We talk a lot about Quaker values as if they are what it means to be a Quaker.
Values are ideals or standards of behaviour. They are not something true about the world and our place in it. They are simply the ethical principles and goals that we choose for ourselves.
But religious experience is not like this at all. It is not about ‘my values’, it is a new experience of reality.
Quaker spirituality is not about choosing general principles of behaviour. It is discerning our response to a specific calling. The challenge of the Quaker way is to discover how the Spirit is leading us in this particular situation - the thing that is given to us to do.
This calling may even conflict with our usual values and responsibilities. When James Nayler received his leading to become a Quaker minister, he left behind his wife and family to become an itinerant preacher:
“Having on an old suit, without any money, having neither taken leave of wife or children, not thinking then of any journey, I was commanded to go into the west, not knowing whither I should go, nor what I was to do there. But when I had been there a little while, I had given me what I was to declare.”
(Quaker faith & practice 19.09)
This kind of response to a specific leading from the Inward Guide is what Quakers call “testimony”. It is unpredictable and radically challenging to accepted norms of behaviour. It is also dangerous and notoriously vulnerable to error and delusion.
Values are safe and easy. Testimony is dangerous and difficult.
Values are safe and easy. Testimony is dangerous and difficult. It requires practice to develop our receptivity and to test our leadings. This is what the Quaker practices of worship and collective discernment are for.
Testimony is not another word for values. It is our testimony to the reality of human life and our place in it. It is not a subjective choice of what we value, but the reality of life at its deepest and most authentic.
When we encounter spiritual reality, we are touched by the creative energy of the universe. We have been granted a glimpse of ourselves and our place in the divine reality that moves through all things. At this moment, our own values, ideals and principles become unimportant. After such an encounter we are changed, not just in our beliefs or values, but in how we perceive the world and our place and purpose in it.
The first generation of Quakers did not invent a set of values. They lived according to the reality that had been revealed to them. In the process, they discovered that living an authentic human life, and maintaining a genuine human community, is a political act. As Rex Ambler describes it:
"Early Friends testified to the truth that had changed them by living their lives on the basis of that truth. The reality of their life (and of human life) shone through in their lives because they were open to that reality and lived in harmony with it. Lives lived in the truth would then resonate with how other people lived their lives, and more specifically with the deep sense within them that they were not living well, not living rightly. When Friends spoke honestly and truthfully to people, when they dealt with them as they really were, without pretence or projection, when they met violence with nonviolence and hatred with love, people knew at some level they were being confronted with the truth, whether they liked it or not."
Rex Ambler, 'The Prophetic Message of Early Friends (and how it can be interpreted today)'
Have you experienced the power of ‘lives lived in the truth’?
How has the Spirit guided you to live more authentically?
Thanks so much for this, Friend. You speak my mind.