Friends often say that “seeking that of God in everyone” is at the core of Quakerism. But if that means just seeing the good in them, or thinking that we have a spiritual core in common, I’m not convinced.
One of the wonderful things for me about Quaker worship is that it contains vastly different spiritual experiences, whether that’s a personal relationship with Jesus, a sense of God as love that permeates everything, being part of more-than-human life, or connecting with childlike presence in the moment.
My own sense of the spiritual generally involves a dissolving or expanding of boundaries between self and other. It can arise from mindfulness, bringing attention to the breath and to body sensations, observing thoughts and feelings as they pass. It can also arise through thought, meditating on the near-infinite chain of chance events that led to my existence, or on my shared ancestry with the trees that form the floors and furniture of my house, or on the wonder of being a thinking, feeling, moving part of the world.
There’s something different in Quaker meeting, though. I usually keep my eyes open because it centres on connection and relationship with the other people. The intimation of collective consciousness in a gathered meeting arises partly through the possibility of ministry, of the need to try and see from another’s perspective, to reach deep for the meaning that their words may contain for me. And the possibility of the call to speak, and testing whether what comes is truly of and for the whole meeting.
The BYM agenda notes include some quotes from Adam Curle. He was a Quaker with extensive experience of mediation in violent conflicts, and the first professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford. His book To Tame the Hydra speaks of the violence to people and our planet being perpetrated by the international system of institutions motivated by money and power. He describes the problem as arising not “out there” but in our own lives and psyches, through what Buddhists call the “three poisons” of greed, hatred and ignorance. He says they are food for the Hydra. The root poison is ignorance of our own true, connected nature; the delusion that we are separate beings.
Radical witness might involve exactly the same disciplines as radical worship, as we take our worship into the world and create shared consciousness with the other – human and more-than-human. Those disciplines include testing whether ministry or witness is rooted in Light or Shadow. Does it have the qualities of being rightly led: of truth, acceptance, love and trust? Or of being driven: of dogma, craving, anger, fear or rejection?
There’s a humility at the centre of this, a shedding of ego, of belief, of attachment and assumptions. The commitment to deep listening and answering that of God in the other who has a profoundly different experience means being answerable to the aspect of the divine that they reveal. Allowing it to show me my darkness and bring me to new life. Fundamentally, it is an openness to being uprooted.
Laurie Michaelis