After almost 15 years away, I returned to Quakerism in 1997. During a difficult patch of my life, a friend said I needed to do something for myself. So I started going to the meeting house on Sunday mornings. What I rediscovered was the simple fact of space. It was a hiatus, a parenthesis inserted into a complicated, twisty life. Even if it held nothing but breath, it was a relief, and in that relief, quiet notions emerged that had been trampled into the ground of everyday life.
I am an atheist, but I’ve been bothered for a long time by the mushiness I’ve found in the liberal spiritual communities that admit non-believers such as me. I’ve spent the better part of two decades trying to put my finger on the source of this unease, but it is not a question to be solved by the intellect: it must be lived through.
Several years ago, Marshall Massey, a fellow Friend, pointed out to me that ‘truth’, in the sense that it was used by 17th-century Friends, had less to do with verifiable evidence, and more to do with sense of being a ‘true friend’, an arrow flying true. It was about remaining on a path, not about conforming to the facts of the world. This points to a deep truth: we humans are built for a different kind of rigour than that of evidentiary fact. It is at least as much about consistency, discipline and loyalty as it is about the kinds of repeatable truth that we hold up in a scientific world as fundamental.
...Here’s a peculiar sense I’ve been getting in Friends committee meetings: we often don’t know how to seek the will of God; we are uncertain whether God actually possesses will. And yet, I suspect that the way out of our tortuous debates is to stop arguing and submit. That submission — because that’s what it is, in the same sense that islam means submission — is what pulls us out of ourselves and gets us lined up to do what needs doing instead of arguing about whose idea is better."
