Letter
As Norwich Quaker Meeting House was hosting this year’s international Chain
of Prayer in Norwich, and as I am the Quaker representative on the district
group of Churches Together, I had the pleasure of being there from start to
finish. Representatives from different denominations came to participate for
their 15-minute slot. There was much coming and going and each contribution
was unique, so I felt grateful to be able to witness so many different kinds of
worship.
The greatest surprise for me, however, was that the very first contribution and
the very last were remarkably similar in their approach to an idea of how we
see God (or not).
The first speaker was Julian Pursehouse, the Leader of the Methodists in East
Anglia. Part of his presentation which has stayed with me ever since, was a
reading of The Absence, by R.S.Thomas:
It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?
Concentrating on this poem, I remembered one of the guests at the B&B which
my husband and I ran in Old Hunstanton. She was a regular guest, a delightfully
cheerful and kind woman, who was very devout. During her last visit, when she
had started to suffer from dementia, she told me that she had lost the love of
God “which passeth all understanding”, so she was waiting patiently for it to
come back.
Myself, I have always loved the medieval expression “the cloud of unknowing”.
We can never be certain about anything, as people, places and conditions are
constantly changing around us. But if we live confidently in the knowledge that
nothing remains static (particularly in the realms of science, where new
knowledge replaces old knowledge nearly every year), we can attain the
stability of knowing that even an absence can feel like a presence.
This was confirmed when, during the Quaker Meeting for Worship, which
finished the Chain of Prayer, Danene Rogers, one of the Quaker Friends, read
out a passage from “Quaker Faith and Practice”, our book of Quaker discipline: