Letters - 01 November 2013
From the numinous to Programmed Meetings
The numinous
I was so pleased to read Michael Wright’s ‘Disagreeing about God’ (18 October) in which he pleads for mutual respect for our various and unique mystical experience. This ‘speaks to my condition’ as I have no way of referring to my own mystical experience. It is ineffable, as Michael says, and I have no real idea of its nature.
For want of any other word, I call it ‘god’ and talk to it, but have no idea where it comes from. It is not supernatural: indeed it seems to come from within as much as without. I do doubt, and wonder whether what I experience as ‘god’ (very intense, often reducing me to tears) is just my own creation or that it is experience of something like the mind of the living creation as a whole, having a relation to creation like that of my own mind to my own body. Who knows? It’s been with me all my life. How I’ve related to this experience has both changed over time and changed me.
We all experience the same thing, just in our different ways, interpreting it and speaking of it through the web of our individual experience. It is so important to try to share and listen with love to each other as we try to know each other ‘in those things which are eternal’, for which words are inadequate, but which influence all our thoughts and actions.
Noël Staples
Fair Penny Campaign
I am very grateful to John Arnold for his letter about The Fair Penny Campaign (18 October). The campaign focuses on the personal commitment to contribute more in order to increase equality. In so doing, it aims to re-establish the link between taxation and the alleviation of suffering. It also stresses the need for justice, rather than charity, in our society. In these ways, it goes beyond much current intellectual discussion, including the allocation of past blame.
I trust that the campaign will continue its slow, steady growth and become more and more widely known and understood. It is, of course, in the hands of Friends (and readers of the Friend) to make this happen! Then, it may really contribute to the creation of the kind of world we would like to live in, and finding ways to get there from this starting point.
Certainly, though, it would be wonderful if the campaign also inspired practical and immediate action, in parallel, by collecting ‘fair pennies’. I do hope very much that someone will pick this idea up!
Kate Green
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