Do monotheists have a monopoly over religion?

I feel the Religious Society of Friends would be misrepresented if the marriage declaration was altered along the lines suggested in the Friend of 10 February in order to accommodate non-theism, unless we wish to abandon our traditional view that marriage is a ‘religious commitment’ as set out in Quaker faith & practice (1.02, 23).

The declaration not only reflects the couple’s view of marriage but also the view of the Religious Society of Friends as a corporate body.

In my opinion the way in which we define commitments such as marriage and membership reflects how we see ourselves as a faith community. If we wish to remain a religious society, why would it be right for us to define either in non-religious terms? Richard Pashley, The Friend, March 2, 2023

Equating being “non-theist” with being “non-religious” is something of an error. Many non-theist have a deeply spiritual and reverential attitudes towards life and towards relationships. That is not lessened for them by the absence of a purported intangible. 

Many modern Pagans regard the earth itself as sacred and the life springing from it as its sacred out-flowing. They reverence the natural world. The sky god, the celestial god, the abstracted omnipresent but intangible god of judgement, trapped in the texts of ancient books, is not their god. Their focus of reverence is tangible: it is the woods and trees, the rivers and streams, and the abundant fecundity of life.

The Taoist reverence the flow of energy through everything. It is not the river that is sacred, but the flowing of the river. It is not the tree that is sacred, but its growing. It is not the leaf that is sacred but the falling of the leaf. It is not the bird that is sacred, but the flying and singing of the bird. It is not the person that is sacred, but the life that flows through them. When we are in accord with the flow, when we are in harmony with it, when we bend ourselves to it, then we are in spiritual alignment. There is no god, no operator behind the scenes pulling the strings, no eternal all seeing judge, just the flow that gives and keeps on giving, without judgement.

The great Tao flows everywhere. All things are born from it, yet it doesn't create them. It pours itself into its work, yet it makes no claim. It nourishes infinite worlds, yet it does not hold on to them. Since it is merged with all things and hidden in their hearts, it can be called humble. Since all things vanish into it and it alone endures, it can be called great. It isn't aware of its greatness; thus it is truly great.  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Are we to say that the Pagan or the Taoist are not religious because they have no god? Equally, can we say that the non-theist is not religious, because, likewise, they have no god?

Late Roman Empire Christianity – the illegitimate child of Judaism grown into maturity, conformity and authority – inherited from its parent a conception of a celestial god – ineffable, omnipotent, omnipresent, a law giving mega-god – and passed that conception on to its breakaway children, reformed Protestant and non-conformist alike. That was the dominant conception of the god of Christianity in seventeenth century England. We should not be surprised to find that conception embedded in the words of seventeenth century Quakers. 

Their radical re-centring onto unmeditated experience and away from ritual may have returned those first Quakers to what they thought was a form of primitive Christianity, more akin the lived experience of Jesus and his disciples, but it also took them away from reliance on creed or doctrine. They conceived of Jesus as standing in the presence but with the word in his heart. They too wished to stand in such a presence harkening to the word in their heart; and they found that it was in stillness and silence that the seed of that word grew and gave forth. 

But the presence of what? To say that is to leave a vacuum that linguistically begs to be filled. Does it need to be filled? That sense of wonder, awe, reverence, sacredness and transcendence is a vehicle for spirituality, but does it necessarily have to carry you to the response "god"? Is that a convenient word that serves to fill a linguistic vacuum? An obedience to the subject <–> object structure of our language? Is such a response void filling in order to be rid of cognitive and linguistic discomfort? Should we not be examining that discomfort and learning from it? To avoid doing this is, if anything, lazy. 

Our language, it seems, requires an object, but, as the theologian Paul Tillich* points out, if "god' is an object, then he is only one more thing among a universe of things, and, as he is not immediately apparent or tangible, he can cease to have importance or relevance. Rather, Tillich felt that 'god' should stand for the very ground of being itself, or, as he sometimes put it, as being itself: god as sacredness, as reverence, as wonder, as awe, as the totality of being, as our greatest concern, not as one more object among a universe of objects.

In Tibetan Buddhism sometimes pupils are advised to practice 'god' devotion. Only when they have fully realised the practice and come to be devoted to the god, experiencing them as real, does the meditation master burst the bubble so that the pupils are shocked into realising that they have created an idol that is a projection of their own yearnings. Thus deconstructed, 'god' function as a doorway into deeper realisation. This is similar to the Zen advice, that "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him". The devotion and reverence engendered by the practice of god-worship is thus transferred to all life, to being itself. 

Are we to say that such Buddhists are not religious because they have burst the bubble of god? Equally, can we say that the non-theist is not religious, because, likewise, they have no god? Because they are not prepared to worship an idol that is a projection of their own yearnings? That is to deny them devotional and reverential agency. That is to deny them profoundly religious experiences simply because they are not prepared to focus those feelings onto the inherited god of Christianity, a culturally manufactured idol.

I have no doubt that many non-theists are deeply religious, which is exactly why they are non-theist. To worship an mind-made idol – a projection – which they know to be mind-made, would be sacrilegious, blasphemous, and a manifest gross lack of integrity.

Carl Jung in his work as an explorer of the human mind – the psyche – identified what he called the 'god-archetype. A latent cluster of feeling, images, desires, yearnings, in his patients which troubled them unless attended to. It often found form by projection, taking the shape suggested by the patient's culture and history, becoming an object of devotion, of worship, of ritual and of veneration. Alternatively they might suppress it, becoming notably iconoclastic and atheistic; or inflate their experience, becoming identified with the archetype, either embodying it or by becoming its servant. He advised that only integration would aid what he called individuation – which we might think of as maturation – conditioning the psyche (spirit) into wisdom rather than knowledge, thus letting those complex feelings find expression in ways that helped build and enrich life. 

Participation mystique: inherited guilt & reparations

Reparations for slavery

(The Friend) 5 Jan 2023 | by Rebecca Hardy

Decision to make reparations for the transatlantic slave trade taken at Yearly Meeting in May.

Quakers acted on their commitment to anti-racism this year with a historic decision to make reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. The agreement, made at Yearly Meeting in May, followed an earlier announcement to rename the William Penn room at Friends House after abolitionist Benjamin Lay. The new name was suggested by staff at the Quiet Company, which manages Friends House. BYM said that Penn ‘made important contributions to religious freedom, democracy and pacifism, and these will be remembered. But we cannot ignore the truth that he was also a slaveholder, profiting from enslaved people, like many other Quakers’.

Meanwhile, Friends across the country committed to work towards improving diversity. In August, Edwina Peart, BYM’s diversity and inclusion coordinator, said that the Quaker community has made ‘good progress’, but ‘we need to be brave and continue to engage with what are often difficult conversations’.

The year ended with December’s Meeting for Sufferings reiterating the Quaker Life request that Friends cease using the term ‘overseer’.

But why do we feel burdened by guilt over practices that ended about two hundred years ago?  Why do we feel this to be a stain on the name "Quaker"? Why we feel associated with the doings of people now long dead?

One personality test I encountered simply ask participants to list twenty things they are:

I am a …

This was suggested as a starting point to understanding the socially constructed side of identity. In addition to the roles you fill, many of the answers would map belonging, the bond you feel with the society that surrounds you, not just with your family or kinship group, but beyond. What is interesting is how many of those bonds which help define your self-identity in our modern context are with 'social objects': organisations, institutions, businesses, clubs, societies, corporations – objects which are even recognised in law as persons, entities, beings in their own right. They are shared fictions which exist in social contexts and have economic, legal and performative aspects which are their manifestations. They do not exist outside human behaviour.

What is even more surprising is how we can form emotional bonds with such social objects; the Society of Friends being one such. Other species do not do this. They may bond into herds, packs or flocks, and even recognises an out group: a pack that is a threat to your pack's hunting grounds, will cause your pack to unite to drive them off; but only humans form bonds with intangible entities, with social objects. There are no nations, sects, cults or clubs amongst other species. 

Nationality is one of the primary identities among modern humans, it even carries great legal weight and consequences. In earlier times who you owed allegiance and service to better defined you. Now patriotism is both expected and demanded towards such nebulous social objects as nations. A patriotism that may even require the sacrifice of your life, or that you kill others in its 'defence'. But what is the psychological mechanism that bonds you with such social objects?

Jung used the term participation mystique to describe those bonds. He adopted the term from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939), but adapted it for his own purposes, because it seemed so well to describe one of the driving forces of the human psyche: passionate involvement with what are abstract entities, social objects, such as "my country", "my faith", or even, "my football team". And, yes, there is passionate involvement: elation, misery, excitement, anticipation, longing, despair, humiliation, comfort, belonging, … all deeply and completely felt depending on the fortunes of the object of participation. Think of the jubilation or despair of a football supporter depending on whether 'their' team wins of looses, even if they have not witnessed the match. That is a relatively trivial example compared to the bonds formed with religions, political parties or nations.

It is no accident that many Catholics are so engaged by 'The Passion' as to offer themselves for crucifixion on Good Friday, or Shia Muslims self-flagellate in mourning for Husayn ibn Ali whilst preparing for Ashura. They are public demonstrations of the power of the participation mystique.

We derive much of our identity from relations with different communities and other social objects. For many modern people that is a patchwork of shifting associations. Historically there was far less fluidity. Your birth determined almost all of your social identities, as it still does to a large extent with people like the Amish and other Plain People. Now, elements of identity are almost a matter of consumer choice. There is a lot of elective identity in terms of association with subcultures (Gamers, Punks, Bikers, Goths, Vegans, … ) which can make association superficial and dispensable, but often leaves a yearning for something more embracing and identity confirming. A yearning that is a vulnerability that can be capitalised on by cults, or by inducing participation in online communities that bond via adherence to particular conspiracies or ideologies such as incel.

Jung noted the power of the participation mystique only too clearly at work in the rise of the Nazi movement with its abundance of conspiracy theories about the Jews. A search for meaning in life is also a search for identity. Identities much of which are necessarily derived from relationship with social objects. The collapse of social objects such as Imperial Germany leading to an identity crisis that was only resolved for many Germans by the rise of the Third Reich.

Such bonding leads not only to moments of pride, elation, excitement, delight and jubilation, but also to despair, shame, and guilt, depending on how the social object fairs.

One way of dealing with collective guilt was the Jewish practice of turning out a goat into the wilderness, burdened with all of the sins of the community – the scapegoat. It was a symbolic enactment ritualising communal guilt: we still prefer to outsource our burden of guilt than address its causes.

The mantel of both collective and inherited guilt appear to be part of the deal as soon as you associate with a social object. You get to share in its triumphs and tragedies, in its accolades and shames. You participate in not only its current doings, but in its past: the shadow of its misdeeds falls over you. Penance and atonement may be required in order to expiate the wrongs buried in its history.

I was informed recently that I should feel shame over the fact that some Quakers were slave owners, and that others even took part in the notorious triangular trade, shipping African slaves to the New World. Apparently, I inherit the guilt about their actions when I became a member of the Society of Friends. In fact I was told told that my guilt should be threefold: first, because I am a Quaker; second because I am white: and thirdly because I am British. It did not help when I mentioned that my family name was Friesian and originated in Lower Saxony in what is now Germany. That at least sowed doubt about my Britishness and its slave-trade guilt, but lay me open to inheriting guilt for the holocaust; and should I only shoulder inherited guilt to the degree that my genetic heritage is White European, and be excused to the extent that it may be East Asian? Or should that part be embroiled in another set of guilts?

I am aware that in the Judaism there is a recognition of the inheritability of guilt, a belief which was passed on into Christianity:

And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. (Authorised King James Version, Exodus 34, 6-7)

However, with regard to transatlantic slavery we are now well beyond the fourth generation. Is there no statute of limitations for historic wrongs? 

Jung had a lot to say about collective guilt. He noted how much we like projecting it onto others and how much we fear its being projected onto us; but also how much the victim archetype within each of us likes to assume the mantle of guilt, or to slink away in denial. Far more comforting to award yourself virtue points for donning the guilt, at least cosmetically: sackcloth and ashes on the catwalk of human esteem.

But then that also invites another way of processing the guilt: displacement. Carry out a public act of atonement aimed at expunging a past sin, rather than deal with the discomfort caused by current ills which are too overwhelming to be put right by simple and symbolic acts such as changing the name of a room, make a gesture of offering reparations or put up a blue plaque. All outward signs of penitence concerned with both self and public image, and with reputational damage limitation – but what is the real issue? Embedded and entrenched racism, disadvantage and inequality in the here and now! How do such penitential gestures address those?

You only have inherited or collective guilt in so far as you are trapped by the participation mystique: you are a willing participant in the guilt. What are you gaining from such participation? What are you contributing? How does it feed your self-esteem or identity? How does it build the future?

The Eternal Triangle: Rendel Harris, Irene Speller (Pickard) & Helen Sheerlock

When I started investigating Irene Pickard's archive and using it as a lens to see her life and times through, I did not expect to find a story of romance, of emotional entanglement, of trial and tribulation. I had not anticipated that her obvious fascination with Jung as being driven by her own emotional hurts, frustrations, confusions and struggles.

But then I should have guessed. Jung specialised in emotional confusion and distress as a root of mental suffering, but also as the seed bed of maturation, of developing emotional wisdom and integration, of wholeness – the process of individuation as he termed it. It seems that it is only when we are broken open that we are ready to grow. 

I knew that Irene had been Rendel Harris's secretary. What I did not anticipate was that their relationship had developed into something far more than a formal employer-employee relationship. 

Irene had preserved throughout her life what seems to be most of Rendel Harris's letters to her. Quite an achievement through seven moves, including a last minute escape from Geneva to prevent being trapped in Switzerland by the encircling Nazi forces, and a war time crossing of the Atlantic. The letters clearly meant a great deal to her. 

The letters started in 1911 with kindly but business like notes. Irene was regularly travelling out from Birmingham to Woodbrooke to collect work from Rendel Harris to be done at home. The letters got warmer over time, expressing increasing concern for her welfare, convenience and comfort. In 1914, following the death of his wife, Irene moved into Rendel Harris's home as his live-in secretary. By 1917 he was writing to her during his trip to the Middle East in much more affectionate terms:

So many things to talk over with thee. Inshallah, as we say here, which means 'and it please God' we shall be together again soon and walking side by side. I send my love with this.

Rendel Harris

By January 1921 he is opening a letter with:

Chère amie

An expression only normally used between lovers in that period, and continues:

Comme je me trouve desolé, comme un plat sans pain, ou un coupe sans thé, ou un bain sans savon!   (How very sorry I find myself, like a meal without bread, a cup without tea, or a bath without soap!) and ending:

Dear child, I miss thee as the days go by.

Surprisingly, by 1922 Irene was attending Woodbrooke as a full time student, financially supported by Rendel Harris, who writes understanding her need to be away "in the present state of things" and saying "what is broken can not be mended".  A somewhat strange arrangement for an employer who needed the services of a live-in secretary. He had deprive himself of her services, and was supporting her financially during the college terms. The letters from the period read as if there had been a major rupture in their relationship. 

Given the sources I had available whilst writing the book, I was perplexed as to what had caused the rupture – there was little further evidence in the letters beyond a clear change in tone, with Rendel Harris being very solicitous as to her well-being, asserting how much he missed her, and being somewhat placatory. Given the lack of other sources available to me I could only express my confusion as to exactly what had triggered the rupture. That something major had happened to change their relationship could be inferred from the letters, but nothing as to its nature. What I wrote in my text was:

There are question left by reading the letters – questions that can never be answered. One is left reading between the lines, and guessing at the subtext. Had she been Rendel Harris's mistress? Had the relationship been a surrogate father daughter relationship? Had their relationship developed into some kind of bungled love affair, the reaction to which was her needing to spend time away? Has he or she behaved inappropriately towards the other by the strict standards of the day? Was she tormented by a love that she knew could never be consummated? Had she declared herself to the good Doctor only to be rejected? Had he declared himself to her thus confusing their relationship? What is clear is that the relationship was deep and meaningful to them both. Irene's laudation of Rendel Harris in the Memories she wrote about him when she was in her eighties, some 57 years after leaving his household, speaks clearly of the adoration she felt.    (From the chapter Well Met at Woodbrooke)

After I had submitted this text to my publisher, a biography of James Rendel Harris was published that provided a the answer to the causes of the rupture: another young woman! 

Helen Travers Sherlock, two years Irene's junior, and apparently a brilliant scholar of Ancient Green and Latin, had entered Rendel Harris's life. She was very much of the same social standing as Rendel Harris, unlike Irene, who was only an employee. From 1917 she spent increasing amounts of time with Rendel Harris, becoming something of a protegee, and corresponding with him frequently in conjunction with her studies.

Alessandro Falcetta tells in his biography how Rendel Harris did not want his relationship with Helen to go public, even instructing her to destroy his letter to her as he did not want people to read them in the near future. Was Rendel Harris concerned that Irene, who handled his correspondence, might discover the increasingly intimate nature of the relationship? 

In April 1922 Rendel Harris and Helen were spotted walking together in London Zoo, something which was reported to Rendel Harris's brother, who, mistakenly assumed that Harris must have been there with Irene. It was not unusual to see the Irene and Harris together in social contexts, as is indicated by this photography of them side by side whilst on a holiday in Norway. 

 

Now two young women were competing for Rendel Harris's regard and affection. An love triangle had been formed. Did Irene discover the evolving intimacy of the relationship between Rendel Harris and Sheerlock? Did she suffer a crisis? There is evidence of this in the letters. Did she feel betrayed? Was such a discovery the trigger for the apparent alienation and the apologetic tone of Rendel Harris's letters to her, and for his agreeing to her spending a time at Woodbrooke as a student at his expense? 

Rather than return to Rendel Harris home to resume her duties as his live-in secretary, Irene agreed to marry a certain Bertram Pickard, not without a lot of hesitation, and following Rendel Harris's refusal to fund a trip to America for her, which seems to have been the final trigger. 

In May 1923 Irene and Bertram were married. By August that year Rendel Harris had set up home with Helen Sherlock and her mother.

Falcetta points out the Rendel Harris seemed to have preferred asymmetric relationships. His wife had been eleven years older, and both Irene and Helen about forty years younger. 

Although Falcetta does not seemed to have realised the depth of relationship that had grown between Irene and her employer, he does, however, realise the depth of Rendel Harris's relationship with Helen Sheerlock. It is as if our researches have each revealed one side of a love triangle. He does note that some of Helen's letters to Rendel Harris were returned unopened. The thought does occur to me that perhaps Irene intercepted them and returned them? She would have had ample opportunity as Rendel Harris's personal secretary, and the motivation.

In The Way of all Women: Women's Mysteries Ancient and Modern, Esther Harding, one of Carl Jung's early disciples, talks of the hieros gamos (the holy or sacred marriage) which is often a woman's first love, the one which awakens her spiritually and intellectually. A love which is better not fully consummated because the love object should be elevated, idealised, a supreme model of all she values most highly. 

Irene's love for Rendel Harris certainly fitted that pattern, and the breaking of the love spell due to being supplanted in Rendel Harris's affections, with all the attendant pain of being the looser in a love triangle, led her not only into her marriage, but ultimately to the feet of Dr Jung.   

Bergson, Jung and the creativity of disruption

Exploring an archive will always take you on journeys that you had not anticipated. I first came across reference to Bergson in one document in Irene's archive: Proceedings of the discussions on belief, Geneva Study Group, Winter 1937/8.

Henri-Louis Bergson? I had no idea who he was or what he propounded, but two of the participants in the discussions referred to how important his ideas were to them – they were fundamental as a way of framing their beliefs. That gave me little option but to hunt up who he was, what his ideas were, how they related to my subjects, to the period they were living in, and to their fascination with Jung. 

It turned out that Bergson's ideas had considerable influence on Jung himself, so unpacking Bergson was going to be important. 

Researching an archive is a bit like archaeology: you are presented with incomplete and scattered bits and pieces and have to try to fit them into place. But there is an additional problem – time investment. As soon as you start researching a side-shoot there is a danger of that area ballooning and becoming a major endeavour in its own right. The challenge is, can you come up with a synopsis of the side-shoot that will contribute to understanding the spine? Knowing when to stop is almost as important as knowing what is worth following up – something you cannot know until you have followed it up! It is so easy to spend huge amounts of time trying to comprehend something abstruse and near impenetrable, being sucked further and further out in an effort to extract something tangible which would contribute to the main flow of the study. Bergson was one such side-shoot. 

Arriving at an adequate synopsis is always hazardous. It is a bit like taking a photograph of a landscape. The resultant postcard is a snapshot of how it appeared at one time, on one day, in one season, from one viewpoint, and that before some major feature was changed for ever. It can never do justice to the evolving complexity of the place, nor reflect the near infinity of view points from which it could be seen. It would be easy spending a lifetime studying Bergson and still to feel that you had not reached the bottom of what he was saying; but in terms of my study of Irene's archive, he warranted little more than a footnote. However, in getting to grips with Jung, he deserved far more. 

Here is what I came up with in trying to explain the import of Bergson in the context of the document resulting from the 1937/8 discussion group on 'belief':

It is interesting to note that several of the participants refer either directly or indirectly to Bergson. Russell may well have become the dominant public face of English language philosophy between the wars, but it was Bergson who had caught the imagination of the French speaking world, especially after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Bergson's philosophy was important to Jung, who built on Bergson's notion of élan vital when constructing his own view of the psyche after his break with Freud, shifting Freud's notion of the libido from being essentially a sexual drive to being the basic vitality of life. He agreed with Bergson's notion of enduring – that our vitality is experienced as persisting through experienced time – so that we live dynamically in the tension between our past and our expectations of our future – and at a deeper level we also live in the dynamic tension between the greater communal past and the communal expectations of the future. Expectations which Jung thought of as being encoded in what he termed 'archetypes'. Jung also agrees with Bergson about the importance of intuition; that in many ways it is more powerful in helping us survive than intellect. Intellect for Bergson is derivative, a secondary factor: its function is to solve problems when we encounter them. Direction in life is given by our intuition, which is more fundamental. For Jung the process of individuation was very much one of letting intuitions – psychic forces – often carried by symbols – emerge from the unconscious.

Bergson is the very epitome of French language philosophy in contrast to the analytic tradition of English language philosophy. It is as much about feeling right as being right. It is about making sense of life as lived, as experienced; not about reductive analysis and pairing down to what can truthfully be said. It is abstract – very abstract – and fits the thinker like good couture: flattering them as much as serving them: creating an effect that is pure affect. It is fundamentally about what it is to be alive, to be in the human predicament.

Here are my notes on Bergson most influential work, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927: 

Henri-Louis Bergson: Creative Evolution: concepts cannot capture the world – concepts fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things – intuition alone engages fully with reality. Neither rationalism nor empiricism grasp reality – the empiricist ultimately resolves reality into no more than a bundle of bits, the measurables which it can be reduced to; the rationalist keeps accreting more and more properties onto the substance that underlays things, such that "A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears" [see: substance theory] until it become infinitely saturated and is equivalent to God or the universe; "Thus they transform it into an unknowable container in which properties reside. Trying to obtain the unity of the object, they allow their substance to contain more and more properties, until eventually it can contain everything, including God and nature" [see: Intuition]. By contrast, true understanding comes from intuition, which Bergson defines as "a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed”  [see: intuition (Bergson)]; Intuition is driven by the "élan vital" – the fundamental life energy, the vitality of all things.
(Does "boundless enumeration" prefigure Deridda's deconstructionism?)

Bergson's demotion of reason to the service role of problem solving, and his promotion of intuition to the primary role of direction-giving fitted well with Jung's observations of the human mind. Intuitions, Jung observed, arise from the operations of the unconscious and drive our intent: how we feel is more powerful than what we think. Rationalising is almost an epiphenomena, tidying up, enabling and justifying, even masking our drives. He found that those who became trapped by reasoning suffered. Those who connected more deeply with their intuition flowed through life better, unless that dominate instead. Either one-sidedness was a recipe for disaster!

Bergson was anti-determinism, anti-mechanicalism* in his thinking, emphasising the spontaneity and unpredictability of creation. A view starkly in contrast to the almost triumphant determinism of so many of his contemporaries, especially in the sciences and mathematics. David Hilbert, the outstanding mathematician of the age, contended that the completeness of mathematics would be accomplished; Einstein's contended that all of physics would eventually prove to be determinable, and, in consequence, so would human behaviour. Everything would be calculable and explainable. It would be the final triumph of the sciences. 

It is interesting to note how that certainty has crumbled. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, Turing's Halting Problem, and, ultimately, the development of Chaos Theory, have eroded that world view. It seems Bergson had a point. The future cannot be predicted: chaos begets creativity and novelty. 

Jung felt that the phantasmagoria of symbols – images – arising in our dreams, in our imagination, in our fantasies and fictions, are the creative font from which inspiration is derived. They are the true vehicles of human inventiveness and originality. To live a life fully is to live a life symbolically, to unleash those potentials. Bergson's philosophy underpinned Jung's psychology.

Disruption being creative – something of a mantra in Silicon Valley – is now taken almost as an axiom.  Both Bergson and Jung would have been delighted. Both held that mystics and creative people show us that the static world may be comfortable, but it is not ultimately maintainable. It will decay, allowing chaotic interruptions to emerge full of creative potential. For Jung, that was the essence of the mid-life and other crises, and the harvests of personal growth and development – individuation in his terms – that might be reaped from them. 

The arts and culture at a time of stability tend to be flaccid: those from times of crisis tend to be innovative. Religions and spirituality likewise. Bergson not only anticipated the modern view of the vitality of chaos, he also proposed a distinction between static and dynamic religion and their related ethics, those of closed and open systems, anticipating Karl Popper in the process. Dynamic religion and its related open system of morality were rooted, he thought, in mysticism. His book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion explored this at depth. Much like Jung, Bergson linked mysticism to intuition, to the creative non-rational, and to the symbolic and evocative.

Quakers understand how a time of chaos, the British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century (The Wars of the Three Kingdoms), provided the creative space for the genesis of Quakerism; and they understand being rooted in mysticism: the ministry that arise from the germinating silence of Meeting is so often inspirationally metaphoric, allegoric, poetic, symbolic rather than deductively rational – so much in accord with both Jung and Bergson. They also understand Bergson's open system of morality, being alert to continuing revelation.

 
 

* The character of being mechanical; mechanical action or procedure; specifically, in philosophy, the mechanical interpretation of the universe.

William Penn

History is always a dialogue between the past and the present. The down grading of William Penn in the esteem of Quakers by removing his name from one of the rooms at Friends House is very much part of such dialogue. 

How the mighty are fallen! Penn name must be removed from public display because he owned slaves. An unforgivable sin to our modern twenty-first century eyes, illuminated by Black Lives Matter. How could he! Surly one of the founding fathers of Quakerism, one of those who came to accept, propound and live by the testimony of equality, must have realised the crime against humanity he was committing, the massive hypocrisy he was indulging in? Did equality for Penn only extend to people with white skins?

Or should we be looking more carefully at this, and at our relationship with the past? 

There is always a danger of decontextualising when we project into the past our current values, resulting in misrepresentation. Historic figures always need to be appreciated in their context, not judged as if they were our contemporaries; although their significance to us is always part of the current public discourse. The dunking of Coulson into Bristol Docks speaks volumes about were we are in re-assessing our relationship with parts of British history.

William Penn was born in 1644, some 263 years after the Peasants Revolt of 1381, when the peasants of south-east England tried and failed to free themselves from forced labour, and 231 years before the 1875 Employer and Workman Act decriminalised the failure to perform labour. Penn lived near the midway point between the two; between the medieval, when almost everyone was bound into a web of enforced service, and the modern world of freedom of labour and individual liberty.

Prior to 1875 employees could suffer criminal sanctions, including fines and imprisonment, for withholding their labour. The Master and Servant Act of 1823 required "the obedience and loyalty" from servants to their contracted employer, with infringements of the contract punishable before a court of law, often with a jail sentence of hard labour. That act itself was a codification of earlier laws and practices that enforced work and bound servants to their masters. Servants were still legally bound to their masters even two centuries after Penn's birth.

It was not until 1574 that serfdom was finally abolished in England and Wales, although it had begun slowly disintegrating after the Peasants Revolt of 1381. However, the impression that people were anything like free thereafter was far from the truth. Being bound as an apprentice, indentured servitude, bonded labour, debt bondage, being bound in service, impressment into the military, convict labour and forced day labour, on road repair and such like, were all normal. It has been calculated that 80% of the world's people were in forced labour of one kind or another in Penn's time, and for much of the following century (see Adam Hochschild Burry the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery).

Wives and children fared little better being, in the eyes of the law, dependents of the man. Injury to a man's wife, child or servant was injury to him, and he would deserve compensation for such harm. As master of his household he was entitled and expected to administer 'just punishment' to all – wife, children and servants –  including the use of the rod.

The concentration on the Afro-American experience of slavery can lead to the impression that seventeenth century slavery was simply an issue of white people enslaving black. True, as long as the extensive enslavement of Europeans in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates, the enslavement of up to 80,000 Ukrainians, Russians, or other Slavic peoples a year by the Crimean Tartars for shipment into the Ottoman Empire, or the widespread trading in slaves along the Silk Road and elsewhere in Asia is ignored. Fear among Europeans of falling into Barbary or Ottoman slavery was very real. Upwards of two million Europeans were taken into slavery between 1500 and 1700, with the Barbary pirates raiding as far north and the English Channel and Iceland. It was only in the eighteenth century that numbers of African slaves in the Americas overtook that of European slaves in the Islamic world. There were also other very healthy and vigorous slave trades around the world in Penn's time. Slavery was globally endemic and horribly normal.

In the seventeenth century Quakerism was new and was finding its way, following those openings that George Fox spoke of, being led by the light. All of the first generation of Quakers came to it from outside, bringing with them the mores, beliefs, attitudes and values which they had grown up with and which they had lived by. Bending themselves to the emerging ethic as it grew was at times a painful struggle. There was no template for being Quaker. It all had to be worked anew. The rejection of all authority except that of the inward light meant being open to transformation. Nothing was a given. The seed had to be allowed to grow. Continuing revelation is never comfortable. It requires moving from what is, to what now seems required. The testimonies were not givens, they emerged through painful living and long hours of contemplative sitting in that collective and germinating silence, attending to the ministry that arose. 

It took many years for the testimony of equality to emerge and to see how it applied to all manner of people. Accepting the spiritual equality of women was not automatic – Margaret Fell's Woman's Speaking Justified dating from 1666 – and for many years men held Meeting for Business separately, not involving women in the proceedings; women's' Meetings were confined principally to matters of social wealfare. Likewise, how equality applied to children, servant, employees, non-Quakers, non-Christians, non-Europeans, or any other degree or kind of person, had to be worked through, including what aspects of life it applied to. A process that is still unfolding: the twenty-first century seeing Quakers addressing the issue of equal marriage amongst other issues.

For seventeenth century Quakers your lot in life, your estate, was simply a given. You might be a free man or bound. You might be a pauper, or the owner of great wealth. Equality in the spirit was separate to your earthly estate. William Penn counted amongst the wealthiest men of the age, especially after receiving the grant of lands in North America from Charles II, making Penn the greatest private landowner in the world: but his word arising from the gathered silence of meeting for worship was worth no more than that of the least of his servants, indentured, bound, or enslaved.

Equality did not mean material or economic equality for early Quakers, it applied to spiritual equality: being open to revelation, to speaking the word as it came from within. This perception was applied to slaves as well as to the 'free'. It appears that the first encounter between Quakers and slavery was in Barbados in the 1660s, where slaves were welcomed into Quaker meetings, even becoming elders. Nelson McKeeby has described this as a weird version of slavery.

By acknowledging that slaves had spiritual equality Quakers had laid the foundations for their coming to realise that slavery itself was wrong. A revelation first expressed in 1688 in the Germantown Petition against Slavery, only seven years after the grant of Pennsylvania to Penn, and six since the first colonisation of Philadelphia. Penn seems to have had 12 slaves, initially employed on the construction of his house and outbuildings. However, slaves were already part of the workforce of the Delaware valley, having been imported as early as 1639 by Dutch and Swedish settlers, and added to by later landings. It seems that Penn's slaves were purchased from that pool by Penn's agent as that was all the manpower to be had. Penn, like the Barbadon Quakers, was concerned with how slaves, other indentured people, including personal servants, were treated, and laid down regulations concerning them all after his return to Pennsylvania in 1699. Jack H Schick's account of Slavery in Pennsylvania includes a more detailed account of this. 

In an era when slavery was normal the interesting story is how the Quakers came to reject the practice and became leading campaigners for abolition. It almost conforms to George Foxe's revelation that in order to come to realisation of what was right, it was necessary to have a sense, and perhaps experience, of what was wrong. By giving spiritual dignity, respect and equality to everyone regardless of their estate, the Quakers lit a fuse that ended slavery. 

So should we feel shame about William Penn because of his slave owning? Should he have leaped in one bound from the normality of his times, to applying equality in every respect to everyone, or was this a work in progress? It may be that the removal of Penn's name from a room says more about our current discomfort about race than it says anything about Penn and his times. Is it a way of  avoiding the dissonance that its continued presence may invoke, rather than our engaging with the transformations we need to make?

[This item has been re-worked by removing the more polemical and confrontational tone of the original due to the criticisms it received, for which I am most grateful.]

 

Refuge, Relief, and Reconciliation

I was asked recently what defined Quaker responses to war. The assumption was that it would be conscientious objection, but actually Quakers are more proactive than that. Their responses, at least in the twentieth century, were overwhelmingly to tend the wounds of war. Only by looking at the history of male Quakers of military age does conscientious objection come to the fore.

I suspect that a feminist might comment that it is another example of His-story, which all too often comes to fill the pages of our his-story books, which predominantly chronicle his-stories to the exclusion of a broader and more inclusive vision of our past. A glance at the history section of any of our major booksellers, or the history section of our libraries, would tend to confirm the suspicion that the feminists have a point. 

Katherine Storr's book Excluded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief, 1914-29 (Perter Lang, 2010) was something of a welcome antidote to so much of the published history of the period I was researching. I needed to know so much more about the times in which Irene Pickard's archive was embedded, and the massive – yes I do mean massive – publishing bias in favour of male and militaristic histories of the period from a male and military perspective made hunting for those gems that would provide a more balanced picture something of a challenge. Especially any that included accounts of the Quaker experience!

This study reveals women's hitherto ignored lives as refugees and relief workers during the First World War and shortly after. The focus is on coping with and changing the devastating effects of war on civilians, rather than on the fighting of it. Wherever fighting took place, people fled from their homes or were trapped behind enemy lines. Most refugees were women and children. While some came to Britain, others remained in or near their country of origin. They were helped, sometimes under bombardment, by Quakers and suffragists.     (From the blurb about Katherine Storr's book)

It was women who spearheaded the Quaker response to war. Men were tied up with the social expectation that they should 'do their duty' and serve with the military; an imperative made so much more complex when conscription was imposed in 1916: the Flanders fields having eaten up the bodies of the willing leaving the war-machine short of fodder to feed to the machine guns. The imperative did not extend to women, who were thus free to see the war for what it was – the greatest of human tragedies which heaped suffering on suffering. Tending to that suffering was what they did. 

It became clear when mapping Quaker responses to war during my research that they fell under three headings: refuge, relief and reconciliation. Patterns that were to repeat themselves over and again through the twentieth century. 

Unlike the cornucopias of material available on the studies of the wars themselves, there is a dearth of works about relief work. Katherine Storr's work along with that of a paper written in Italian by Bruna Bianchi called Grande, Pericolosa Avventura: Anna Ruth Fry il 'relief work' e la riconciliazione internazionale (1914-26) [A Grand Dangerous Adventure: Anna Ruth Fry, relief work as international reconciliation (1914-26)] and Campbell Leggat's Friends in Deed stemming from outside the Quaker universe. The rest from within. 

Notable among the Quaker works are John Ormerod Greenwood's three volume Quaker Encounters; A Ruth Fry's A Quaker Adventure. The Story of the Friends' Relief Work in Europe during the War and After ; David McFadden & Claire Gorfinkel's Constructive Spirit; Quakers in Revolutionary Russia ; Joan Mary Fry's In Downcast Germany 1919-1933 [a very rear and almost unobtainable book that it is such a condemnation of the British role in inflicting starvation on the German population] ; Sheila Spielhofer's To Vienna with Love - Quaker Relief Work 1919-1922 ; William R Hughes's Indomitable Friend. The Life of Corder Catchpool, 1883-1952 ; Geoffrey Carnall's Gandhi's Interpreter. A Life of Horace Alexander ; A T Teglar Davies's Friends Ambulance Unit. The story of the F.A.U. in the second world war 1939-1945 ; Roger C Wilson's Quaker Relief; an account of the Relief Work of the Society of Friends 1940-1948 ; and C H Mike Yarrow's Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation.

Armed with these, and what other papers and references I could find, I was able to provide the context for why my subjects were in Geneva during the 1930s engaged on peace-work, and how they coped with the tidal wave of war which swept over them in 1940. 

What placed them there in the first instance, stemmed from another consequence of the outbreak of the First World War – the virtual collapse of support for peace movements. 

Carl Heath (1869- 1950) was appointed secretary of the National Peace Council in 1909, a body connecting the disparate anti-war organisations, ranging from trade unions through socialist societies and the suffragettes, to religious groups such as the Quakers. The declaration of war in August 1914 saw almost all but the Quakers desert the Council. Even the suffragettes mostly followed Emmeline Pankhurst in withdrawing and suspending their protests in support of the war. The desertion of the National Peace Council by so many organisations led in time to Heath throwing his lot in with the Quakers – the only remaining members – joining them in 1916. It was his suggestion for the need for 'Quaker Embassies" – as he call them – that led to Irene and Bertram being in Geneva as staff of one such, and their eventually encountering Carl Jung.  

Ever since their almost accidental formation in the seventeenth century, Quakers have been a counter-culture because of their deriving their moral compass from inward revelation engendered by the practice of silent waiting, rather than from alignment with the prevailing zeitgeist – the ethos of an era. As a result they were for much of the time a people apart. A community that gave equal weight to the words of women as those of men – as seeing female revelation as just as valid and inspiring as male revelation. As being prepared to be led by women as men, if those women felt compelled to act under a concern; and many remarkable Quaker women were so compelled, providing much of the leadership in relief-work; addressing as much of the suffering caused by the unleashing of wars in the first half of the twentieth century as they could. Ruth and Joan Fry, Hilda Clerk, and Bertha Bracey are names that stand out as indomitable leaders of relief efforts.

Researching Irene archive and its context proved to be a study in counterpoint to the mainstream flow of history. Event making dominated by an almost exclusively male political and military patriarchy finding a reciprocal counter flow of outpouring of human compassion, often led by Quaker women. A story little told of providing refuge, of providing relief and of working to promote reconciliation, by a community set apart by a charismatic tradition that centred its ethics on inward revelation not on conformity to the prevailing ethos. What greater nonconformity than being pacifists and peacemakers in times of war; of tending to the wounds of war rather than adding to them. 

Ourea, or the numinous presence of Allt-fawr

 

Capel y Gorlan, Cwmorthin

Numinous this, numinous that, all I know is that sometimes we are forced out of our skin. A moment in time that is different, where we are knocked sideways whether we would or not. 

That is what happened to me in Cwmorthin, near Capel y Gorlan (chapel in the sheep fold). It is a stiff walk up into the mouth of Cwmorthin, and then along the cwm to the tumbled down remains of the chapel. A  remote place in a deserted valley where the stillness soaked through the skin along with the damp. A silence so deep that even the grazing of the odd sheep on the far hillside could be felt; and then a sense of presence overwhelming. Something ancient. Something that had taken form both of itself and of the communion offered in the chapel, and, who knows, of older offering long before time was counted. Allt-fawr – its name a tribute to its size – a presence by it sheer wall of endless hill stretching up beyond the cloud, and wrapping the valley in its curve to the exclusion of all else. No wonder the Greeks thought such mountains to be gods, 'ourea', their brooding presence being so tangible. 

I sensed a fluidity over time in the presence. The last imprint on it being the close harmony hymns of the slate miners sung on their one day off. Their one day not under the ground. Miners who had hollowed out that vast hill. A slate mine 1500 feet from the top level down 25 floors of stale caverns to its lowest. 50 miles of tunnels and tramways all inside Allt-fawr, the mountain. A mine as big as the vastness of its name. The scars of the mining now fading as the mountain reclaimed them, wreathing them in rain soaked moss, lichen, bracken and grass. The soft tread of sheep being all that disturbed them now, and the chapel itself fallen to ruin. 

But still the presence persists, tentatively described by a word from a tongue alien to those Welsh hills – god? – and that from one who is no theist; hills that were used to hearing the word "Duw" sung with confidence in their embracing fold. 

The theologian Rudolf Otto was in want of a term to describe what he felt was special about religious experience, so he created 'numinous' from the Latin numen, meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring."  Jung found Otto's term of great value, because he knew how such moments shone in the minds of his patients – they were touch-stones of religious experience; the access points where the safety and supposed sufficiency of the rational ran out and exposure to the spiritual happened. Once exposed the doorway was open to growth by incorporating the spiritual, the numinous, the religious, into the life of his patients, releasing them from their psychological malaise. They were suffering because they were shut off from deeper communion with life, often by their overdeveloped rationality, and their rejection of the mystical, the numinous, the religious.

In a letter to P.W. Martin (20 August 1945), the founder of the International Study Center of Applied Psychology in Oxted, England, C.G. Jung confirmed the centrality of numinous experience in his life and work: "It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character" (Jung 1973, 1: 377). If one holds the classical Jungian view that the only genuine cure for neurosis is to grow out of it through pursuing individuation, then treatment based on this model would seem necessarily to include "the approach to the numinous," as Jung states so firmly in this letter.   [ Jung - Martin letter 1946 "On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation" Murray Stein, Ph.D.]

P W Martin was one of the main members of the Geneva Quaker-Jungian group to which Irene Pickard belonged. Her archive included papers by Martin. He was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the group, often travelled to Zürich to see Jung during the 1930s, and maintained contact with him after the war, gaining Jung's support over the establishment of the centre at Oxted.

Spiritual experiences, religious experiences, are not rational. They are something else; divine intoxication; divine madness; opening of the being; being touched; stopping the world: they are a door into another way of relating to the world; to another dimension of being. They have the authenticity of the moment of transport; they need no validation because in that moment they simply are.

Jung was a complete relativist at this point. He did not believe that only one source of the holy could have a healing influence. He did not subscribe to the view, for instance, that only Jesus can give us the salvation we need. Jung believed that the numinous could derive from countless sources, and religious traditions, from mythologies, cosmologies, esoteric systems, and arts and science. Moreover, he believed that the numinous is present, at least potentially, in common experience, and can be felt and made known through meaningful coincidence, synchronicity and an ‘inner’ relationship with the facts of the world. He did not believe that institutions of faith or creedal doctrines could regulate the spiritual experience, but that such experience occurs spontaneously, as we enlarge life with depth and commitment.   [David  Tacey: How to Read Jung: Granta Books, London, 2006]

Nor did Jung think that belief, whether inherited, inculcated or otherwise acquired, was any form of substitute for honestly accepted experience, of openness to the numinous:

When people say that they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don’t need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.    [ Jung in answer to Philp’s question #3: Is the God-archetype All?: H L Philp: Jung and the Problem of Evil: Rockliff, London, 1958]

The War in its Effects upon Women by H M Swanwick, August 1916

Three themes emerged from researching Irene Pickard's archive: Quakerism, Jung and peace-work. If it was not for the peace-work the Pickards would not have been in Geneva, and the Irene may never have been exposed to Jung's ideas with such intensity, and certainly would never have met the man himself, nor, one expects, ever been in correspondence with him nor been on friendly terms with his wife, Emma Jung, herself a significant analyst. 

Emma Jung's visits to Geneva to talk to the Geneva Quakers was one of the key events deepening Irene's appreciation of Jung's psychology and its importance to her Quakerism. For Irene, it opened up the inner workings of the mind and gave life and validity to her faith. It placed it on a 'scientific' footing as an essential part of being a complete and psychologically healthy individual. Contrary to the Marxists or to the Positivists – both prevalent philosophies at the time – religion was neither the 'opium of the people' nor vacuous nonsense: it was, according to Jung, essential to the process of successful individuation (to becoming an increasingly mature and balanced individual).

However, it was not analytical psychology that had brought Irene to Geneva but peace-work. It was where the League of Nations was which put it at the heart of the efforts to build a new way of working internationally that might prevent another catastrophe like the First World War. It was why the Quakers had decided to open a centre near John Calvin's cathedral in the old town, and why they decided to appoint Bertram Pickard as its first full time secretary, with Irene as the warden of a proposed student hostel for young Quakers studying International Relations at the University – the first university courses of this kind in the world.

What made the Quakers adamant that they needed to have a voice in Geneva was their experience of the war. Many had been so much at odds with mainstream sentiment, so much in conflict with the authorities over such issues as conscription, and had reacted to the war so much at variance with the dominant patriotism – working to alleviate the suffering caused rather than compounding the suffering by participation – that they felt impelled to aid, in any way they could, steps taken to construct a permanent peace. 

Living out the Peace Testimony under the duress of a world war had not been a comfortable experience. It had tested many Friends to breaking point and had led some to abandon the Society. Helping to construct a peaceful future would need considerable investment in the opportunities for collaborative working with those outside the Society. That was the model that had allowed the Quakers to have such an impact in the abolitionist movement: it amplified their concern by finding and working with allies.

Once such ally was Helena Swanwick (1864 – 1939). She had been active in the women's suffrage movement, but resigned over the Suffragette's active support for the war effort, and particularly their decision not to take part in the Women's Peace Congress at the Hague in 1915. 

In 1916 she published her inflammatory condemnation of men, as makers of the war, for their blindness towards its effects on women, who suffered inordinately but had no voice. War was pre-eminently the doing of men. She also condemned her erstwhile companions in the British suffrage movement for their lack of compassion for the impact of war on women in the conflict zones: 

… although [British women] suffer like all the other women by the death and maiming of their men, they are curiously removed from the stunning effects of war on their own soil. Their grown men die, it is true, too young and very dear. But they do not see their babies killed by the thousands; they do not see their daughters outraged; they do not have their homesteads and fields defiled and burned and blown to atoms; they do not have to take part in those hideous retreats of women and children and sick and old, starving and dying on the cruel roads: they do not bear their babies to the sound of cannon … [The War in its Effect upon Women, August 1916]

She shared with the Quaker an understanding of war as tragedy and as a massive failure of human governance. She even suggest that women should ask themselves –

… whether men are so made that periodical wars are necessary for their bodily and spiritual health. Many people tell them so, and sometimes, in bewildered amaze at all the suffering brought about for what seem trumpery reasons, women will feel inclined to think that, after all, men fight because they like fighting; they always will like fighting; they always will do what they like. 

However, she thinks it is only a half truth, as:

… the mind of man should be equal to the task of directing and transforming this instinct (to fight) to the common good. By the prodigious development of mechanical and chemical resources, men have perhaps forged the weapons that will teach them that they must kill war. For it seems that unless man will kill war, industrial and military machinery will kill man.

Helena went on in 1919 to be a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]. The league had grown out of Jane Addams's peace movement via the International Congress of Women. It appointed Emily Greene Balch as its first International Secretary-Treasurer, with its headquarters in Geneva.

Emily soon came into contact with the small Quaker community in Geneva, and became a member in 1921, saying: 

Religion seems to me one of the most interesting things in life, one of the most puzzling, richest and thrilling fields of human thought and speculation... religious experience and thought need also a light a day and sunshine and a companionable sharing with others of which it seems to me there is generally too little ... The Quaker worship at its best seems to me give opportunities for this sort of sharing without profanation.     [Randall, Improper Bostonian, p. 60]

Emily Greene Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work with the WILPF. One of three Nobel prize winners associated between the wars with that small Quaker Meeting in Geneva.

In 1924 Helena Swanwick severed as substitute delegate to the League of Nations on behalf of Britain, and between 1928 and 1931, during the build up to the disarmament conference, as part of the Labour British Empire delegation.

During both those periods Helena would have connected with Emily Greene Balch and others on the network of peace activists in the city, including many from the Quaker Meeting. During her second spell that network was joined by Bertram and Irene Pickard. Bertram in particular played a very prominent part in the network. In 1929 he was appointed as Honorary Secretary to the newly formed Fédération Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies à Genèva [FIIG] an umbrella organisation bringing together all the non-governmental organisations [NGOs] in the city. He also became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organisations in Geneva. He made himself very much the hub of the peace activist network. 

There was a fascination in researches springing from Irene's archive, to see how apparently diverse people interwove their lives because of the networks they became part of. How they gravitated towards each other because of their commitment to one or other ideal. The network of committed peace activists in Geneva was no exception. 

I first came across Helena Swanwick in Katherine Storr's book Exuded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief 1914-15 whilst researching outwards from Irene's archive into its historical context. References in Katherine Storr's book led me to finding a copy of Helena's 1916 booklet, which I then used as an example of divergent attitudes to the war. It was only later that I discovered that she was connected to Emily Greene Balch via the WILPF, and had been involved in peace work in Geneva. Writing based on an archive is very much like fitting pieces into a jigsaw, but where so many pieces are hopelessly lost for ever, or others do not turn up until late.

Meeting the Messiah: 4 – Where am I now?

 The foundational story of Christianity – the story of Jesus, his ministry and death, and of how he inspired his followers to take the Gospel (the 'good news') out into an ever widening world – is the central pivot on which the faith hangs. It is what differentiates it from the other Abrahamic faiths. 'God', known by one name or another – or even as the unnamable – exists in them all. Jesus exists in two of them – Christianity and Islam – but Jesus Christ, the man-god, exemplar and teacher of the 'second commandment – "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (Mark 12.31) – only exists in Christianity. The authenticity of his story and teachings are crucial to Christianity's supposed authority and allure; but therein hangs a thousand and one questions.

Through my school years I was exposed to the Jesus story both at the daily school assembly – the required "daily act of collective worship"  – and the required lessons of 'Religious Education'; and, for those unlucky enough to be sent to a boarding school, compulsory Church attendance on Sundays plus an act of "collective worship" every evening. Enough exposure to have some familiarity with at least the outlines of the Jesus story. Exposure, which if anything acted as aversion therapy: by fourteen I was a sceptic, by sixteen an iconoclast, and by eighteen a cast iron atheist.

What I had received was, we might say, was the standard version of the Jesus story – if fact, given the established status of the Church of England, the authorised version – framed within a lapsarian theology, which I had reacted to with vehement distaste. I found so much of it repugnant: it was antithetical to life, to joy, to drinking the substance of being, to celebrating each breath. I had to agree with Nietzsche, that the paviours of Christianity were life denying "afterworldsmen". Christianity fed on guilt: it induced it, and then it fed on it. Repentance and penance and falling on the mercy of an unseen and unseeable being who judges and weighs every second of your life, who might just admit you to the golden afterworld, or condemn you to eternal, unimaginable and unspeakable suffering, and who was so insecure as to require regular and repeated doses of praise and worship (I am a jealous God Exodus 20: 2-6) were the substance of the religion – and I was having non of it. You could not have put more distance between me and Christianity if you tried. 

The numinosity of life led me via the East – Buddhism, Daoism, Zen, Dzogchen – and back again to the West, where I found myself sitting in Quaker meetings and once again encountering versions of Christianity, but transformed by the journey I had been on. My eyes did not fall on it in the same way as the young man's eyes. I felt sorry for what it has so often become, but heard once again echoes of the far off teachings of that wandering Galilean rabbi. 

Researching Irene Pickard's archive forced me to reacquaint myself with the Jesus story – to meet the messiah – to update both my understanding of the story and my relationship with it. Her archive was full of reference to modern theological thinkers, ranging from her mentor, Rendel Harris, through Carl Barth, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Thomas Merton and Don Cuppit, with whom she corresponded about his television programme Who is Jesus? (1977). One thing they all had in common: their Jesus was not the one I had been introduced to and rejected. 

Carl Gustav Jung, whose works provided the lenses for Irene to see her spiritual questing through, detected in the human psyche a nodal point – an archetype – around which all our spiritual feelings, images, and ideas clustered, which he called 'the god archetype'. He suspected that it was universal, but the form it would appear in would vary depending on the cultural material available. He also thought that it was itself evolving, finding better fits for its expression, which is why religions came and went. The evolution of Christianity out of Judaism and its supplanting Paganism throughout the Roman Empire, being an example. Its emerging form being made by the transfer of pre-existing symbols from earlier religions, such as that of the god-man who undergoes a cycle of death and rebirth. He suggested that if a better fit for the archetype came along, then Christianity itself would be replaced.

So what versions of 'Jesus'  – according to Jung, the Christian manifestation of the archetype – are on offer? They seem to range from the Jesus of the evangelicals, based on assumptions of Biblical inerrancy, and the certainty of the coming judgement, and even something strange and apparently not in the Bible called the 'rapture'; through the long established Jesus of Catholic dogma, with the elevated role of his mother to that of divine interceder; on via various demystifying versions, such as those emphasising Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, to the entire thing being a fabrication, a fiction, a didactic vehicle, a myth. Take your pick. 

One thing I think can be observed. At the budding point at which new religions are born, almost invariably there is a charismatic teacher who is focussed on reforming the pre-existing religion. The reforms may be accommodated by the faith absorbing the reforms, or by the formation of a new sect within the tradition – think here of the birth of the Franciscans, or the Jesuits – or by a schism developing, and a new branch of the religion being formed – think here of Martin Luther and the Reformation resulting in the formation of the Protestant Churches, or later of the splitting off of the non-conformist churches and sects – or by the formation of entirely new religions. The rejection of the reforms, and often the death of the charismatic teacher – sometimes at the hands of defenders of the original faith – leads to their followers either having to abandon the reforms, or set off on their own, as is seen with the birth of Sikhism, the Bahá'í or the Mormons. In each case at the budding point there is an inspired teacher. It is their followers who create the new faith: it was probably thus with Christianity.

What do I think? I know we have the texts containing the Jesus story – a legend if you will. I suspect that the Gospels are woven out of oral traditions about the sayings and doings of principally one, but may be more, charismatic itinerant Jewish teachers. The Gospels, thus created, seem to chart a progress of increasing deification, starting with Mark, where Jesus is infused with the wisdom of God manifest as love at the moment of his baptism, who then tried to live that out; through Matthew and Luke where, as well as his resurrection and ascension, the divine and miraculous origins of his birth are added; to John where, in highly literate and educated Greek, the story is reworked to emphasise the Passion – the god come to earth to suffer and redeem.

In Christianity I feel there are two distinct voices: that of Jesus the teacher, and that of Paul the evangelist. The one teaching a here and now immanence of the Kingdom that is open to all seekers (Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: Matthew 7:7); of inner revelation that will transform life; of a Jew teaching Jews to stand and live in the immanent presence of their Lord in the hope of the imminent coming of his kingdom as a result (right living leading to right ordering of the world through mass alignment with the right living); and the Greek speaking Paul, racked with guilt because of his persecution of followers of Jesus, who postpones the kingdom to an afterlife, as he is unfit to live in the immanence. His Greek speaking heritage making tenable the notion of Jesus as a god-man and the existence of an afterworld: both grafts onto the original Jewish stock.

The evangelist Paul was mission driven. First to defend Judaism against the Jesus sect, then to spread the teachings of that sect as far and wide as he could, regardless of the distinction between Jew and Gentile. It is interesting that he received his transmission of the teaching in Damascus from a community with at least three degrees of separation from Jesus, who were transmitting via an oral tradition, the intent of which was to proselytize not to preserve historical accuracy. It contained what inspired them, not what was testable as historic fact. They were fired up by the revelation of spiritual truth. Paul did travel back to Jerusalem but fell out big time with Jesus community there, and took his version of the teaching to the Romano-Greek world as a result. The Aramaic speaking Jesus community in Jerusalem's influence was largely destroyed along with the destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews, hence Paul's version came to dominate. 

For me some of the words of the legendary Jesus of the Gospels resonate deeply. Fewer of Paul's. I cannot say I ascribe to the cosmology or eschatology that, following Paul, is inbuilt into so much of Christianity. For me Jesus is one of the great wisdom teachers, one not to be ignored, but just one. His teaching of immanence corresponds well with what I have from my wanderings in the Buddhist world. His ethic of love the real heart of the diamond: om mani padme hum! (The jewel at the heart of the lotus). 

But I dare say my views are heretical and an anathema to many.  

The Pronoun Dance

It is so much the fashion now to not just give your name, but your preferred choice of pronoun. This is supposed to be more inclusive. What right do I have, if and when I speak about you, to categorise you as male or female? Unless I know you intimately, how should I know how I might be transgressing against your sense of identity? Perhaps male, perhaps female, perhaps something other? There is a rainbow of hues possible – so we are told. The pain of those who struggle with their identity testifies to the suffering caused by attempts to conform to the binary identities imposed by society – a simple 100% M or 100% F – branded onto you at birth. Why should I corral you into one or other sorting pen, conferring on you the appropriate privileges or strictures as a result? I do not wish to injure you.

Even if you are happy with your classification as F or M, it does not follow that you are happy with the cloud of expectations that accompany it: you may not want what is on offer in the pink aisle or in the blue aisle. There are as many ways of being male or female as there are men or women.

Mostly we signal identity externally: this is how I dress, so this is what I am. This is the body shape I have, so this is what I appear to be. Sometimes those are in harmony. Sometimes not. The use of 'he' or 'she' follows the appearance, almost as an ingrained reflex: the two tribes being discovered so early in childhood; each with their own way of being, reflected in speech, mannerism, dress and approved choices. A girl acting girlishly get adoring looks, a boy acting like that soon earns a reprimand. Exhibiting the behaviour of the opposite sex has always risked provoking repression. Societies police the sex boundary with varying degrees of severity.

Sometimes people play with this, knowing and enjoying the confusion and discombobulation caused. Long live drag! The gender bending as performance has a long history. There is much that is tolerated on stage that is pillared in daily life, as boys in the UK who tried to attend school in skirts found out. Cross-dressing for fun is tolerated, even celebrated, but cross-dressing in daily life is problematic and even risky. The existence of male and females codes of dress only serve to emphasise how deeply embedded the binary is, how it shapes so much of our culture and expectations of what is to be accepted. It invites and even enforces conformity. There are always those prepared to police the boundary, and enjoy the licence and power they think is conferred on them.

Non-conformity is discordant. It jars. It challenges. It may provoke reaction, invited or not. Those of us who are to a greater or lesser extent androgynous know the dangers, and too often have tasted its bitter fruits. You learn how to duck and weave, to camouflage, to anticipate and dodge the blows. Societies self-appointed police savour the opportunities proffered by the non-conforming. Socially tolerated coercion is an opportunity for the sweet indulgence of much that is normally denied and repressed: the joy of bullying, the ecstasy of violence. It is a catharsis of liberation for socially manacled.

The more we stretch the boundaries of tolerance the more we invite explosive reactions. 

Jung was deeply aware of the dark potentials in people, lurking in the unconscious waiting for ecstatic release. It was witnessed only too clearly in the popular embrace of the cruelties and excesses of the regimes of his times. Most obviously in the Third Reich, but with a polite veneer and deniability in British and French empires, or the cold logic of the Soviet gulags; and since his times in the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution, the madness of Pol Pot's killing fields, the Rwandan genocide or the Srebrenica massacre.

And the pronoun dance? It invites yet another stretch of tolerance and acceptance; a blurring of the boundaries; a suspension of policing – conscious or unconscious – an effort to accommodate those who do not fit easily or comfortably into the binary of male or female; but it also poses a double problem. 

Firstly, many people are happy and comfortable with the binary, they embrace and live it for they are living out their maleness or femaleness as they feel it – it is authentic for them. That is why there is so much unease with the claim that 'gender is a social construct'. It would be more honest to say, for a huge number of people it is an organo-social construct – they are organically the construct they feel they are. Being male or female is their organically authentic selves. It is not a superficial, acquired construct like being a Manchester United supporter – a voluntarily acquired association. Those who try to pull sex and gender too far apart, making them not deeply interwoven but detachable, play a largely intellectual game to win a space for building a language more accommodating to diversity, but less aligned with lived experience.

Secondly, is there a right to require of other that they use words that do not arise naturally and spontaneously in response to what they encounter? Here is a conflict between what happens when someone externalises their inner difficulties with their identity and the perception of others. Should attachment to a self-ascribed pronoun preference take priority over the spontaneous and authentic responses of others? 

To know that how you see yourself is significantly different to how you are seen is essential to personal growth and maturation. Jung was acutely aware that people were largely blind to their shadows: not just to what lurked in the depths of their psyche, but to how they appeared to others. As Robert Burns wrote:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

(Oh, would some Power give us the gift
To see ourselves as others see us!)

People's pronoun choice about us is their authentic response to how we appear to them, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us feel. 

Being 'out and proud' may challenge others to accept you as you see yourself, but that may not be what they are confronted with: they will see your shadow and that may be far from how you see yourself. That is what they will respond to. We all run the risk of wearing the Emperor's New Clothes!

Some of the recent furore over male to female transexuals 'invading' female spaces is because of the dichotomy between how the would be woman sees herself, and the shadow he still casts.

Even a superficial understanding of Buddhist psychology would warn that attachment to how others speak about you is a cause of suffering; liberation would be in indifference to the choice of pronoun used by others about you – in wholehearted acceptance of what is proffered. 

Quakers did away with the heirs and graces of title that implied hierarchy, understanding the attachment to rank was a delusion best dispensed with. Are we now substituting self ascribed pronoun titles in place of those of rank and not seeing them as being a modern equivalent? The same desire to bind others with how we wish to be addressed? We are plainly what others would see us as being, and that should determine their words, not our need for confirmation of the peculiarities of our chosen identity. The discordance between what we have chosen and how we appear may not allow the words to flow naturally.

As one who lives biologically on the boundary between maleness and femaleness –  androgynous as a birth-right – or birth infliction – I have no wish to control others choice of words about me. At best, a label stating my preferred pronoun would only achieve superficial compliance in my presence, and confusion and discomfort on part of others. 

Pronouns are usually used in the person's absence, so what compliance is likely anyway? Is it an aspiration that a not externally obvious identity might predominate even in your absence?