Thought for the Week: Neil Morgan comes back for more
‘Being Quaker allows me to express my dizzy dumbfoundedness, and sense of gratitude for this mystery.’
I attended Yearly Meeting Gathering in Friends House in 2018, when the decision was taken to revise Quaker faith & practice. I remember someone standing up to minister and saying something along the lines of ‘I do not believe in worship, that’s old fashioned’. Personally, I do worship. Indeed, I come to Meeting for Worship to worship. But what does it mean?
Each of us has a different view. I feel it as something linked to being alive, and the miracle of self-consciousness. Life – being – is a mystery, beyond (and in a different register to) the plain facts of chemistry and molecular biology. Seen from this perspective, it is not a scientific problem but something to wonder at, as Gabriel Marcel the Catholic existentialist has pointed out. Similarly, reality in its profusion illustrates what Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, has called, from her Christian perspective, ‘an over plus of meaning’. I would call this a profound sense that the world conveys more – in the same way that a painting conveys more meaning than the sum of its pigments. It depends how you look at it.
The simple, but striking, awareness of just being here unites every human soul – those before us, those alive now, and those in the future. As self-conscious beings, we are given the sense, for a moment, of being a part of everything. Thus we are able to partake in feelings that seem part of the eternal: love, for example.
We are, inevitably, caught up in the tide of life and self-consciousness from the moment of our birth. Then we are carried along by it as by a wave. We are not in control of it (just think about the turbulence of adolescence and first love). Helen Dunmore, the poet, deeply aware of mortality, talks of all this in a very moving way. ‘To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling, until it breaks and is gone’.
All of this is a profound mystery beyond plain human understanding, which is more used to counting beans. Seen as a gift, it points to the idea of grace. Being Quaker allows me to express my dizzy dumbfoundedness, and sense of gratitude for this mystery. By sharing this mystery with others in the silence of a Quaker Meeting, I become clearer. We can each find our own words, on the edge of language. It does not sit right that this mystery, and a spiritual if non-creedal dependence on it, can be ushered away by science as ‘nothing but’. Better perhaps, it is increased by the light thrown on it by the self-conscious mind.
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