There are times when I am seized with a great fear that Quakerism is just my newest delusion. One of the greater banes of my life is my seemingly endless facility for fooling myself. If you give me a week and some solitude, I can convince myself of nearly anything. My query for myself this week (at least)is...
What does it mean to be convinced?
I have a good inkling it has nothing to do with convincing myself, but rather having an experinence beyond myself - it's nothing I can talk myself into or out of, which is frustrating. I have a feeling that is is a lot like what is referred to in the Velveteen Rabbit as "becoming real."
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him."
I wonder if this is it - if becoming convinced is less of a St. Paul thrown by his horse moment and more of a continual happening. If I want to get metaphysical about it, maybe it is a happening outside of time. No, screw that, I don't want to be metaphysical about it.
All I know is that for the past year, I have had this line of Aeschelus ringing in my ears...
"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."
Of The Best Stuff, but Cracked
2 comments:
Amanda,
Your doubts and hesitations are very normal and very healthy.
I think you are probably truly "convinced" but not yet "converted". As I use these words, "convinced" means that you have understood the Quaker teachings and see (at least most of the time) that they are true and right for you. This can happen fairly quickly. But being "converted" is a deeper, slower, longer-lasting process that may last a lifetime. It comes about in the process of facing day-to-day decisions, seeking and getting guidance from the Light (aka Christ Jesus), and then actually following that guidance. And, of course, sometimes something that seems like divine guidance turns out to be something else. So there are turnings back and restarts.
Since this life involves choices it also involves roads not taken and paths not explored, as well as roads followed out to the very end.
You have a good and brave heart. I believe that in time, as you follow leadings of God and leave behind the distractions, you will find yourself more and more clear and confident.
- - Rich Accetta-Evans
Hi Ruthie -
I'd written a big wordy clever involved answer to your comment, and then accidentally closed the browser before I could post it. Agh!
In brief, I know just what you mean. There have been times when I would have (and do, and may in the future)expressed myself in exactly the same way.
This question of agnostisism or even atheism - I wouldn't automatically class myself either. It boils down to the difference in what I know experiementally and what I believe at any given moment or period. Fox asks me "What canst thou say?" Well, about God, very little, it turns out.
This is what brings me back again and again to the passage of the Bhagavad Gita I have already quoted in this blog - that beautiful and moving inversion of which "religious practice" the deity finds most pleasing. This is an excerpt of Krishna's answer to Arjuna, who asked,
"Lord! of the men who serve Thee - true in heart As God revealed; and of the men who serve, Worshipping Thee Unrevealed, Unbodied, far, Which take the better way of faith and life?"
Krishna responds in a tricksy way, first naming conventional holiness, in what appears to be descending order:
1.)The mystic/saint - "Constantly true, in full devotion fixed" - those who know god and abide with him always.
2.)The saint who may not have had a mystical experience of knowing god, and yet diligently devotes their entire life to him - like a contemplative nun, for example.
3.)The pious layperson, who worships steadfastly.
4.)One who cannot raise his mind to worship steadfastly, but does many good works - we'll call this person an agnostic humanist
Krishna says that all of these people will achieve union with him. Then he says:
But, if in this
Thy faint heart fails, bring Me thy failure! find
Refuge in Me! let fruits of labour go,
Renouncing hope for Me, with lowliest heart,
So shalt thou come
And then inverts the "worth" of all of the above, saying that to despair, to feel yourself incapable of ever knowing god, of ever having unity with him, is actually very close to enlightenment - which makes sense. Once I've given up all ideas/dogmas/teachings about what god actually is, and what he wants of me - beyond the unkowable, I am actually closer to the reality of god, which is so huge an unknowable that anything I may claim about it is practically a lie, and therefore increases my ignorance of god's true nature.
That is the sort of agnostisism I'd claim, if I were going to claim agnostisism.
Does that make any sense?
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