The power of Quaker worship
We should conduct ourselves compassionately around Friends with electric energy says Roger Seal
How, it is interesting to speculate, would someone in the seventeenth century describe electricity. Of course they lacked completely the analytical grasp that allows us today to explain and exploit this amazing thing: in their awe quite possibly the closest they could get to it would be ‘a secret power’ or ‘life’, or even ‘Life’, for its palpability and potency. So it is interesting and illuminating to find that Robert Barclay, writing in 1678 and quoted at 19.21 of Quaker faith & practice, uses those exact terms to describe what he discovered and what happened to him when he found himself among God’s people. And perhaps it would be allowable therefore to paraphrase what Barclay wrote introducing such further analogous concepts as current, contact and charge: they could convey something of the force of what he was writing.
It is perhaps unfortunate that passage 19.21 is set in a section of the current Quaker faith & practice entitled ‘A Guided People’, words that carry a sense of calm, control, even coolness. What Robert Barclay had found was much more than any of that: it was dynamic, and high voltage. For all that God’s people assembled silently they were not just alive but live, like a cable, whose power reached into his heart, a power that like some searching radiotherapy weakening evil and raising up the good, or like a welder ‘knitting and uniting’ this newcomer into their fellowship. All that was required of the believer was simply that he ‘give way unto it’ and acknowledge his need, almost a craving, for what he had discovered and it was his in its fullness.
We tend to think of such people as Barclay as sage and aged divines but this vivid anecdote appeared in print when he was thirty years old, and presumably he was describing what had happened to him in his twenties. It has the intensity of young fervour about it and reminds us that, to reverse the order of Joel, though it is the old men who dream dreams it is the young men who see visions. We would do well to nurture the young in our midst for they may know God most intensely of all.
However, he was plainly convinced that the essential setting without which all this would never have come about was consistently the assemblies of God’s people, as varied by age, circumstance and spiritual stature as any gathering of believers. We have no idea whether any of those present really appreciated what was happening to him in their midst: did they feel, like Jesus, the power go out of them as he drew upon it, or were they completely unaware? How did they regard this passionate young man; did they discern his passion or was it wholly interior, did they recognise him as a leader in the making, a prophet in their midst, or even a somewhat ‘high powered’ Seeker after Truth most needing stability and support for his own good and theirs? What part did they play in what was truly going on?
All this can be no more than speculation; perhaps their one certain role was simply to be there, steadfast, available and accessible. Few are given to be Robert Barclays, but every assembly of God’s people should recognise that they could have a Robert Barclay in their midst, to be insulated but not isolated, to be earthed but not defused, to be charged up but not allowed to burn out. And the secret power at the heart of all this has the potential to transform the lives of all who open themselves to it.
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