In the mix: Sarah White on spiritual integration

‘This culture is what holds us together.’

It seems to me that most British Quakers are spiritual bricoleurs – from ‘bricolage’, meaning ‘something constructed or created from a diverse range of things’ or ‘a do-it-yourself job’. Sometimes this may be a conscious choice, splicing together different traditions that the individual finds helpful. Other times it may be unconscious, a patchwork of past experiences, childhood training, and chance encounters. Most often, perhaps, it is a mix of the two. This prevalence of bricolage reflects, I believe, two characteristics of contemporary British Quakerism. First, the majority of Friends join the Society as adults, so many bring with them a history with other spiritual paths. Second, the Society has embraced plurality, including people who identify with diverse religious traditions, and those who disavow any form of supernatural belief.

Since the early days, Quakers have laid a distinctive stress on direct experience: that anyone might know God directly, through collective discernment, not limited by scripture, priest or church. But the experience of those first Quakers did not spring from nowhere: they were steeped in Bible knowledge and Christian tradition. It was this that engendered their experience of God and the words they used to express it.

I suspect that the same is not true even for the most Christian of British Quakers today. We are all marked by our secular age, characterised by, as Charles Taylor says, ‘a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.’

Unease with ‘God-talk’ means that British Quakerism no longer fully embraces the religious tradition that nourished early Friends. In our Meeting, we tend to avoid explicitly-religious references, and speak instead about the beauty of nature, the urgency of social action, or care for one another. We emphasise our practices of shared silence, collective discernment, and a distinctive way of doing business. This culture, ‘how we do things’, is what holds us together. This is what we have to pass on. But when it comes to the spiritual – to what we believe, to where we place our trust and where we seek the resources to help us – we act as individual bricoleurs, assembling for ourselves the particular mix that seems to give us meaning and sustenance.

My question is: is there a way to integrate this bricolage more intentionally within our common life? Can we support each other to become more effective at it? Can we make visible, help articulate, and celebrate, this ‘do-it-yourself’ job of spirituality? Can we transform individual enlightening into a common resource? Could a more intentional acknowledgement of our practice as bricoleurs bring us new ways to ‘know one another in that which is eternal’. If so we might build a scaffolding for our personal and collective experience. It could help others to grapple with that more essential question, ‘How do we live now?’

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