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One experience that stays with me was when, newly interested in Quakers, I visited Sunday Meeting for Worship. About twenty chairs were arranged in a circle. But it so happened that one, with a cushion on it, had already been occupied – by a cat. During our hour of silent reflection, this unexpected visitor spent much of its time purring contentedly. The cat clearly resonated with whatever spirit – a loving spirit – it detected in
that room.
Magda Kelber was born on 7 June 1908 in Aufsess, a little town in north-west Bavaria. She was the fifth of the six children of Julius and Pauline. Julius was a Lutheran vicar, like many other men in the family. Lutheran Protestantism was (and still is) for many of the Kelber family the unquestioned truth, the only correct way of life. Children were brought up with strictness; kindness and love were considered weakness, and one should be proud to be a Kelber.
There are lives so compressed by circumstance, so bright with conviction, that they burn through the years and illuminate us still. Edward Burrough lived only twenty-nine years, yet in that brief span he faced rejection by his own family, engaged in pitched theological combat, pleaded at the court of a king, and died in prison – never once, as far as the record shows, losing hold of the inward light that had seized him as a teenager in the fields of Westmorland.
I have found two signposts within myself as I approach Quaker worship.
The first I read as ‘the religious and transcendent way’. Thomas Aquinas and others used the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’ to define a Creator not as an entity in this world, nor indeed in a supernatural world, but in a different register: beyond us; transcendent. This is what Rudolf Otto described in The Idea of the Holy. By contrast, there is the view of atheists such as Alfred Ayer, and before him David Hume. They deflate the religious balloon.
Sometimes, it is what’s behind a word. Early Friends used some fifty terms to denote God or the inward presence. Familiar examples include the Inward Light, the Light of Christ, the Seed, the Root, the Spring of Life, the Living Water, the Teacher and the Truth.
Can it really be 300 years since Voltaire began his exile in England, and first encountered Quakers? The celebrated French writer had been beaten up on the orders of one of his enemies, and locked up in the Bastille. Not wishing that to happen again, he came to live in England. This was in 1726, the same year Gulliver’s Travels was published. Voltaire’s Letters on England has some of the surreal quality of Swift’s satirical masterpiece.
I agree with you Sir, Everything
emits. Electro-magnetic dominance
in war will be multivalent. Complex.
If you are a gardener, do you ever find the garden becoming a battlefield? From a distance, a gardener is an epitome of serenity, but the actual experience can be that of a constant tussle with pests, weed and weather. Planting, sowing and nurturing are outweighed by uprooting, pruning, burning and shredding. How does this sit with our peace testimony?
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