Out of service: Bob Ward is past the peak

‘What canst we say?’

For a long while, a valued activity in our Meeting has involved some Friends getting together once a month before Sunday Worship. We enjoy a simple breakfast, followed by discussion of a shared text. During the pandemic, of course, we’ve had to make do with encounters on Zoom, wielding coffee mugs, but we continue to engage one another seriously and hope to meet up again soon. Currently, we are taking turns to select passages from Quaker faith & practice that speak to us particularly. When we read them, Fox’s challenge arises: what canst we say?

Personally, I have known just a few ‘peak experiences’ that opened a deeper sense of reality: a feeling of peace alone with nature in a country lane; a vision of a divine presence during a Meeting for Worship at Woodbrooke; the birth of a child at home. By now, however, I have come to understand that such occasions of grace cannot be sought. One must be grateful to have had them and their value is in their recollection.

Much more frequently come those ‘promptings of love and truth’ that resonate in the opening of our Advices & queries – those moments of spiritual clarity that often arise from mundane circumstances. I connect these with the observations of John Macmurray (Quaker faith & practice 26.11): ‘…[our] experience of the depths of experience fills us with a sense both of reverence and of responsibility, which gives even to our finite lives a meaning and a power which they do not possess in themselves. This, I am assured, is our human experience of God.’

One prompting that stays with me, although it happened long ago, arose when my Meeting held weekly bread-and-cheese lunches, in part to raise funds for Quaker work. They soon began to act as a social hub for people on life’s margins. The visitors included a young man who was confined to a wheelchair by a progressively debilitating disease. Mostly he spent his days trundling around the town at random.

With difficulty I managed to steer his wheelchair into the Meeting house through a side door. He obviously enjoyed the welcome that we were able to give him. Then one day he confided to me that he needed to pee. He carried a urinal in his bag, but where could he go to use it? Our toilet was too poky to admit his bulky chair, so I manoeuvred it out into the garden to find a discreet corner. While I was waiting for him to reappear, I sensed vividly that there was no more important service that I might be doing beyond helping this man preserve his dignity. It was a privilege to be on hand at a moment of need. Sadly, he lived only a few further years after that. I preserve his memory with profound respect.

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