'Knowing I was made in the image of God helped me with self-acceptance.' Photo: by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
What’s in a name? Abigail Maxwell on what we call ‘God’
‘These experiences are idiosyncratic, but we see commonalities.’
If there is an Eternal Creator, then I experience it. If humans are evolved animals in a material universe, there is something in us which Quakers have called God. We experience it as powerful and apparently alien in moments of Convincement, and as producing something new and valuable in ministry. It is as if we have conscious selves adapted for our society, and something inside fits us for something so different that we call it Heaven on Earth.
In Friends Journal recently, Rhiannon Grant called on nontheist ‘poets and prophets’ to produce names for this power. Possibly, ‘God within’ is the best, used to describe the only God that exists. Because it signifies something we do not understand, yet grow to know, its property of meaning different things to different people is an advantage. It could be applied to each person’s experience. These experiences are idiosyncratic, but we see commonalities.
Rhiannon objects to the term ‘inner light’, when white privilege rules Quakers. Dropping the term is merely symbolic, but we must do anything we can to oppose the quiet racism suffusing some Meetings.
Any word we choose moulds our understanding of God in helpful and unhelpful ways. Knowing I was made in the image of God helped me with self-acceptance. Seeing God’s power as ‘grace’ helped me understand myself. Sometimes the inner God is a ‘Muse’ giving me words. Sometimes it is a vocation: I saw a man remembering a cartoon of two cavemen looking at the Sun when he was a child, and knowing he wanted to be a comedian.
Combining these two, I might say I have an ‘inner Guide’ using a capital letter to show its importance and strangeness. But this implies there is something guiding, and a separate thing guided. Sometimes that is my experience. I suffer internal conflicts. And doing the work of sitting in Stillness (that capitalisation again) I bring the unconscious into consciousness. Increasingly I speak with my integrity, saying what I know with every fibre of my being to be true.
We have a compass or north star, showing what is right, and I felt utter misery seeing an injustice and knowing I did not have the strength or capacity to oppose it. It took time for me to accept my Guide’s absolution for that. My Guide knows what I am capable of, and how it differs from my desire for a false perfection or my self-abasement.
My Guide grows in me, so I love Isaac Penington’s metaphor of the ‘seed which God sows in the heart’. Perhaps we need many words, each showing a different aspect of what twelve-steppers call a Higher Power, which could be that eternal Creator or something in each human being.
Rhiannon’s article can be read at www.friendsjournal.org/the-quaker-vocabulary-of-tomorrow, or in the December issue of the print magazine.
