Letters - 14 October 2022
Fro Quakers and religion to Quaker and mental health
Quakers and religion
I had to live through my own questioning of the meaning of the term ‘God’, before resolving it enough to join Friends many years ago now.
One helpful piece of the jigsaw, for me, was to see that belief in a ‘personal God’ did not mean belief in ‘God as a person’. I cannot believe that an individual, who is God, exists somewhere. But that was never part of the Judeo-Christian tradition in its origins. God was different, a spirit, a presence, a mystery, experienced but not in the usual way that we experience living people that we know.
This type of ‘personal’ experience is hard to put into words, because we are wedded to the idea that ‘personal’ means individuals. What helped me was an analogy. We are happy with belief in the ‘material’. That doesn’t mean that we think there is a piece of ‘matter’ somewhere which may or may not exist! It is the same with ‘personal’. We participate in it and it is all around us, like matter is, like life is. And I came to see that ‘God’ has been one way of naming this aspect of reality. It leaves everything open to exploration while at the same time linking us to the insights of those who have lived before us.
Religion is where concern with the personal, with God, is shared communally. Quaker ‘discernment’, which can involve seeking the ‘will of God’, is part of this. In the difficult transition away from some of the dogmatic beliefs of the past, we need to form a bridge to new understandings. We cannot insist that any particular new understanding is shared, but we can at least insist that this exploration not be ruled out, in other words, the bridge to the past should not be broken. Each of us has to be free to face our doubts honestly, while granting that freedom to others. Traditional terms from our Christian past need not be feared if we are open with ourselves and each other. We need to be able to explore them if we want.
Jeanne Warren
Importance of language
Like many Quakers I hesitate before entering this discussion, but I agree with Ol Rappaport (30 September) about the importance of language when it comes to anti-Zionism and antisemitism. However, he appears to do the thing in his piece he accuses Quakers more generally of and that is conflate two separate issues.
Distinguished former judge Stephen Sedley has written that ‘anti-Semitism is hostility towards Jews as Jews. Where it manifests itself in discriminatory acts or inflammatory speech it is generally illegal, lying beyond the bounds of freedom of speech and of action. By contrast, criticism (and equally defence) of Israel or of Zionism is not only generally lawful: it is affirmatively protected by law.’
In May 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental body, adopted a ‘non-legally-binding working definition of anti-Semitism’. Sedley concludes that ‘this definition of anti-Semitism endorses the conflation’. I can understand why Zionists would want to conflate these two separate issues, but I feel we should endeavour to avoid doing so.
Nick Matthews
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