Thought for the Week: A mystery
Diana Lampen considers living the questions
Some see the division between theist and nontheist as both puzzling and unbridgeable. But is it really? When do we sit down together, not to argue but to explore and listen deeply to each other? Do you know what I, a theist, believe? Do I know what you, a nontheist, believe? The ‘god’ the nontheist has thrown out may well be the one I have rejected too. I long ago left behind the ‘strict parent in the sky’, who watches us like a hawk to catch us out and punish us; the fireman, ready to rush to the rescue; or the Santa Claus, ready to give me whatever I ask for.
Once I had to lead a day on ‘Experiment with Light’ in Sweden. As it turned out, unexpectedly, most of the group were not Quakers. At the end of the day there was time for one last question: ‘Before you go, Diana, please give us an exact definition of “The Light”?’! I paused and centred myself and then heard myself say: ‘It’s a presence and a power that some of us call “God”.’
I have since felt that I could have added ‘and a guide’, for I have come to know, through experience, that guidance is available. I can’t explain this – it is mysterious – but I can say I know it. When I follow the guidance I’m given, I find all indecision melts away and there is an inward, quiet certainty that gives me the courage to respond. Again and again, this taking the first step of saying ‘Yes’ is followed by unforeseen happenings, which both confirm the leading and take it forward.
So, I can’t explain the mysterious ‘something more’; but I can try to live in response to it. This response includes wonder, a sense of being accompanied and a knowing and trying to live out love and find, through this, some meaning for my life.
At the very lowest, darkest moment of my life, as I sat by the broken body of my mother, who was dying after a car accident, when I cried out from the depths of my anguish and helplessness, I had the deepest, most profound experience of my life. It was of both of us being held in a love beyond measure; of a peace ‘beyond all understanding’; of a sense of joy and a certainty that ‘all is well’.
If you have never had such experiences, we may struggle to discover any common ground. But if you have, it doesn’t seem a good use of our time to argue about where they come from. I cannot, and don’t need to be able to, explain my experience. Words are totally inadequate to account for it.
Rowan Williams tried to put his faith into words when talking on the radio: ‘God is first and foremost that depth around all things and beyond all things into which, when I pray, I try to sink. But God is also an activity that comes to me out of that depth; tells me I’m loved; that opens up a future for me that offers transformations I can’t imagine. Very much a mystery, but also very much a presence’.
I am content to go on living the questions, trusting that I will gradually find my way into some of the answers. To nourish and challenge me on this journey, I need worship, which is, for me, so much more than ‘my one quiet hour in the week’.
In sharing what has happened to us my hope is that we might enlarge our understanding of each other, instead of becoming antagonistic.
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