Janet Harland
The thoughts that follow arose in a discussion that took place at one of the monthly sessions convened by John Mason for Friends across the Area Meeting under the heading ‘Living in the Spirit’. Each month one of us chooses a passage for the group’s reflection. When it was my turn, I chose Advice and Queries no.1:
Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.
Advices & Queries (AQs) were not only a very valuable support for me when I was struggling to identify the core elements of Quakerism twenty years ago, but they have remained at the centre of my faith. They have indeed served me as both the comfort and the discomfort that its Introduction promises. Of all the 42 AQs, it is – in my view – the first which encapsulates the core. And I suppose I especially like it because it reads as a statement put together through collective thought and lived experience rather than by a single author.
AQ1 contains only 33 words, yet it is both a concise statement and indeed a prompt for many different strands of thought. Many of our group’s conversations have come back to the question of just how we come to hear the voice of God (or whatever we choose to call it). In AQ1 this voice is described as ‘the promptings of love and truth’ – so that is where we started.
One of the images that sticks with me about these promptings comes from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:
I find letters from God dropt in the street,
and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are,
for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
(lines 1286-1288)
But there also come into my head memories of my upbringing where conscience was seen as a route to separating good deeds from bad. It too was thought of as an internal voice. ‘Can you do this or that with a clear conscience? What does your conscience tell you?’ The index in our current printed Quaker Faith & Practice makes no mention of conscience (though there are several references to consciousness which is a related but not identical matter). Its predecessor – Christian faith and practice in the experience of the Society of Friends – published in 1955, certainly does deal with conscience though it has a pretty sceptical notion of its value, choosing to quote a Yearly Meeting definition of 1879, perhaps to point up the fact that the issue had been well and truly dealt with and disposed of:
As the eye is to the body, so is conscience to our inner nature, the organ by which we see; and as both light and life are essential to sight in the natural eye, so conscience, as the inward eye, cannot see aright without the quickening and illumination of the Spirit of God … (para 170, op.cit.)
This quote probably reflects the attitude that most Quakers held for some time. Certainly, it was a view supported vigorously by Caroline Steven whose short book, Quaker Strongholds, was published in 1890 (and of which the opening sentences appear in Quaker Faith & Practice 2.02 and are still among the most uplifting in the whole collection). In her own book she writes:
Conscience as we all know, is liable to perversion, to morbid exaggerations … to twists and crotchets of all sorts. (It) can never be our supreme and absolute guide … In a broad and practical sense, we all know that if there were nothing above conscience, conscience would assuredly lead many of us into the ditch … The light by which our consciences must be enlightened, the light in obedience to which is our supreme good, must be something purer than this fallible faculty itself. … It must be the power in which we live and move and have our being – the power and the presence of God. (p17)
This seems to me to be a nonsense, and indeed something of an insult to all those folk whose lives and works we admire because they are forces for good in our troubled world, and yet who do not share our spiritual commitment. Surely the reservations I have quoted are not suggesting that we experience not one, but two internal voices, possibly locked together in ceaseless debate as in ‘My conscience tells me to do/value/work for this, but wait a bit, the promptings of love and truth are pushing me in a somewhat different direction’. Obviously, my conscience has been shaped by many life experiences, and not all of them are what others might approve, but they come together in a totality that reflects what I value; and they shape what I do and evaluate what I have done. And because I have some kind of religious belief of a Quaker kind, that conscience moves along somewhat predictable lines.
I realise that my thoughts are leading me back to Freud’s notion of the superego, or more probably to Socrates’ assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living. And these are perhaps areas to which our interesting group will return. In the meantime, my argument here is that we should focus our minds on the opening words of AQ1 – Take heed – because these promptings reach us all, and as in Whitman’s signed notes, they are there for us all, and not just for Quakers.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 520 • August 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
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