Walking cheerfully in a time of darkness: Harvey Gillman wrestles with something

‘All my life I have sought, and occasionally found, communion’

About four years ago I decided I would no longer organise weekend retreats. I had said all I had to say. There was a danger of becoming a cliché. Then came Covid and lockdown. During that period, I was able to fulfil one of my ambitions: to edit and put together an anthology of poetry written over a period of sixty years. But I then received an invitation to conduct a retreat at Charney Manor, the Quaker retreat centre.

I was really challenged by this. The theme was up to me, which made it all the more difficult. ‘What canst thou say?’, as George Fox asked. Did I have anything to say at all?

I was in a time of confusion. My sense of being part of a community seemed less than before. I have often felt myself an imposter, wondering if I really fit in among Friends. My enthusiasms, occasional cynicisms, the ease with which I get angry, my increasing intolerance of debates over theism/non-theism, post theism, atheism, my intolerance of intolerance, my occasional discomfort even with the niceness of such lovely people like Quakers, my sense of being in a secular humanitarian society, lacking a depth of spiritual conviction… all these challenged my sense of being at home here. And yet I was being called to offer a weekend retreat. And so, believing that one’s self and one’s experience are actually all one has to offer others, I gave a title: ‘Walking cheerfully in a time of darkness’.

This title was a challenge to my own situation. I am not always cheerful.

I tend to be spontaneous in my offerings, but I decided that the weekend would need a structure. It came to me that a sort of open liturgy was required. I chose the mass as a format, but a Quaker mass: lamentation for confession; seeds of light as the Gloria; sharing the words of our lives and readings and music and artworks; and opening ourselves to the world through meditation and reflection on text. This would be a peaceful sharing of different experiences – communion through deepening our sense of ourselves as community, sharing the bread of our lives. Then, at the end, a thanksgiving for the grace of being together. We shared our experience of the last two years: our pain, our anger, what kept us going, and our hopes.

One of the sessions included a reflection on the struggle of Jacob with the man/angel/self/God in Genesis 32. Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the Hebrews, had deceived his brother Esau, who became his foe. One night Jacob realises that Esau is coming to meet him ‘with four hundred men’. Jacob fears for his life. In a cowardly moment he sends on half his flock and servants, almost willing to sacrifice them if violence ensues. It is dark. There is a river to cross. Jacob then sends on the rest of his family and flocks, hoping that his brother will be appeased – anything but fight with his brother. Then, in the darkness, in fear and solitude, he meets ‘the man’, the other, often interpreted as an angel or God.

To me this is the archetype of the other which is also part of the self, that which must be encountered. In a time of real darkness, having lost everything, Jacob wrestles with the ‘man’ until dawn. Having avoided conflict with his brother, he now refuses to give up the struggle with the stranger. The man forces him to say his name. In this struggle Jacob must accept his own identity, must come out to himself. But the other man, when he is challenged by Jacob, refuses to name himself. He remains the nameless one, struggled with as night becomes day. Eventually, Jacob leaves the struggle with a dislocated hip, but he has forced the man to give him a blessing. As a result of the struggle he is given a new name, Israel, ‘because you strove with God and man, and prevailed’.

I find this particularly powerful: it relates the encounter with the dark as a noble struggle.

We bring to this encounter the whole of our selves. We struggle with something within and beyond ourselves. And we yield to it. In this we are aware of our solitude. But this challenge may be a source of blessing. Blessing is ambiguous, we leave the encounter limping. We realise that the names we give and are given are partial, but we cannot name that which transcends us. At a time of disease, warfare and climate crisis, we are challenged to recognise who we are, how we might struggle, and at the same time the cost to our bodies and our souls.

When George Fox talked of walking cheerfully, he was not giving a command. He was talking about the outcome of the encounter with the divine within: ‘Be patterns, be examples… then you will come to walk cheerfully’. You cannot command anyone to be cheerful. You are in the light with all your pain, your darkness, your glory. Cheerfulness here is not a superficial smiling niceness. It is a sense of courage, when the face is lifted to the world – ‘cheerful’ deriving from the Latin ‘cara’, meaning ‘face’.

I have received another invitation for later in the year. Having once described myself as a seeker, finder, and explorer, I began to feel challenged about what I was looking for. After this weekend it came to me very strongly that all my life I have sought, and occasionally found, communion. A depth of relationship, a being at home in the world, the social, the personal, and the natural world, which is all one, an opening to that which is within and beyond and between.

I was very moved by a recent article in this magazine that talked about ‘the framing structure of the transcendent’. Increasingly I return to the Jewish prohibition not to mention the word ‘God’ except in prayer. I am more comfortable with the words ‘the divine’, but one has to find one’s own words, if one needs words. Many Friends are suspicious of religious language and I understand why. But for me the word ‘communion’, for all its historical overtones, is the reason I remain part of a religious tradition. It contains the passion, longing and yearning for relationship, within a framework of reverence. It is out of this communion – with self, the other, and the world, underpinned by something which is both within and beyond – that our witness through action springs. Our testimonies are love in action, our worship in the world. In this worship we bring our despair, our lamentation, our sense of anger at injustice, and our need to behold and restore the sacredness of things. In this worship we are seeking for seeds of light. We share our words and our silences; we pray with or without words, for peace, equality, truthfulness and simplicity, and for a reverence for the earth. Communion makes community. In community we find words, however tentative. ‘Communion, community, and communication’ is the title of another adventure.

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Comments

I lift my face, in giving thanks for this article, having never known cara from which we derive our notion of cheerfulness means face.  I am reminded that though I cannot always walk cheerfully, I can step out with heart, or courage in lifting my face to what communion may come…..
Thank you Harvey Gilman for these moments of communion which speak to my condition this day.

By bigbooks1963@gmail.com on 12th January 2023 - 12:24

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Thanks Harvey. I found this an illuminating - so to speak - way of addressing darkness,  especially the observation that blessing itself may be ambiguous, painful.

Mike

By RMNELLIS on 9th March 2023 - 13:25

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