Bear it in mind: Abigail Maxwell on the psychology of nontheist worship

‘As a believer, and as an atheist, I have experienced the gathered Meeting for Worship.’

I joined the Religious Society of Friends in 2002. I came via the Anglican church, where I had happily recited the creed. In 2009, I was losing my belief in the triune god, in a long, melancholy withdrawal – my belief had been part of my identity from childhood. My partner felt that Quakers should believe in God, and found nontheist membership questionable. I agreed, until a nontheist Friend said to me, ‘The question is not why an atheist would join a religious society, but why we stay’. My heart went out to her, and I ceased my objection.

In February 2010, I admitted to myself that I do not believe in God, specifically in ‘God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth’. I was touring the south coast of England when I went into a church. I was so overwhelmed by a numinous quality that I knelt down. I still have a sense of the sacred, or spiritual, but I believe that these things are explained by baryonic matter in humans and the world. Brian Cox, the well-known physicist, says that there is no Spirit influencing or affecting matter. If there were, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN would have detected it. If I have a spiritual experience, that is in me, and my history, as well as in the immediate stimulus precipitating it.

The last time I ministered in Meeting, I quoted Galatians, because I consider that Paul has profound psychological insight into humanity, individually and in community. Another atheist and I spoke of spiritual language: much of mine is Christian, which I understand metaphorically. Could we find a new language?

Some Quaker language is neutral. I minister: I stand to speak in worship. I am usually speaking of what has been in my mind during worship, but, as I speak, new words come to me. Jesus says that ‘The Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say’ (Luke 12:12). I believed that God in me, connected to God-suffusing reality, moved me to speak, and now I believe that there is something so wonderful in each human being that calling it ‘that of God in us’ is not hyperbole. For me, though, this thing is beautiful humanity, not something beyond, even if it is outwith many people’s experience.

As a believer, and as an atheist, I have experienced the gathered Meeting for Worship. I do not believe Christ is with us, as Matthew 18:20 says, but there is a particular quality to our being together. Other nontheists refer to an Old English root weorthscipe, meaning ‘worthship’: reverently contemplating the web of life together. (I find these ideas in the words of Mark Stringer, a Unitarian minister.) We are all ‘present in the moment’, rather than consumed with thoughts of past or future, an idea from our wider culture, which increasingly values meditation. Here, each person’s Presence affects the other.

Increasingly, I explain these things with ideas from Iain McGilchrist, the psychiatrist and former neuroimaging researcher. Bonnie Badenoch, a psychotherapist, and Sarah Peyton, a neuroscience educator, offered me a layperson’s understanding of these in their 2017 book Your Resonant Self. I do not have the scientific background to assess the evidence for myself. The ideas give me a new set of metaphors. Our understanding of the human brain continues to grow, and to percolate from academia into wider society.

For McGilchrist, while both hemispheres of the brain are involved in any experience, your focus on a task comes from the left-hand side of the brain. But the kind of experience where you see ‘Heaven in a wild-flower’, as William Blake did, or see what is around you in glorious detail, which can feel like a spiritual experience, exists in the right-hand side. A bird hunting worms will stare at the ground with its right eye, as well as listening and feeling vibrations. The right eye feeds information to the left brain. Its left eye, meanwhile, connected to the right brain, is turned upwards, considering the whole world around it. Is there anything to which it needs to give attention?

The left-brain may be disproportionately valued in our culture. Right brain perception is often reserved for spirituality and mysticism, and initially can seem like an overwhelming spiritual experience. European culture treats the world instrumentally. I notice a thing if I need it. I pick it up, use it, put it down, forget it. Some individuals even see people in this way. This is left-brain. Sitting in worship, I see the beauty of the grain of the wooden bench. There is so much fabulous detail! The ordinary thing appears transformed into something wondrous. Perhaps God is in it panentheistically, the idea that God is in everything. More and more, seeing things through right-brain mystic contemplation, I became panentheist. Now, I would say I am perceiving it with my right brain.

I have memories of what seemed like wonderful spiritual experiences. Once, I was walking home from work, leaving the centre of town, along a road with little greenery. I passed a patch of grass, only about two yards square, on the corner of a street, and found myself arrested by its beauty. Each individual leaf was unique. I did not have the words for this, at the time. I worried that it was insane to see in this unaccustomed way. Now, I would say that my conscious left-brain thoughts, preoccupied with manipulating the world, gave way to consciousness of the right brain perception which had been going on unconsciously. The patch of grass which my left-brain saw as less useful than the pavement I walked on, appeared to change in a moment to something out of Eden, suffused by God.

The brain’s information flow, as it processes sense-perception, is much greater than our conscious experience. We are more than our consciousness.

The ‘Inner Light’, for me, is the unconscious, producing new blessing and understanding. Some might argue, for example, that the concentration of mind needed to avoid a car accident is The Light taking over. It is an instant reaction separate from conscious decision.

I have seen this brain terminology – left brain for using the world, right brain for contemplating it – used in Quaker social media. It might be of use even to Christian Quakers. Once, I might have hoped that when an inquirer joined us in worship, their wayward and disturbing thoughts might give way to awareness of God – in them, in the worshippers, and in the world. Being transformed by the blessing that is Quaker worship, they would join us and bless us with their presence. But now, consciously practising seeing simple objects, art works and natural scenes with right-brain perception, to delight in the beauty of the thing in itself, I might learn to help others to see the world so that their hearts filled with Love for it. How might we teach this skill? We could know it experimentally.
In worship, I relate to others with my right brain. I am in the moment, and they simply are: individual people, beautiful, terrible and unknowable. Words may come. The left brain comes to an understanding of what all this means, and shares. Words come out of unconsciousness. As I learn, I build connections between neurons and even produce new ones: this is called neuroplasticity.

A dualist understanding of the mind – or soul, or brain or self – suggests that it inhabits the body, in some way distinct from it. I moved from this to an idea of my organism as a process, taking in nutrients, perceptions and ideas, and changing with them. There is no clear division between the nerves suffusing my body and the brain inside my skull. Nerves in my belly, chest and throat have feelings about my situation and other people, which I have translated into words describing emotion, and now seek to sense directly, bringing them more into consciousness. As I practise this, neuroplasticity integrates my experience and develops these skills.

For Bonnie Badenoch, the sense of safety is associated with the autonomic nervous system. When we have a sense of safety, the ventral vagus – a myelinated nerve that has emerged relatively recently in mammals, speaking evolutionarily – is activated. ‘Ventral vagal’ is a state of relaxed responsiveness. When we feel scared, the sympathetic nervous system activates, and we go into fight-or-flight mode. But if one senses that there is nothing one can do about a threat, the dorsal vagal parasympathetic nervous system is activated, and the person lapses into freeze. Freeze is not calm or silence, but apathy and helplessness. The organism is depressed, conserving energy.

Fight-or-flight mode increases neurotransmitters for physical action. The person is likely to make a definite decision, and stick to it. This is necessary if under physical threat, but not suited to a modern sedentary lifestyle. Sarah Peyton says many people operate from self-hatred. An inner critic which can never be satisfied bullies the person, and they act in fight-or-flight or lapse into freeze. Ventral vagal, fight-or-flight, and freeze all affect our facial expression, which communicates that sense of safety or danger to others around us. In our primate past, threat was ever-present, so threat communicates most effectively.

These three states, safety, fight-or-flight, and freeze, map onto my experience of myself, and of how we are together in Quaker Meetings. In Meeting, we seek the ventral vagal sense of safety and calm presence together. Some Friends might be ‘hot from the world’, from thoughts or experiences before Meeting, or ‘angry, depressed, tired or spiritually cold’ as Advices & queries 10 has it. Then they might be in fight-or-flight or freeze mode. Those Friends who are in ventral-vagal mode already can help build our sense of safety, and we settle into worship together.

Those in ventral vagal communicate their sense of calm contemplation to the other people present. When enough of us are ventral vagal, the Meeting feels gathered. Ministry can deepen the silence, rather than break it, by increasing that sense of safety and togetherness.

Preparing for worship, I seek that sense of calm safety. I am habitually anxious. I acknowledge my anxiety with this mantra: ‘I feel anxious, and I am safe here.’ It enables me to calm. Others may see that calm on my face, and be enabled to become calm too. In worship, I may be with my Love for the worshippers and the community.

What of the business meeting? Some Christians believe that only religious people have a proper sense of morality or capacity for altruism, but I hope most Quakers have met humane humanists. Putting what we do together into non-religious language, I would say we set aside the ego to seek what is best for everyone who will be affected by our decision. If I am triggered into fight-or-flight mode, I am less able to hear others’ different positions and nuance, and fight for my own position. I may enter freeze mode, feeling that any contribution I can make will do no good, so I just accept what others say even if I find it harmful. As with other forms of worship, I would seek to be present in ventral-vagal mode, so as to be open to possibility, so that unity may come.

Predominantly, my right brain is open to the experience of worship, and then my left brain creates a framework of understanding with language for the experience. Ideally, the framework leaves me open to possibilities and greater understanding.

The Quaker tradition gave me Christian language to understand spiritual experience. The words meant more to me as my experience grew. But the experience is primary, the words are secondary. Christian and atheist explanations may give us different perspectives. Hearing others’ understanding enriches our own understanding, and our shared worship.

Ideas of God may change from God the Father Almighty to a personification of creation and change, to a word for how humanity, life, or matter is. My commitment to truth makes me uneasy using the word ‘God’, even as a metaphor. If it brings Quakers together, it does so by concealing our differences. But I am happy that my Meeting includes believing Christians. I value the gifts they bring. I do not believe I have all the answers, or the final word. But psychological understandings of what we do together as individual Meetings, and also as a Yearly Meeting, may help us do it better, and renew our Society.

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Comments

Lovely article; naturalism is a valuable perspective no doubt. God’s a bit better than that though. A bit better than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN too 😉
David Johnson’s exposition of Quaker prayer on the QuakerSpeak channel on youtube is all you need to know.

By markrdibben@gmail.com on 22nd February 2024 - 18:21

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I very much agree with the following statement from Abigail’s article;

Hearing others’ understanding enriches our own understanding, and our shared worship.

I feel that such a mindset should influence our response to the views of others on all the issues upon which Britain Yearly Meeting is struggling to find unity.

In friendship

Richard Pashley (Bull St Meeting).

By Richard Pashley on 23rd February 2024 - 15:58

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