Photo: Adam & Eve in Eden, Debre Giyorgis Church, Ethiopia, 16-17th century.
Garden centre: David Brown’s Thought for the Week
‘Eden is a place inside all of us.’
Eden first came to me a few decades ago, and revealed to me that there is nothing, nowhere and nobody that is not Eden. Eden is a place inside all of us. These days I can find my way back there almost at will.
After that first experience, coming back to normal reality was a shock and a sadness. It left me wanting to find Eden again. But how? I thought I had found it in an Indian Yoga sect. What a cliché! But after a while I realised that subservience to a guru was a false Eden.
Where to look next? How could it be so complicated, when I knew Eden was within me all the time? One day I went to a talk by Tenzin Gyatso, the dalai lama, and realised he was living in Eden all the time. It could be done.
I came to Quakers a few years ago, on what I considered to be a trial basis. I had gone regularly to Quaker Meeting as a young man and had not found it to be particularly powerful. This time I found it to be a mellow, pleasant experience in the company of other seekers.
‘How could it be so complicated, when I knew Eden was within me all the time?’
And what was that book on the table in the middle of the room, next to the Bible and the vase of flowers? Quaker faith & practice? Did that perhaps have anything to say about Eden? It did! Here is a piece by Elfrida Vipont Foulds, from 1983: ‘I read that I was supposed to make “a place for inward retirement and waiting upon God” in my daily life, as the Queries in those days expressed it… At last I began to realise, first that I needed some kind of inner peace, or inward retirement, or whatever name it might be called by; and then that these apparently stuffy old Friends were really talking sense. If I studied what they were trying to tell me, I might possibly find that the “place of inward retirement” was not a place I had to go to, it was there all the time. I could know the “place of inward retirement” wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, and find the spiritual refreshment for which, knowingly or unknowingly, I was longing, and hear the voice of God in my heart. Thus I began to realise that prayer was not a formality, or an obligation, it was a place which was there all the time and always available’ (2.21).
Elfrida had found Eden, and knew as I did that it was there all the time. Reading that was a shock and still is.
There are many others. George Fox talked of floating in an ‘ocean of light and love’ – a perfect description of the experience of being in Eden – and William Leddra talked in 1661 of the experience of the ‘divine nature’ and how ‘when it withdraws but a little, it leaves a sweet savour behind it.’
Clearly Eden was well known to early Quakers or to some of them at least. Is twenty-first-century British Quakerism offering doorways to Eden? How strong and available are its echoes today, the ‘promptings of love and truth’?
