Explaining God

I re-post this blog on three other websites, and from last week's entry I have had a number of responses, all asking me to clarify what I meant in my description of how I see God. I still don't have the mental energy for replying to each one individually, so I am putting my reply into this blog post, and I hope it will explain what I mean.

Firstly, I have for a long time been a kind of Unitarian. The way I understand the Trinity is that, just as I am simultaneously mother, daughter and friend, depending on who I am interacting with, so God is simultaneously Father, Son and Comforter in one Being.

I also believe that God is the ultimate Truth, beyond and above time. Whenever someone finds Truth in their hearts and minds, that Truth is of God. That person might say the Truth has been given to them by any one of a number of names - Yahweh, Allah, conscience, Inward Light, Jesus, Buddha, or a bolt from the blue - but Truth is Truth and is indivisible.

We all listen for Truth in our Meeting for Worship. In that context, I don't mind whether you say that you are listening to God, Mother Earth or the Flying Spaghetti Monster - your name for that Truth does not alter the fact of it being Truth.

Our names for whatever reveals the Truth to us are ultimately completely arbitrary, and depend on our upbringing, beliefs and world view. This is why I say that I believe everyone is listening to the Christian God - but if I were Jewish, I would probably believe that we are all ultimately listening to YHWH.

The point is, the names don't matter. They get in the way of our understanding that we are all listening to the one Truth. And this is why I say that Quaker worship is the best chance for peace between the world religions, and between believers and non-believers - because in silence, we are all listening to the same Truth, and we're not upsetting each other and causing rifts by using different names for that Truth.

This is the Truth as revealed to me, and I hope I have been faithful in my description of it.

Quaker Quest: Quaker Worship

I thought it might be interesting for people to see what I said at Quaker Quest about Quaker Worship.

We three speakers had to speak twice during the evening, once on Faith and once on Practice - broadly, what we believe and what we do.

In the Faith section, I started by saying I love Quaker worship because it is unique. I came to Quakers because of the worship - I used to be an Anglican, and then a Methodist, and in both denominations I used to feel that I was just settling into the time for silent prayer when it would be time to sing another hymn.

Another reason I appreciate the Quaker way of worship is that I am rabbiting on to God all day in my head, and it gives me a chance to sit and listen for a change! I also explained that I don't mind what other people say they're listening to - God, Yahweh, Allah, the Earth, their own conscience - as I believe those are all names for the same thing : Truth. I believe that Truth comes from the Christian God, and, if pushed, I would say that all other believers (and non-believers) are listening to Him/Her too - they just have other names for Him/Her.

Because we are all listening together, with no words to cause divisions, Quaker worship brings people together in a way that no other type of worship can. We may not agree on the words to use in worship, but we can all listen together in silence. It can also be a very healing time for people who have had bad experiences in more traditional churches.

Later I spoke to the idea of the practice of Quaker worship, although to be honest my ideas were pretty well entwined between the two parts! I explained that a Meeting for Worship is not like a dentist's waiting room, with a whole load of disparate people sat in silence - there is a palpable air of expectancy and of a gathered community. I always get very excited when there is ministry, as you never know what is going to be said, and whether it will be pertinent to you, or even to the whole Meeting. I also explained about online Meetings for Worship at Quaker Faith and Fellowship, which no one else in my Meeting has experienced; and about the smaller MfW held at my home every month, and how it has a different atmosphere, more intimate than the weekly MfW at the Meeting House.

We had a lot of questions about how you know when you are supposed to give ministry, why we don't discuss ministry when it is given, and how to settle into the silence and prepare our hearts and minds. The room was about three quarters current members/attenders and one quarter new visitors, with between 40 and 50 attending in total. Everyone said they had got something from it, no matter how long they had been a Quaker - we so rarely discuss the finer points of our beliefs that it was interesting to hear what different people actually thought.

If your Meeting is considering running a Quaker Quest, I strongly recommend it. There is a certain amount of work in setting the course up, but it benefits everyone who attends (including the speakers!) so much, that it is well worth it.

What a month!!

Well, October turned out to be the most stressful month I've had for ages. Unfortunately nice stress tires me out as much as nasty stress, so even the good stuff just made me more tired. It has been one of those times when everything that could happen, did happen - and I ended up not getting a proper afternoon rest till almost the end of the month (instead of almost every afternoon), which meant my night-time sleep was disturbed, too.

That meant I began having nightmares. Initially they were things like still being married to my alcoholic ex, but eventually they morphed into the standard scary monster nightmare. (One was that Daleks had invaded Earth - and banned knitting!!!! Terrifying....)

To give you an idea of what I mean, this all happened between October 1 and October 27:

1 theatre trip
1 trip to Quaker Quest - on the same day Richard was out all day,
travelling to Manchester and back to the funeral of one of his uni
housemates. It wasn't a good month for him, either.
4 visits from friends
3 visits from Richard's grandfather, who is very difficult to talk to
1 visit from both his grandparents
1 visit from Mum and my sister
3 visits from new carers
1 5-hour excursion to A&E at the eye hospital - I'm OK, so don't
worry, but apparently I'm starting to get cataracts :(
1 Quaker Meeting here
1 newsletter to write and send round, during which....
Our Broadband started falling over for hours at a time
1 failed delivery of necessary medical stuff
1 delivery of oxygen canisters
1 visit from Social Services
1 visit from a care company team leader
1 visit from the other care company's admin assistant (1.5 hours)
1 service of my oxygen machine
1 visit from the GP
2 visits from the District Nurse
1 blood test
1 flu jab (different day from the blood test)
1 visit from the Access Bus team to make sure my wheelchair will fit
on their minibus (then I can go shopping occasionally!)
....and then the clocks changed and completely mucked up my body clock, as usual....

As you see, it was a fun time :)

I'm not complaining one bit about the nice stuff - ever since I first got ill, I've had the view that nice stuff is worth recuperating from! But every day seemed to bring a fresh reason why I couldn't have a rest, and by the end of last weekend I was feeling quite desperate.

I'm happy to say that I have now had a week asleep, and I feel much better, so I hope to be a much better blogger again now.

Next week - what I actually said at Quaker Quest.

Excursions!

I'm not blogging this week, for a very nice reason. I am recovering from a trip to the theatre last week - my first time out of the house for over a year!

As always, I never do things by halves: this week I am speaking at our Quaker Quest evening on Quaker Worship. I was so pleased to be asked, and I am really looking forward to it. I know I will be shattered afterwards, so I'm announcing now that there will be no blog entry next week either.

Accounts of my expeditions will be forthcoming as soon as I can write them :)

Music

I listen to a lot of music, and I am quite eclectic in my tastes. I grew up on the Beatles and the Stones, followed by Bowie and Roxy Music. I have a good chunk of prog rock in my collection, especially the wonderful Pink Floyd. I think Jarvis Cocker (in and out of Pulp) is absolutely brilliant. I can sing along to most of the Great American Songbook, and I love all kinds of jazz. I can listen to anything, really, except rap, and drum & bass.

The thing I always stick with, however else my tastes may change, is baroque music - Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann, Corelli.... As a household we didn't listen to much classical music. Mum is a big Bing Crosby fan, and Dad was tone deaf. I can still remember the joy that came over me when I discovered Bach, on a second-hand record - 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring' and 'Sheep May Safely Graze'.

Music can lift me whatever my mood. I recently heard this on BBC Radio 3, and wanted to share it with you. I hope it lifts you, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsQmIRS3gTc

Good news - of a kind

I am feeling huge relief today. I received the results of my application for renewal of my disability benefits, for which I had the recent medical.

Last time I was awarded high rate mobility and high rate care (the top awards) for a period of two years. This has been the norm for the past ten years. This time I received the same award - for an indefinite period of time.

I was shaking so much I could hardly show Richard the letter - no more renewal forms (30 pages of tricky questions), and no more worry!

When the euphoria wore off a bit, I saw the other side of this. Indefinite means they don't expect me to improve substantially from where I am now. As I have lost weight, I have noticed a difference in my ability to breathe, and to walk - but although they feel like big differences to me, in the overall picture of my health, they are fairly insignificant. I've been ill so long now that I have lost my yardstick of what being well feels like, and sometimes a good day feels like more of a step forward than it really is.

Certainly the expression of shock on the doctor's face, when he came in to do the medical, should have said volumes to me. His first words were, after all, 'Well, I really don't know why they've sent me out to you - you're clearly very unwell.'

See, inside my head, I still feel like me. I'm so used to making accommodations for the things I can no longer do that I kid myself I feel no different from when I was working, studying, swimming, singing and acting, back before I got ill. Then I get a reminder like this - and it hits a little hard.

I don't believe in giving in, and I won't let this get me down. But maybe I should take a little more care to make sure that I don't get any worse.

Show us humanity

There have been several programmes on BBC Radio recently about Tennyson, as this year is the 200th anniversary of his birth. In one, a modern soldier read part of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. He explained how well Tennyson captured the confusion of battle, and how he emphasised the bravery of the soldiers and the stupidity of the generals. The young man seemed very touched that someone outside the battle had cared enough about the disaster of it to commemorate it in verse. Paradoxically, it is only because of this poem that anyone apart from military historians knows the battle today.

Similarly, what would our images of World War I be without poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas? We would have the photographs, films and other archive materials, but nothing gets across the horror and the human tragedy of life in the trenches with the immediacy of the poetry.

Modern wars still seem to be about the ordinary soldiers taking the risks, while the generals stay well out of the firing line. We are sending children into battle, children who are fighting other children. We are bombarded with images and footage of war on TV, but we rarely hear from the individual soldiers about the horror of their daily experiences. The more film we see of explosions, and the less we hear from the combatants, the more modern warfare starts to resemble some huge video game.

We need people who remind everyone of the human cost and the barbarity of war. We need to be reminded that the little figures we see running on the news are individual people, with lives and thoughts - and emotions which are being crippled as much as their bodies are by the horror of their experiences.