Seeking the light

Ernest Hall reflects on his spiritual journey

by Ernest Hall 2nd May 2014

I was brought up as a ‘High Church’ Anglican. I progressed from Sunday school to choir boy and on to being a ‘server at the altar’. Early in 1939 I volunteered for the territorial army.  I had been eighteen for just four months when Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 and I was called up for full-time army service. Throughout my army service and during the three years that I was a prisoner of war (PoW) I wore a small crucifix attached to the identity discs that every soldier wears round his neck.

Beyond all that

When I was discharged from the army in April 1946 I was quite sure that I was beyond all that. One of my most vivid memories of my time as a PoW in Germany was of one of our guards, a friendly old chap who was a veteran of world war one, hearing someone say ‘Ach – du lieber Gott’ (Oh, dear/loving God!) probably the commonest of German expletives. He commented (in German, of course) with infinite sadness, ‘There is no loving God. If there were he wouldn’t permit the terrible things that are going on all around us.’

That was towards the end of the war, when we had seen scores of weary refugees from the ever-approaching Eastern Front pass through the little East German town where I was a prisoner, on their way to Dresden. Thousands of those refugees were incinerated by the terror air-raids of the RAF and American Air Force on Dresden on 13 and 14 February 1945.

I found myself agreeing with that guard. God, I decided, was a fabrication of the human mind ‘created in our own image’. We had made of religion (as declared by both Karl Marx and Anglican clergyman and children’s author Charles Kingsley at about the same time!) an ‘opium of the people’. The hope of getting ‘pie in the sky when you die’ kept working people docile while suffering injustice and inequality in this world.

However, on 27 April 1946 I married the girl I had met and fallen in love with on 2 September 1939, the day before war broke out. She was a committed Christian and, in fact, a Methodist Sunday school teacher. We married in a Methodist church and I was quite prepared to accompany her to church on Sundays and join in the worship, although I didn’t believe a word of it!

On impulse

Just before Christmas 1947 we moved to a new home near Ipswich for my work. We weren’t very impressed with the local Methodist church and any magic the Church of England had once held for me had completely gone. One Sunday, on impulse, we looked in at Meeting for Worship at the Quaker Meeting house in Fonnereau Road, Ipswich. We were made welcome, the nature of Quaker worship was explained to us, and we immediately felt at home.

We became regular attenders and, after a few months, applied for membership. We were, of course, interviewed before being accepted into membership. I confessed my nonbelief but declared that I believed myself to be ‘seeking the light’ and was prepared to be a ‘humble learner in the school of Christ’. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant but I was always ready to learn from others and I hoped that that would do. It did. We both regularly attended Meeting for Worship at first in Ipswich and later, when my work took me to north-east Essex, at Clacton-on-Sea Meeting, where I am a regular worshipper today.

A questioning faith

At Ipswich Meeting it had been the practice to read at least one of the Advices & queries, and a passage from the New Testament, every Sunday. At Clacton Meeting in the 1950s and 1960s members were moved to read from the New Testament rather more frequently than they are today. Perhaps it was because of this – plus the long periods of expectant and prayer-filled silence – that I found my attitudes changing.

There was no Damascene moment; no experience of being ‘born again’; no day on which I could have said ‘yesterday I was an agnostic and a humanist, today I am a believer’ but regain my faith I did. It was not the absolute undoubting faith of my childhood and adolescence but a much more questioning, in some respects more fragile, faith yet it was more broadly and more firmly based than that of the past.

The idea that there is a divine spark, ‘that of God’, implanted within every human being became a reality for me. Furthermore I saw ‘that of God’ to be the ‘inward light of Christ’ to which saint John refers in the preface to his gospel; the true Light that shines in the darkness and that the darkness cannot overcome.

I also came to accept that some two thousand years ago that Light had been ‘incarnate/made flesh/personified’ in Jesus of Nazareth who, in his life and teaching, revealed God as the loving Father of all mankind. I realised, too, that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, a stumbling block to some, simply means that God has made himself known to us as Creator of the universe; as Immanuel (‘God with us’), that-of-God planted within us all and personified in Jesus; and as the Holy Spirit, who creates and maintains all life on earth and has been the inspiration of the prophets throughout the ages. Yet these three manifestations are of just one God.

Becoming a Quanglican

That new-found faith inspired me to accept an invitation by the congregation of the local United Reformed Church to lead the worship there on a number of occasions when they were without a resident minister and, several years later, to renew my membership of the Church of England as well as maintaining that of the Religious Society of Friends.

Terry Waite, possibly the Church of England’s best known lay member, is similarly in dual membership. He recently described himself to a gathering of Southern East Anglian Friends as a Quanglican. When I revived my membership of the Church of England I promised myself that I would never let this prevent my regular attendance at Sunday Meeting for Worship. So far it
never has. I therefore prefer to think of myself as an Angliquaker!

Nowadays, when I hear Friends, referring to the Christian faith, claim (perhaps just a little patronisingly) that they are now beyond all that, I wonder if they have ever considered the possibility that they may not yet have reached it.

Comments

As we strive for a living relationship with Almighty God we best focus on this amazing man Jesus and what we can learn from him. I am encouraged to read in Q F&P 26.54 ‘To me Jesus is a window through to God, a person who in terms of personality, in a way that can be grasped by our finite minds, shows what mercy, pity, peace are like in human life. I turn to the Jesus of the New Testament – to his healing word, his freedom from anxiety, his outreaching insight, to him as a whole person - not to imitate him but to let him live and grow in my life.’ So for us hopefully to discover the spiritual power and fire experienced by those early Quakers. We can have good reason to ‘Be joyful in the Lord – Rejoice!’ (Philippians 4.4)

By John888 on 2nd May 2014 - 16:25

A good piece, and another Angliquaker here! I think it is a valuable way of being ecumenical in practice.

By speak51 on 4th May 2014 - 16:49

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