The Living Fountain: Remembrances of Quaker Christianity, by Benjamin Wood

Author: Benjamin Wood. Review by Jonathan Wooding

Just look at these chapter headings: ‘The Problem of “Thin” Quakerism’, ‘The Romantic Quakerism of Rufus Jones’, ‘The Unquiet Presence of God’, ‘Recovering the Slow Jesus’, ‘Heaven: Walking the Road with Anne Conway’ – goodness! Who’s Anne Conway? I couldn’t wait, and frankly, now I can’t cope. I need help, Friends; we need shared reading groups, we need workshops, and we need to read Wood alongside things like T S Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ (to which he refers significantly). Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ might also help those who are nervous about Wood’s focus on tradition. What’s wrong with institutional conservatism?

Timely, and beautifully-written, this is how you do theology. It is ‘what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence’, as Wittgenstein (echoing Blaise Pascal) is quoted here as saying. This, not smiling outreach or bragging, but lucid inreach and invitation. Atheist? Post-Christian? Universalist? Humanist? Not so fast, my friend, ‘Quaker’ can still do quite nicely, it turns out. It is a clear and present theological condition and offering. Benjamin Wood, visiting researcher for the Centre of Religion and Public Life at the University of Leeds, is not about to straighten us out or tick us off, but nevertheless to demonstrate our common wealth.

Let the context-savvy, history-friendly Wood speak for himself, from a chapter called ‘The Recovery of Quaker Narrative’: ‘Unlike early Friends, we live our lives in mostly secular, largely religiously plural spaces. Our culture has few if any religious or sacred givens. To choose a spiritual life often feels like swimming against a heavy tide. We cannot put aside these realities even if we wanted to, but we can at least begin our Quaker journey in the same place, with an appreciation of the same language, the same story, the same shared history.’

Wood is keen to illustrate that Quakerism isn’t just an arena for free-for-all speculation, with relativism rampant, where you can do whatever you like. It can be these things, but then Wood’s case is that that’s to miss out on the Quaker offer: ‘When we sit together in silent waiting, we are continually reminded of our counter-cultural essence.’ Wood’s affirmation is that this apparently-simple definition of Quakerism, which contains our ‘shared narrative’, is not to be superseded, nor cast away, nor ignored, nor merely tolerated. That is entirely convincing, to this Quaker at any rate. We are nonconformist for heaven’s sake, and evermore shall be so, fundamentally ‘alienated’ from the winning ways of this wayward world. We make ‘estrangement’ a virtue –  both our own estrangement from alien values, and the tell-tale estrangement of, let’s say, the worldly and irreligious and indifferent, from true flourishing.

Wood’s purpose here is ‘to move discussions of Quaker identity away from the quagmire of diversity and towards a shared conception of “being” and “living” Quaker.’ Justifying diversity and multiplicity is not distinctively Quaker, strange as this may sound. Secular bureaucrats of every dispensation may offer this to justify their own sainted conditions. No, we don’t come to Meeting to celebrate diversity, do we? Wood writes: ‘Our Meetings are not just benign spaces for individual spiritual projects, but sites of a shared story, rooted in the promise of universal transformation.’ Worshipping God leads to such celebration, but it is God that indicates to us that praise and hallelujahs are more natural, and more nourishing, than building walls, proclaiming dogma, and elaborating identity, however deeply cherished.

So, Wood brings this ‘deep medicine of tradition’ to those he sees as guilty of ‘Friendly indifference’, ‘this generation of Post-Christian Quakers’, who suffer – and I mean no offence – an ‘aimless celebration of diversity’, and a ‘refusal to say definite things’. Here’s the challenge and the offer of Wood’s manifold creative insights: ‘What this book implores Friends to do is to sink down into the distinctive words, practices, and symbols, that make us Quaker.’ Spoiler alert: ‘With its focus on orthopraxy, universality and personal stories, Liberal Quakerism perhaps resembles the kind of “thin” description which might be offered by an outsider.’ How rude! He does well to apologise for those bits we’ll find ‘prickly, confrontational, or uncomfortable’.

That hesitation about calling yourself Christian? I have that too. As a Gentile I almost want to be pre-Christian, so embarrassing it all is. Wood refers, tellingly, to a Simon Best essay in the Friend from 2010, ‘The Religious Society of Friends in Britain: Simple, Contemporary, Radical?’:‘The de-theologisation of Quakerism is marked by individuals no longer seeing their Quaker involvement as a religious exercise.’ Frankly, I can quite understand this. Other people glaze over, don’t they, even your own family, if they perceive you as ‘being religious’? And many of us don’t get much further than Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero of J D Salinger’s celebrated Catcher in the Rye. Caulfield confesses, endearingly, that: ‘In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth.’ Wood likes Holden too, even comparing George Fox’s writings with the ‘protestations of the disaffected Holden Caulfield… Like Holden, Fox is seemingly surrounded by “phonies” who refuse to tell the truth about themselves.’ Well, this is helpful, when we think that Holden is definitely ‘alienated’ and an ‘outsider’, and that his creator also apparently struggled with both Jewish and Catholic inheritances.

Wood re-instates, via the heavenly Anne Conway, the poetry and, let me say, the Quakerliness of theologising. This, he admits, may lead to ‘exasperation among many contemporary Liberal Quakers, whose scorn of theologising, constitutes something of a shared dogma’. Again, how rude; but Wood knows he’s on thin ice – he knows to ask what has ‘the speculation of metaphysicians got to do with the unadorned walls of the Meeting House?’ Well, it is in the theology of the passionate heart, not that of logic and abstract speculation, that ‘the living fountain’ which is God’s presence and God’s wisdom, source of true flourishing, good ground of all being, is to be found by those who are prepared to attend. Let’s get this right: ‘Conway’s system is not a dead husk that stands in the way of genuine experience, but the intense crystallisation of spiritual biography, framed as propositions and axioms.’ Respect. After all, Anselm’s famous ontological proof is said, likewise, to be no ‘proof’ at all, but a love letter to holiness.

Hold on to the Quaker God: ‘an unbounded and unruly presence, which suffused [for Fox] the pains and joys of ordinary life.’ And listen to this: ‘whatever my reservations, I am still a Liberal Quaker, albeit one who refuses to jettison the depths of the Christian imagination in the name of some bland, generic “spirituality”.’ Wood makes a clear and decisive religious offer: ‘Once we have disinvested ourselves of the glittering jewels of relevance, we can finally be free to fail by the standards of our secular age, and prosper by the lights of Heaven.’ No need to be pre- or post-Christian; be Quaker.

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