Present company: Neil Morgan’s Thought for the Week
‘Imagine that Jesus of Nazareth had somehow randomly walked into our Meeting for Worship on Easter Sunday.’
Martin Heidegger, the Existentialist philosopher, refused to be labelled an atheist. He preferred to speak of the absence of God, rather than the non-existence of God. That was his position, and he refused to be budged. It opened up for him the field of human existence.
RS Thomas, the Welsh Anglican priest and poet, also traced the negation of the absent God. But his word paintings were Christian, and always pointed to the positive trace of the still absent. This is very different to positivistic atheism (although at first glance they can seem the same, they are not at all).
Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine that Jesus of Nazareth had somehow randomly walked into our Meeting for Worship on Easter Sunday, taking a seat in silent worship with us. We would have lucked out. But before we could press into his hands some introductory Quaker leaflets, what difference to the tone of the Meeting would his presence have lent to us?
Nothing physically would have changed. We would not have burst into flame, or sprouted wings. Our watches would have kept time. We would have ended worship at a predictable time. My shirt would have remained pink, and remained cotton. The laws of physics and maths would have continued. Two and two would remain four. Hydrogen balloons would have gone up, and stones fallen down to Earth. Our lives would proceed by heartbeat, and those hearts would continue to count out our lives, leading to our eventual death, according to our genes and the laws of biology. The laws of nature would go on.
So what difference would his presence have made? I imagine it as somehow altering our relationships with each other. I also think it would make a difference to my relationship with me. That would, I think, become clearer. It would simplify – uncover perhaps – my relationship to my own life. Don’t you think?
Everything would be changed, but nothing physically would be altered at all. Nothing in the world would be changed, but everything would be changed. It would be a transfiguration of personal meaning, without an alteration at all of physical facts.
The important question, the one we need to figure out, is how would this occur, and why? I see this as the intellectual and emotional Quaker pilgrimage.
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