Cliff-hanger: Could Anne Wade remain a Quaker?

‘I signed away what I wanted.’

Last week I wrote about my glimpse of reality on the Dorset cliffs (Thought for the week, 8 December). Words are too limited to do a proper job, but, back then, as Young Friends, we agreed to try to share such experiences with the next generations. At the time our elders would only say, ‘My spiritual experience is too deep to put into words’, which we thought was a cop-out. But perhaps my consequent experience justifies their reticence.

Individual Quakers have always recorded such experiences, but for three centuries our Society seemed to forget that it was founded on a vision of Christ himself, not the Christianity of the churches. Friends sometimes say that everyone was Christian when the Society formed, but that isn’t quite true. Margery Kempe, for example, a contemporary of Julian of Norwich, was edited to present her as conventionally Christian, rather than a witch.

After my experience on the Dorset cliffs, I spoke about it in ministry. An elder told me, crossly, that I should not bring such near-psychotic material into Meeting for Worship. I was surprised, and angry, but thought that perhaps I had not processed it enough to explain it well.

In our Meeting at the time a clever, high-status young man was taking fifteen minutes every week to ask whether he should stay in his job. After six weeks of this I asked a different elder if the man could be helped outside Meeting, as we needed more silence. She was angry with me. I was ‘not being very Christian’, she said, alluding to my Dorset cliffs ministry. I said I was no longer sure that I was very Christian. She told me that I might be better off with the Buddhists. I felt worthless. I had never been treated like this among Quakers. I should have just tried another Meeting, but thought that if I had to choose between my experience of reality and Quakers, there was no contest. I left.

I liked a lot about Buddhism, but I was inescapably a Quaker, in everything I thought and did. I just assumed my reservations about Christianity disqualified me. An overseer bounced into our flat and asked me brightly whether, as I hadn’t been for so long, I wanted to leave – ‘but do feel you can ask us for anything you need’. I signed away what I wanted, because I was too tired to explain.

Later, someone in another organisation noticed something about how I behaved and asked if I was a Quaker. She reckoned that Friends no longer demanded that everyone be Christian, so, very dubiously, I came back. After my first Meeting, when I was invited to say something, I gave my name and said I wanted to be as small and mean and petty as I was, and see if I was acceptable. I don’t think anyone took me seriously, but I really did feel, after the last Meeting, that there would be some doubt.

I have been at this Meeting ever since, very happily. The cliffs experience stays with me. It makes it easy to centre down, to come and go, to be aware of reality while staying fully engaged with this world. I don’t believe – I know.

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