Thought for the Week: Trust, wait and meet together
Richard Thompson shares an experience
We arrived at the Maison Quaker in Congénies, the only purpose-built Meeting house in France, at 10.30am after a drive of one-and-a-half hours, with time to relax and prepare for Meeting for Worship. I knew that a non-Quaker group had been following a week-long course based on silence and I asked Dave, one of the resident Friends, how he had found the week. ‘It’s strange to explain,’ he replied, ‘in the evening, when my wife Judith and I joined them for supper, I felt something different… like a calm energy.’ Then I came across some of the group having coffee and chatting together and told them of this feeling. I added that our Western culture tells us that silence is an absence of words; but Dave was talking about an experience of presence, of strength. They were moved.
In Meeting I saw that this experience of presence in me is short. It is as if our tasting of reality is taken over by our ‘normal’ cultural attitudes. Thomas Merton expressed it very uncomfortably: ‘Reflect, sometimes, on the disquieting fact that most of your statements of opinions, tastes, deeds, desires, hopes and fears are statements about someone who is not really present. When you say “I think”, it is often not you who think, but “they” – it is the anonymous authority of the “collectivity” speaking through your mask.’
Thomas Merton suggests: ‘The first thing you have to do, before you even start thinking about such a thing as contemplation, is to try to recover your basic natural unity, to reintegrate your compartmentalised being into a coordinated and simple whole and learn to live as a unified human person…’ He concludes: ‘The inner self is not a part of our being, like a motor in a car.’ Then I add my own words: ‘It is an aliveness.’
In my ‘normal’ day I often do not give time to taste this reality, especially in periods of collective fear and insecurity, like the one following the Brexit result. We have, fortunately, this amazingly simple, and difficult, advice from the early Quakers to trust and wait. We remember that balance of not letting the mental or emotional or even physical take us over. Then we begin with trust.
George Fox bids us: ‘Let your faith be in the power that goes through all things, and over all things.’ We now take on the challenge of waiting: ‘Your strength is to stand still, after ye see yourselves.’ He combines trusting and waiting when he asks us not to fret about time: ‘So be faithful, and live in that which doth not think the time long.’ Third, this advice is important: ‘Friends, meet together and know one another in that which is eternal, which was before the world was.’
My question is now: ‘How do I begin to live this new perspective?’ Certainly ‘Meet together…’ is essential whenever I can meet up with Friends. In addition, I resolve to remember in my normal daily life to ‘Wait in the life, which will keep you above words’. Rex Ambler’s modern English translation of this is beautiful: ‘Stay with the experience of the life within you, and this will free you from a dependence on words.’
Comments
Richard, this matter of waiting is so counter to our culture that it is presented as ‘not doing’, whereas, as you have offered,it is of the essence of doing, the essence of being. Thank you. I would like to be better at it, but I suppose even that is a daft thought! Waiting without wanting. Perhaps that’s it.
By Scribe on 15th September 2016 - 16:57
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