This is a Facebook posting by Almeley Wooton Friend Brian Holley
"I'm realising more and more that I have left absolutely all my
religious beliefs behind. Yet my inner life; my spiritual life, is
the richest it has ever been. Not that I no longer value all that
brought me to this place, but I now have no concept of 'God' and no
need to believe any religious stories intended to help me
understand 'God'. Yet, in my morning meditation and from time to
time during the day when I pause to notice, I experience what I can
only call 'presence', though not a person. It is an experience of purity, clarity, wholeness and peace. In it, from time to
time, arise insights, which may be inspired by scripture or books
I'm reading. More importantly, I'm finding more time to care for
others in practical ways as well as in "holding them in the
light".
Why am I going public with all this? It's to say that, as well as a spiritual life within religion, there is a spiritual life without and beyond religion. The 'presence' is within each of us (and I've now met enough other people who experience it to be confident of that). It's not necessary to label it. All we have to do is notice it. And that's the difficulty, learning to be still enough and open enough for long enough for something wonderful to happen. Once we've been enabled to do that we can never be the same."
Here is an epistle from an Experiment With Light held at Glenthorne in March 2018. Experiment with Light is a process of steeping oneself in the spirit initiated by Rex Ambler. As the epistle notes Friends who have explored this have found that it creates a space "where we can feel confident to share at a deep level. Working into our hearts deeply and looking into the hearts of others enhances our relationships – with ourselves, with each other, with our Meetings, with the world around us, and with the Light."
This is part of a post in the Silent Assemblies blog, by Mike Farley:
Marcelle Martin, in her 2016 book Our Life Is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey, writes of the process known by early Quakers, George Fox in particular, as “The Refiner’s Fire” (from Malachi 3.2: “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap…”):
You can sign up to have an email whenever new posts are added to the Silent Assemblies blog.
Here is another Mike Farley blog from Silent Assemblies,
Naming the Mystery :
Prayer is not about unveiling an impersonal source of our being, nor about gaining access to some sort of basic cosmic energy, nor about diving into a greater whole. Prayer is meeting the Father's eyes and discovering that he loves us, cares for us, and journeys at our side.
Luigi Gioia, Say it to God: In Search of Prayer: The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2018
This is the sort of statement that irritates some people, Friends and liberal Christians alike, who do indeed feel they wish to see God in impersonal terms like these. The problem is one of language, of course (see much of God, words and us, ed. Helen Rowlands), but also of rather more than the bare use of that term might suggest. Too much use of the personal may awaken in some unfortunate memories of simplistic caricatures of faith taught in Sunday schools, evangelistic rallies and elsewhere, while the often studied, mannered use of the impersonal may cramp and inhibit those of us whose own natural speech uses the concepts of a Trinitarian God as the inevitable expression of their experience of faith.
Craig Barnett, quoted in God, words and us, writes,
Most Quakers who use the word 'God' are not speaking of an 'old man in the clouds', or the omnipotent and omniscient supernatural God of the philosophers. Liberal Quakerism has inherited from the wider mystical religious tradition an understanding of spiritual reality as ultimately mysterious and unnameable, This tradition uses the word 'God' not as the name of an external 'being' but as a signpost that points towards our experience of spiritual reality...
For many people the word 'God' has so many unpleasant association with authoritarian or dogmatic religion that it is definitely unhelpful for them. For others, it is the most natural word to express their own experience and its continuity with traditional Quaker spirituality or with other religious paths. There is no right answer here: it is simply a matter of our personal histories and sensibilities, which may also change over time in response to different experiences.
Writing in the 22 March 2018 issue of The Friend, Cap Kaylor says, in their article 'Christ, mystery and faith',
Whether we care to acknowledge it or not, the deeper narrative from which Quakerism sprang is the Christian narrative of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, who functioned both as archetype and engine for the early Quakers. For most of our history Friends have had no trouble identifying with that Christian narrative.
The Religious Society of Friends began as a reform movement within Christianity, and for the early Friends there was no confusion when it came to identifying the Light with the historical person of Jesus. They lived and moved in a society that was saturated with a Christian ethos. The very stones around them proclaimed a Christian culture that we can no longer take for granted as they could. Embedded within a Christian milieu they found their meaning and their mission in the gospels.
We are now faced with a dilemma. That Christian milieu has long since faded, and seeds that were planted early in our own history have left Quakers uniquely vulnerable to the stresses and challenges of a materialistic and aggressively secular civilisation. The historic channels through which Christian faith has typically been transmitted were scripture, tradition, and sacramental ritual. They weave together to form the narrative that is the Christian community’s collective memory of the Jesus event.
To a certain degree, part of the uniqueness of Quakerism has been its rejection of scripture, tradition and ritual as the principle sources of religious authority. In their place, Friends have historically elevated the individual’s experience of the Inward Light as primary. But it might now be asked whether the very thing that made Quakerism unique within Christianity is now making it uniquely vulnerable. Without scripture, tradition or sacramental ritual, what is left to re-link us to the original narrative that gave shape and substance to what began as an explicitly Christian mysticism?
We could do without a reliance on scripture, ordained ministry, or ritual while we lived in a Christian society that provided us with commonly held ethical presuppositions and a vocabulary to interpret our spiritual experiences. But that time has now past. However, without the force of at least an ostensibly Christian culture, where is the Religious Society of Friends to look for its identity and its engine?
Prayer has a way of undercutting our assumptions and our intellectualising, our "notions" as early Friends would have said. We are so much less than we think we are, and beside the realities we encounter in prayer our ideas and our preconceptions seem, to be honest, often slightly silly.
Luigi Gioia goes on to say,
In the end the source of authentic peace and truth will have to be looked for within. The real source of certainty as well...
Here is a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Pontifical University in Rome saying something that would not have sounded inappropriate in the mouth of an early Quaker! Prayer, if it is anything, is an authentic encounter with that which is far beyond the personal as we understand it, not because it is less than personal, but because it is infinitely more. For that, my own understanding fits precisely the Triune God of the creeds. When I pray the Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, I am not reciting a formula; I am praying, in the Spirit, to Christ. There are no other words for that. We humans need sacraments: we need something, whether shared silence or shared bread and wine, to link us and heal us and remake us, to make real, to the ground, our experience in the flesh in which we are made. Prayer needs this grounding - it cannot live as bodiless esotericism. It needs breath, warmth, life.
Gioia again,
Not that [in prayer] pain, worry, sin, selfishness, shame, guilt, magically disappear. Not that we lose our solidarity with all our brothers and sisters who do not pray or who do not believe. On the contrary, authentic prayer makes us more compassionate: we start feeling not only our pain but the pain of our brothers and sisters as well, we start perceiving the inward groans of humanity and even of the whole of creation [Romans 8.19-23]. What changes, however, is that these groans, this pain, these worries, this shame, this guilt, become prayer, feed prayer, so that love and hope are inexplicably infused into them and they lose their bitterness, their ability to hurt us, to trouble us: in hope we were saved and when we hope we become able to wait with patience, because all things work together for good for those who experience God's love in prayer [Romans 8.28]...
Mike Farley | 26/03/2018
Contemplation, like pain, is not a private enterprise. This may seem an odd statement. After all, we speak of "my practice" as though it belonged to us; we say, "I am in pain" as though we were enclosed in it as in our own room. But grace does not allow this kind of solipsism. We pray as somehow representative of all that is involved in being human - the generations of DNA, the common rhythm of our breathing - and we suffer in the same way. My pain is inextricably bound up in yours, merely by our common inheritance of a nervous system, and emotions. How can we not love, even our enemies, when we are of the same flesh, the same breath? The very word, "compassion" is derived from the Latin for "suffering with".
Why am I going public with all this? It's to say that, as well as a spiritual life within religion, there is a spiritual life without and beyond religion. The 'presence' is within each of us (and I've now met enough other people who experience it to be confident of that). It's not necessary to label it. All we have to do is notice it. And that's the difficulty, learning to be still enough and open enough for long enough for something wonderful to happen. Once we've been enabled to do that we can never be the same."
Here is an epistle from an Experiment With Light held at Glenthorne in March 2018. Experiment with Light is a process of steeping oneself in the spirit initiated by Rex Ambler. As the epistle notes Friends who have explored this have found that it creates a space "where we can feel confident to share at a deep level. Working into our hearts deeply and looking into the hearts of others enhances our relationships – with ourselves, with each other, with our Meetings, with the world around us, and with the Light."
This is part of a post in the Silent Assemblies blog, by Mike Farley:
Marcelle Martin, in her 2016 book Our Life Is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey, writes of the process known by early Quakers, George Fox in particular, as “The Refiner’s Fire” (from Malachi 3.2: “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap…”):
Experiences of the Light are challenging when they show us ways we have not been living in accordance with God’s love and truth. Western cultures teach people from infancy to onward to push divine guidance to the back of our awareness, and most people quickly learn to block perception of the indwelling Presence of God. Reversing this and consciously opening our hearts and minds to spiritual truth is not easy. It takes patience and courage to still our minds, turn within, and wait in a receptive way for the Light to show us how we have been resisting divine Love and Truth in the particulars of our thinking, our relationships, our way of living, and our participation in the world. Seeing this can be surprising…For me, the reality has been less straightforward than it is or some. Due to some quirk of nature or nurture – my mother, who brought me up as a single parent, was a painter and sculptor – I never did “learn to block perception of the indwelling Presence of God” to the extent that most people seem to. As I wrote a couple of years ago, “I have known since childhood the power of solitude, of lonely places; and I have always been most at home alone in the grey wind, without a destination or timetable, or sitting by myself in a sunlit garden, watching the tiny velvety red mites threading their paths on a warm stone bench.” Listening for that indwelling presence has been at times terrifying, at times joyful, but it has never been entirely possible to escape, hard as I occasionally tried, especially in my mid-twenties. I am at least as susceptible as anyone I know to self-deception and wishful thinking, to being untrue to myself and to God, and to looking outside myself, at the external aspects of thought and practice among people of faith, trying to distract myself from the work of the Spirit in my heart. But it is less easy to distract the Holy Spirit, and so I have been called back again and again to these uncomfortable, at times downright dangerous, places, out in the saltmarshes of the heart.
[Quoting Sandra Cronk] “The process of entering into a deep relationship with God is also the process of uncovering ourselves… In the light of that love, deep re-patterning can take place in us.”
You can sign up to have an email whenever new posts are added to the Silent Assemblies blog.
Here is another Mike Farley blog from Silent Assemblies,
Naming the Mystery :
Prayer is not about unveiling an impersonal source of our being, nor about gaining access to some sort of basic cosmic energy, nor about diving into a greater whole. Prayer is meeting the Father's eyes and discovering that he loves us, cares for us, and journeys at our side.
Luigi Gioia, Say it to God: In Search of Prayer: The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2018
This is the sort of statement that irritates some people, Friends and liberal Christians alike, who do indeed feel they wish to see God in impersonal terms like these. The problem is one of language, of course (see much of God, words and us, ed. Helen Rowlands), but also of rather more than the bare use of that term might suggest. Too much use of the personal may awaken in some unfortunate memories of simplistic caricatures of faith taught in Sunday schools, evangelistic rallies and elsewhere, while the often studied, mannered use of the impersonal may cramp and inhibit those of us whose own natural speech uses the concepts of a Trinitarian God as the inevitable expression of their experience of faith.
Craig Barnett, quoted in God, words and us, writes,
Most Quakers who use the word 'God' are not speaking of an 'old man in the clouds', or the omnipotent and omniscient supernatural God of the philosophers. Liberal Quakerism has inherited from the wider mystical religious tradition an understanding of spiritual reality as ultimately mysterious and unnameable, This tradition uses the word 'God' not as the name of an external 'being' but as a signpost that points towards our experience of spiritual reality...
For many people the word 'God' has so many unpleasant association with authoritarian or dogmatic religion that it is definitely unhelpful for them. For others, it is the most natural word to express their own experience and its continuity with traditional Quaker spirituality or with other religious paths. There is no right answer here: it is simply a matter of our personal histories and sensibilities, which may also change over time in response to different experiences.
Writing in the 22 March 2018 issue of The Friend, Cap Kaylor says, in their article 'Christ, mystery and faith',
Whether we care to acknowledge it or not, the deeper narrative from which Quakerism sprang is the Christian narrative of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, who functioned both as archetype and engine for the early Quakers. For most of our history Friends have had no trouble identifying with that Christian narrative.
The Religious Society of Friends began as a reform movement within Christianity, and for the early Friends there was no confusion when it came to identifying the Light with the historical person of Jesus. They lived and moved in a society that was saturated with a Christian ethos. The very stones around them proclaimed a Christian culture that we can no longer take for granted as they could. Embedded within a Christian milieu they found their meaning and their mission in the gospels.
We are now faced with a dilemma. That Christian milieu has long since faded, and seeds that were planted early in our own history have left Quakers uniquely vulnerable to the stresses and challenges of a materialistic and aggressively secular civilisation. The historic channels through which Christian faith has typically been transmitted were scripture, tradition, and sacramental ritual. They weave together to form the narrative that is the Christian community’s collective memory of the Jesus event.
To a certain degree, part of the uniqueness of Quakerism has been its rejection of scripture, tradition and ritual as the principle sources of religious authority. In their place, Friends have historically elevated the individual’s experience of the Inward Light as primary. But it might now be asked whether the very thing that made Quakerism unique within Christianity is now making it uniquely vulnerable. Without scripture, tradition or sacramental ritual, what is left to re-link us to the original narrative that gave shape and substance to what began as an explicitly Christian mysticism?
We could do without a reliance on scripture, ordained ministry, or ritual while we lived in a Christian society that provided us with commonly held ethical presuppositions and a vocabulary to interpret our spiritual experiences. But that time has now past. However, without the force of at least an ostensibly Christian culture, where is the Religious Society of Friends to look for its identity and its engine?
Prayer has a way of undercutting our assumptions and our intellectualising, our "notions" as early Friends would have said. We are so much less than we think we are, and beside the realities we encounter in prayer our ideas and our preconceptions seem, to be honest, often slightly silly.
Luigi Gioia goes on to say,
In the end the source of authentic peace and truth will have to be looked for within. The real source of certainty as well...
Here is a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Pontifical University in Rome saying something that would not have sounded inappropriate in the mouth of an early Quaker! Prayer, if it is anything, is an authentic encounter with that which is far beyond the personal as we understand it, not because it is less than personal, but because it is infinitely more. For that, my own understanding fits precisely the Triune God of the creeds. When I pray the Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, I am not reciting a formula; I am praying, in the Spirit, to Christ. There are no other words for that. We humans need sacraments: we need something, whether shared silence or shared bread and wine, to link us and heal us and remake us, to make real, to the ground, our experience in the flesh in which we are made. Prayer needs this grounding - it cannot live as bodiless esotericism. It needs breath, warmth, life.
Gioia again,
Not that [in prayer] pain, worry, sin, selfishness, shame, guilt, magically disappear. Not that we lose our solidarity with all our brothers and sisters who do not pray or who do not believe. On the contrary, authentic prayer makes us more compassionate: we start feeling not only our pain but the pain of our brothers and sisters as well, we start perceiving the inward groans of humanity and even of the whole of creation [Romans 8.19-23]. What changes, however, is that these groans, this pain, these worries, this shame, this guilt, become prayer, feed prayer, so that love and hope are inexplicably infused into them and they lose their bitterness, their ability to hurt us, to trouble us: in hope we were saved and when we hope we become able to wait with patience, because all things work together for good for those who experience God's love in prayer [Romans 8.28]...
Mike Farley | 26/03/2018
The practice of contemplation is good not only for us but also for the entire world. Many testimonies throughout the contemplative tradition bear witness to this. Not least among these is that of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing: "This is the work [the practice of contemplation] of the soul that pleases God most. All the saints and angels rejoice in this work and hasten to help it with all their might... All the people living on earth are marvellously helped by this work, in ways you do not know."...Typically the first great motivator on this pathless path is the sense that this appeals strongly to something within us. The other great motivator is despair. There are times in our lives, sometimes lasting rather a long while, when just being silent and still is the least painful thing we can manage right now, when all our effort is crushed into barely surviving, just keeping one nostril above water. After discovering that pain itself has a silent centre and that our own pain is not private to us, however deeply personal it is, something opens us from within, especially if we are too poor to desire any such opening should ever happen (but we cannot make ourselves poor in order to make this happen.)What brings us to the practice of contemplation does not matter. What matters is that we give ourselves to this practice at least once a day...
Grace and pain, and love
Contemplation, like pain, is not a private enterprise. This may seem an odd statement. After all, we speak of "my practice" as though it belonged to us; we say, "I am in pain" as though we were enclosed in it as in our own room. But grace does not allow this kind of solipsism. We pray as somehow representative of all that is involved in being human - the generations of DNA, the common rhythm of our breathing - and we suffer in the same way. My pain is inextricably bound up in yours, merely by our common inheritance of a nervous system, and emotions. How can we not love, even our enemies, when we are of the same flesh, the same breath? The very word, "compassion" is derived from the Latin for "suffering with".
Contemplation
is such a simple thing, and yet its power, for us and for all whom our
hearts embrace, is without any limit I have been able to discern.
Insofar as it liberates us from the illusion that God is something we
lack, for which we have to look, and restores us to the plain awareness
that "God is the all-loving, groundless ground of being" (Laird, ibid.)
it is obviously limitless. The gradual opening out of the patient
practice of whichever stream of contemplative prayer we find carries us
is not a thing that can be measured, or predicted, however. It is all
grace. Our whole path is gift, God's uncountable mercy. As Martin Laird
points out in the passage I've cited above, we cannot even take things
away in the order to bring it about. It isn't ours to bring about.
Paul
explained in his letter to the Christians in Rome that "we know that in
all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been
called according to his purpose." (Romans 8.28) Love for God enfolds all
those others, human and otherwise, who, like us, have their very being
in the "groundless ground" of God, and so does God's endless work for
good flow through us to all whom we love. It is so simple. There is
nothing to it. As TS Eliot said, it is "Quick now, here, now, always - A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)..."
Mike Farley 
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