Spiritual Journey - where to?

Yesterday (Sunday 20th September) we did the first session of set 2 of the "Creating Community" workpack on this year's Yearly Meeting Gathering theme. This is called "Spiritual Journeying" (Session 8).

I felt quite a bit of unease when thinking through this, and realised that I have now more or less abandoned the metaphor of 'Journey' for talking about my spirituality and experiences. This is because I find that the metaphor is not only no longer useful, but detrimental. It encourages linear thinking and the idea of some sort of progress to some goal - the end of the journey. This in turns leads to an over emphasis on self at the expense of community and belonging - so given the context of 'Creating Community' I was doubly uneasy.

However, I was not about to stand apart from the group using the materials, since being in community is more important than personal foibles, so I went through the exercise. My first remembered spiritual experience remains central - I have not journeyed from it but rather allowed that experience to continue to speak to me. At the time, surrounded by evangelical Christians, and my understanding of Christianity shaped by such thinking, I thought of what happened as a 'conversion' from which I would grow into maturity on some sort of journey. I now see this interpretation as inadequate - what I experienced was community or fellowship, and I have experienced it many times since. But I am no longer a disassociated self looking at life objectively, but I am in community and in fellowship – I love and I am loved.

Rather than being on a journey, it feels to me that a better metaphor is being rooted in community, and feeling those roots get deeper and stronger. The metaphor could not be more different – trees only move in fairy stories. In a culture utterly obsessed with the self and individualism, to the extent that we become completely disconnected from not only the world and those around us, but even from our own bodies, it is too dangerous to use metaphors that surreptitiously encourage such thinking.

As for my own life in time, necessarily linear, the need is to get out of time, to experience the “timeless moment. Is England and nowhere. Never and always.” (TS Eliot Little Gidding)

There, where there is no 'there', is and not is “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE”.

Some issues never go away

I don't know if anyone else knew about this:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/29/BAQPVAUVO.DTL

The Trouble with 'The Trouble With God'

Some while ago a Friend lent me a copy of David Boulton's book 'The Trouble With God.' I read it and reacted with anger. I wasn't angry that someone should put forward an argument like the argument in the book. I read this sort of thing all the time with an even temper. It's more that an argument such as this should be presented from within the Quaker movement as a Quaker viewpoint, when it seems to be to be a parody and undermining of everything that drew me to Quakers and keeps me among them.

Now people who are that personally angry about something are generally in above-average danger of making errors of judgement about it, so when I ended up writing a fairly long piece stating the grounds of my objection to 'The Trouble with God,' I assumed it might be flawed for this reason, so I filed it and forgot about it, thinking it possible I might be mistaken. Looking at this piece again after a while, I find it's not as bad as I feared, so I've decided to take the calculated risk of putting it out, warts and all. I'd appreciate Friends' comments. I'd like to stress that I've no beef with any individual Friend, least of all David Boulton (I've never met him and know very little about him). If I'm going after anything, it's the book. But the book, in my judgment, is an absolute turkey.

*

'The Trouble with "The Trouble with God"'

There is an inner integrity in us all which rejects all programmes of As If. ... This inner integrity demands the real.

Thomas Kelly, Reality of the Spiritual World, 1944

There's no cosy way of saying this. David Boulton, the "humanist and Quaker" author of The Trouble with God: Building the Republic of Heaven, has written an anti-Quaker book. The Trouble with God is not a work of Quaker universalism; it's not Quaker humanism; it's not Quaker atheism or Quaker non-theism or Quaker agnosticism. It's not Quaker anything. It's anti-Quaker. It's against any and all sorts of Quaker testimony or subdivisional -ism.

At first glance, this assertion itself seems unQuakerly in its intolerance. But it isn't, for two reasons. Firstly, it isn't intolerant. David's entitled to put his view forward, and maybe he's right. It's just that if he's right, Quakers of every stripe are all equally wrong. Secondly, and more fundamentally, it's Quakerly to propose clarity. An anti-Quaker understanding of truth is, by definition, not in unity with a Quaker understanding of it. For the moment, then, I'm postponing any full assessment of the truth of David's thinking, simply as such. All I'm now seeking is clarity about what he says, and how this stands in relation to the essentials of Quaker faith and practice, no matter who's right or wrong.

Quakers don't, and shouldn't, think in terms of creeds. David doesn't suggest a specific creed, but his thought is deeply credal, in the sense that it acknowledges no reality beyond what the conscious, rational human mind can grasp, and what human words can achieve. It comes from the same spiritual place that creeds come from. This is not the point of origin for any genuinely Quaker witness.

David terms his thinking radical religious humanism. Unlike conventionally religious credal thinking, it's based on the secular theory that the human consciousness is quite unable to experience absolute truth or reality in any significant sense. All we can experience is, in a sense, our own talking or thinking. So goes the theory. Applying this theory to God or the Spirit, David concludes that we can't, and don't ever, have any direct experience of it. He infers that human words such as God and Spirit can't refer to anything real; they're fictions, and this is the basis on which hardcore atheists demand that we stop using the terms altogether. But David takes a different line. He believes that, if we accept that God is simply an idea, we are free to have what he calls a "make-believe" relationship with an idea as if it were a reality, and that this is worth doing because such make-believe is life-enriching and ethically fortifying, even if it's ultimately only a form of imaginative play.

In my judgment all this is demonstrably untrue, from the basic theory onwards, but that's not currently my point. My point is, firstly, that spiritual life in David's understanding depends entirely on human thought and language, in a way which would make it a credal process. Creeds about a make-believe God are still creeds. So here, tentatively and under correction, I shall compare religious humanism with the current state of my own discernment of what Quakers are.

Quakers have always maintained that there is a truth beyond language which we can experience. Their point has usually been that we don't experience it very often, or very easily, or very fully. We can't understand it, or talk directly about it, because our conscious capacities for thought and language won't allow us to. When we do really begin to experience this reality, we experience it ecstatically, both in the general sense that it is a heady experience, and in the literal sense that it makes us 'stand outside' our normal selves. It strikes us with such overwhelming power and presence that we are compelled to call it a spiritual reality. It can change us utterly. It can disrupt our conscious mind and will, and our habits of behaviour and communication, often traumatically. For some, like me, it can only be understood as actual godhead, or God, a presence rooted in a reality which is more real than the one we move through every day. For other Friends, the same spiritual truth is the reality we always experience, viewed through cleansed and enlarged human perceptions, more or less as William Blake taught. Without papering over the cracks between these formal understandings, they aren't really germane to the point currently at issue, because all such views share a basic sense that the truth we call spiritual, whatever else it may be, is, at any rate, real. It is not solely the creation of human thought and language. Quaker understandings are less about cultivating linguistic fiction than they are about clearing it out of the way in order to get at the reality beyond.

Our business method, with its disregard of personal preference, its striving after unity, and its abhorrence of the vote, is the practical expression of this essential Quaker recognition of the reality of the real. It is, apparently, the one feature of Quaker practice which is more or less globally invariant. I believe (subject to correction) that all Quaker meetings, whatever their faith tradition, whether programmed or unprogrammed, maintain the observance of the business method. The method's historical origins lie in a literal belief in the direct inspiration of God, discerned specifically in distinction from individual or collective human opinion or rational calculation. In Britain, the method is not always now practised in this conscious understanding. Its workings may or may not be seen (as I see them) as potentially transcendent in the supernatural sense, but they are always, in fact or aspiration, ecstatic in the literal sense, inasmuch as, through the method, we continue to seek, and act on, an understanding of truth, as distinct from preference. In practice, Quakers may fail to follow the method into its fullness. But, to date, we have not redefined the basic aspiration. Nor should we.

This aspiration is not compatible with religious humanism. Its whole point is to seek after the reality we have no choice about. The practical difference therefore arises over the issue of choice, and its relation to truth. In the final analysis, as David argues through his favoured symbol of the 'republic of heaven,' the religious humanist goal will always be to realise and express human choice. This is what compels David's humanism to reconfigure the sacred as a form of make-believe. The risk is that, if we once admit that the sacred is real, in a way our own thoughts and words aren't, then something beyond us suddenly seems to threaten to impede, or at least authoritatively guide, our choices. The thing about Quakers is that this guidance - including, if necessary, a disregard for our own preferences - is exactly what we look for. We define ourselves as Quakers by our intention to live in the truth - that is, face up to reality. We don't look for freedom. We seek to take responsibility.

Modern British Quakers are purposefully and extraordinarily vague in their verbal descriptions of Spirit to which they feel responsible. It is possible to be seduced by this into the assumption that we are, or should be, equally vague in our experienced understanding of it. This is not my view. Quaker words and ideas about the Spirit are vague. But Quaker experience and understanding of the Spirit is precise and specific. And to me at least, we appear far from vague about what the Spirit is not. It is not us. Whatever it is that we do or don't worship in meetings for worship, it is clear that we are not worshipping our own selves. The Spirit is not us, though it may be discerned within us. It's something greater than us, something in some sense apart from what we currently or habitually are. And, above all, as the mere existence of the truth testimony ought to remind us, it is not construed as a game of make-believe. Right or wrong, the Quaker method of life is the opposite of religious humanism. Quakers teach that, because reality is accessible, we had best stop playing around with creeds. Religious humanism teaches that, because reality is inaccessible, we may as well play around with creeds to our hearts' content. This view, if acted on, would turn Quaker unity into its opposite: an anthology of make-believe creeds whose only unifying feature would be that none of them would really be Quaker, arguably because they'd all be lies, but chiefly because they'd all be creeds. Saying this sets no constraints on our paradoxical unity-in-diversity. It re-affirms the essential ground of its being. Religious humanism and the Quaker way are like chalk and cheese. There are infinite varieties of cheese. But chalk isn't one of them.

The ingrained Quaker refusal to impose outward uniformity of creed or doctrine has fostered the vast, liberal, and spiritually healthy unity-in-diversity of which British Quakers are rightly protective. This unity now consists (partly) in incorporating, within our common witness, expressions of belief and understanding which are logically and rationally opposite to one another. As a result, the aggregate of liberal British Quaker witness now centres on a vast, formally inexpressible paradox, which radiates an apparently boundless plurality of belief and expression of thought and life. At its shallowest, this plurality bogs us down and renders us impotent. At its highest and deepest, it arises from a harmonious unity of witness to authentically revitalised human lives. Radical religious humanism (besides appearing far too comfy to be really radical - but that's another discussion) is not a new tactic or style of play in this great liberal Quaker game of contact with reality. It is an attempt to stop the game by dispensing with the reality. If only for clarity's sake, we should stop calling it Quaker.

Quaker Quest

Nether Edge Quakers are offering five Wednesday evening sessions of Quaker Quest in September and October.

@ Shirley House (next to St. Andrew's church), 31 Psalter Lane, Sheffield, S11

23 September Quakers and Worship
30 September Quakers, God and Christianity
7 October Quakers and Faith in Action
14 October Quakers, Peace and Justice
21 October Quakers and Living Simply

Each session will start at 7.30pm. Doors open from 7.15pm.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Sessions are free, and you are welcome to attend any individual session/s or all five.

If you require further information prior to the sessions please ring 0114 275 7390.

Quakers in Transition

The Friends Quarterly has recently launched an essay competition on 'The Future of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain'. This is a subject I have been thinking about a lot, especially in relation to the Transition movement, and I would like to ask for your help in working out some of these ideas by reading and responding to my 'work in progress'; part 1 of which is below. Any comments, suggestions or questions much appreciated.

We are living in extraordinary times. A combination of climate change, energy crisis and resource shortages are undermining the industrial civilization that has dominated the globe for the last two centuries.

The questions and struggles of British Quakers over the coming decades will not be those of the past. The most pressing and controversial issues will no longer be about our relationship to our Christian and theist roots, or the challenges of pluralism and secularism. These were the debates of the age of globalization, that effectively ended with the financial collapse of 2007/8.

The debates of the age of the ‘long descent’ will be quite different. How do we prepare for a future of diminishing energy resources and a contracting economy? What aspects of our religious tradition need to be revived or transformed to meet the needs of the future? What ways of life, habits of thought, practical skills and spiritual practices can sustain us and our children through the profound changes that we are facing?

This is not a perspective that comes easily to British Friends, and it may turn out to be exaggeratedly pessimistic. It is certainly unrealistic, however, to expect the next few decades to continue on the same trajectory of accelerating economic growth and energy consumption that we have lived through since the 1950s.

The usually unacknowledged basis of much of the prosperity of the late 20^th Century was cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy, chiefly oil. Just as Britain’s Industrial Revolution was powered by coal, it was the cheap and ever-increasing supply of oil that fuelled the last century’s massive expansions in industrial capacity and technology, first in the USA, and then throughout much of the world.

However, the physical limits to oil production are well-established. Once the cheapest and easiest to reach oil deposits are extracted, production first plateaus and then goes into an irreversible decline, as each remaining barrel of oil requires more energy and expense to extract. This pattern has already repeated itself over most of the world’s 800 major oilfields (including the North Sea). It is also a pattern that applies to the world as a whole, in which oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s, and oil production will inexorably follow it. The International Energy Agency, official energy policy advisor to the main Western governments, has recently predicted a peak in world oil production by 2020, with a global ‘oil crunch’ sufficient to prevent economic recovery from the current recession within the next five years (The Independent, 3rd August 2009).

These hard facts of resource depletion and energy scarcity have far-reaching consequences for a civilization that has been built on the necessity of ever-increasing consumption. A prolonged period of economic contraction with spiralling energy, food and fuel costs; at the same time as climate change is blighting much of the world’s food producing capacity, will have deep political, social, cultural and spiritual effects as well as economic ones.

How will these global shifts affect our society, our economy and our own lives and neighbourhoods? How will they re-order our priorities and concerns as a religious community? And what resources and relationships will we have to draw on to guide and support us?

201 and counting

Having just heard the Prime Minister claim to speak for all with regard to our being in Afghanistan I can't help but wonder how true it is as he certainly doesn't seem to speak for me. As we know from our own life experience death is a long-term painful loss and that there are increasing large numbers of seriously wounded - and that is simply from the reports of what 'our boys' (which is inclusive of women as well from what I have read) are suffering but what about the sufferings of the people of Afghanistan and related regions in Pakistan? Are we not giving some a reason for war rather than taking away a potential source of conflict?
Increasingly failure to support our actions is tied with accusations of lack of patriotism but what I fail to see is the toleration of dissent which is the sign of a democracy of the type we claim to have and wish to install in Afghanistan. Is patriotism truly the 'last resort of the scoundrel) to quote Dr Johnson or is it as, Ambrose Bierce wrote in 'The Devil's Dictionary','In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.'?
Afghanistan is not purely a secular issue. It is not just a matter of politics - which are confused to say the least - though it no doubt will have political weight in any forthcoming General Election. In the midst of the suffering there is a spiritual aspect but are we meeting it or even respecting it? Matthew 25:35 - 40 to me seems to find a form of reflection here if we go beyond the literal meaning of the words to the underlying sentiment.
There appear to be no immediate or apparent ways at finding a beginning to its end. When senior military figures talk about being involved for at least 40 years what prospects does it hold for the young on both sides? Are there implications regarding potential conscription if the death count is given daily? What about the wounded who are demanding being treated in special military hospitals rather than with the 'non-understand' general public with whom they are having to share space in NHS institutions? 40 years plus sounds almost medieval/early modern in these terms.
Already, I feel, there is the potential for inter-communal conflict within the UK but how do we meet it? Where do we as Friends stand in this? What can we do? What should we do? I ask because I feel that I get no clear sense of vision and purpose relating to this matter.
How can we proceed in such matters if we claim that there is that of god in all or is god selective in his causes as some seem to think?
In confusion and waiting for the counting to stop
Peter

All of you

I do love reading this blog. I do love all of you dear Friends who write here. Thankyou so much.