The man behind the door

I dream:

I’m trying to get into a house through a door. Trying to get into a Quaker place inside. The door is the front door to our old family house. There is an older man behind the door - he is strong and wiry, with a sandy beard, not elderly, but older than me. When I push the door open, he suddenly jams it shut. The second time I push it open, he jams it shut with such force that it nearly catches and takes off one of my fingers. He’s a little vicious, maybe desperate. I push through - push it open. He grabs a knife - like a Stanley knife, a craft knife. Outraged and confident, I say: “No, you can't stab me!” He slashes at my left hand and draws blood. I show him the hand, blood gathering into a big, dark blob. I say: “You can't do this, you're a Quaker! You believe in love and mercy – as do I!” 

I wake up with a startle and think: I’m trying to force becoming a Quaker. I need to back off and let it happen (or not).

Later, another attempt at interpreting the dream: this is my house, my family house. I’m entitled to be here. Who is this violent man trying to keep me out? I mention the dream to my wife. She comments: It’s interesting that you’re trying to get back into your old family house. This puts me on a better path… 

This is the door to my old childhood home, to my past. But in the dream, I also think it’s the way in to being a Quaker, or the entrance to a Quaker space. If being a “Quaker” symbolizes a new, more mature spiritual identity - a moving on from the “protective traditions and guiding authorities” of “spiritual infancy” (1) – why force my way back into my childhood home? Maybe the guy with the knife has a point: this is the wrong place. I shouldn’t come in.  

One of my great hesitancies in progressing with Quaker belonging is the difference I experience between the faith and practice of early Quakers, and the sort of interests that modern liberal Quakers often focus and spend energy on.  Shaking, I tried to put words to this once - in the first and only time that I have given verbal ministry in a Meeting for Worship: 

Quakerism has this amazing tradition: it says that we can encounter God very directly, that God is always communicating with us. Here, I hear a lot about social justice concerns and people’s experiences of supportive community, but very little about people’s direct, inner spiritual experience. Why is this? 

I had sat on this ‘ministry’ for many months, hoping it would mellow and go away. Hoping someone else would say it. Or that it wasn’t really a ministry for the group, that is was just my own personal stuff that I needed to sit with and work through. Maybe I was making an unnecessary and un-Quakerly distinction between social justice and spirituality. But the disquiet didn’t go away.

Some other Quaker groups I’ve been part of have been more personal, more spiritually lively. More weird and wonderful at times, too. These groups centred around practising a contemporary, Quaker-based form of meditation called Experiment with Light. Devised by British Quaker theologian, Rex Ambler, Experiment with Light attempts to capture and make available the process that early “Friends” (Quakers are officially known as the “Religious Society of Friends”) moved through as they waited on the Spirit, encountered the Light Within, and experienced confrontation, guidance and transformation. (2)

First, in gathered silence, Friends encountered a Presence that held and welcomed them, in which they were simply included and accepted as they were - male and female, equally - without first needing to recite this or that creed, receive this or that sacrament, etc. 

Second, silent waiting on the Spirit supported those present to sink below the usual level of mind and self, and discover a deeper “life” and “power”: 

Be still and cool in your own mind and spirit, free from your own thoughts, and you will then feel the divine source of life in you turn your mind to the Lord God. (3)

At a time when Christianity was attempting to pare back unnecessary accretions and “superfluities”, including unwarranted doctrines and verbose liturgies, it was also  laying the foundations for a more intellectual faith. Protestant reformers, such as Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, sought to simplify and return Christianity to its essentials, yet at the same time ended up privileging words, the Word, preaching, and Scripture above all else. This has led to a Protestantism that is rather heady, busy, and largely alienated from the contemplative treasures of Catholic Christianity. Quakerism took a different path (at least until it became more rational and discursive in later years, under both evangelical and liberal theological influence). 

In a sense, early Quakers rejected (or bracketed) both sacrament and word. They waited in silence and dropped below thinking - sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart (4) - not to remain quiet or without thoughts forever, but to experience God and reality more powerfully and immediately. 

While silence often connected Friends with a deeper “source” that was healing and immensely refreshing, it was far from a romantic affirmation of self, or an invitation to think and believe whatever felt most true, beautiful, and lofty (as some later, modern Quakers emphasized). (5)

The Light was often, initially at least, a disturbing, confronting encounter: 

Now, Friends, deal plainly with yourselves, and let the eternal Light search you, and try you, for the good of your souls. For this will deal plainly with you. It will rip you up, and lay you open, and make all manifest which lodges in you; the secret subtlety of the enemy of your souls, this eternal searcher and trier will make manifest. Therefore all to this come, and by this be searched, and judged, and led and guided...(6)

Things get worse before they get better:

But oh dear, that’s when I saw my troubles and tribulations more than I have ever done before! As the light appeared everything that was out of the light also appeared: darkness, death, temptations, whatever was not right or good. Everything was disclosed and seen in the light… (7).

As Jesus is credited as saying in the Gospel of Matthew, and in a manner that captured the sufferings of many early Friends:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. (Matthew 10: 34-36).

This experience of “the Light” (Christ, God within) is almost unknown to theological liberalism, whether in Quaker or other forms. The liberal antipathy to what we might call ‘the judgment of God’, except in systemic, impersonal terms, developed, most likely, as a corrective to an overzealous, utterly condemning, evangelical doctrine of humankind’s ‘total depravity’.  

The Light was searching and personal, could rip you up and open.  Yet waiting in it was also a permissive, or non-repressive, experience. If early Quakers were to sit the “Big Five Personality Test”, they would score highly on “openness to experience”. Certainly, at this stage, there is no sense of ‘the Light Within’ as a humanistic warm fuzzy. But though the Light could be fierce and piercing in its truth and honesty, it also was imbued with a healing radiance. There was no sense of a raging, ‘satisfying’ God. “The light is that which enables you to see.” (8) 

There is one wise and delightful elder in our local Quaker Meeting who, in response to more outwardly-focused social justice ministry, is always asking us to look within, to look at the reality and projections within, to account for our “shadow” in whatever issue is before us. (9)

My family tended to repress what Carl Jung called ‘the shadow’ - i.e. one’s negative, uncomfortable feelings and inner self-parts, as well as one’s hidden, untapped gifts and disallowed potential - and flee into positive talk and service to others. Rather than feeling and accepting our own woundedness - e.g. anger, sorrow, fear, doubt, envy, rivalry, resentment, burn-out, depression - our family pattern is to focus on and look after others’ needs and wounds. My experience in working with dozens of Christian clients in therapy over the years is that this “rescuing” pattern/avoidance is extremely common. 

Helping or saving others is often identified as the essence of Christianity. This has largely been unconsciously true for me, a child of missionaries, as well. But only God saves others, heals others, enlightens souls. My primary responsibility is to make space for this encounter within me, first. I have never yet received inner guidance to “save” anyone else. I have to ensure that my inner power supply and homing beacon is on and working/receiving, otherwise I am a dead person spreading death and aimlessness in the world, spiritually speaking. It’s so common that it’s hardly worth felling guilty about. At the same time, it’s certainly unhelpful. 

In the dream I began with, I say to the man behind the door, “You can't do this”, you can’t stab me. “You're a Quaker! You believe in love and mercy – as do I!”

What if Christianity – including the Quaker path – is more than just treating others kindly, or serving others in the world? What if it involves, firstly, a deep and searching, often painful, encounter with self and God, without converting this discomfort into loathing, self-hate, or negative rumination, without projecting it onto others or discharging it in frenetic rescuing, or if this occurs, seeing it in the Light/having it “searched” and “laid open” by the Light? What if “the Way”, crucially, involves receiving tangible “power” and “life”, though not the sort of power that is usual and commonplace in the world? And what is this “power” and “life”, outrageously, was the same power that animated Jesus, his disciples, and the prophets, as George Fox and the early Quaker's claimed? (10) 

What if the man behind the door is a “threshold guardian”, refusing to allow me to take the next step, until…

 References:

(1) Paul Tillich, The Boundaries of Our Being (1973), p.127.

(2) See Rex Ambler, Light to Live By (second edition, 2009), and https://experiment-with-light.org.uk/.

(3) George Fox, quoted in Rex Ambler, Truth of the Heart: An anthology of George Fox (2001, revised edition 2007), p.25.

(4) Isaac Penington, Some directions to the panting soul, (1661); retrieved from http://www.qhpress.org/texts/penington/panting.html.

(5) See Benjamin Wood, The Living Fountain: Remembrances of Quaker Christianity (2002), for an insightful and encompassing critique of modern liberal Quakerism.

(6) Margaret Fell, Epistle to convinced Friends, 1656. C/f. Caroline Stephen: “The first effect of the shining of light within is to show what is amiss - to ‘convince of sin’.” Caroline Stephen, Quaker Strongholds (1890, fourth edition 1939), p.24. 

(7) George Fox, quoted in Ambler (2007), p.31.

(8) Fox, quoted in Ambler, p.29.

(9) George Fox had an intuitive, lively understanding of projection: “The Lord showed me that the things that cause hurt externally are themselves internal, in the hearts and minds of wicked people. [E.g. when they call other people names such as ] ‘dogs’, ‘swine’, ‘vipers’…The cause of these hurts I saw within, though people had been looking outside themselves”; See Fox in Ambler (2007), p.13-15, 29-39.

(10) There is a moving and Christ-like account of George Fox being apprehended, assaulted, and thrown out of Ulverston, Cumbria, having preached his Quaker testimony in the church there. Other Quakers, present, were also beaten:

And the blood ran down several people so as I never saw in my life as I looked at them, when they were dragging me along…

And when they had led me to the common moss…they fell up on me with their hedge stakes and clubs and staves, and beat me as hard as they ever could strike on my head and arms and shoulders…and at last I fell down up on the wet common. There I lay a pretty space…I lay a little still, and the power of the Lord sprang through me, and the eternal refreshings refreshed me…

Source: George Fox, Journal (1652), quoted in John Lampen, Wait in the Light: The Spirituality of George Fox (1981), p.25.

Image at top of page: Adam and Eve expelled from Eden by an angel with a flaming sword. Line engraving by R. Sadeler after M. de Vos, 1583.