Yesterday morning’s meeting was quiet, and the morning light through the meeting house windows was pearl grey. I spent much of the time holding the space, as it were, for Friends, sensing that the Spirit was doing something beneath the surface. And yet I was uneasy.

Towards the end of the meeting a Friend stood to give ministry, and said that like so many others perhaps she had come to meeting deeply worried, almost panicking really, about the seeming success of the campaign for a leave vote in the EU referendum. As she had sat in the silence, it had come to her that she was, in fact, one very small person, and that worry as she might, nothing except her one vote in the referendum would make any real difference to the outcome. But she could pray. Whatever the circumstances, she could still pray – and she would – that peace, and wisdom, and hope would prevail. It was all she could do; but it was the one thing needful. And she sat down.

If ever a ministry spoke to my condition, it was that. For all I had been sitting in stillness, listening and holding, the same anxiety had nagged at the edges of my mind, try as I might to settle. Our Friend had opened herself honestly to hear her own heart’s cry, and the Spirit had touched her with extraordinary precision, and brought the answer through, not despite, her and my unquietness.

In his Pendle Hill pamphlet Four Doors to Meeting for Worship, William Tabor writes:

Entering into worship often feels to me somewhat like entering into a stream, which, though invisible to our outward eye, feels just as real as does a stream of water when we step into it. Just as bathing in a real stream of pure flowing water needs no justification to one who has experienced the vitality it brings, so entering into the stream of worship needs no justification to one who has experienced the healing, the peace, the renewal, the expansion which accompanies this altered state of consciousness. I once thought worship was something I do, but for many years now it has seemed as if worship is actually a state of consciousness which I enter so that I am immersed into a living, invisible stream of reality which has always been present throughout all history. In some mysterious way this stream unites me with the communion of the saints across the ages and brings me into the presence of the living Christ, the Word, the Logos written of in the Gospel of John.

On the Quaker Renewal group on Facebook, a Friend asks whether renewal is happening, or is about to happen; and the answer is, as one of the responses wisely points out, both. It reminds me of the Kingdom of God, the ‘new covenant’ in the Gospels, which has arrived with Jesus, and is yet to come in its fullness.

In an excellent article in the Friends Quarterly (2.2016) Stuart Masters, writing on Pauline Christianity in the early Quaker movement, says:

Another dimension of the new covenant, described by the apostle Paul and proclaimed by early Friends, is that it is now possible for all people to experience Divine indwelling in which Christ acts as inward teacher, king, counsellor, prophet, priest and redeemer. The great claim of the first generation of Friends was that ‘Christ is come to teach his people himself.’ This is what Paul means by being ‘in Christ’, and what early Friends referred to as the ‘Inward Light’ of Christ. Such a direct inward presence had precedence over the physical or ‘carnal’ sources of authority in the old covenant, such as the human priesthood, the physical temple, the outward law, and the written Scriptures.

Stuart Masters concludes:

In the early Quaker movement, we see a revival of the radical, egalitarian, and spirit-led character of the Pauline churches. It may well be that Paul’s message was so revolutionary that it had to be controlled and domesticated by the institutions of mainstream Christianity. In England in the 1640s and 1650s, young men and women experienced the spiritual empowerment to break free of that controlled, and domesticated view. As a result of their life-changing spiritual experiences, they understood Paul in an entirely different way… I will leave the final word to Paul himself, a powerful message of hope and encouragement: For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.38-39)

Whatever language we may ourselves adopt to express our experience of the Light that reaches us in the stillness, we should recognise that spiritual renewal is a radical process, not only in the modern sense of “characterized by departure from tradition; innovative or progressive” but in the sense of relating or returning to the root (L. radix) or origin of something – the musical sense of relating or returning to the root of a chord. Our renewal has to be about what Quakers are and can become; but it will not be radical enough unless it is also about where we come from, and where we still derive our strength: the simple experience of the Spirit’s light in the listening silence.