Reflections on the ‘Red Book’: Listening with both ears
Alison Leonard, in the first of two articles, offers a response to the Quaker faith & practice reading programme
When in a knotty discussion about the meaning of life, I sometimes say that I have two little characters sitting on my shoulders and muttering into my ears: one is a believer, the other is a sceptic. These two characters have been very active of late, muttering to me from both sides, and I’m trying to listen equally to them.
My Meeting has an active Quaker faith & practice reading group, and we’ve been following the programme recommended by the Book of Discipline Revision Preparation Group. It’s interesting that we’ve been asked to read Chapter Nineteen, ‘Openings’, last of all in the reading scheme. This chapter contains much of the writings of early Friends.
Our group found ourselves fascinated, and at the same time deeply provoked, by the heightened, exalted and often almost biblical language of these seventeenth century writers. ‘The Word of the Lord came unto me…’; ‘I heard a voice saying…’; ‘We came not in our own wills but in the will of God’. Thus summoned by the divine, they travelled around the world; they were imprisoned; they had their goods seized; they were even sent to their deaths.
This is a language, a passion, and a level of commitment that is utterly foreign to us in Britain today. Members of our group, who are a mix of longstanding Friends and those relatively new to Quakerism, were bemused. Comments were made such as: ‘I feel like asking: “What were they on?” ‘Were they crazy?’ ‘It’s more like the religious fundamentalism of current headlines than the gentle, inclusive ministry you get in our Sunday Meeting for Worship.’
Yet, these first Quakers are our forebears. Their words have been retained in every edition of our central book, and their insights will no doubt survive every future revision. These paragraphs describe how they discovered the fundamentals of the ‘Quaker Way’: the ‘Light Within’, the divine voice unmediated by priests or clergy, the summons to preach, to work and to witness. Their stories show how they sought divine guidance for their lives, received it, and acted upon it.
In A Letter from James: Essays in Quaker history John Lampen, the modern Quaker educator, peace worker and writer, urges us not to lose the vital Quaker principle of placing our lives under the guidance of the Spirit: ‘When George Fox asked the congregation at Ulverston, “What canst thou say?” he was not asking what they thought, but what they knew from their experience of the divine. His question continued, “Art thou a child of Light, and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?” But his question is used nowadays to imply that anyone’s beliefs contain as much truth as anyone else’s.’
After quoting other modern Quaker writers such as Alistair Heron and Christine Trevett, John Lampen goes on to ask: ‘Do we pay enough attention to the legacy we should be giving the Quakers of the future? What are we contributing to our Yearly Meeting’s future spiritual maintenance? Do we see a clear and necessary role for ourselves in this? Or, alternatively, are we weakening our sense of corporate identity and undervaluing the importance of our society’s past?’
This challenge needs to be answered. Today’s Quaker witness can seem insipid compared with that of the past. Where are Quakers in the refugee crisis? Are we not called by God to open our homes, to leave home and family in order to cherish the desperate on Lesbos and Lampedusa? The occasional Friend does make choices of this magnitude, but there is no mass movement. Friends lobby and march for peace; they take up issues of social justice more than the average citizen; the occasional Friend risks jail for the sake of the planet. But few say openly: ‘I am called by God to do this.’
There are very good reasons why they do not. Killers in Iraq, in Syria and on the streets of Britain – like militants on both sides of the Irish conflict before them, like soldiers of many nationalities in two world wars – claim to do what they do in the name of their faith, their God. ‘Following one’s conscience’ is reasonable, yes; but ‘following the voice of God’ is a dangerous road to go down in today’s world.
In a more administrative context, Friends a decade ago had to wrestle with the phrase ‘the will of God’ when setting up new charitable status for Area Meetings. How should we describe our decision-making process, which involves waiting for guidance and for the ‘sense of the Meeting’ until the … makes itself known? What should fill the space of those three dots? Some Area Meetings opted for ‘the will of God’; others, like my own, chose to use ‘the right way forward’. Was the latter a cop-out? I think not. These official documents were to be read and quoted by people who had no knowledge of Quaker history or processes, and might misconstrue words that are more often screamed out in tabloid headlines than used in charitable trust documentation.
The world we live in is completely different from the world of George Fox, Margaret Fell and other early Friends. I remember Cecil Sharman saying, while he was writing George Fox and the Quakers: ‘Every single word in the saying “Walk cheerfully over the world, answering to that of God in every one” means something different to us from what it meant to Fox.’
It is not just a matter of language and political context. We now live in a scientific world and in an information culture. Now, if you embark on a course of action and people ask you why, you’ll need more of an answer than ‘I just know’, or ‘God told me that it’s right’.
I live in a family of scientists and, though I often speak in a more spiritual language than they do, I value their clear-headed approach to questions of ethics. In my Meeting, and amongst Friends I’ve met in other Quaker contexts, there are practical, well-informed people who value the open-minded, communitarian and ethical basis of the Quaker way, but cannot give, or prefer not to give, personal accounts of spiritual experience.
At the same time, I find among scientists and practical people a great respect for the leap in the dark and openness to the imagination. For how can we move into an unknown future without being open to the almost fantastical possibilities it may bring? Who, at the time of the last revision of Quaker faith & practice, could have envisaged that by the time of the next revision, our lives would have been so wholly transformed by the internet?
So, this is the issue. We are deeply attached to the writings and example of early Friends, yet in this present age they are extremely problematic. We have in our Meetings – sometimes in our very selves – both a wish to lay our lives before a greater, wiser power, and a need to live in and speak from a rational, evidence-based perspective. (At the same time, of course, as being gentle, compassionate and strong of spirit.)
How can we square this circle? In my second article, I hope to find some possible answers to that question.
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