Unemphatically speaking
John Anderson entreats Friends to use plain speech
If I were a Quaker pope I would permanently proscribe the use of adjectives such as ‘deep’, ‘total’, ‘profound’ and ‘absolute’. Actually, I would forbid the employment of all ‘emphatic and extravagant quantifiers’ in our Friendly discourse and writing.
It is not just that I find myself somewhat shamed and diminished by such words, implying, as I take them, that other folk have much more significant thoughts, feelings and things to say, but that they represent a challenge to our testimony to equality. I believe we all live on the surface of our lives.
An image of the human psyche could be that of a bowl of porridge: the skin standing for awareness and all that bubbles and seethes beneath for the unconscious: desires, fears and regrets; ecstasy and despair; the need to love and be loved and the rest – you name it and it’s there somewhere in the boiling – of which we can only become aware if and when they break the surface.
All our experience registers superficially. While some things will have a greater impact than others, the Spirit is manifest in every aspect of life: as much in opening a can of baked beans as in an audience with the Dalai Lama.
How can I compare the strength of my experience with that of another? If I claim to be ‘totally overwhelmed’, does this not imply that I (or more likely someone else) has the capacity to be just a little overwhelmed? Similarly, with ‘profoundly moved’. Does this imply the possibility of a shallow alternative? Weak cases, also, demand strong defences.
We all, rightly, suspect that someone, with something to sell, who claims to be ‘absolutely and completely honest with you,’ is about to express either a partial truth or a downright lie.
So, there may be good reason to suspect the over-the-top claims of others to extraordinarily profound (or sublime) emotion and experience.
I have, also, often been struck by a disparity between the inordinate claims of hurt and objective evidence for it. I am convinced that those protesting their pain too vehemently often wind up fulfilling their own glum prophesies, and frequently progress to the conclusion that either they are uniquely oppressed or that humanity shares a general brokenness.
William Blake reminds us in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Everything that lives is holy’. As in life, so in the experience of life; a Meeting for Worship rich in ministry or one passed in total silence; a child’s homemade Christmas card or the Rembrandt self-portrait at Kenwood House in Hampstead; the manicured gardens at Rosemoor in Devon or a host of golden dandelions beside the A38; these few words or those many words of a revered mystic. All perceptions impact as they impact and there is no correlation with the remoteness from which they may have come.
Nothing should be beneath our notice; with a refreshing frequency, we can discover the Spirit to be alive and kicking in the quotidian. You would rightly convict me of being profoundly suspicious of, deeply unhappy with, and utterly, completely and absolutely opposed to extreme expression in any form.
So, I would entreat Friends to revisit plain speech; let us, of course, experience, feel, think and express as we always have but be, also, over and done with ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ – in fact, with all the ‘emphatic and extravagant quantifiers’.
