The Quaker way
Alec Davison is impressed by an account of Quaker faith and spirituality
Most of those who become Quakers today will have made a spiritual journey to arrive at this destination. We are now a Society of convinced Friends rather than cradle Quakers. Many daughters and sons of Friends continue their parents’ questing and move beyond the Society, even if holding to Quaker values. Like Tony Philpott I have made that journey. So when his book, From Christian to Quaker: A spiritual journey from evangelical Christian to universalist Quaker, came to hand last Christmas, at that period of calm after the seasonal consumerist tsunami, I avidly devoured it, provoked in part by the implications of its title.
Raids of recollection
It’s a feast of a book – a real humdinger. In retirement, after a professional lifetime as a geography teacher in Britain and Kenya, and then a head teacher of a Hampshire comprehensive, he has gathered together fifty or so years of thoughts, jottings, diaries, lecture notes and articles, while making raids of recollection on his substantial library, and fashioned them into a remarkable expedition of spiritual questioning and exploration.
He treads again in his footsteps from a childhood Evangelical to a contemporary Quaker Universalist. His highly readable log of the voyage can only raise admiration and envy for its commitment and dedication. Would that I had such thoroughness and attention to detail.
For the outcome is nineteen chapters, embraced in three parts – The Questions and the Journey, Exploring World Views and Bringing it Together – with a substantial bibliography and glossary, copyright and references, so that it is possible to follow up on the host of new thinking and provocations that his quest will raise in the reader.
In the first chapter the ‘big questions’ become the dialogue to the book as Tony changes and grows in understanding them. He questions truth, the self, time, God, life before and after, meaning/purpose, ethics/morality and difference. These questions are woven into his experiences and reflections and we keenly watch their development.
Seeds of transformation
The earnest and idealist teenager in a literalist environment of Anglican Sunday School, Covenanters, Pathfinders and a ‘born again’ Youth Fellowship has much to break away from when confronted by the academic world of geography, sifting evidence and absorbing radical new thinking about ‘locational analysis’ and world ‘reality’. To still love what has been, and the people who cared, is not easy when their way is no longer comfortable or credible.
In the growing turmoil of his spiritual life, Tony decided only to trust his own experience and to depend no longer on external authority. The ground was ready then in his teacher training encounters with Roger Wilson, professor of education and a Quaker, for seeds of transformation to be sown.
But for all his thirty-six years of professional education life, he remained a spiritual explorer and only became a Friend on retirement, when he could give himself fully to the Society. Those explorations become the heart of the book.
He deepens his understanding of Christianity but emerges out of it, travelling without God and examining humanism, rationalism and agnosticism. He looks east to Buddhism, then Taoism and Confucianism, returning to our roots in Paganism and beyond into atheistic spirituality. He delves into the mystic dimension of all spirituality and the role of the arts in this. Finally, he returns to more contemporary and symbolic understandings of Christianity beyond the literalisms of his youth.
Each of these explorations is written crisply, with extended quotations from a range of writers and people who have witnessed to its way. He often sets out ideas comparatively in tables, boxes and columns when necessary, in a masculine and geographic manner. Books that you have read you will find are memorably encapsulated; for those that you haven’t, the tasters will add to your book list of must-reads.
Then all is gathered in for a final reflection on the ‘big questions’ that first spurred both his quest and ours. Here he often draws on a wide range of contemporary understandings from diverse disciplines. It is rare for the range to be so wide in a book of this accessibility.
Tony concludes with the two key reasons why he finds richness in being a Quaker: the spiritual space of worship and the opportunity to explore the crucial questions ‘starting from me’. This he does now as a Quaker.
Tony’s journey
By implication, Tony raises the key question: what is the Quaker Way today? George Fox broke through the religious mould of his times. Quakers were attempting to revivify the spiritual vision and witness of the historic Jesus, before their ossification by the church, just as Jesus, the charismatic Jew, had attempted to revivify Judaism, which had become ossified by the Temple cult.
Experience gave authority to early Friends, as it did to Jesus, but they had neither biblical scholarship nor the availability of religious texts and contexts from all the world’s faiths. Today, a new faith is emerging from this radically changed social and global consciousness. It acknowledges a oneness of experience, spiritual and scientific, that is profoundly human but in resonance with the originating creative spirit, out of which all is manifest: immanence from the transcendent.
Tony’s journey, recounted so beguilingly, is archetypally the journey of all awakened contemporary questers, breaking out from ossified moulds and heading for new destinations. His book is the most substantial publication yet by the Quaker Universalist Group: the venture is a triumph.
From Christian to Quaker: A spiritual journey from evangelical Christian to universalist Quaker by Tony Philpott, QUG Publishing, 2013, ISBN: 9780948232336, £8.00.
This review was first published in Universalist, a magazine of the Quaker Universalist Group.
