Practical Mystics: Quaker faith in action by Jennifer Kavanagh

Author: Jennifer Kavanagh. Review by Jonathan Wooding

‘Oh, Jonathan – the Quakers? Lovely people, but completely impractical!’ This was the polite (but stinging) verdict, sometime in the early 1990s, on my latest head-in-the-clouds, ‘Manchester Guardian’ venture – attending Quaker Meeting in Wandsworth. It was delivered by Mrs O, the elderly mother of an old school friend, who had introduced my schoolmates and me, in our teenage years, to the novelty of tea and serious conversation in what was called ‘the drawing room’. Her opinions carried some weight with us all – not just because she was the only parent who seemed genuinely to enjoy conversing with us, but because she had been secretary to someone important during the war and had run a colonial farm and hospital in Kenya. She was very pleased with Margaret Thatcher and fairly keen too on the archbishop of Canterbury (she was patron to a local Anglican convent). Quite a practical person, then, no nonsense. How did she come into contact with the Quakers? Was it the Kenyan Quakers, questioning perhaps her commanding presence in their country? Well that was all pie-in-the-sky, wasn’t it?

What she meant by ‘impractical’, I see now, was of a piece with her view that it was ‘impractical’ to give everybody the vote in South Africa (sadly, that is what she had believed). So, for ‘impractical’ we might read ‘guilty of wanting fairer practices’. And as for ‘lovely people’? Well, you cannot afford to be lovely if, like Margaret Thatcher, you’re going to tackle all those northern ‘moaning Minnies’ who opposed her policies on employment. Who would want to be practical if the job, as it seems to me after forty years of observing English society, is to facilitate the commanding presence of, let’s say, the upper-middle or officer-class, who run the country, after all, don’t you know? The kingdom of God is for the convent, or perhaps the academic or literary ivory tower, and we’ll all be as well-off as we can ever be if the political establishment resembles more the practical arrangements evident in, say, Downton Abbey, rather than the homes of the BBC-watching teacher class.

When I look up the word ‘mystic’ in the dictionary, lo and behold, I find even the ‘Manchester’ Guardian saying derogatory things about mystics. Take this, from 1993: ‘Poor old Glastonbury. It can’t help being a magnet for poets and mystics and assorted yabbering crackpots.’ How odd! That’s not so far from Mrs O’s view. And just glancing through the various definitions and uses of the word ‘mystic’ recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary does suggest that this is a word that needs reclaiming from discredit as much as the words ‘God’ and ‘Christian’ seem to. I think that’s what Jennifer Kavanagh wants to do in her wonderful ‘Quaker Quick’. If only I’d had this to hand when Mrs O delivered her withering judgement on my foolish new venture. Impractical crackpots? Just because we’re mystical, and have our heads in the clouds? Think again, Mrs O. ‘The Quaker way requires us to take responsibility. It is very much a do-it-yourself religion – or rather… a do-it-together one’, writes Kavanagh. We walk as cheerfully over the world as any good establishmentarian might, but we also answer to ‘that of God in every one’. Everyone gets a vote with us (though rigged majority voting’s not really our thing). Our democracy’s before God, not the vagaries of the ballot-box. Hope that’s not too mystical for you.

I say this book is ‘wonderful’ but, do you know, I did become a little suspicious of how, sort of, unimpeachable it all is. I don’t mean to sound like Mrs O. I know Kavanagh is more fiery, more spiky, more prickly, more, well, heretical than this. Look closely and you can find some snippets of personal disclosure left tantalisingly around when the author’s internal editor was sleeping: ‘out-of-body experiences’? A ‘big voice vibrating within’? A ‘spiritual kick up the backside’? ‘A golden band round the waists of each of us’? John Woolman’s tendency to delete ‘as many mentions of the word “I” as he could’ from his writing (before publication) is mentioned in Kavanagh’s appendix, but I for one would welcome more of these egotistical incursions. Nevertheless, practical mystics – that’s fine – all power to Evelyn Underhill’s mystic elbow, and Kavanagh’s powerful reappraisal of this unnerving, non-conformist path. But there’s a precedent for my unease with, shall we say, Quaker-speak, which is not the language of the great mystics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first editor of another publication called The Friend, wrote in 1802 in a letter that: ‘I approve altogether & embrace entirely the Religion of the Quakers, but exceedingly dislike the sect & their own notions of their own Religion.’ Take note: Coleridge preferred the garrulous Fox to the collegial Barclay. There’s something to be said for challenging Friends’ own depiction, however worthy, of Quaker faith. Iris Murdoch notes in Existentialists and Mystics that, at a time when our ‘religious and metaphysical background is so impoverished’, the ‘will-power’ of the manual and how-to guide alone is not a recipe for living ‘a religious life without illusions’, as we must. More quiddity, please, less queasiness.

Crucial to my own Quaker identity, for instance, was an encounter with a rather flamboyant imam I met at Woodbrooke in the 1990s. When I asked him if he’d joined the Society of Friends, he replied: ‘When there’s a militant wing of the Quakers, then I’ll join!’ So, a little less decorum, please. It’s the provocative, fighting talk, and the outrageous, sublime sense of the prophets and poets that provide a fairer picture of the life of your average non-conformist. Kavanagh quotes the mischievous, heterodox Yeats, but I was waiting for George Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’:

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.

This ‘drudgery divine’ is very much practical mysticism, wouldn’t you say?

For all our pride in our no-comment position when it comes to the big metaphysical questions, we don’t want, surely, to omit something that we need later to rely on in Mrs O’s skeptical court. Remember rather the ‘egotistical sublime’, the lambency and locution of Wordsworth’s mystical poem, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’:

With an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

While I accept Kavanagh’s is a kind of manual to the specifics of Quaker life, I wanted to hear more about this strong and enduringly peculiar mysticism expressed by the poets. Early on Kavanagh writes: ‘This is not to deny the place of prophets and visionaries’, but then we do deny them, rather too often. Equal respect to every person’s ministry, of course, but some poems, some of Simone Weil’s writings (which Kavanagh draws upon), are surely as potent as a cathedral, as a Quaker Meeting house. Calling oneself a practical mystic is otherwise a little too self-congratulatory in my book, having one’s mystical cake while distributing it too for the edification of the indifferent, and unbelieving masses. Nevertheless, in good proselytising spirit, I believe we all should be buying copies of this and donating them to public libraries and patronising friends and relatives forthwith. A bestseller before the mystical Christmas which we do and do not celebrate? Nothing mystical about a manger, is there? Incarnation; incarceration?  Hang on – is God that unmystical?

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