To Quake or not to Quake

It’s Quaker day or week or something. I have no intention of becoming a Quaker and will say something about that in a minute. Yet I do hang out with Quakers and go to the meetings, though hardly with regularity.

I really like the meetings, mainly because it is an hour of silence (mostly) and because the company is good and shares a vague intention to point the boat in a half-decent direction. One of the reasons I love the silence is my own religious history, of which I might say, in the beginning was the Word but that was nothing to the torrent of words which followed. I also admire the ponderous but careful process for reaching common decisions and I like what I have heard about how the business meetings are meant to be managed –  though I will continue to avoid getting any direct evidence. Almost all of the time the meetings and the company of those who Quake is thoroughly inclusive. You are there and that’s all that matters.

So why freeload by getting the benefits and dodging the work?  I know that even the simplest of arrangements need work, care and attention, to pay the venue bills, to manage the property, if any, to handle the communications. One reason is that I do my whack of that stuff in other places and as George McDonald said “The altar may be built in one place so that the fire may fall in another.”

There is a deeper reluctance which is based on some of the Quaker terminology. I try not to get too hung up about that and most of the time I can get along with a bit of smart internal translation and the venerable principle of Mr. Badger – “It amuses you, Ratty, and it does me no harm.” I can manage a decent translation of  “that which is of God within you .”. However “worship”, as in Meeting for Worship, is a bit tricky to get down. Being told that all it means is “service” does not help. For one thing the ordinary and everyday meaning of the word is the adulation of a superior being, human or otherwise. And even “service” is dodgy, since as used in the Christian Bible it means the work of a slave with all the connotations of a stratified cosmos. I don’t want to make a fuss about it (Mr. Badger again) but I dislike enough for it to be a bar against seeking membership. And I wouldn’t want to be identified as a non-theist Quaker, which to me conveys about as much information as saying that someone is a Quaker who does not support Forres Mechanics FC.

Actually, I don’t want to be identified at all. Yes, I attend meetings but please don’t give me that spooky upper case in Attender. And I will continue to attend because these are tiny niggles that in the face of the wonderful acceptance don’t amount to a hill of beans.