‘For me, Quakerism isn’t so much about religion as about relationship with God.’ Photo: Book cover for A Simple Faith in a Complicated World: One Quaker’s journey through doubt to faith, by Kate McNally
A Simple Faith in a Complicated World: One Quaker’s journey through doubt to faith, by Kate McNally
Author: Kate McNally. Review by Harvey Gillman
This book is an introduction to the Quaker way. Most of these are written by convinced Friends trying to make sense of this convincement. The usual dilemmas must be faced: the Quaker way is experiential, so each journey is personal and unique. The language used by Friends is tentative. The Quaker way is unique but shares characteristics with other ways. Friends have a wide variety of beliefs, so how do you talk of God or Christianity, or even of religion as a phenomenon? Can you even say all Quakers are this, that, or believe the other?
Kate McNally is being brave in writing this short book as even her inclusive approach may be unintentionally controversial. She is keen to point out that she is describing her own journey from Catholicism, preaching sinfulness and a fear of hell, to a universalist, inclusive Quakerism. She realises that words like ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ need explaining. She does not claim her views are the ‘norm’, since the norm among Friends is debatable, but nevertheless she claims that Quakers are pacifists and mystics. Some Friends will question the use of these words, others will rejoice.
I liked how the book opens a conversation with the reader. Kate is a psychologist, and at times this reads like a counselling session. From the fundamentalist tradition, there is a lot of guilt to come to terms with. On the other hand, I have heard from several enquirers that they have not felt good enough to become Friends. For them, sinfulness in one tradition meets apparent perfectionism in another. Kate stresses the need to accept one’s own imperfections, even one’s apparent abnormality. Indeed, our individual weirdness ‘makes us aware of the work we have to do’. The Quaker way leads to service in the world. The way we serve depends on the particular human being we are, with our oddities. We need not be concerned with being perfect.
I underlined several profound sentences on which I felt I needed to meditate: ‘For me, Quakerism isn’t so much about religion as about relationship with God.’ She goes on to talk about a trinity of relationships: with ourselves, with other people, and with God. For Kate, God is ‘a greater good-ness, something more powerful than me, something that was about justice and goodness and fairness’. God is a ‘life force’. I had heard of the idea that God might be a verb, but Kate offers the word ‘Quaker’ itself as a verb. Imagine asking someone if they had been Quakering recently!
Worship thus is opening to relationship by waiting and listening. I loved how aspects of Quaker life are described in one chapter as practices to deepen spirituality, and then in another as ways to overcome conflict. Her comments on prayer were useful and practical, and made me realise that Friends in Britain today do not write much prayer. When I think about it, we are not very good at exploring with newcomers ways that might help them settle into worship.
Two further sentences give a sense of the wisdom Kate imparts: ‘We can remember that the love that comes from us is finite. The love that comes through us is infinite.’ Then ‘God lives in sacred actions’. A book to read and to share.
