The Inner Light
Tim Gee reflects on his faith and living as a Friend
You probably know the proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Growing up Quaker was rather like growing up in a very lovely village, albeit one dispersed across the country and, of course, linked across the world.
As a teenager being Quaker was all about the annual Quaker summer school. I don’t remember a whole lot of talk about God during those weeks, but what I did experience was concentrated love, in a safe, inclusive and open space that gave us each freedom to explore who and what we were. It was an experience I realise now has informed the rest of my life.
In sixth-form, against the background of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I found myself using some of the skills of inclusive facilitation and teamwork I’d learnt at Quaker events to help set up my college anti-war group. From there it was fairly straightforward to make the link between war for oil and oil causing climate change. As a university student I became a climate change campaigner.
I love to read and have been particularly inspired by the work of Paulo Freire and later the author bell hooks – educationalists who believe that every person has answers within themselves. Their approaches seemed to echo my Quaker experience, and strongly informed my work as an activist trainer.
I went to Meeting when I was awake on time, but rarely felt brave enough to stand up and speak. Nor did I feel that mattered. I remember telling someone at the time that I understood my activism to be my ministry. Meeting for Worship was for me then, more than anything else, just a space to be and be still, in contrast to the tensions of activist life. Meeting is not always memorable. But sometimes it can be unforgettable.
One such time for me was in 2012. It was a turbulent time personally: I’d not fully processed a family bereavement, and was also struggling from having been evicted from my flat during the pre-Olympic Games London rent hikes. I’d written a book about people-power though, and had been given the opportunity to tour it in the US. Passing through Pennsylvania, I visited Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meeting, and sank into the gathered stillness. I found myself thinking of my love for others and theirs for me – my family, my friends, my Quaker Meeting, all of the strangers who had helped and housed me along the way, and opening that out to the love that exists in humanity as a whole. And I really experienced something physical, which I still feel. It was, I suppose, my first moment in which I consciously felt the presence of what Quakers call the ‘Inner Light’.
After that my experience of being Quaker changed again, and became about trying to tune in to that channel of universal infinite love – in Meeting for Worship and during the week. I began trying to make decisions from that place. My reading of books about faith transformed too, as I began associating that feeling of connectedness with the word that has been used for thousands of years: ‘God’.
We might not have much used the words at those Quaker summer schools, but looking back now I realise that if God is love, then the Spirit was present all along.
Tim gave the George Gorman Lecture at Yearly Meeting Gathering 2017.
He will be co-facilitating a weekend course, ‘Building a Diverse and Transformative Movement for Change’, at Woodbrooke from 16-18 March 2018.
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