Have I found the bridge?

It was tiny, just a single sentence editorial introduction to an article in a monthly magazine produced in 1970 – the Quaker Monthly – but had it finally provided the bridge I had been looking for? Somehow, I felt that two of the people I have been writing about may have had some connection, but how or when was lost in the mists of time: it sometimes amazes me how little trace is left of many people's lives – just faint scatterings, motes of dust – that a historian has perhaps the fortune to find, if he is lucky. 

The rich, the famous and the powerful leave heaps of traces. They have big footprints in history. So, you wish to research into the life of a Churchill or a Orson Welles? No problem. You will have oceans of source material. Such lives are massively recorded. But try to research the lives of more obscure people, people who have not courted publicity, people whose lives are much more private and out of the limelight of media attention, you often have little more than scattered and vanishing vapour trails.

I suspected that Irene Pickard, whose archive had launched my researches, must have had some contact at some time with Pierre Lacout, the author of a much translated Quaker booklet, God is Silence. They had both been members of the small community of Quakers in Switzerland. They had both lived in Geneva, but not at the same time, as far as I could see; Irene had left Geneva in 1955, and Lacout can only be definitely connected with the Swiss community of Quakers sometime in the 1960s, becoming a member of the Lausanne Meeting after he settled near there. He had undertaken a course of psychotherapy in Geneva prior to that. They both shared a common attitude to the centrality of the practice of silence waiting as the wellspring of Quakerism, and the significance of psychoanalysis – especially that of Carl Jung – as an aid to spiritual development. They both had many Swiss Quakers they knew in common. It was a small pond in which they both swam with a reasonably high chance that they had either directly or indirectly connected.

Irene had maintained an active interest and connections with the community of European Quakers in the years following her and her husband's retirement to England. Significantly, they had been involved in the Friends World Committee on Consultation (FWCC) European conferences, both at the planning stage and during the events. We know for sure that they were highly involved in the 1959 conference on Depth Psychology as a help in the Religious Life, and maintained an interest in, and connections with, later European conferences.

The editorial introduction to Lacout's article in the March 1970 edition of Quaker Monthly notes that the article is:

Concluding our Swiss Friend’s address to last years European Conference, in which he told of his passage from Carmelite Monk to Quaker.

Sadly, what I don't know is if Irene was present at the 1969 conference, or had anything to do with it. Irene would have been 78, and was still involved in many Quaker things, especially the Seekers Association. She was also perfectly fluent in French – her years in Geneva having made her bilingual – but was she actually there? Did she ever meet Lacout? Did they correspond about the conference? We shall never know: there is no record. All we do know is that she had a copy of his booklet in her archive. If there was ever a bridge, it has been washed away.

What we do know is that Lacout and Irene were very much in sympathy with each other as to what was at the core of Quaker religious experience, as were so many of the members of the Seekers. Here I quote from a letter written to me in 2013 by Candia Barman, about the Seekers Movement:

The Seeker Movement aims to explore the discipline of waiting on the spirit at the still centre of our lives. We try to deepen our spiritual awareness in a devotional way based on mutual support and sharing with like-minded people. This leads to the search for expressing Quaker witness in the world.
Much of traditional language has become ineffective and diminished in meaning for people today, including ourselves. We seek through exploration and sharing to connect with the mystery at the heart of our world and our lives. We are active in opening ourselves to new light; this may come from modern scientific, theological or artistic endeavours as well as older traditions. We aim to promote a creative interplay amongst the diversity of understandings within the Religious Society of Friends.
This is done through residential and other gatherings, with a particular emphasis on working in small groups. Also correspondence groups on various topics and the movement’s journal.

It compares well with Lacout's description of what is at the heart of the Quaker experience in his 1969 address:

Silent worship, taking for us the place of dogma and creed, gives to us, by its unsullied transparency, infinite possibilities of dialogue. We think in a climate of absolute freedom with no fear, in principle, of condemnation by the Quaker community. Our faith, not being the prisoner of any form or words, can go without reservations towards the truth of every man, whether he be Christian or not, believer or not. We are as attentive to men as to God. Is not a human brother a part of the presence of God? If we dwell in the receptive state of mind which living worship develops in us, we shall not go towards the other man with the proud assurance of one who seeks to make a convert, but with humility of one who goes forward in gratitude for a revelation he is about to receive. To love the other man is to love his difference. Free from dogma we have more chance than others of building bridges between the fragments of our broken world. In this age of confrontation and hostility, let us learn to draw from silence, as from a well, the strength and art and skill of truthful reconciliation. No other religious family grants such liberty to its members.
 

The need for a symbolic life according to Carl Jung

We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul - the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill - this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are "nothing but." . . . Everything is banal; everything is "nothing but," and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war; they are all glad when there is a war; they say, "Thank heaven, now something is going to happen - something bigger than ourselves!"

Carl Jung - The Symbolic Life

 

There is a need to relate to an overarching narrative of who we are and why we are. If not, then we all to easily sink into the malaise of consumerism and sensation seeking, or even a state of ennui. Is there a need for a sense of mission, for a rubric to live by?

This is the vulnerability that cults and demagogues feed on: "I will lead you; I will save you: I will inspire you and give meaning to your life."; and whilst intoxicated by the newly found sense of purpose, of being valued, people are induced into 'the cause' much to the benefit of its hierarchy, its leaders.

It is a serfdom of the soul engendered by a profound abdication of responsibility for finding your purpose in life; and there are always those ready to profit from it.

 

[The Guild of Pastoral Psychology: Guild Lecture No. 80: “The Symbolic Life”: Prof C G Jung: a seminar talk given on 5th April 1939: transcript from shorthand notes of Derek Kitchen: April 1954, reprint 1964]

Lost in translation

from Lost in translation? James Gordon digs deep into Matthew’s Gospel:  James Gordon The Friend, 26th August:

I have checked over twenty different translations of these passages into English (easy to do these days with the internet), and in every case the words διὰ τοὺς ἐκλεκτοὺς (dia tous eklektous) are translated ‘for the sake of the [elect/chosen]’. Wycliffe has ‘for the chosen’, and the Latin Vulgate, which Catholics rely on to this day, has ‘propter electos’, where the preposition means ‘because of’. We need to be clear. Jerome (author of the Vulgate in the fourth century CE) was using the Greek that we have, which is the nearest we have to an original (scholars think Matthew and possibly Mark may go back to Aramaic originals but, if so, they are lost).

 

Letter to The Friend, 10th September, 2021  

Lost in translation?

In his article James Gordon (27 August) says that the Aramaic originals of the gospels are lost.

Not so lost! In fact found through the work of a Quaker scholar along with others, in ancient Syriac text; a text often used by Western Aramaic speakers.

J Rendel Harris, later to become the first director of studies at Woodbrooke, was in the habit of taking his vacations exploring for ancient documents in Egypt. He made several major discoveries at the Orthodox monastery on Mount Sinai. He advised the twin sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, of the existence of many other ancient documents at the monastery and provided them with letters of introduction. During their stay at the monastery they discovered what is known as the Sinaitic Palimpsest of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the oldest known version of the Gospels. The following year, Rendel Harris accompanied the sisters and others to Mount Sinai to painstakingly copy the retrieved texts.

Shockingly this earliest version of the Gospel of Mark – itself believed to be the oldest of the gospels – was shorter than the versions we have now, ending with the discovery of the empty grave, rather than with the resurrection and ascension.

As Rendel Harris himself put it: ‘There is no suggestion nor fragment of evidence that we might, by excavating a thousand years, unearth an ecclesiastical Christ. He, at all events, is the dream and creation of a later age.’

David Lockyer

 

Belief

 I was asked the other day what Quakers believed, or, more precisely, what I believed. I realised that I was completely unable to answer this apparently simple question. I was left floundering.

I could have given a formulaic answer, something on the lines of 'being guided by the light' or 'answering to that of God in everyone' or, as I have often done, pointing to the Testimonies, but, instead I 'fessed up' – as the modern phrase puts it – and said “I don't know”. And then “I don't do belief.”

That answer came from quite deep: a knowing that I needed to be honest in response to a genuine question, but also a knowing that I feel deeply uncomfortable about claiming any form of belief. I had not until that moment formulated why that was.

I know what I experience. I know what comes to me in the silence. I know what moves me in the words of others. I know what makes me reflect and feel compassion. I know what challenges me and makes me feel uncomfortable. I know that I have blind spots and prejudices that are far clearer to others than they are, or ever will be, to me – but belief? No. I don't do that: it pretends to certainties where there are none. I think that is because it is a substitute for the hard work of not knowing, of being open, of being receptive, of discovering.

I do know that marinated in our collective silence, in attending to the words that arise, sometimes in the mouths of others, sometimes, even against my will, on occasions in my own mouth, I become more mellow and less hasty to judge; more inclined to listen and to see different sides; to be less partisan. This makes me understand why we speak of Quakers being 'seasoned', much like we season timbers before they are fit to use: Quakerism is not a slate of beliefs to be acceded to, but a process of putting aside and untangling, or even, to borrow yet again from modern parlance, of unplugging; of simply being in the presence of being; of being with others and what envelops us all.

I feel the more we name and label what we experience the more we diminish those experiences; the more we package them and put them into boxes, the safer and the less demanding they are: packed, wrapped and contained. For me this lacks integrity and authenticity: it takes us away from the raw stuff of simply being, and the honesty of not knowing.

In some ways I feel as if beliefs are like Christmas wrapping paper – tinselly and appealing, but insubstantial – when the real gifts are inside, and what you might do with what is inside.

I am on a spiritual journey, but it is no package tour – the point is the journey, not any supposed destination: is that why I do not 'do belief'?

Published in The Friend of 30 July 2021

I am an orphan in death

 I am an orphan in death having neither grave stone, cemetery, grave yard, burial ground or even place of scattered ashes by which to remember those from whose flesh I am grown.

My mother's ashes are scattered in the sea of a beach on an island I only visited twice: once in her life and once in her death. I know not the place, and would be hard pressed to find it.

My father lies I know not where, his dying having passed some fifteen years before I even knew of it. My memory of him being only that of a child not yet five. Who the man was, I barely know, only his shadow hangs over me, half loved, half feared, and his voice coiled in anger.

As for those who share my parentage, wholly or in part, one yet lives, the others ashes are somewhere I know not fully. I know the county, and have some idea on which downland ridge they lie, but beyond that, I know not.

My cousins? I think they are no more, being much older than I, but may be they live, who knows? Of the four, two I met in life, the one twice only. Only one other did I know more fully, but she was married when I was just seven. 

Perhaps we do need places where we can go and sit and be a while to remember? It is not my lot to have that, or so it would seem.

Still a non-theist?

 I was asked the question whether I was still a non-theist?

You said, quite rightly I think, that my understanding is somewhat Taoist. Naming the nameless is to damage and limit: it is also an arrogance. Being open to the profoundness of what is - to the naked force of being - and knowing that you cannot know - that is fundamental. Imagining that we can have a transactional relationship with the totality of being is delusional: reality is remorseless. In the preciousness and precariousness of life we find the divine light. The spark that ignites the transmutation of the inert into the vital: the promethean fire that burns through us all. Minding, nurturing and guarding that light, both in ourselves and in others, is the function of religion.

So, am I still a non-theist?

Peace: A Three Piece Suite

Peace: A Three Piece Suite

The first peace, the deepest, the root from which it grows; the silence that calms and heals; the point of is-ness when there is no I, no me, no not me, no knowing, no not-knowing, no you, no not-you, no us, no not us – just pure being and the ground-of-being – the rest point of being in the moment – at one with the in-breath, the drawing-in of all that there is and all we are part of – open and accepting to whatever comes. At one with the out-breath, circulating fully and giving out all that we are. Being without attachment or aversion as the Buddhists say. Knowing that the attachments and aversions are what distorts and blinds.


The second being at peace with those around you. Being at peace with the small things of life; a peace that begets patience and concern; a ministry of presence for others, wholeheartedly witnessing their being, no matter how small the transaction, no matter how small the moment. Others are not simply instruments to our well-being - they are not background music to our songs - it is together that we are the choir of life. We are each and all witness to each other; we are each and all ministers one to another. It is of the small things of life that the world is woven.


The third piece is that world peace; that of governments and societies; that of renouncing violence as a means, as a political weapon, of not letting war be, as Clausewitz remarked, “… a continuation of politics by other means”. It is not the continuation of politics - it is the failure of politics, in fact, the greatest of all its failures.

Having recently visited a country that has been at peace for two-hundred years, that has not killed or harmed even so much as one person in its name, I cannot but feel shame to come from a country that has not even managed a decade in those two hundred years when it has not killed and maimed, has not wrought violence and havoc, has not devastated lives in its name.




This is the three piece suite of peace - and one on which we could all sit comfortably if we choose.

[Published in the Friend of 24 February 2017]