Last Thursday saw our first Creative Conversation after the Summer break. This time we tackled a concern raised by two Quakers, our member Catherine Carr and Kindler pamphlet author Judith Fullard Smith, Exploring New Ways of Believing and Belonging.  The idea arose from Catherine’s reading of Judith’s Kindlers pamphlet Explorations: discovering a spiritual way. We started as usual at 18:45 with a brief period of welcome and catch-up as people arrived in Zoom, and at 19:00 William led us into a gathered Quaker silence for twenty minutes. I worship in silence at Saffron Walden Meeting, but I know for some of the members of our network this gathered silence is the only time they come together in silence with fellow Quakers, and that often leads to a wonderful sense of depth. This time people were particularly thankful to be together again after our Summer break.

After the silence Catherine kicked off the presentation portion of the evening by asking Judith to outline to project that led to her pamphlet. The pamphlet took ten years to write and Judith reflected that its concerns were rooted in her experience of moving from a very Christian Meeting for Worship (MfW) to a broader one as her and her husband retired. This led her to want to explore people’s sense of belief and belonging. Over the time it took to gather data and write the pamphlet Judith’s concerns had moved, and she mentioned that the pamphlet did not tackle concerns like sexuality and disability which it would if she was starting now.

From that introduction Catherine and Judith moved to a Q&A session, where their discussion followed each other’s promptings. Here the two themes of the evening really came to the fore: believing and belonging. Catherine introduced James Lovelock’s Gaia Principle, the pantheistic idea that the earth forms one self-healing complex system. This thought, that we are part of a larger system comforts Catherine and gives her hope. Judith picked up the idea and reflected on how many of the people she spoke to for the pamphlet, that when talking about ‘God’ they were often talking about the link between nature and us. Catherine and Judith moved on to belonging, reflecting on how important MfW can be (“with Meeting, people are not alone”) and how the pandemic has sharpened our sense of our need for community. Judith and Catherine both touched on other books that has proved important in their journey: Judith mentioned Brian Mountford’s Christian Atheist and Catherine talked about John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism.

We have gone through many iterations of how to structure the discussion that follows. We have tried small long breakout sessions, no breakout sessions, and we are now on larger shorter breakouts—it is good to finish wanting more! The breakout I attended was lively and really set the main ideas that we revisited in the open plenary afterwards: the positive aspects of nontheism, and what does belonging mean to us. One person in my breakout room brought these two questions together when she answered that what was important for her was … ‘Finding what’s right for you through discernment and trying it out with other people’.

The plenary discussion which followed our brief breakout discussion was excellent, people cam back really charged with thoughts and questions to share. We talked about the morality of instinct, about the role of groups like ours meeting online, about how the pandemic has reminded us of our need for community (communities?) People spoke of other activities that conjure a similar sense of ‘the spiritual’, like bike rides at sunset, and how we can make a conscious effort to seek out awesome experiences. I cannot do the plenary discussion justice here, and that’s part of what makes these kaleidoscopic events so wonderful.

As he often does it was William who brought our discussion to a close with a summing up before our closing silence. His summing-up statements are often provocative, and sometimes poetic. This time he used a fragment of Blake’s poem Auguries of Imagination:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

William saw Blake’s God as the human imagination.

Catherine & Judith’s Creative Conversation moved me and really got me thinking. I was particularly touched by Catherine’s frank admission that she could not (yet) unify or relate the two strands of thought she’d explored (the positive aspects of atheism and  our place in nature on the one hand, and belonging to Quaker communities on the other). I love that sense that we a grappling with things that matter to us, ideas that will not fit together like a jigsaw, things that need work.