Hear and now: Margaret Roy’s Thought for the Week
‘Maybe it is time to listen again to those early Quakers.’
Living adventurously, as Quakers are encouraged to do, is often interpreted as being more activist – taking risks, and pushing out of the comfort zone. Being different. It tends to suggest that the ordinary is not good enough.
Could it be that we are looking for new horizons right now? Could that mean new strategies for coping, or surviving? Is there a way out of all this? Are there different perspectives to help us understand the challenges we face?
On and on, with new development, and new growth, the behemoth of our modern systems just gets bigger. It hides, it camouflages. And when it breaks cover, we are shocked and surprised as to how we have been deluded.
How has our vision become so clouded? How can we break new ground? Are we prepared to change our lifestyle? Are we ready to set aside our individual desires to seek the common good? Do we really need all this money? What are we using it for?
Old Testament Hebrew culture had a formula. The Jubilee Year (every fifty years) wiped out all debt. The land was owned by no one. It was the Lord’s.
How many tons of cloth are discarded in Europe each day? We create new sources of energy without questioning how much energy we really need to use. Plastics, chemicals, pollution. What’s to be done? Are we ready for change?
We wait in silence. Are we open to new Light? Were the Spirit to speak, could we unravel the clutter surrounding ‘God’ and ‘Spirit’ to ‘listen simple’? Early Quakers and Early Christians were aware that the first stage was kenosis – the emptying of one’s own will to become receptive to the Spirit’s. It opens to a different type of consciousness, which the ancients called ‘heart’. That is not soapy sentimentality. Meditation is a frightening step into the unknown, a letting go. Margaret Fell talked about how the Spirit moving is not always a pleasant experience. It shakes you, and you quake.
The mystics spoke of that state of consciousness as union with God. Whatever. There are different values. Life changes as we change.
Maybe it is time to listen again to those early Quakers: ‘There is a spirit which I feel delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself’ (James Nayler, 1659). Or, ‘There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath different names; it is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion nor excluded from any where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomever this takes root and grows, of what nation whatsoever, they become brethren’ (John Woolman, 1762). Friends, are we really open to new Light?
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