'More surprising was the real enthusiasm with which group members received some of the things I mentioned, like ‘gathered stillness’.'
Article of faiths: Angela Arnold visits an interfaith group
‘We really do have things of value to share.’
When the North Wales Interfaith Group invited me to their online meeting, I wasn’t expecting much. Some general pleasantness maybe, or some planning for a public event. But what I learned – about us Quakers – took me by surprise.
As the group’s first Quaker, I was asked to shed a bit of light on what we’re about. A lot of questions followed. The first lesson I took was that, even among faith leaders, and others very interested in faiths/religions, there is a huge lack of knowledge where Quakerism is concerned. We really aren’t putting ourselves out there, even among the generally like-minded.
The drift of the questions wasn’t so surprising. ‘How, when you all have such different “faiths” (or none), do you manage not to fall out?’ When I had shared my thoughts on that one, someone remarked that it seemed to him Quakers were a sort of interfaith community in themselves. I do like that!
More surprising was the real enthusiasm with which group members received some of the things I mentioned, like ‘gathered stillness’. ‘That sounds so amazing!’ the facilitator exclaimed. Several times I was quite taken aback by their surprise, delight and appreciation. Lesson number two: we really do have things of value to share, so why don’t we?
Two followers of the Bahá’í faith were present, and it transpired that one was actually raised a Quaker – and even went to a Quaker school. She told us how, when she reached her teenage years, she wanted to know more about her religion. She kept asking her father questions, like ‘So what is this God about, really?’ Whatever the question, the answer was always the same: ‘Well, I don’t know – you figure it out yourself. We don’t prescribe what people should believe’. Somehow that was not a satisfactory answer for her, ever. Our Friend rapidly became an ex-Friend, searching for more concrete answers elsewhere.
So my third lesson was: it’s not really OK to be so endlessly vague. We are seekers, but we are also finders (of admittedly-interim understandings). So why don’t we have the courage to share that, with the proviso that another Friend will have found something different? And I don’t mean preaching, obviously.
Finally, what emerged in the course of the meeting was a shared understanding that we as a group had something to offer the world. We oughtn’t do this by proselytising for our individual religions/spiritualities (and I might mention that the leader of the group is himself a humanist, which was a surprise in itself), nor by trying to promote specific beliefs or practices. Instead we should look to spread the general idea that some kind of connection with [insert non/God word of choice] is essential to the human condition, and the way we interact with each other.
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