Posted: October 8, 2023   •   Posted in: Faith, Reflections

Simple. Radical. Spiritual – and a hiccup

Nicky reflects on the hiccup caused for her by the word ‘spirituality’.

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This trio of adjectives has been rolling round in my head since I first saw it on the outreach posters for Quaker Week 2023. ‘Simple’ and ‘radical’ I can understand and on my good days I certainly aspire to. But ‘spiritual’ is for me a real hiccup. My parents embodied (I think) each end of the spirituality spectrum: at one extreme my father never spoke in terms of ‘god’, while, at the other, my mother lived, breathed and easily talked about her sense of the spirit being everywhere, all the time. A nice quirky reminder she has left with me is her conviction that every piece of reflected sunlight is an instance of god – so she saw god in chrome furniture, in teaspoons, in raindrops, in puddles, in lakes. I love it and can understand it as a metaphor: an excellent reminder to look for and celebrate the positives all around us, but if I’m honest that’s where it stays.

‘… but what canst thou say?’

I realise, as I try to represent fairly what my parents believed, that it’s hard to speak for other people, and perhaps, in the end, not always useful. George Fox’s challenge echoes across the centuries and seems to speak straight to me: “You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say?” (Quaker faith & practice 19.07)

My partner Sal and I have recently completed another 190 odd miles (6 days) of our long-term project of cycling from Dover to Tain (N. Scotland). Keep reading – this is relevant! A couple of times a day, at cafes, or viewpoints or sometimes even half-way up steep hills – we talked to other cyclists and walkers – some warned us of difficult junctions we were about to meet, some of slippery surfaces, some of the views, the weather, the cafes and even the other travellers they’d met along the way. It was entertaining, memorable, sometimes extremely useful, and we knew it was all real; it was their experience of their journey and the route we were about to face. But to hear different people talking you might think they’d been on different routes.

Something beyond?

I’m not an atheist but I have no experience of what other people seem to mean when they talk about god or the spirit. I’m not at all denying the reality of what they describe. But like travellers’ descriptions of the track they’ve followed – the experience of the pathway differs wildly according to what you notice. In life I try to look for and respond to love, goodness, optimism. I try to stand up against prejudice, malevolence and dishonesty, but as for feeling or knowing that there’s a binding supernatural power beyond what I can see or touch or feel or hear – I have yet to experience it.

Nicky (Beccles Quaker Meeting)