Thought for the Week: Flowing together
Derrick R Whitehouse reflects on the question: What do Friends believe?
What is the reality of the culture in a typical Local Quaker Meeting in Britain today? What do the participants in those Meetings actually believe? These questions have puzzled me for a number of years and I have travelled widely amongst Local Meetings in an attempt to find the precise position of Friends on both these issues.
My conclusion is that many participants in our Meetings, be they attenders or members, are still open-minded and perpetual questers concerning their own spiritual path. For many this means that they are not able to be precise over their personal convictions.
So, how do we group these cautionary seekers who are reluctant to commit, yet continue to find their association with Friends Meetings desirable and essential for the development of their faith and practice? My deduction is to call them ‘Proteans’.
Proteus, in Greek mythology, was a wise man of the sea. Each time he would change his appearance at will when approached for advice, which he also varied. To be Protean means having an outlook on life that is variable, versatile, flexible, adaptable and open to change.
Therefore, being spiritually protean means: I am always open to new understanding from whatever source; I may change my mind quite often; I tend to vary in what I proclaim; I remain flexible in my understanding; I am able to adapt readily to any belief or interpretation; I know that I am a versatile person who is able to change in outlook readily; and I enjoy having these personal protean characteristics.
By being protean I can use God language or nontheist language or philosophical or psychological explanations as the spirit moves me without feelings of guilt.
This, I know, is how numerous participants in many of our Local Meetings are thinking and behaving, which I find healthy and commendable. Often, people tell me that they do not wish to play word games over specific definitions of faith practices. They know there is ‘something there’ beyond the self and do not wish to get into a discussion or to understand what it is. Yet, paradoxically, at the same time they are exploring their personal truth in their own special way and that is enough for them at the moment.
We have a range of belief systems and references that many hold fast. These Friends are the bedrock of Meeting cultures. We have conventional and conditional Christians; there are those who go along with Eastern and Middle Eastern faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Sufi philosophy; then there are nontheists and religious humanists; and, recently, Quaker pagans (Quagans) or simply a healthy agnostic without enough knowledge to commit to anything. It could be suggested that British Quakerism is tantamount to becoming a protean Religious Society of Friends.
Our saving grace is that we all strive for unity with one another through our style of worship and discernment, our sense of a covenanted community, loving and trusting each other and through social witness based, largely, on our testimonies. We find that we are able not only to live together but we actually rejoice in our diversity.
In other words, we are united in our cultural and spiritual questing and, to use a metaphor relating to rivers and streams, we need to flow together. When rivers and streams join up, we talk about the confluence. I find this analogy helpful as, once the spiritual water flows from the streams to the river and from tributaries to the larger river, it is not possible to define where the water has come from. It is all the same nourishing and essential commodity and there is no tangible difference to be found. Then we are confluent – flowing together, uniting in the quest.
For that reason I would describe the reality of contemporary British Quakerism as a confluence of faiths flowing together in the pursuit of common convictions and concerns. That should be enough to present us with a feeling of unity with one another. But, of course, this particular Friend may not ‘speak your mind’.
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