'Then, suddenly, I am a child again reading what my father has just written in my autograph album...' Photo: Quote courtesy of Eva Tucker.
Be a good person
Eva Tucker explains the background to a new Kindlers booklet, written with Stephanie Ramamurthy, on Quakers and interfaith relations
My mother was German Jewish, my father German atheist. They divorced when I was four, for personal not political reasons, and I was brought up by my liberal Jewish grandparents. I enjoyed going to synagogue with them on feast days but on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, my father would look after me and tell me about Charles Darwin and the monkeys. He said that when I grew up I could choose whether or not to believe in God. That was a shock to the system – as far as I was concerned, God looked like my grandpa and indubitably existed.
All this was happening in 1930s Nazi Berlin. Anti-Semitism was growing ever more virulent. I went to a Jewish school, where I was embarrassed to admit that my parents were divorced (quite rare in those days) and that my father was not Jewish. He had English Quaker friends in Bad Pyrmont where he, as a first world war veteran, went for holidays. It was from him I first heard the word ‘Quaker’. It sounded like ‘angel’ to me – they were going to rescue my mother and me from Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In February 1939, two months before my tenth birthday, my mother and I set off for England.
Varieties of religious experience
Fast forward: In 1950 I married a man who had been brought up as a Roman Catholic but had turned away from that and all other beliefs in his late teens. His chief interest was in philosophy. I went along with his atheism though I was never as convinced about the nonexistence of God as he was.
During the years before I joined the Religious Society of Friends, in the 1970s, my reading included William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. My husband and I laughed about James’ ‘Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean and thus dispose of it. I am no such thing, it would say, I am myself, myself alone!’ That pinpointed the problem of being a member of a community without loss of personal identity.
I was also immersed in Dorothy Richardson’s autobiographical stream-of-consciousness novel Pilgrimage. In the volume Dimple Hill I found a most perceptive account of an early twentieth-century Quaker Meeting.
Dare to believe!
I was going through a difficult period in my life when, quite by accident, I came across Hans Küng’s book Does God Exist?, with its introductory injunction: ‘Dare to believe!’ Yes, I thought, I will dare!
So, then I needed a spiritual roof over my head and I found it in a Quaker Meeting. Soon after I had been accepted into membership at Hampstead Meeting I got to know Margot Tennyson. She, like me, had been a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. Unlike me, she was deeply involved with interfaith activities. When her health began to fail she asked me to take over interfaith work. For ten years I tried to run Hampstead Interfaith Group in her spirit. The Group would not have got off the ground without the unstinting advice and assistance of Brian Pearce and Harriet Crabtree of the UK Interfaith Network and of Alfred Agius of Westminster Interfaith.
Myriad variations of belief
The myriad variations of belief and practice between the faiths, even within the same faith, as well as atheism, are all inextricably intertwined with the time and place people were born. I came to realise that, in the way people conduct themselves, ethnicity and culture are at least as important as religious belief. People strive for fulfilment in life – in relationships, in work, as well as in something that, metaphorically speaking, involves a degree of vertical take off from the quotidian.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James says that true religious happiness comes to those who, when unhappiness is offered, positively refuse to feel it as if it were something mean or wrong. Robert Louis Stevenson meant much the same thing when he said: ‘Our business [is to] continue to fail in good spirits’, echoed more recently by Samuel Becket’s: ‘Fail again, fail better’.
William James goes on to say that the essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we must finally judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else, a perception of something there. But what of the many people who deny that there is something there at all? Nor can it ever be established whether believers or unbelievers have caused greater mayhem in the world.
Rowan Williams, when archbishop of Canterbury, said that ‘Learning an all-inclusive set of mental habits… gradually changes the way you relate to the world’. Perhaps interfaith groups go a little way towards helping to form such mental habits.
Hampstead Meeting
Always, between adventures into other spiritual worlds and between our Group meetings, I homed into my Hampstead Meeting. Sometimes my thoughts meandered. What do we mean by ‘it’ when we say ‘it’s raining’? How many shades of difference are there between literal belief and the ‘as if’ of symbolism? Where is God in the slaughterhouse and is that a pointful question? Is the person who causes things to be done – both good and bad – even more important than the doer? Does discussion of the concept of God leave what it is supposed to stand for untouched?
I remember the Anglican priest I met at a Leicester multifaith conference who thought that God was a figment of our imagination – but having imagined Him, we have to be responsible for our imagination. And then I smile as I think of the late brother Daniel greeting me and the woman I was talking to on an interfaith walk with the words ‘Hello, you two unique manifestations of God!’ I had never thought of myself or others quite in that beneficent light.
Alert passivity
So now, as I get used to being old and the slowed down tempo that comes with it, I try to practise a kind of alert passivity, allowing things to come towards me rather than rushing towards them, recognising what is relevant to my life now.
If someone were to ask me now what I mean by ‘God’ I might say it is tapping into an immensely powerful energy using neglected aspects of oneself so that one has the strength not to cave in when things become difficult.
Then, suddenly, I am a child again reading what my father has just written in my autograph album: ‘To be clever is good, to be brave is better, but to be a good person – that is everything.’
This article was given as a talk at Friends House to launch: SIGNPOSTS – Quakers Exploring Interfaith by Eva Tucker and Stephanie Ramamurthy. Published by The Kindlers. ISBN: 9780956224576. Price: £3.
