Rex Ambler - The Quaker Way: A Rediscovery

I would like in this book to explain the Quaker way, as far as that is possible. It will not be easy. The Quaker way, after all, is based on a practice of silence, the deliberate letting go of words and ideas. It is an attempt to get beyond all the things we say and write about our life to a direct experience of it. Yet, as we shall see, there is some point in trying to explain why we do this. If we cannot provide a rational case for the Quaker way, we can at least point to those human experiences that help to make sense of it and persuade of its rightness. And we Quakers are confident that everyone has some awareness, some inkling, of the experience we take most seriously, the experience that takes us beyond all words to an encounter with life in the silence. But how to evoke that awareness? Part of the answer is to encourage people to try the practice for themselves, to attend a Quaker meeting for example, and see what the experience yields. But another part of the answer is to attempt to describe the experience, and to try to explain why it is important, how it can be gained, and what difference it makes to our lives and to our engagement with the world. I can only hope that, in offering such an account, I will find echoes in your own experience, that my testimony, as we Quakers like to say, will answer that of God in everyone.

I will not assume that you know about the Quaker way already, only that you are interested, and interested enough to want to go deep, to get as far as possible to the core of the matter. In that respect I hope that what I say will be of interest to you even if you are a Quaker. I hope indeed that it will help you or challenge you to think deeply or differently about the Quaker way and to become more conscious of what it is were committed to and why.

These two aims may seem to be at odds, but my sense is that many people today are interested in Quakerism because of the profound possibilities it offers to people who are looking for something different, perhaps something more real or relevant. They might be a lot more interested if they could understand what those possibilities are. There are also many Quakers who have still not found that depth themselves, though they came to Quakers looking for just that. (This was for many years true of me, and it is because it was a struggle for me to find the depth I was looking for that I feel motivated to communicate my understanding to others.) And others, who have found what they were looking for, may be lost for words when asked to explain what that is. So I am confident that a probing inquiry into what the Quaker way is might be of interest to many different kinds of people.

Making sense of the Quaker way

My probing for this book began five years ago when I was asked by my own Quaker Meeting to give a series of talks on The Quaker Way of Doing Things. Their concern was that many people had started to attend the meeting who were very puzzled by the way we did things. We sat in silence for a whole hour, for example, and no one led the meeting or explained what was happening (or not happening!). There were also members who were still puzzled after many years about why we adopted such a slow and cumbersome process in coming to decisions together. They could only see the traditional language about being led and waiting in the light as at best vacuous phrases for thinking about a difficult matter, or at worst a refusal to think seriously at all. So I was challenged to offer some rationale for these and other strange practices of Friends. In thinking about them, however, I came to realize that an historical or descriptive explanation would not really answer the questions being put. If I explained what was set down in the official Book of Discipline,