God, words and us: A Christian Quaker

Rowena Loverance offers a Christian Quaker response to the book 'God, words and us'

Who shows us the Father and is himself the Way

- Advices & queries 2, before 1994

We are told that, as Christ died, the sky darkened and the veil of the Temple was torn in two. For Christians, at the season of Easter, when I am writing this, the veil between our limited human life and the full human-and-divine life which we aspire to lead is at its thinnest. This is nothing to do with how well we are living that fuller life.

This Easter my life is just as disordered, inadequate and insufficiently loving as it is the rest of the time. But as I watch in the darkened church, having shared a eucharistic meal with fellow-worshippers, many of whom are now sharing the same food with our neighbours and fellow-citizens living on the streets of Tower Hamlets in London, the presence of the living Christ is almost palpable.

There is a better way to live. It is not easy and that’s why most of us don’t do it. It involves opening ourselves up, turning ourselves inside-out, setting aside all the prickly fearful stuff which is our common condition, being willing to see and feel the lives of others, of our fellow-creatures, of the planet, from the inside, just as we see and feel our own life. Jesus has modelled this way of life for us. We know where it leads. But it is the life for which we were made, the life God wants to live in us.

A transcendent quality

Our Quaker tradition is full of saints who have somehow managed this self-reversal. I think of John Wilhelm Rowntree, with his impossible cry at the 1895 Manchester Conference: ‘Lay on us the burden of the world’s suffering.’ Who on earth did he think he was? He was prophetic, as it turned out, since he soon had heavy suffering of his own to bear. But I am sure each of us can celebrate Friends we have known personally whose lives have this transcendent quality.

So, now we come to it – why do I call this way of life transcendent? If we all know, at heart, that this is our true satisfaction, our true humanity, then why does one have to reach for a transcendent explanation to justify it?

Simply because we can’t, I believe, do it in our strength. The contrary pressures, inside and out, are too great. We buckle. We need to believe that there is a greater source of strength that we can tap into, a sense that when we do this we are plugging into the world’s power system, not just to ‘recharge our own batteries’, as is often said about Meeting for Worship, but to align our weak efforts with the cosmic power surge, to remind ourselves that this is how the world is meant to be.

I am grateful for the work of the Friends who have produced Gods, words and us. They are right to remind us that we need to listen to one another at the deepest level. Each one of us has our unique insights to bring.

The power grid

But to the question ‘Does it matter whether I express my deepest experience as God, and you express it as the best that humanity can achieve?’, I have to say that, yes, for me, it does. This self-reversal I describe is not easy to achieve; personally, I feel I have barely set out on the road. If, when we plug into the power grid at Meeting for Worship, many of those present don’t feel the existence of such a grid then our collective surge is bound to be weakened.

So, that is why I, a birthright Quaker steeped in Quaker ways to the point, I sometimes feel, of being positively pickled in them, find myself in a darkened church on Maundy Thursday. It is not entirely comfortable to be there. The Jesus we worship together is not altogether my Jesus – he is too certain of himself, too victorious. The credal faith we proclaim (‘born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate’) remains for me a total impossibility, both in what is said and what is not said.

The broken bread and wine outpoured seems to me a perfect metaphor for the life in Christ we are called to live, but I still stand aside from the practice of the eucharist – too literal, too clerical; and too much associated with Paul’s phrase, to ‘proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’.

For Quakers, Jesus is not stranded somewhere between the Ascension and the Book of Revelation; the Quaker insight I most cherish is our certainty that he is fully present in the here-and-now: ‘Christ is come to teach his people himself.’ We are absolutely not waiting for the Second Coming, we are living now in the end times, so we’d better get on with it.

Quaker understanding

I do not consider this Quaker understanding of Jesus to be the only truth about God. I have been fortunate to spend a lot of time over the years among Orthodox Christians and their Muslim neighbours. To celebrate Easter in a Greek village community, to walk through the streets in Christ’s funeral procession, to crawl on all fours under the bier, is to understand from the inside out that religion is not a matter of propositional belief but of embodiment.

To sit in prayer under the domes, semidomes and exedras of an Istanbul mosque, surrounded by calligraphy I cannot read but which I know proclaims Surah 2.255, the ‘throne verse’ of the Qur’an, is to be overwhelmed by the awesomeness of God. As Psalm 139 has it: ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; I cannot attain it.’

The nontheist understanding of faith, the via negativa, is an essential part of any religion. The Orthodox call it apophatic. Anything we can say about God is by definition inadequate. Quakers have always known this – read any line of Isaac Penington, recite John Greenleaf Whittier’s great poem ‘The Brewing of Soma’ and his words ‘…the still small voice of calm’, which were taken and used in the hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. But the way of unknowing was not developed to deny the existence of the divine power, but rather to assert its unlimited nature.

The Quaker understanding of Christianity is precious; at a time when more fundamentalist forms of religion are being shouted from the rooftops, our still small voice is needed more, not less.

I want to be able to witness, as I have tried to do all my life, to what Quakers know about Jesus, and through him, about God. And I want to be able to do this, not just as an individual, but as a member of a worshipping group which holds these insights corporately.

God, words and us: Quakers in conversation about religious difference edited by Helen Rowlands is published by Quaker Books at £8. ISBN: 9781999726928.

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Comments

Thank you for this moving expression of your Christian faith.

For those readers not aware, J.W. Rowntree was a leading figure of the Quaker Renaissance but suffered poor health and died young.

By frankem51 on 4th May 2018 - 10:09

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