Quaker faith & practice: True Godliness
Roland Carn offers a personal response to one of his favourite quotations from Quaker faith & practice
True godliness don’t turn men out of the world but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavours to mend it… Christians should keep the helm and guide the vessel to its port; not meanly steal out at the stern of the world and leave those that are in it without a pilot to be driven by the fury of evil times upon the rock or sand of ruin.
William Penn, 1682
Quaker faith & practice 23.02
London 1954. Winter. I walk along the street. Yellow, sulphurous, corrosive, choking fog all around. I can’t see my feet. Buildings, people, cars loom and disappear. Voices, engines, footsteps deadened indistinct.
The fog’s confusion is in my head. Corrosive, critical, voices. ‘Do This!’ ‘Do that!’ ‘Be good!’ ‘That’s bad!’ ‘Be like us, you fool!’ ‘You’re weird!’ I search for sense, for reason, for rest. Depression. I can’t win. What’s the point? The demands of reality follow me, even into the sanctuary of monkish retreat. Not that way for me.
Quakers require that we live our beliefs. Integrity speaks to my condition. I have a reason to get out of bed: a way of living in harmony with God’s universe, of separating good from evil. It gives religion a practical use. I am a scientist by training. Science is listening deeply to God and learning his world. Decades later, I find William Penn calls this ‘godliness’. His images speak to me.
God’s creation plays itself out in the rules set in the Big Bang. It’s not broken. I work to understand it, to roll back the fog, remove the confusion, lighten the depression. Living my beliefs, pursuing godliness to live in harmony with God’s design is my lost Ark. I move like Indiana Jones from crisis, to narrow escape, to rest, and off again. My endeavours and my faith follow me through teens, college, employment, career and business. They lighten my life and spice my marriage and my children.
God’s circumstances thrust an ‘Indiana-like’ steersman role upon me. My voices clamour: ‘Drive!’ ‘Manage!’ ‘Control!’ ‘Act!’ ‘Behave!’
Through joy, frustration and disappointment I slowly learn that God’s wind drives my ship through the ocean of dark and light. My light tiller hand bears the bladed rudder on the swelling current to a harmonious world.
Sneaking over the stern, leaving the ship to others, is to sink in the sea of darkness. A release denied me. Saint Francis’ prayer sustains me.
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything, I go not gentle into that good night. Did I find my lost Ark?
Living my beliefs, godliness, is the core of my faith and practice. Friend, how is it for you? Isn’t it the same for you? I can’t see in your head, know what you know, feel what you feel, think what you think.
Has the world so corroded Quakerism that, confused, we must needs look in the fog for the core of living our faith, our godliness?
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