Authentic leadings: the
making of a Quaker author
Talk given at the Quakers
Uniting in Publishing
meeting April 2007
Alex Wildwood, Britain Yearly Meeting
Summary: Authentic Leadings is a written version of the talk given by Alex
Wildwood at the recent QUIP meeting in
In reflecting on this subject – my experience as a
Quaker author, someone whose writing can be seen as a
form of ministry – I realised how inherently corporate I have found the
enterprise of writing-as-ministry to be.
First of all, I present to you the evidence. You know
the old saying: ‘If you were accused of being a Quaker, would there be enough
evidence to convict you?’ The evidence I can present as a minister of the
written word is really quite meagre: the Swarthmore lecture in book form A Faith to Call Our Own: Quaker tradition in
the light of contemporary movements of the Spirit, published in 1999; an
article in Friends Quarterly
published in January 2002, ‘A Great People to be Gathered?’; an issue of The Woodbrooke
Journal, also from January 2002 – and subsequently distributed in the Hearts and Minds Prepared study pack).
All these are published but other evidence includes – in manuscript, the draft
of a book I’m co-authoring with Jo Farrow provisionally entitled Faith in Transition: living a new story
and a booklet – also being co-authored, this time with Timothy Peat-Ashworth,
the bible studies tutor at Woodbrooke - with the
working title Gathered Together: engaging
with our spiritual diversity in BYM.
I want to share the stories of these pieces of writing
as examples of ‘writing as ministry’ in the light of what I’ve come to
recognise as three aspects of written ministry. In preparing for this talk I’ve
been reflecting on what distinguishes writing as ministry. Vanessa Julye spoke last night of ‘leaving a permanent
record’ for those who follow us – and clearly this is
one difference between the written and the spoken word. And one that can make
writing an intimidating thing to do, especially knowing that some Friend is
bound to refer to something you wrote years before and quite likely expect you
to hold the same views today!
I feel that writing that is ministry needs to satisfy
three basic criteria (perhaps in discussion afterwards we can think of more).
It needs, I believe, to be inspired, tested and ‘answering’ to others (and to
be answered by them in the reading).
Inspired: Writing as ministry seeks to come from
beyond the egoic mind, what Buddhists call ‘the
mind-made sense of self’. The inspired writer is a channel, a conduit for
something that needs to be said, recorded and heard. There are passages in the
written version of the Swarthmore lecture which still surprise me when I read
them. And this requires, in my experience, a certain
vulnerability on the part of the author. (I’ll return to this later).
Tested: We were reminded yesterday of Thomas
Merton’s caution about ‘not rushing into print’ and my sense is that written
ministry has been honed and crafted by more than the writer’s individual skill
and precision; it has been tested in the light of whether it is faithfully
addressing – and is likely to elicit a response from – ‘that of God’ within the
reader. For the writer this can be a difficult and even fraught process; there
is a necessary quality of obedience, of submitting oneself to the scrutiny of
others – during the creative process of writing. This testing is about
discerning whether our written words will ‘speak to the condition’ of our
readers.
Such tested writing may well be challenging to the
reader yet has to be taken on board,
the message cannot be sidestepped. The well-known phrase that
something ‘speaks to one’s condition’ seems to have changed in meaning over the
generations – at least amongst British Quakers. Early Friends (who
thought much more in terms of sinfulness than is fashionable among liberal
Friends today) used this phrase to mean ministry that revealed our lack of
wholeness, that reflected our true condition, that broke through our denial,
our complacency, our habitual defences. (George Fox seems to have possessed an
uncanny, almost ‘supernatural’ talent for looking into the very heart of a
person and sensing their ‘condition’.) This process was itself an inherently
inspired and collective one; those transformed by the Inward light both
recognised this process at work in one another and were then able to see others
in this penetrating way. But this was as a result of a transformative
experience they themselves had known.
In my
experience of writing as ministry these elements are present not only in the
process of producing the writing but also describe aspects of a process
happening to the writer, him or herself. For example, there is a testing
process in being asked to give the annual Swarthmore lecture. My understanding
is that the committee meet to discern, that they consider both a list of themes
likely to be of interest/importance for the Yearly Meeting and a list of names
of Friends who have been noticed as having at least a latent or budding sense
of ministry. It is an unusual, privileged platform in BYM, an opportunity to lay before the Yearly Meeting – not as a formal part of
Yearly Meeting in session but whilst Friends are so gathered - a prepared
ministry. It is a chance to address, in one place and at the same time, around
1000 members of the Society (roughly 5% of the Quakers in Britain).
The length of time one has to prepare varies but I had
been approached three years before I gave the lecture and was asked to write
about my spiritual journey both before and since coming amongst Friends.
Already there are at least two contexts of discernment here: as well as the
Swarthmore lecture committee’s discernment there was also the fact that when I
was asked I was in my third term at Woodbrooke, the
Quaker Study centre, initially because I had been offered an Edward Cadbury
bursary though Quaker Life (a department of Britain Yearly Meeting previously
known as Quaker Home Service). Such funding is aimed at encouraging
study/ministry amongst Friends in the Yearly Meeting and someone had decided I
might be a worthy recipient. I stayed on for a further two terms (thanks to
bursary support from Woodbrooke) and had the
wonderful opportunity to study with Janey O’ Shea, then Quaker Studies tutor and author of the 1993
Backhouse lecture Living the way, Quaker
spirituality and community.
So there was discernment all the way: Friends in
Quaker Life who decided to award me the bursary, the Swarthmore lecture
committee considering names and possible lecturers, Friends at Woodbrooke cultivating me as someone with ‘something to
say’. I have the sense, looking back, that for at least three years I was being
prepared in my own process of reading and writing, prayerfully reflecting,
opening myself to (hopefully) being inspired. And then it came to the writing
there was a rigorous process of testing with two members of the Swarthmore
committee – Val Ferguson and Jo Farrow – both seasoned, ‘weighty’ Friends who
nurtured, challenged, and encouraged me to stick to the brief, to write from my
personal experience (when my own tendency was to want to hide behind quoted
passages from much more worthy spiritual sources).
They were there eldering me in the fullest sense – firmly ‘sitting on
me’ at times but always nurturing, drawing forth the talent that might be there
– not for my aggrandisement but for the benefit of the community as a whole.
They read the early drafts, met with me frequently and upheld me in prayer
throughout. By keeping in contact, and preventing me getting lost in the
isolation required by the discipline of writing, they provided solid bedrock
for me, grounding me in my doubts, countering my fears, my sense of being
inadequate to the task.
Other members of the committee read later drafts, the
whole process constantly refining, commented upon, becoming a more tested
ministry which hopefully would fulfil the Swarthmore lectureship’s twofold
purpose: ‘to interpret to the Society of Friends their message and mission’ and
‘to bring before the public the spirit, the aims and the fundamental principles
of Friends’. Yet there is a delicate balance here: the actual words, the
inspiration of the lecture and the book, came through me but they were disciplined,
tested, honed as they were being formed into a ministry of the written word by
the loving consideration of many other people. The image I have is of the banks
of a river, the firm but also yielding sides of a fast-flowing stream. And of
course there’s the discipline of a tight deadline. The book has to be out on
the night the lecture is delivered.
So I had a sense of this both being my writing and it being so much more
than my own creation, its genesis being something far greater, something so much
more than any ambition or aspiration on my part as the author.
I remember the day I was to give the lecture in the
evening, being too anxious and excited during the day to sit in the main
sessions but sitting through the worship in the main meeting room at the
beginning of the afternoon session. I looked out at the Friends assembled there
and I didn’t see individual faces, I just saw a tide of colour (of their
clothes) and felt a wave of love and goodwill coming from them and returned to
them from me. My heart literally felt opened and at that moment I knew it would
be alright, that whatever I was led to say that evening would be ‘in the life’.
(Most lecturers read directly from a script. I had prepared one but it felt
wooden so I prepared crib-cards and spoke to themes instead. One of the things
people commented on afterwards was the memorable way I paused during the
lecture, waiting in the silence to sense exactly how I was led to proceed. The
process of giving the lecture illustrates the kind of vulnerability I spoke of
earlier). Looking back at this experience I resonate with those words of John Woolman’s we have been reminded of at this gathering: ‘Love
was the first motion’.
A different process of testing happened with the Woodbrooke Journal – Tradition & Transition: open
to the sacred yesterday and today. This is really the written-up version of
a (by then) much repeated vocal ministry, basically my presentation in the
‘Rooted in Christianity, Open to New Light’ project which Timothy Peat-Ashworth
and I developed and took around meetings between 2001 and 2004. I have never
written anything so quickly or with so little reworking of the material. Having
been a student in Tim’s classes, we entered into a dialogue which has continued
for the last eight years. We started to offer work together with a sense of
addressing wounds Friends and attenders might be carrying from their religious
(Christian) past. We felt we were under concern in the traditional Quaker sense
and our idea of working together underwent a process of eighteen months of
testing in clearness meetings with colleagues, discerning the right way
forward. We applied for funding from the Joseph Rowntree
Charitable Trust to travel in the ministry and were asked to gain the
support/oversight of a Quaker body such as Woodbrooke
for our project (which we did). Being rejected for this initial funding in a
clear and well-reasoned way was part of the testing of the concern. We ended up
travelling to one General Meeting, fourteen Monthly Meetings and running nine
residential events at Woodbrooke over a three-year
period. Interest was still growing in the project when we felt it was right to
lay it down.
We travelled together as minister/elder, each of us
presenting material and the other prayerfully upholding the presenter. After
each event we reviewed, encouraged and reworked the material together. The
challenge was to keep the material fresh, to continue our ‘dialogue in
difference’ in a way that was authentic and had life in it. In 2002 there was a
slot in the Woodbrooke journal programme and I was
asked to write up my part in the project. I sensed my job was not to be too
clever or precious about the actual words. I was reminded of the words of Louis
Pasteur: ‘Chance favours a prepared mind’. With writing as ministry maybe grace
favours a prepared heart? For whatever reason, the words just flowed.
And this relates to what I said about the
vulnerability involved in writing as ministry. The author’s job is one of
emptying oneself of personal ambition, not being too attached to the outcome
(once the ego’s vanity has been appealed to by knowing that ‘I’m going to be
published again!’). In this case the material had been offered to several
hundred Friends by the time it was written down; it had been tested by the
rigorous process of presentation and discussion at many different kinds of
meetings around the country. (With hindsight I see these meetings as threshing
meetings – chances for theological discussion and even argument but where there
were moments of great tenderness, of opening up and maybe convincement, moments
when Something Else was apparent in the room.)
In the case of this fat manuscript an altogether
different process of discernment has been at work. I was brought on board as
co-author to help Jo Farrow finish a book she has been working on for the best
part of ten years, a follow-up to her earlier book The World in my Heart. The discernment here was in a meeting with
two trustees from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable
Trust where it was decided to offer funding to release me to write for six
months. (The writing involved then took eighteen months!). This manuscript is
now being considered by Quaker Books (of Britain Yearly Meeting) and is at the
editorial stage of pre-publication.
The current writing I am involved with is still only a
draft which offers Friends and attenders in BYM a model of, and reflections by
Tim and myself on, the spiritual diversity of our
yearly meeting at the start of the C21st. This has arisen directly out of the
ongoing conversation between the two of us but has been tested by students on
the ‘Equipping for Ministry’ course at Woodbrooke on
which we have taught together since the project ended. An earlier complete (we
thought!) draft was tested by four readers, one of whom loved it, two of whom
thought it was good but needed work and one of whom disliked it quite strongly.
A complete reworking seemed called for and it is now very much a work in
progress, currently going through the testing, honing and refining process I have
been outlining.
In researching the topic ‘writing as ministry’ when I
searched on the internet it was not surprising to be directed to the Earlham
School of Religion in
“Writing
is a ministry to the writer, the reader, to human history, and sometimes to the
subjects. Working as a scribe or an inventor, writers may gather thoughts from
a source of greater mystery than themselves. This is the miracle of writing:
the transcendent does occur. Writers become pilgrims on a quest, searching for
truth and clarity and sometimes, just sometimes, in the excitement of a
carefully chosen phrase, an incarnation takes flight and the illuminated page
becomes a holy grail. The tiny symbols perform an act of grace”.
In her conclusion to this brief article
she perfectly encapsulates my own hope as a writer:
“If
I am able to share the awe I feel… or bring the beauty of our planet into
focus, if I am able to give hope to one person who is grieving or set afire the
courage of another, than I shall have ministered in words.”
Her words remind me of something Jean Cocteau wrote:
‘The poet does not ask for admiration; he wants to be believed’.
In conclusion I want to return to the theme of the
vulnerability of the writer as minister (in my experience). I think of how
earlier Friends used the words ‘tender’ in two distinct ways. On the one hand
there was the tenderness of being kind, considerate, sensitive
to one another. On the other they used it as a verb, ‘to be tendered’ – as in
Margaret Fell’s observation that ‘the Light will rip
you open’. It is, for some of us at least, the cost, the mark, of being
faithful. Personally I struggle, almost constantly, with self-doubt. It is a
cross I have to bear, linked with my perfectionism (the form my pride often
takes).
I remember when I was at Woodbrooke,
giving a presentation and worrying about it how it was received. Janey O’Shea, my tutor, said something wise about the
giving of ministry that I shall never forget. Seeing my anxiety, my wanting to
have ‘got it right’, my wanting to be liked and accepted by my audience, she
said there is only one question that a minister had to ask themselves: ‘Was I
faithful?’ I hear these words every time now that I prepare to give a talk,
convincing myself that for all the times it has worked in the past, this time
is will surely be a disaster. And I think this links with what I’ve suggested
is one of the criteria of a true ministry of writing. Just as it is, hopefully,
inspired and will have been subjected to testing, so too it must be ‘answering’
that of God in the reader. And this way of writing, I have found, necessarily
speaks to the present condition of the writer. For me it is part of a process
of surrendering, of not having my egoic self too
invested in the writing itself, in the craft of writing – which can be a trap.
This is often not a comfortable process. I find the
call to be a minister of the written word at times exhilarating and at others
almost more challenging than I can bear. I question my discernment,
I doubt my sincerity, my spiritual credentials (‘Who do I think I am to hold
forth to others on things eternal’?) Yet all this angsting is worthwhile whenever I
have the sense of having answered the sense of the Mystery in an other. The thing that confirms that I was faithful in my
Swarthmore lecture is the number of people who have approached me since reading
it to thank me for articulating something they couldn’t put into words, for
maybe challenging them but also confirming a precious experience of faith
(particularly one that takes an unconventional form) that was hard, indeed
almost impossible, to encapsulate.
To be a writer-minister, I have found, means being an
avid (even compulsive?) reader, constantly noticing new material, absorbing,
assimilating and (let’s be honest) regurgitating the words of others that seem
to us to be ‘in the life’. As writers we are necessarily called to a ministry
of listening – to others we meet in person and to those we ‘meet’ through the
written word. I was at a talk given by a friend of mine recently and he said we
have been used to going to talks such as the one he was giving and we have expected
to hear inspired speakers. Part of what our world is crying out for today, he
said, is inspired listeners.
Thinking of Patricia Loring’s
wonderful description of the Quaker way as ‘a listening spirituality’, I
immediately saw this as one of our most precious gifts for the world today,
part of our essential vocation as Friends in all our ministries and witness –
to be inspired listeners in every situation. I have a particular sense of this
myself in that I feel we’re called to an unfamiliar, prophetic, kind of
listening in this time. Some years ago, in Yearly Meeting in session, we were
reminded of the sobering words of the Zen monk and poet Thich
Nhat Hanh: ‘Now is the time
to hear within us the sound of the Earth crying’. That is a challenging listening
ministry called for in this time.
I was struck in reading some of the proposed pieces
for the new collection of the writings of young Friends by comments made by Kody Gabriel Hersh in his article
‘Obstacles to Faithful Ministry’. He offers sound advice to all of us would-be
ministers when he says, ‘nothing will cripple a ministry more effectively than
waiting until you are the perfect person to deliver it’. (This Friend knows my
failings all too well). ‘In order to serve God best,’ he continues, ‘I need to
evaluate the gifts that I have now, not compare them to the gifts that I think
I might have in future’. (Or, I might add, to the gifts I believe that other people
already have!) The real question, he suggests is not, ‘“Are my gifts ready?”
but instead, “What work is best suited to what my gifts are right now?”
And of course, to state the blindingly obvious, the
work of any kind of ministry is not an occasional, take-it-or-leave-it pastime;
we’re talking vocation here. You write because it is, in a sense, in your very
nature, it is something you have to
do. And for all the trials and tribulations I have describing here, it brings
you joy in the execution and in the process of faithfulness and response, the
answering and being answered. Thinking of vocation I am reminded of what Parker
Palmer says in his deceptively little book Let
Your Life Speak: listening for the voice of vocation: “The deepest vocational question is not “What
ought I to do with my life?” It is the more elemental and demanding “Who am I?
What is my nature?” This question, he suggests, leads to another. The Quaker
teacher Douglas Steere ‘was fond of pointing out that
the ancient human question “Who am I?” leads inevitably to the equally
important questions “Whose am I?” – for there is no selfhood
outside relationship’. Only as we answer this question, Palmer suggests,
can we ‘discover the community of our lives’.
The challenge we face – as writers, as ministers, or
simply as faithful human beings, is to “grow into our own authentic selfhood,
whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we
will not only find the joy that every human being seeks – we will also find our
path of authentic service in the world.” He then links this with one of my
favourite insights, from the theologian and novelist Frederick Beuchner who writes of vocation: ‘The place God calls us to
is the place where our deep gladness and the world’s
deep hunger meet’.
I know that in considering my formation as a Quaker
writer-minister the support and discernment of others has been crucial. And
this is an ongoing process. I meet at least twice a year with my Faithfulness
Group, three seasoned Friends who help me weigh up the options and sense the
rightness of my leadings. I am encouraged (given heart) by them, to help me get
beyond what Kody Gabriel Hersh
describes as the second obstacle to his ministry, which he describes as
‘getting stuck in my “head space”, the rationally-driven part of me that
believes nothing without proof, and so is constantly confounded in any
understanding of God’.
He certainly speaks to my own condition when he
writes: ‘My faith, my ministry – indeed, everything about my life – falls apart
when examined under the lens of rational “objectivity”’. This nineteen year-old
Friend from Miami names perfectly for me the tyranny of this intellectual
scepticism for a post-Enlightenment Quaker like myself:
“These occasional episodes of doubt and
confusion are disruptive enough that even when they have passed, they make me
doubt my fitness to minister. How can I be a faithful gospel minister without a
constant certainly of God’s existence?”
But he offers me hope when he goes on to write that
‘ministry is less about belief and more about witness’.
(Of course, I can doubt my faithfulness here as well!) He challenges and
encourages me in equal measure when he says: “One does not need to
intellectually accept any set beliefs or doctrine in order to minister … The
work of a Quaker minister is to be spiritually receptive and to manifest the
goodness of God, not to expound it as doctrine.” Amen to that.
Being ‘spiritually receptive’ for me is also about the
kind of vulnerability I have been describing; being open, being accessible to
the inspiration of the Spirit in our lives. Of course all Friends are called to
live that way. But those of us called to be ministers of the written word need
to live by a particular sensibility (and sensitivity) in the fullest sense of
the words. So please be tender with us in our fallibility. We don’t need to be
treated as prima donnas but I ask you
to bear in mind the image I had this weekend of us as ministers and you – as
our editors and publishers – as our elders. I hope I have been able to convey
something of the writer’s side of this joint enterprise, this common calling to
faithfulness.