How a Catholic mass made me a Quaker
Antonia Swinson describes her experience of ‘a different finding’
A few months ago, for family reasons, my daughter and I were invited to stay in a Benedictine community as personal guests of the Abbot. It was a singular experience for two non-Catholic females. If we found taking our meals in silence before a plaster figure of Christ bleeding on the cross a bit of a cultural stretch, we were, nevertheless, borne up by the welcome we received, as well as the kindness and integrity of the monks. Listen with ‘the ear of your heart,’’ said Saint Benedict in his famous Rule – surely not so very different from answering that of God in everyone? It was not long before we were asking ourselves whether we could work for a fusion of Benedict and George Fox, given that listening should come before answering.
Our Anglican years before we discovered the Quakers served us both well in that the hymns and liturgy were reasonably familiar. We could only respect the faith of these men who lived such a tough and disciplined life – up at four o’clock in the morning for the first office of the day. No free will. No coffee either.
Benedictines embrace the contemplative and the mystical. Silence plays an important part in their worship and way of life, together with practical action – such as running a farm and a shop, and offering hospitality. Slowly – very slowly – we inched towards the shared and not the different.
Then came Sunday mass. What a positive answer to those who write off the Catholic Church as a corrupt and failing institution. On this ordinary Sunday, the monastery abbey was packed. Hundreds of worshippers, including many young people, crammed into the pews, with standing room only for latecomers. What a triumph of smells and bells and Gregorian celebration. Hairs rose on the back of my neck. Here was Christian faith in action: unapologetic, theologically self-confident and male.
When it came to communion, four lines formed in the central aisle. Men and women of all ages smiled and beckoned to us to move before them. The Abbot had already invited us both to receive a blessing, so what was keeping us?
It seemed as if time had braked. Though still conscious of faces turned towards me, as if in slow motion, I made a sudden, unlooked for, and, in some ways, an almost embarrassing discovery. I had become a Quaker.
Before that moment, I would have said that I was a Quaker already, a member of my Meeting, trying to live adventurously and let my life speak. And so on. But this discovery was something else – a different finding: rougher, more demanding and uncomfortable. It was an in-the-marrow, take it or leave it, like it or lump it, crossing the Hellespont, ‘here I stand so help me God’ receiving of what being a Quaker really meant.
In that instant, I had a sudden, sharp sense of the dozens of women and men who had given up their health, youth, careers, freedom and – in some cases, just a few generations ago – even their lives to give me the priceless gift of a direct relationship with God. And giving me, too, the certain knowledge that my relationship, as a woman, with God, is equal to that of any man.
Then I knew that to go to receive a blessing from one of the smiling priests at the altar would have meant an easy acceptance of the ‘business as usual’ Christian default: that though Quakerism is all very well, only a priest can really have a direct relationship with God – and here, in this thriving Catholic community, only a male priest at that. At this point, rebel words, though thankfully unspoken, bubbled noisily into my heretic head: ‘Go up there? I’ll be damned if I will!’
Of course, in the twenty-first century, some of us cannot avoid other defaults – such as being a liberal parent. So, I asked my daughter in a whisper if she would like to go up for a blessing.
Out of the mouths of babes… quick as a flash came the fierce little hiss, audible to the waiting faithful within a radius of at least twenty feet: ‘Get a grip, Mum. We’re Quakers!’
