‘Quaker worship, in my experience, is more about being changed than it is about being confirmed in where I already am.’ Photo: By Vanessa Krebs on Unsplash.
Travelling Light: Matt Rosen journeys home around the Yearly Meeting
‘This is no easy homecoming.’
I’ve travelled extensively around our Yearly Meeting over the past year, visiting many small and struggling Meetings. I’ve witnessed the exhausting demands of many Quaker roles, and the anxiety of many Friends about the future of our Religious Society.
As I’ve travelled, I’ve marvelled at the confidence and conviction of our spiritual ancestors, who joined the Quaker movement in extraordinary numbers while this was seriously risky. They clearly had a message worth suffering for. It was a simple message that appealed to many seekers, up and down the country, who had become exhausted and despairing looking for the truth outside themselves. ‘Why gad you abroad?’ they preached. ‘Return, return to Him that is the first Love’, they cried in towns and villages, on hillsides and in steeplehouses (Quaker faith & practice 26.71). Their earth-shaking message was that Christ can be found in every heart, and that once listened to, he will join us together to learn from him: their slogan was, ‘Christ has come to teach his people himself’. As they listened, this Voice of Love and Hope led them to preach by word and deed everywhere they went.
Many of us are only passingly aware of this history – indeed, many of us regard as history what our spiritual ancestors called ‘the everlasting gospel’, this message of God’s presence and power here and now. We are very reasonably wary of becoming a seventeenth-century reenactment society, a group centred more on George Fox than on Jesus the Light Within. Fair enough. But we miss something: the excitement of the early Quaker movement was found in the fact that George Fox was not preaching himself, or with any power or technique to which he had special access. He preached the living Word to be found in every single person, and its power to transform us all.
With an eye toward this life-changing message, I’ve often asked Friends why they became Quakers, why they come to Meeting, why they walked through the door and stuck around. I’ve heard many fascinating answers: stories of lives changed in waiting worship; experiences of answers found, hearts softened, and forgiveness made possible. But the answer I’ve heard most often is some version of, ‘I came to Meeting and simply knew I was home’.
There’s a way to understand this experience that seems to me to harmonise with early Quaker experience. When the first Friends were ‘convinced of the Truth’, they came to see and hearken to a Power that had been working in them all along, but which they had missed as they searched for answers outside themselves, depending on the authority of books or other people. This convincement experience was often profoundly uncomfortable. As the first Advices & queries reminds us, the Light first of all shows us our darkness, and as we wait in the Light, we are then brought toward new life. This is no easy homecoming. As Fox puts it in his Journal, ‘As the light appeared, all appeared that is out of the light’. As early Friends came home to their first Love, to Jesus in them, they found themselves changed and worked on, not just confirmed. They described this as the awakening of a witness for God in them.
I worry that we sometimes have a much more comfortable homecoming in mind, one that affirms our prior convictions, leaving us relatively unchanged. Even more than there was in Fox’s day, there is now a marketplace of religions, and we may be drawn to a faith whose values align with our own. We may feel at home in a Quaker Meeting because we are surrounded by people like us, people who more or less think like we do. Convincement can become about fitting in, being among our tribe.
‘Quaker worship, in my experience, is more about being changed than it is about being confirmed in where I already am.’
Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful if our experience of worship deepens our commitment to good values, and if our community helps us to live with greater integrity. But Quaker worship, in my experience, is more about being changed, finding the good in me raised up, and the evil held down, than it is about being confirmed in where I already am. God’s love for me is not lessened one iota by my weakness or failings, and it is this love that then works in me for good.
Stephen Crisp, an early travelling minister and writer, advised Friends, in a sermon in 1691, to come to Meeting ‘as poor desolate helpless People that are broken off from all their own Confidence and Trust, and have nothing to rely upon but the Mercy and Goodness of God’ (The Kingdom of God Within, 1707). We should come, Crisp says, expecting to be changed, helped, comforted, made uncomfortable, and renewed more and more into the Divine image. We should come in full awareness of our own weakness and need for help from a Power greater than ourselves, and we should expect that Power to show up. We may not all come with minds alike, and we may not find our values confirmed as we wait on this Power. But as we wait, my experience is that we will be joined together in a much deeper way.
It’s an amazing thing when our worshipping communities help us to ‘return home to within’, to find God already at work in our hearts. That’s a homecoming to celebrate. This is very different from discovering a religion that checks the right pre-existing boxes. Indeed, early Friends strongly believed that the Word was made flesh, not in order to found one more world religion, but in order to point people to the life of that Word in themselves, and to rescue us from all human-made religions. They preached a direct teacher-student relationship with Christ within, not a system of values. This meant a life of learning and changing in faithfulness to the Light, not an endorsement of our own ideas and agendas. It meant being drawn into a community of fellow humble learners in the school of Christ, in a unity that goes deeper than like-mindedness. It meant, simply, an openness to being guided.
I pray that we all experience the homecoming of transforming worship. Perhaps then we will hear that early Quaker cry, ‘Christ has come to teach his people himself’, with new ears, and we will be ready to learn from him. Having been weary and heavy-laden, we will be ready to return to our first Love, find new peace, and see what adventures this Love will take us on.
Comments
Good article. Takes us back to our theocentric roots. Has echoes of Ben Pink Dandelion’s Swarthmore Lecture “Open for Transformation”.
By Richard Pashley on 7th September 2024 - 15:09
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