Open source: Kenneth Bird’s Thought for the Week

‘What Quakers have to offer today lies not in our testimonies.’

How much is my Quaker faith formed or influenced by my philosophical understanding – my theology, if you will? I have reached a convincement that there is a unifying principle which is underlying, sustaining – and also creatively informing – the cosmos.

This principle, which I term God, represents total pure energy, unfathomable in its vastness and in its particularity. The closer it infuses the microcosm, the more loving, less impersonal it appears. We can truly claim that God loves all creatures and that those creatures reflect the glory.

It is our consciousness that enables us, after our kind, to acknowledge and listen to the divine spirit at work in the world. We are given right of access for the asking, for the sharing, for our deepest enjoyment. There is a reciprocity that offers peace and the impetus for serving others.

‘What Quakers can offer above all is the sharing of our understanding of the source of spiritual energy, which is present in everyone.’

From where I stand, I see our Quaker testimonies as founded upon our relationship to God, not merely alongside or collateral, but growing out as of the true vine, the metaphor which Jesus offered his hearers.

What Quakers have to offer today lies not in our testimonies, though we practise and wear these as a badge. It lies not in our way of silent worship either, though this can of course be a powerful source of energy and inspiration. What I believe Quakers can offer above all is the sharing of our understanding of the source of that spiritual energy, which is present in everyone, and which embraces the oneness, the underlying unity of all created matter.

It might appear that this is an intellectual pursuit, which perhaps it is until it is transmuted into practical paths of joy and love, into the particularity of the individual circumstances of our lives. Our response is not just of the mind, for the mind is in the heart – to quote RS Thomas in his poem ‘Suddenly’:

I looked 

at him, not with the eye

only, but with the whole

of my being, overflowing with

him as a chalice would

with the sea.

To which one can only say ‘Amen’. 

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