a simple, radical,
contemporary spiritual path
So who are the Quakers? The start of the organisation was amongst the groups of seekers in the seventeenth century, people who in and around the time of Oliver Cromwell were unhappy with the way the established church, and the Church of Rome, were implementing the teachings of Christianity – and equally unhappy with Cromwell and his approach to these teachings. It was a man called George Fox who coalesced many of these groups into the Society of the Friends of Truth, later known as the Society of Friends. In their early days these ‘Friends’ gained the nickname Quakers, and this has stuck ever since.
Quakers are still a group of seekers at heart, with roots in Christianity but not restricted by it, who meet together in an organised way because they believe that the sharing of insights – and doubts – between one another is a strong tool in the search for spiritual Truth and an equally strong weapon in resolving what is not Truth.
So why should Quakers be in any
position to
offer a spiritual path when they are still
seeking what
that path might be? It would
be inspiring to think that absolute Truth
is
there to be found by those who search the
most diligently, but it is
not like that. There
may be absolute spiritual truth, but the nature of human interaction with the world of the Divine is such that we humans have no way of knowing with absolute certainty whether the truth we sense from experience is Truth indeed. But that does not mean we know nothing. We Quakers feel we have a sense of a part of that absolute truth, and we need to share it, both because others can share in our sense of part of the truth and because the insights of others might well open up more of it.
But this last paragraph probably begs more questions than it answers. How do Quakers, or anyone else, know about things spiritual? Are they a figment of our communal imaginations anyway? Why should Quakers think that anyone else would have, or even want to have, any spiritual insight?
It is true that church-going is at an all-time low, and set to decrease even further. It is also true that many people nowadays are rejecting much of the teachings of the traditional church. Whilst some Christians believe, and believe totally sincerely, in the ideas of, for examples, the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth and of his resurrection following his death from crucifixion, or the stories of the lives of Noah and Methuselah, the majority of our citizens tend to the view that these events did not happen or if they did then it is of no importance to anyone today.
But whilst less than 10% of Britons now attend church regularly, serious objective research has shown that over three quarters of the population are prepared to acknowledge spiritual experience – experience of something which is separate from our normal physical selves, something 'out there'. For some this is only a feeling of contact with or closeness to someone who has died, but nevertheless it is experience of something that cannot be described or explained in scientific terms, something which is 'out there'. Others experience a much stronger feeling of being held, being supported, being led. We humans often do not have the words to describe or explain what we experience, but it does not make the experience any the less real.
Some people equate experience of the movings of the spirit with such as talking with ancestors through the power of a Medium, with lights going on and off and tables moving in front of them and so on – and cynically reject the whole idea of anything that science cannot explain. To do this is to miss the importance of an underlying reality because a few people exploit the idea for whatever personal reason.
The research that indicated that many of us can acknowledge some personal spiritual experience also showed that only around 4% of the population adopts an atheist position, asserting that there is no God, no divine power, no spiritual force, no overall creator, nothing on this earth that is not capable of being resolved into scientific fact and mathematical equation. It is worth reflecting that if 96% of us do not adopt that position then the likelihood is that there is something that we can recognise, something that is real despite the fact that science cannot explain it, something that we can only describe as spiritual.
So what is Quaker Quest all about? Quakers feel they should share something of their understanding and experience of the spiritual dimension of life. Why? – because Quakers feel it will contribute to the happiness of those who gain from us and to the wellbeing of the world. There is something to offer. 'Quest' is not primarily about gaining new Quakers, but it is recognised that, whoever you are, if there is a sharing of the route and the findings and the consequences of that search then greater rewards accrue. Quakers are more than ready to see new members of the Quaker community because it is a ready-made means of sharing spiritual experience.
But it is not just
the experience of the spiritual. Quakers have also had to find their
way through the mixture of truth and human accretion that is the state
of traditional religion today and create, insofar as it can be done, a
coherent, reasonable and acceptable understanding of religious
traditions (not Christianity alone) that does not 'throw out the baby
with the bathwater'. Much of many people’s reaction to anything
religious is governed by their reaction to certain medieval
understandings such as the idea of God as a human form up in the
clouds. That there is an organisation that has learnt to deal with
these difficulties may be of considerable benefit to those who are
seeking answers to spiritual questions and find the traditional
Christian answers unconvincing.
So what do Quakers understand by this spiritual dimension? It is not thought of as a system of beliefs. Quakers are not saying you have to believe that the Spirit is this or the Spirit does that or that you have to be like this to accept the Spirit. Quakers are saying that there is something of God (ie the Spirit) in everyone, that there is no need for special people – ministers of religion – to open you or me to the leadings of that Spirit and that the promptings of love and truth in our hearts are in fact the leadings of that Spirit. Quakers are not defining what the Spirit is, or even giving it a single name. Quakers, according to personal preference very often, might use the terms God, the Spirit, the Divine, the Light, or any of the other words that might be used to give a handle to their spiritual experience. Definitions in words limit the scope of something, and the Spirit cannot be limited by human words. The Jews realised this when they thought of their spiritual force as 'that which has no name'.
If you have followed the direction of this discussion so far, you will probably understand why Quakers are offering a spiritual path, not spiritual truth or spiritual revelation or spiritual understanding. Quakers are offering a way of life, a spiritual journey, a spiritual roadmap. We are all on a spiritual journey. Quakers are not making claims about reaching any destination, or indeed that anyone will get to any particular destination. Quakers are not talking about destinations, but about a way of life. Quakers are talking about leadings, which anyone can and will benefit from. This is about the present and the next step, not something that might be at the end of the rainbow.
The claim in our advert is that the path is simple. That means not simple as in 'easy' but simple as in 'uncomplicated'. What Quakers are saying is that a lot of what goes for religious belief is man-made, unnecessary for the spiritual journey, and limiting. The true effect of one’s spiritual consciousness should be on what you do, not on what you believe. Quakers do not believe, for example, that Moslems are wrong and Christians right about their ideas on, say, heaven and hell, or the place of women, or how many times it is necessary to pray in a day, or where you must go to pray. Quakers do not believe that Moslems are right and Christians wrong on these matters either. It is believed that there is a common trend in all religions which determines the way human beings should live and that this is what is important. The two commandments of Jesus, that you should love God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself, re-expressed in modern language mean that we should listen to the movings of the spirit within us and treat our neighbour accordingly, not because of any reward of heaven hereafter or threat of hell and damnation, not because the Church says we must, not because the Bible says we must, but because that is what we are being led to do.
Many Quakers, but not all, would describe themselves as Christian. It depends on what is considered that being Christian entails, or in other words, whether you believe certain specific beliefs are essential to being Christian or whether you consider being Christian means essentially that you attempt to follow the teachings of Jesus. Christianity is part of our heritage, part of our culture, part of our inheritance. That does not mean that Buddhists have got it wrong, but just that they are operating in a parallel culture in another society. Simplicity is the shedding of all that is unnecessary, getting to the foundations of what matters. That is what Quakers seek to do and that is what you are invited to share in.
Quakers are also claiming that the path we are offering is radical. It gets to the root of things. It does not get sidetracked into the vagaries of theology. Our path is concerned with fulfilling our ideals and beliefs in the real world, not endless analysing, considering, debating, questioning to the point where the debate becomes important rather than the action. Quakers are only human, and that means that achievements do not always match intentions, but the intentions are radical, do get to the root of things, and that determines where we should be going.
What about being contemporary? As commented already, the vast majority of the world’s population recognise a spiritual awareness, although this does not always appear in identical form. And each tribe of human beings has their own understanding of what that spiritual awareness means, where it comes from, and what it demands. When knowledge of the known world extended to Gibraltar in the west and India in the east, the notion that the world is flat was sustainable, and you could build a representation of what was above and below this flat world to explain not only rain, clouds, sun, volcanoes and so on, but the spiritual world as well. Now that we know the world is a sphere in a vast conglomeration of similar objects our attempted explanations have to be different. What matters is not, in the final analysis, whether any particular explanation is true or false, sustainable or unsustainable, but whether it gives a valid picture of that part we see of our spiritual existence. It follows that any images belonging to an earlier period are only part of a present-day image of the Spirit world in so far as they help our understanding. Quakers do not feel bound by a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, by an Old Testament explanation of the origins of life, by Medieval ideas of heaven and hell. It may be harder – perhaps a lot harder – to sort out our own picture of the spiritual world (and we all have to make one because we are incapable as humans of fully comprehending the unenvisagable), but Quakers hold that it is important to do so nevertheless.