I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
(Ephesians 3:16-19, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
Whenever Quakers in my (liberal, unprogrammed) meeting call me a “Christ-centered Friend,” I have to smile. I know a fair number of Christ-centered Friends, and I share many of their beliefs about what it means to live out our Quaker testimonies so that, in George Fox’s words, “your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them.” But I don’t have anywhere near the faith in Jesus Christ they do.
If you hang around English-speaking Friends long enough, you will inevitably hear the phrase “that of God in everyone.” The expression goes all the way back to Fox, but has come to mean different things to different Quakers. Some take it as an expression of full human equality based on our common nature as part of God’s creation. Others go even further, claiming each of us possesses a spark of divinity within us.
I lean in the direction of a metaphor used by many early Friends.
A contemporary of Fox, Isaac Pennington, spoke of “the seed which God sows in the heart,” and urged Friends to set aside their own egos, “sink down” to that seed, and “let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee.”
Yes, Fox and Pennington and others saw that seed, our capacity for living a life in which thought and deed give testimony to Quaker values, in Christ-centered terms. But does that make the seed which God sows in the heart inherently Christian? Or did they just have no other acceptable frames of reference in their cultural circumstance to make sense of their profound spiritual experiences?
I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, receiving most of the major sacraments in my youth. We had an illustrated children’s bible around the house, but my precocious reading habits soon led me to the Good News Bible, a “Bible in today’s English” with captivating line drawings by a Swiss artist named Annie Vallotton. (Do I detect nods of recognition, fellow Generation X members?)
(Don & Pat Griggs / used with permission.)
I liked the stories, especially the stories about Jesus. Even as I grew older, and became more skeptical about the miracles and, really, the whole “Son of God” thing, I liked what I didn’t know enough yet to call the “social vision” of Jesus. I tried to hang on to that vision even as I fell away from the Catholic Church in my early twenties.
After that, I fell somewhere between “spiritual but not religious” and agnostic—but never full-on atheist. I might not have felt that God cared about me and my world, I may not have even detected the presence of God in my world, but I still acknowledged the possibility of God, or something like God, existing.
So I read a lot of Buddhist and Taoist texts. I tried my hand at chaos magick. I kept up with what scholars were learning about the spectrum of beliefs in the earliest Christian communities.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I hit upon the Quakers.
I went to a few meetings in Seattle. I moved to Brooklyn, and went to meetings there. Then I moved to another part of New York City, and for more than a decade I stopped going to meetings.
I started going back again because of what I choose to regard as a particular, personal revelation. Jesus, or at least my idea of Jesus, played a role in that revelation, but it didn’t make me a full-fledged believer. I cannot say, as Paul wrote to the Galatians, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”
I do believe in something bigger than myself, something I don’t fully understand but would like to know better. I often talk about it in “Jesus language” because my cultural background gives me a fluency in Jesus language, but I don’t think exclusively in those terms.
I see “sinking down to the seed” as another way to describe seeking communion with that something, whether you call it God, Spirit, or whatever else. I believe the pursuit of that communion will root and ground me in love, as Paul advised the Ephesians. And I believe that achieving such communion could fill all of us—the Christ-centered Friends, the universalists, the non-theists, everyone—with the fullness of “God,” at a time and in a world where we sorely need it.
This writing reminds me of a first day in my home meeting when I was in my 20’s.
I was not a frequent attender at that time.
When I did find my way there, my coat was sometimes polluted with cigarette smoke from
the previous evening that found me dancing with my husband in a neighborhood establishment.
Ever loving, ever welcoming; my Aunt Beulah, would rise from her place on the facing bench and share with
the congregation of gathered family and friends: How that we are all looking for love. Wherever it takes us.
That Jesus is the love we are looking for.
This essay mirrored my experience in the larger sense if not the details. I was raised Episcopalian but something in me rebelled against the idea of an All Powerful Creator outside of us somewhere who managed everything and meted out punishments and rewards like the Wizard of Oz. When my spiritual search sent me exploring, I visited The Catholic church in my town, the Baptist, and finally the Congregationalist, which was the humblest and simplest and the most Christ-like as I understood Christ from my early religious education.
Eventually I found the Society of Friends in Philadelphia and I found that religious understanding most fit my unspoken and perhaps indescribable world view. I, too, made a study of Easter religions along the way, but there was something of the love of Christ missing in Zen Buddhism for me. I have found a great deal of guidance in the writings of Rex Ambler. Thank you for sharing your experience!