Journey into life

Roger Ellis considers the published version of Gerald Hewitson’s 2013 Swarthmore Lecture

Of all Christian traditions, Quakers are most committed to a mystical understanding of religion. They share this understanding with the Carthusians and Cistercians, and with the mystics of the Church. This explains why George Fox felt such affinity with the sixteenth-century Lutheran mystic Jakob Boehme. It is also why our Friend Gerald Hewitson’s inspiring 2013 Swarthmore Lecture (Journey into Life: Inheriting the story of early Friends) structures its account of the author’s life – from the industrial heartland of South Yorkshire, through higher education, to a career in teaching – around moments of heightened spiritual awareness.

Spiritual awareness

These moments of heightened spiritual awareness started early, with a strong sense of Presence as a child when walking through woods on his way to his grandparents’ house; and a voice in his head when he went to his first Meeting: ‘There is no need to journey any more. You are home’. Later, he had a strong sense of ‘the love of God streaming through the universe for each and every one of us… cascading as a benign flood’. And later again, during a residency at Pendle Hill, he had personal revelations of ‘great compassion in the heart of the Universe’, a ‘burning anger at social injustice’ and a sense of ‘the entire flower of our being’.

Such language may not immediately recommend itself to sceptical readers. Gerald wants to help us deepen our spiritual experience by reconnecting it with that of the early Quakers (note the subtitle of his lecture) and, through them, the Bible.

The Bible

Mention of the Bible is likely to bring the hairs up on the back of some necks, because many Quakers come to Meeting damaged by previous experiences with one or another Christian tradition. They often want nothing to do with its language. (The young Gerald was himself exposed to a Pentecostal preacher’s ranting, ‘being called to the front to be prayed over’, so that he, too, has difficulties with ‘language such as… “God sacrificed his son for us”, “needing to be saved”.’) Gerald does not use the Bible, however, as fundamentalists do. He sees it as the record of spiritual encounters between the writers of the Bible (and the people whose stories they are telling, most obviously Jesus) and – whatever we understand by the term – God. In this respect he is at one with George Fox: ‘Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter’.

Fox is here blending two kinds of language, the mystical/experiential and the biblical, and he can do so because, he believes, the words of the Bible were themselves heightened visionary utterances: ‘the Scriptures were the prophets’ words and Christ’s and the apostles’, and what… they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it [directly] from the Lord’. In other words, the words of the Bible were an outward expression of an inner experience, which all convinced Friends share, like George Fox, and which they can confirm from their own experience. Or, as Gerald puts it, ‘the outer work of our hands is the result of the inner work of our heart’.

The spirit of early Quakers

Fox wanted to represent his experience not only to himself but also to his contemporaries, and the Bible was the most immediately and readily available tool for the purpose. Gerald implies that, were Fox, or Jesus, alive now, he would probably be using a different language, and appealing to a different mindset, to get his message across. But that’s not the real point of the lecture. Rather, it’s trying to help modern readers recapture the spirit of the early Quakers, and to look with fresh appreciation at the Bible, even though its words have been so appropriated by fundamentalists that we may feel it impossible to use them ourselves. Gerald gives a telling instance of this in his own story.

His time at Pendle Hill included the experience of an American Quaker praying for and over him, thanking God ‘for the meticulous attention paid to our lives’. However much this might look like a re-run of his earlier negative experience with the Pentecostal preacher, an ability to trust what was being offered led Gerald, this time, to feel he was ‘encountering Truth’. At the same time, the earlier-noted vision of his own self as a flower was articulated for him ‘in black American idiom’ as ‘who we say we are’ [which] needs to be related to ‘who we be’. Probably, this articulation of the spiritual journey – metaphoric, allusive, leaving the word ‘God’ out of the frame – will appeal more directly to readers than the way of praying aloud to God. But, the text insists, both are complementary ways of apprehending and expressing the one truth.

Translation

If we want to use a single word for this activity of finding ourselves in the Bible and in early Quaker writing – and, equally, of finding them in us, as we and they model one another – that word is surely ‘translation’. Gerald uses this word to describe the challenge he finds in translating ‘seventeenth-century Quaker speech into the modern day speech which might be preferred by some readers’, since he has ‘barely learned to speak it, let alone translate it’. But he also offers a striking instance of translation, when John Woolman talks of his sense of his ‘Inner teacher’, the ‘Christ within’, as ‘the presiding chairman’. This phrase is more fully ‘translated’, 150 years later, by Thomas Kelly: ‘it was as if there were in him a presiding chairman who, in the solemn, holy silence of inwardness, took the sense of the Meeting’.

Woolman and Kelly are both using a familiar idiom to represent an experience for which there are no adequate words: translating that experience into something homely and ordinary – a bit like what Christians think happens in the Incarnation. What is true of early and later Quakers is also true of the stories of the Bible. As Gerald puts it: ‘the Bible is, at heart, the continuing story of encounter, so it provided patterns and examples whereby their [Quakers’] new found, newly discovered experience was described and understood… Their biblical reading did not dictate the terms of the encounter, but helped them capture the sense and meaning of their experience’.

Delight

The lecture doesn’t call attention to the dispiriting tendency of all religious and other structures to fragment and split. At a recent Meeting at Woodbrooke on Quaker chaplains, I saw this exemplified in the care we had to take in talking about ‘God’. Strikingly though, by the end of the Meeting we had all moved much closer to one another’s understandings of that contested term. This, I think, is what Gerald is hoping for as an outcome from his lecture. Fundamental to his understanding is the word ‘delight’; God’s in us (‘the voice of that Presence… delights in our unbounding glory’) and ours in Life: ‘the Quaker answer [to the mystery of the human condition] however provisional and hesitant, has a delight in life, an acknowledgement of the richness and complexity of the human experience, and a wholehearted responsive affirmation to the world and all it offers’.

We can, obviously, take delight in this book reading it by ourselves, but Gerald also hopes to make it a resource for Quakers meeting together. So, the book ends with a series of activities readers can undertake in small or larger groups. Here Gerald’s gifts as an educator come to the fore. As a final indication of this considerable charism (as saint Paul puts it in Corinthians), we may note that the lecture has been issued in two subtly different formats, as first written, and as actually delivered (the latter is accessible on the Woodbrooke website and by CD from Woodbrooke). So, you can hear the word, as well as read it!

Gerald Hewitson, Journey into Life: Inheriting the story of early Friends. The 2013 Swarthmore Lecture. Quaker Books. ISBN 9781907123474. £6

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