Letters - 14 December 2012
From experience to veganism
Experience
Twenty-seven years have passed since my first contribution appeared in the Friend and, with my ninetieth birthday imminent, the time has come for me to put down my pen.
To ‘sign off’ I have chosen a passage from Thomas Kelly’s Reality of the Spiritual World that is relevant to today’s discussions (Pendle Hill Pamphlet no. 21 1942 (reprinted)).
‘But there is a wholly different way of being sure that God is real. It is not an intellectual proof, a reasoned sequence of thoughts.
‘It is the fact that men experience the presence of God. Into our lives come times, when all unexpectedly, (He) shadows over us, steals into the inner recesses of our souls, and lifts us up in a wonderful joy and peace. Sometimes these moments of visitation come to us in strange surroundings – on lonely country roads, in a classroom, at the kitchen sink. Sometimes they come in the hour of worship, when we are gathered into one holy Presence, who stands in our midst and welds us together in breathless hush. In such times of direct experience of Presence, we know that God is utterly real.
‘This evidence for the reality of God is the one the Quakers primarily appeal to. It is the evidence upon which the mystics of all times rest their testimony.
‘Quakerism is essentially empirical; it relies on direct and immediate experience.’
Edward Hoare
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