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Friends have many words for the divine. Describing what we feel connected to in worship is not easy – in my case it doesn’t fit any of the descriptions I heard as a child, nor many that I have heard as an adult. Nonetheless, I use the word ‘God’. I understand the spirit behind all of the words, but they do not define the experience we have, only point to it.
It is axiomatic among Quakers that Friends are not given to times and seasons. We hold that God is immanent, that the experience of the spiritual is indissolubly woven into the everyday. That being the case, no particular place, no particular time, is any more sacred than any other. And yet, we still cherish some times more than others, some places more than others: Swarthmoor Hall, Woodbrooke, Friends House, our local Meeting House... ‘Cherishing’ is not quite ‘hallowing’, this much is true, but it’s a near neighbour.
In 2003, a few Friends noticed that a number of Quakers had settled in the Peckham area of south London. They started a Meeting for Worship, monthly, on Sunday evenings, in a home. That Meeting has continued for the last twenty-one years, until Friends discerned this year that it should be laid down. This is the story of Peckham & Plumstead Common Meeting.
Almost a year ago, our Meeting was enriched by a newcomer who is studying the thought and writings of Kong Fuzi, better known to us in the west as Confucius. Our new Friend Wenjun Zou told us of Confucian meditation practices. I wanted to know more, so she and I watched a programme focussed on his thought. I was interested by the concept of ‘ren’.
Our response to history is so often a matter of identifying with the bits we like and leaving behind the bits we don’t. Visiting a stately home is a chance to reflect on that.
Dave Tomlinson is an Anglican priest best known for How to be a Bad Christian… And a Better Human Being. His latest book is a collection of prayers that he has composed himself, mostly for his excellent Holy Shed podcast.
This is a fascinating, short book on spirituality and religious language. As the first part, ‘The Allegory of God’, makes clear, the author holds that all religious language is allegorical, existing ‘to enable humans to talk and think about the spirituality they experienced’. Equally fascinating is part two, ‘Mind, Brain and Spirit’, which expounds the later theories of the physicist Roger Penrose and the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. These suggest that ‘the Quantum structures’ which facilitate consciousness ‘are the very structures of the material of which all the stuff of the universe is made’. But as the author adds, this tells us little about the nature of subjective experience itself, or thus about spirituality.
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Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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