Preaching

[f4f3]

When widgetfoxand I stopped seeing each other, I wondered if I'd keep going to Quaker meetings. It's something I started doing with her, and to an extent it's still bound up with her, and I feel a little sadness every time I sit down in a group because of that. 
It looks like my feet have their own ideas, though, as they've been taking me to meetings on a Sunday when I'm in Glasgow. 



One of the things I do to quiet my brain down for the shared silence is to pick a passage to think about from one of the copies of Faith and Practice which they leave lying around. It's an interesting book, partly history, partly a rule book for meetings, and partly personal reflections, everything from the end of the 17th C to the start of this one. 

Today I opened it at random and came up with this:

"Art thou in the Darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will fill thee more, but stand still and act not, and wait in patience till Light arises out of Darkness to lead thee."

That was written b James Nayler and that's all I know about him. From the phrasing it's seems likely he was more at the King Charles end of things than the Prince Charles end, but who knows

The first few words remind me of Nietzsche of course - Gave not into the abyss, for the abyss gazes also into you, and contend not with dragons lest ye become one

So good advice to me - don't give your attention to the darkness, or it will fill you. That makes a lot of sense in a world where the papers are full of things guaranteed to get me annoyed or make me despair. And you can always find darkness in your personal life (well I can. It's a talent). 

The next bit, though...

"stand still and act not"

Well I have a bit of a problem with not acting. I want to put things right, or at least rail against what's wrong. Though I suppose I'd rather act in a useful way than jump in and make things worse. And as for:

"wait in patience till Light arises out of Darkness to lead thee."

Well, I have a big problem with that. What's this light you talk about?

So those were the thoughts I carried into the shared silence with me, and after five or ten minutes I started to smile. The point of the silence, is to listen to the voice inside you. To listen, in fact, to the light inside you, which Quakers believe we all have, equally. It's why they have no priests, or why they are all priests. 

So the Light arising out the Darkness isn't something external, it's our own light, and we need to listen to it. This isn't a hard thing for me to believe, although I have no belief in churches or religion, or an active, revealed god. I think all through history there have been teachers pointing us that way, to tending the light inside ourselves. Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, David Hume, Adam Smith (and if you don't believe the last two belong there, read some Hume and some Smith).

Most of the rest of my hour was spent thinking about how to encourage the flame, the light inside myself. That seemed a good use for my time.

Towards the end, though, someone stood up and spoke firmly, but with quite a bit of upset in his voice. He started by quoting some well known sayings from the bible: "Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, if anyone harms these children, better to be cast into the sea with a millstone lashed to them.." and linked these to the world we're in. He then said that Christianity was under attack by those who should know better: "I don't need Richard Dawkins to tell me the world turns on its axis. I don't need Richard Dawkins to tell me we travel round the sun, I don't need Richard Dawkins to tell me that the moon causes our tides by magnetism. I need Richard Dawkins to look to his own assumptions."

And he sat down, still looking quite upset. It might surprise some of you, but I didn't get up to say that the tides are caused by gravity, not magnetism, as Newton would no doubt confirm. But I was surprised. I couldn't understand, if he was a believer, why he would be upset by a non-believer's words. Being persecuted for your faith is grounds for a beatitude, I think, and the answer is to turn your other cheek. And no matter how much of a lion's den the media might be, their teeth aren't as sharp as, well, as a lion's.

I didn't stand at all, but I thought about what he'd said, and I decided he was exactly wrong. We do need scientists (atheists or not) to tell us how the earth turns, and why the planets pick the paths they do, and when the best time to build flood defences might be.

And we need teachers and thinkers to encourage us to look within for other answers. I don't care if that's Jesus or Buddha or Marx or Lennon. Even the words they use aren't as important as the simple, essential truth that there is something in us that grows when we feed it, and that grows more beautiful when we feed it on light than darkness. 

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

That's precisely why, I suppose, their actual idea content matters to me so much. Quite a few doctrines of universal love need no significant abusing whatsoever to get their followers bothering innocent bystanders. Universal love can be rather horrible if appropriately applied.

(I think it's rather obvious I'm a bit of a cynic about these things.)

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I think I'm even more cynical than you are. When any doctrine can inspire fanatics, the roots of their fanaticism doesn't really matter. Far better to be able to profile fanatics by their behaviour rather than their (professed) allegiances.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I think I'll stick with this "Know thy enemy" thing. Who knows? Maybe it'll allow me to see them coming further away than I otherwise would.