My spiritual history

Greetings

Thank you for letting me join.

A little background: I live in London. I hope that I am nearing the end of a five-year training to work as a Gestalt psychotherapist with individuals and groups. It's a career change; I've worked in the fitness industry since leaving university. I've worked in gyms, owned one, and now freelance as a group exercise (usually spinning and yoga) instructor. I am a very serious yoga practitioner and sometimes teach yoga and meditation privately too. I grew up in the States, in Indiana, although not amongst Friends and attended a Baptist church when I was a child. My mum is Church of England and I have been involved to one degree or another with the C of E (in America the Episcopal Church) too. 

In my response to the joining question, I said how I’ve been struggling with how I can remain a member of the Society in Britain. I would like to give a full picture of it, which is not a short story:

I've been a member of the Society in Britain for just over ten years and attended for some years before that. I started attending after leaving the Church of England when a bishop rejected me for the ministry in quite an unfriendly way. I've had a very strained relationship with the Society and my meeting since the lockdowns and some of the hardline 'woke' culture has become dominant, especially in London. I fear that the Society has forgot that it is the Religious Society of Friends and is becoming an umbrella group for activists riding on the coat tails of our good repute. Those of us who still consider ourselves Christians are silenced (ha!) in some respects. I realise that is what I feel and that I silence myself. I feel like the Society has gone very mainstream whist claiming to be radical. One of the things that drew me to convincement was that when I started attending, we were definitely not mainstream. We spoke unashamedly of Jesus and the Light, albeit in the way Rufus Jones introduced. I have a whole lot to say about that but not here. While I am definitely a mystic, I am hesitant to lump all mystic paths into one and feel that distinction must be maintained in order for the different religions to mean anything.

I had been having an on-again off-again relationship with my meeting since the lockdowns were released. I was having to go on the tube almost every day for work/grad school and I didn’t especially want to commute to meeting too. I noticed when I went that I found the ministry hollow: much of it was very activist and I struggled to hear God in it, but I hoped others could. I was also struggling with the ordering of the meeting and disagreed with having attenders as elders/overseers, some of whom attended only by zoom.

I was asked to lead a post-meeting session on Quaker spirituality. In the time leading up to that session I was regularly struggling with the ministry in the meeting, again owing to its largely activist themes. I began to feel as I did in my therapy training where I spent a year being demonised for being the ‘wrong sort of gay’. I remember a meeting where a Friend offered ministry about a friend of hers in the US who was distressed over the Trump administration’s change in policy about the sex marker in passports, followed by another who claimed to be the ‘official receiver’ for reparations to be paid over slavery. The Friend then ran a front page quoting junior YM saying ‘The future of the Society is queer’ and I just couldn’t stand it any more. I wrote a piece in The Friend against this and the shift to making some people more welcome than others, which is not equality by my lights.

One of the elders at my meeting was supportive and promised to be present during the session on spirituality. I led it Gestalt style and said very little myself. I wanted to hear what the others present made of spirituality. I had brought along a few paragraphs of Thomas Kelly and some from our 1921 book of discipline, which is my favourite, and read them when something said by a group member resonated with it. The participants left saying they wished more post-meeting groups were run the way I had done it and they’d got a lot out of it. A different elder approached me and said she’d like to speak with me privately and we arranged to meet. This was around Easter 2025. This Friend had been named to me by several others as a fellow Christian who would support me.

Indeed she supported my struggle around the identity issues. Then she said how she was worried about the post-meeting session I’d run as I may have put newcomers off from returning to meeting; I had apparently given the impression that one needed to be a Christian to be a Quaker. I said that I felt I had made it clear that I was speaking for myself when I shared my spirituality and had invited others to do the same. She asked what I thought about Jesus and I said that I can see Jesus as saviour of the world, as a great teacher, as a yogi, as an elder brother, to which she responded with an exasperated ‘f*ck’. I made a comment about how I see Mary as an example to Quakers, which elicited the same response. I was told that the Society is not a church and not even Christian and when I pointed out that George Fox would disagree, she responded that ‘he’s not around anymore and we’ve moved on’. I felt myself getting angry but struggled to express it, although I did say I felt angry. I was asked whether I thought that people should have to be Christians to join the Society and I said no, although I did not understand why one would join a Religious Society if one wasn’t, in fact, religious. It wouldn’t cross my mind to do that. I was told I didn’t understand equality and even that I didn’t understand Christianity. She asked me what I would do another post-meeting session on and I said on the Gospels, or even on how we could learn from the Nicene Creed in light of how the testimony (meaning peace, equality, integrity, etc.) has become creedal in a way. My suggestions were met with scorn.

When we parted I was shocked and still angry. I have been to meeting a few times since, although to a different one. Mostly I have been going to a Church of England; the first time I went to it, which was the weekend after this incident, I just cried the whole through the service out of anger and hurt. It’s not the first time I’ve been hurt by a Friend but it was the worst wound. I’ve stayed in contact with the overseer (or whatever they’re called now) to whom I am assigned and he sympathises with my struggle.

Over Christmas, I was visiting my mum and went to church with her. We often talk about religion and I said a number of things during our conversations that I knew to be pure Quaker theology. I felt very secure in saying them. I am, after all, convinced. When we went to church, we were sitting in a pew where a spotlight was shining on the top of my mother’s head. She said something about it and I replied it was the like the Light shining into her and showing her the ocean of darkness and the ocean of light. Despite it being a bad joke when I said that it hit me that I really wanted to be in meeting. I am absolutely a Quaker. I don’t know how to be in the Society in Britain at the moment but I cannot not be a Quaker. I looked around the church and found all of the stuff off-putting. I saw a jumble, much as I felt my thoughts become in that moment.

I hope to go to meeting again for the first time in months on Sunday. I think I’ll go to a different one that my usual, either the smaller meeting I began to attend as this all started or another large central London meeting where I have a few acquaintances. I can’t go back to my old meeting just yet, although I need to to speak to the elder who caused me to upset myself so much. I want to stay and make my voice heard but I need support to do it. I am becoming familiar with the work of Lewis Benson and Edward Grubb. I’ve read quite a bit of John Punshon and other explicitly Christian Friends. Benjamin Wood’s newish book has also been supportive. I read some Fox last night and was reminded of how I was convinced. It was his writing of the oceans of darkness and light, and that he had to experience everything and that nobody could speak to his condition but Jesus.

I wonder how I can get support here. My apologies for being quite long-winded but I wanted to give the full picture.