Do British Quakers believe in God? What might that mean?
Ours is an experiential faith. We have spiritual experiences which we share. They start as peak experiences, a moment of wonder, and become integrated into our daily lives. We develop language to communicate them to each other, and it appears they are similar for each person. They include a sense of presence in the moment when all the senses are heightened; a sense of the unity of all that is, and of being my own part of it; and a sense of being suffused by love, which some might call the love of God.
Then there are the spiritual experiences we have together. We know of the gathered meeting, where we are together in our spiritual experience, and of unity, where we come together to know what is right, what some call Godās loving purposes. Our worship is not meditation, but a common endeavour. Itās not like sitting in a waiting room. We know we may sometimes feel āangry, depressed, tired or spiritually coldā, but the effort of- whatever it is that we do, in worship- is worthwhile.
If you attend Quaker Quest meetings, you will have heard the phrase āfor meā, for Quakers have all sorts of opinions, and a wide range of disagreement, and I have the temerity here to speak āfor usā. We share practices with quite complex rules, and experiences. Then we ask what is behind them, and disagree wildly.
Some of us believe in God almost as in the creed, or in the Christian concept of the trinity, or different ideas of God. Some of us, like me, are materialists. I believe I am an evolved creature in a random universe. I donāt know how life could come to be through non-living chemical processes but I believe that is in principle knowable. I donāt think consciousness is in itself spiritual, but a manifestation of the mammalian brain.
Our understandings of God are not hypotheses in the scientific sense, capable of making predictions or being proved wrong by evidence, but stories. They are stories created by some of the finest human minds, addressing common spiritual experiences, progressing from a God who demanded Abrahamās son as a sacrifice to a God who offered Godās own son to die for us.
It is my perception that British Quakers squabble less than we did over these beliefs. Some of us argued it was ridiculous for someone who did not believe in God to belong to a Religious Society. My Friend answered that: āThe question is not why we join a religious society, but why we stayā. Now we find language to share the spiritual experiences, and I feel the explanations behind them- God, psychology, or Donāt Know, seem less important.
I was baptised Anglican, grew up reciting the creed without a qualm, and around 2009 slowly realised I no longer believed in that way. It felt like a great loss, and I was in slowly reducing denial for months. Just after I admitted to myself I do not believe in God I was broken open by a residential personal growth course. I went into a church as a tourist, to see the art, and a sense of its holiness brought me to my knees.
This was a difficult experience to fit into my understanding. I say: āI am inconsistent. I could only be consistent if I were inerrantā. I say, āI am rationally atheist and emotionally theist. I have a strong emotional relationship with the God I do not believe in.ā I read philosophical ideas of how well humans might see the world as it really is- not well, it seems.
I know that unconscious processes in me can form poetry, so that it seems to come to me by inspiration. My being, this process taking in food, water, oxygen and ideas, is capable of more than I consciously understand, and it is tempting to call all that is greater than my own consciousness God. Or I should abandon the word, because it means such different things to different people. Or I could use the word āGodā honestly to talk with someone who believes in the Trinity, because we both mean things we cannot know.
In Quaker worship you may see the Living God. Insofar as those words can have meaning, I know they are true.