Still life: Shirley McCaw sees a Meeting of departed Friends

‘It is comforting and fascinating to think about an “after spirit”.’

I attended a Meeting online recently in which I was thinking about the spirit, both during life and after life. A Friend had died that week and was being remembered in the Meeting. I’m sure most of us like to imagine that a Friend who has died might still attend their Meeting in spirit, sitting in their usual chair, and occasionally even ministering in our imaginations. We might wonder as to what they would say on a particular subject, or simply recall poignant ministries of theirs that had a profound effect on us. We might be thankful for their silent ministry, too.

So what would the flip side of this look like? I don’t believe in an afterlife, but it is both comforting and fascinating to think about an ‘after spirit’. I imagine a Quaker Meeting for all deceased friends, a gathering of their spirits, with no need for chairs or a room. A Meeting in which they might sometimes embrace those from the living world. Would the sense of the Meeting be one of all-being and all-knowing?

Occasionally in Meeting I reach a very still, quiet place where day-to-day life appears to fall away. I become a living presence, aware of my body but without my mind being busy with thought. I feel a great sense of joy and peace. It is a very spiritual, almost animal, experience, and has the effect of a complete reset. It feels as if my spirit or essence has had space to breathe and be rekindled.

Could this be similar to a spiritual presence after life? I also imagine an ‘after spirit’ to be similarly at peace and to not need anything. Could these two spiritual ways of being be like two sides of a coin? They are both spirits but from different viewpoints. Could a spirit be both alive and not alive, and could we have a glimpse from one to the other? For some people these questions may well have answers, but for me they are unanswerable. To make meaning of life, however, we continue to search for them. For me, any answer will really only exist in my imagination.

My own father is now ninety-one and has Alzheimer’s. He is a religious man, having been a Unitarian all his life. When the inevitable occurs I wonder whether all his memories could be reunited with his spirit after death. Would it in some way become whole again, and regain all the experience and knowledge of a life lived? Will his spirit or essence be intact once more?

I can remember as a child the moment I realised that, if I died, the world would carry on existing without me. It was a terrifying moment. I felt a real sense of abandonment that the world could leave me behind. It was a kind of existential panic, an awakening to one’s mortality. Now, many years later, I thankfully feel much calmer when thinking about death, although I am keen to experience another twenty years of living first! If the quiet peace that I sometimes reach in Meetings is similar to an ‘after spirit’ then that will be enough for me.

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