'Spiritual reality is "prevenient" – it was there before I came along, waiting to be found.' Photo: Matt Howard on Unsplash.
‘Spirituality is a response, not a groping in the dark.’
Look who’s talking: Neil Morgan on Quaker seeking
Quakers have always been Seekers. Seeking has deep roots in the religious and political ferment described in Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. In allegorical form it appears in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Quaker searching is for something personal, and profound – indeed ‘Ways of Seeking’ has its own section in Quaker faith & practice (26.16) It is a search beyond time, and beyond frozen images.
John Robinson wrote of this search for spirituality beyond the ‘old man in the sky’. He called it ‘my single continuing quest’. He said: ‘What I have in mind is that which makes one say “Yes, that’s true, that’s real – for me”.’ He was searching for ‘what is meaningful, significant, stimulating, what rings a bell… There are many things one could not have thought up or expressed (oneself), but when one hears them, or sees them, one says “yes”.’ Robinson felt a personal sense that ‘what is most deeply felt is before one, one is simply catching up on it, entering into it’. He was haunted by the paradoxical statement of Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician who wrote of his spiritual source as saying: ‘You would not be seeking me if you had not already found me.’ It would have made sense, logically, if he had written: ‘You would not be seeking me unless you had never known me’, but Pascal doesn’t say that. Rather there is this paradoxical sentence, which yet makes great emotional sense. It rings bells, we respond with our heart. To the more logical sentence, we do not.
We do not have to personalise this source, give it a face, or name. What is the reason that people of faith, or no faith, can identify with this statement of Pascal’s? Robinson suggests it is because spiritual reality has just that defining but deeply paradoxical quality. It is how it is. Spiritual reality is ‘prevenient’ – it was there before I came along, waiting to be found.
Spirituality is a response, not a groping in the dark. We know it is there. It is waiting, and we are trying to get closer to it. We are searching for this ‘it’. We cannot quite describe it, until it reveals itself.
We can compare this to the absence of this feeling, or its atrophy. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of God that ‘Failing to take root in my heart, He vegetated in me for a while, then He died.’ He adds, wistfully, perhaps bitterly, that ‘whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the easy amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle: “Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us”.’
This world-weariness is a long way from the enthusiasm of early Quakers. Have we perhaps become deaf to the ‘ringing bells’ of the prevenient? Are we estranged? Are we even sighing for what might have been? And, if so, what might those seekers, George Fox, or Isaac Pennington, have made of that?
Comments
Thnak you for this piece. I respond to it with my heart!
By suehampton@btinternet.com on 8th October 2020 - 13:02
Thankyou very much Sue . I am glad you enjoyed it . Friendly greetings
By Neil M on 12th October 2020 - 22:13
Please login to add a comment
