we come together in community around shared experiences? How do we avoid sitting in our isolated bubbles on a Sunday morning?

Not for us relying on the ancient scriptures or the teachings of the Church or the wisdom of the elders - but what we can say for ourselves. This then illuminates the scriptures, teachings and words of the elders, but not necessarily as all good or true. We therefore need ways of communicating the truth that are adequate to the nature of the truth that we have discerned. I believe that there are three essential forms of 'truth carrier' in language - logical propositions to carry factual truth, metaphor and analogy to carry emotional truth or values and stories to carry relational truth.

It is important to realise that the propositions, metaphors and stories are not themselves the truth, but the carriers of the truth - a serious mistake made it seems almost universally, not least in asserting that the Bible is the 'Word of God' or the 'truth itself', but also very dangerously in confusing metaphors or models of scientific truth with the truth itself in many popular presentations of science - properly only esoteric mathematics can adequately describe scientific truth, and then mathematics itself is still only a 'truth carrier'.

Our western civilisation is very good at logical propositions and pretty good at metaphors or poetry, but lousy at stories. Possibly confusingly, novels and other forms of fiction - including the movies - are not 'stories' in this sense, though they may (and often do) contain stories - but are actually forms of emotional or value truth carriers.

Quakers have become very good at using the arts to illustrate the truth that we have discerned. Not just language in poetry, but visual arts and music. However, the metaphors and analogies in art still do not tell us everything. Art is very good at being a 'truth carrier' to ourselves as individuals, but it does not necessarily provide a sense of shared identity and common feeling in time and place. Art is very much about individual discernment - one person's beauty is another person's ugliness.

This is perhaps the important insight that the early Quakers had when they eschewed the arts. They were searching for a much deeper, shared integrity that binds together and perpetrates the community without reliance on scripture, ministers and dogma. And perhaps it is not surprising that as Quakers have become more and more caught up in western individualism, we have also promoted the arts more and more.

Unlike poetry and 'conventional' fiction, stories are independent of the language (or images) used to say them: 'There is, then, a particular kind of [fiction] which has a value in itself - a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work' (C.S. Lewis, 'An Experiment In Criticism' 1961, p41). This of course does not mean that stories cannot be well told - and should be well told - but: 'The story of Orpheus strikes and strikes very deep, of itself; the fact that Virgil and others have told it in good poetry is irrelevant.' (ibid.)

However, we confine stories to the nursery. We tell children bible stories and stories from the Greek and Norse myths, and stories of Arthur and 'The Matter of Britain', but we consider this something that we grow up out of. It is much more mature to be to able to understand scientific propositions and to appreciate art and poetry. But we have rejected that which binds us together, that which children instinctively recognise as the pearl of great price. Even worse, often when we do use stories, we make them into moral tales – they then contain the very dogma that we say should come from within.

Around the same time as Quakers emerged in Britain, Hasidic Judaism arose in eastern Europe. They realised that an important way of bringing the Kabbalah to ordinary people was through telling stories. The best stories stand on their own, without allusion to teaching or morality – their purpose is to go into us and find the truth that already resides in us, waiting for a means to be carried out and shared. Here is one:

A woman came to the Maggid of Koznitz asking him to pray for her that she have a child.
'My mother too was unhappy as you are,' said the Maggid. 'Then one day she met the Baal Shem Tov and presented him with a beautiful cape. One year later I was born.'
The woman's eyes brightened. 'I will make you the most beautiful cape in the world!' she said.
The Maggid smiled and shook his head. 'I am afraid that will not work,' he said.'You see, my mother did not know this story.'

And now these three remain: propositions, metaphors and stories. But the greatest of these is stories.

Journey into Life

Our Friend Gerald Hewitson's Swarthmore Lecture, Journey into Life, is an uplifting and heartening read. It occurs in two formats: the original version published by Quaker Books; and the version he delivered at Yearly Meeting, which is, or will soon be, available on the Woodbrooke website or on CD from Woodbrooke. I heard the lecture, but haven't been able to listen again to it yet, so I'm focusing here just on the printed version. Gerald's readiness to rework his lecture for oral delivery provides impressive witness to his understanding that texts, and especially spiritual writing, like the lives they commemorate, are always work-in-progress, needing regular rewriting to accommodate them to the new situations in which they find themselves.

His lecture tells his own spiritual journey from a poor background in South Yorkshire through higher education to a career in teaching, and more than thirty years of committed service as a Quaker. It is a story read in the light both of Quaker testimonies, from the earliest Quakers to modern materials collected in Quaker Faith and Practice, and of the Bible. He uses the Bible not, as evangelical Christians do, as a source of proof-texts, but as the source of 'patterns and examples' by means of which the visionary can articulate his own experience to himself and others.

The high points of this spiritual journey are presented straightforwardly as moments of vision and revelation. When first Gerald goes to Meeting (at Bangor) a voice speaks in his head to him: 'Why have you been travelling the face of this planet? There is no need to journey any more. You are home'. Much later, during a term's residency at Pendle Hill, he has personal revelations of 'great compassion in the heart of the Universe', alongside a 'burning anger at social injustice' and of something which many mystical writers would have well understood, and which he describes as 'the entire flower of our being'. Another 'seeing', which comes when he finds himself, newly retired, in 'the dark night journey of the soul', he describes as 'the love of God streaming through the universe for each and every one of us – endlessly, ceaselessly, cascading as a benign flood.'

In these moments he applies to himself a phrase of George Fox: 'Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.' Fox's experience will be familiar to most lovers (think, say, of the love poetry of e e cummings), as well as to those facing their own death or the death of what they love (think how Dennis Potter, dying of cancer, said of the cherry tree, outside his study window, that it had the 'blossomiest blossoms he'd ever seen').

Fox is here blending two kinds of language, the mystical/experiential and the Biblical, and he is able to do so because he believes that the words of the Bible were themselves heightened visionary utterances: 'the Scriptures were the prophets' words and Christ's and the apostles', and what... they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it [directly] from the Lord.' In other words, the words of the Bible were an outward expression of an inner experience, which Fox and all convinced Friends share and can confirm from their own experience. Or, as Gerald puts it (speaking of a whole life and not just words on the page), 'The outer work of our hands is the result of the inner work of our heart.' This is not a view of the Bible likely to appeal to a modern sceptical cast of mind: which, in varying degrees, most of us share. But Fox's use of the Bible is at least in part a reflex of the language available to him to talk of ultimate reality. Had he been born in another age, as Gerald implies, Fox might well have used a different 'thought frame' to reach his readers. Like all mystics, Catholic and Protestant, Fox makes a clear distinction between the practice of contemplation and the credal statements (or Quaker lack of them) which I think of as the nursery slopes of the spiritual life.

In trying to return readers via Fox and his contemporaries to the biblical roots of Quakerism, Gerald has a very specific quarry in mind, the many members who have come to Quakers in flight from wounding experiences in other religious traditions, whether Catholic or Protestant: people for whom the experience of the Bible, and of words like 'God' and 'Christ', to say nothing of 'sin' and 'crucifixion', are really difficult to disentangle from the hurts that accompanied their previous delivery. But he insists that ways can be found through these hurts to a fuller appreciation of the truths they enact or point towards. He offers in his own story an instance of the process. Exposure when young to a Pentecostal preacher's ranting, 'being called to the front to be prayed over', has meant that 'language such as “the blood of the Lamb”, “God sacrificed his son for us”, “needing to be saved” can still raise the hairs on the back of my neck”.' But his time at Pendle Hill also included the experience of an American Quaker praying for and over him, thanking God 'for the meticulous attention paid to our lives'. The new context, his growth away from the reactive and angry child, and his ability to trust what was being offered, led him to feel he was 'encountering Truth'. At the same time, the earlier-noted vision of his own self as a flower was articulated for him 'in black American idiom' as '”who we say we are” [which] needs to be related to “Who we be”'. Probably this articulation of the spiritual journey – metaphoric, allusive, leaving the word 'God' out of the frame – will appeal more directly to readers than the Quaker praying aloud to God in thanks for Gerald. But, the text insists, both are complementary ways of apprehending and expressing the one truth.

If we want to use a single word for this activity of finding ourselves in the Bible and in early Quaker writing – and, equally, of finding them in us, as we and they model one another – that word is surely 'translation'. Gerald uses this word to describe the challenge he finds in translating 'seventeenth-century Quaker speech into the modern day speech which might be preferred by some readers', since he has 'barely learned to speak it, let alone translate it.' But he also offers a striking instance of translation, when John Woolman talks of his sense of his 'Inner teacher', the 'Christ within', as 'the presiding chairman.' This phrase is more fully 'translated' 150 years later by Thomas Kelly: 'it was as if there were in him a presiding chairman who, in the solemn, holy silence of inwardness, took the sense of the meeting'. Woolman and Kelly are both using a familiar idiom to represent an experience for which there are no adequate words: translating that experience into something homely and ordinary – a bit like what Christians think happens in the Incarnation. What is true of early and later Quakers is also true of the stories of the Bible. For a vivid example, think of Paul's account of a spiritual rapture in which he was caught up 'into the third heaven' (2 Cor. 12.2) – maybe an out-of-body state: Paul doesn't know – and heard words that 'cannot and may not be said by any human being'. As Gerald puts it:

'the Bible is, at heart, the continuing story of encounter, so it provided patterns and examples whereby their [Quakers'] new found, newly discovered experience was described and understood';

and again:

'their Biblical reading did not dictate the terms of the encounter, but helped them capture the sense and meaning of their experience.'

All the same, this new experience, and its new or more traditional articulation, cannot be had without cost. Gerald insists on the (self)-sacrifice that must accompany the journey; and on the pain that is part of the process: and the first such pain is the serious consideration that my own view of the world really is limited ('think it possible that you may be mistaken'). Here Gerald uses an extremely familiar metaphor (not, as such, biblical, though the Bible uses it frequently): childbirth, where pain is 'the price that must be paid for new life' – especially the new life in the spirit to which Quaker Faith and Practice constantly witnesses. Gerald starts by modelling 17th-century Quaker experience, as well as modern Quaker experience, on modern understandings of psychotherapy. But he rapidly returns to his difficult project of translating the modern experience by way of the seventeenth-century, biblically-inspired, Quaker one, when he adopts/adapts their terminology of crucifixion: 'crucifying the will', 'going to the cross'. We may find this more difficult than the psychotherapeutic model to work with: but since 'thought frames are simply that – a limited perspective on the world' - the rewards may be as great as the pains, if we make the effort. The struggle to develop what Buddhists call 'beginner's mind' is the first pain we must face en route to our new and fuller life.

But, unlike some doom-laden theologies, the end of this process is not pain at all, but, on the contrary (a word which Gerald uses twice), 'delight'. Hence that amazing and humbling story of Mary Dyer, climbing the ladder onto the gallows in Massachusetts in 1660 and offered her life if only she would come down. She replied that she could not deny the will of God, in obedience to which/whom she had put herself in such jeopardy. 'Then one mentioned that she should have said, she had been in Paradise. To which she answered, “Yea, I have been in Paradise these several days.”' Mary Dyer doesn't use the word 'delight' to express her sense of herself, and it might have felt strange, if not masochistic, had she done so. But that word seems to me the heart of any true spiritual understanding, the thread that joins Quakers to the source (God, life, spirit) of their vitality and will eventually return them fully to it:

'the voice of that Presence... delights in our unbounding glory'

'the Quaker answer [to the mystery of the human condition] however provisional and hesitant, has a delight in life, an acknowledgement of the richness and complexity of the human experience, and a wholehearted responsive affirmation to the world and all it offers.'

Better still, though we can obviously take delight in this book reading it by ourselves, Gerald hopes to make it a resource for Quakers meeting together. So the book ends with a series of activities readers can undertake in small or larger groups. Here Gerald's gifts as a teacher come to the fore. As does the sense that the book cannot be finished until we are finished with it, and it is finished with us. Or that the book is truly prophetic, in pointing us beyond itself, and ourselves, to that at which it, and we, imperfectly gesture. I do recommend it to you, and think it would be great for any of our smaller group meetings (like the Spiritual friendship groups) to work on.

Many thanks to Roger Ellis for this blog post.