Geoffrey Durham went to his first Quaker meeting in 1994 and has been going regularly ever since. He worked as an entertainer, actor and director for thirty-five years before retiring in 2006 to work more actively for Quakers. He was one of the founders of Quaker Quest, a ground-breaking outreach project and an editor and contributor to the Twelve Quakers series of books (republished as New Light). Geoffrey has written three introductions to Quakerism for newcomers and is a regular speaker at Quaker events. He lives in London, UK.

Quaker Quicks - What do Quakers Believe?

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

The Ways of Quakers

I didn't feel I was "good" enough to be a Quaker. But then I realised that you don't have to be "good" at all. Quakerism is for people who are trying, not people who are succeeding.

Carolyn Hayman

Quakers keep themselves to themselves. It isn't that they are secretive so much as naturally quiet, but the result is the same: no one but a Quaker has a clue who the Quakers are.

Ironically, it's their quietness that many newcomers find most attractive. Quakers don't evangelise. They don't have that fervent desire to convert other people that gives religion a bad name. They don't insist they are right and they never pretend to have all the answers. What they do have is a way of life that, in its detail, is unlike that of any other religious group. And their simple, radical message has a startling modernity that belies its 370-year history.

That message is what this book is about, and I realise it may turn out to be different from what you've already been told. Because Quakers have said so little for so long, there's a good chance that what you've heard has been based on centuries of guesswork, assumptions and misinformation.

At a party the other day, the conversation turned unexpectedly to religion. I said I was a Quaker. One of my fellow guests told me that he thought Quakers were a secret society with funny handshakes. Another asked me why I wasn't wearing a black hat like the smiley old gent on the porridge packet. A third wondered why I was there at all, since Quakers are famous for being puritanical killjoys. All those myths, and many others, need debunking before we can begin.

So I'll tell you what Quakers don't believe, and then I'll explain what they do. Let's begin with the misunderstandings I encountered at the party.

I don't know where the idea of secret handshakes came from and I can't quite believe anyone takes it seriously, but the notion that Quakers are a closed sect – in other words, a religious group who don't encourage newcomers and marry only their own kind – is surprisingly common. Let's set it aside now. Quakers welcome newcomers with open-heartedness and warmth. That means everybody – there isn't a background, eccentricity, nationality or sexual orientation that they ever exclude for any reason. Quakers will regard you as a member of their community as soon as you start to turn up regularly. When it comes to marriage, they labour under no restrictions and marry the person they love, Quaker or not. They were pioneers of same-sex marriage during the early years of the twenty-first century, and their weddings are joyful, uplifting affairs.

On now to the porridge – a much more understandable confusion, since the black-hatted image is still prominent on our supermarket shelves. Quakers have never sold breakfast foods. Not ever. And I'll be astonished if they ever do. The Quaker Oats Company of Chicago (originally from Akron, Ohio) came up with their name in 1877 as a symbol of "good quality and honest value". The firm has no association with any religious group, though their familiar trademark does seem to have been inspired by the figure of William Penn, the British Quaker who travelled to America in 1682 and founded the state of Pennsylvania as a centre of religious tolerance. In his time Quakers wore black and grey, often accompanied by a hat or bonnet. There's no similar convention today, though you may occasionally meet a "plain Quaker"; they wear clothes cut as simply as possible and without conspicuous decoration. Most, however, dress exactly like everyone else, tending to emphasise practicality rather than extravagance.

Their lack of extravagance shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that Quakers don't have any fun. Nor – and I suspect this may be the origin of the idea that they are killjoys – should you associate Quakers with a rejection of the trappings of modern life. Contemporary Quakers live in the world. They are not puritans. They use computers, they go to rock concerts, they drink alcohol, they love art, they shop in the high street, they drive taxis, they eat chocolate, they watch TV.

And while we're about it, let's explode some other common myths that may have confused you. The Quakers are not the Shakers. The Quakers are not the Amish. You don't have to be a vegan to be a Quaker. You don't have to be a vegetarian, either. You can wear lipstick. You don't have to be American. You don't have to be a peace activist. You don't have to believe that every word of the Bible is true.

Too many negatives, I know. But I need to add just one more before the positives can take over. And this is a liberation. In fact, many Quakers ironically find it among the most positive statements they ever make. It's an essential fact about them, and it's a good starting point if you want to know more.

Quakers have no creed.

For many people, particularly religious people, that comes as a shock. How can there be a religious faith with no list of beliefs that its followers have in common? No statement of intent? No dotted line that a person has to sign before they call themselves a Quaker?

There's a one-word answer: experience. Quakers call theirs an experience-based faith. They only believe what they have experienced. They have no truck with dogma. They reject religious doctrine and they don't accept what someone tells them until they've tested it. So being told that "there is a God", or "Jesus died to save us from our sins", or "you will know life after death", cuts no ice with Quakers. As it happens, I know a Quaker who shares all those beliefs, but in each case his conviction comes from an experience he has had. Other Quakers who don't share those experiences won't have reached the same conclusions. Nobody minds.

If you ask a Quaker if she believes in God, you're unlikely to get a quick or easy answer. The first response will probably be, "It depends," and the conversation will meander from there. But since "God" means something different to every human being, it might help you to change the question and explore something that could actually have happened. You could ask, "Have you ever had a spiritual experience you can't explain?" or, "Have you ever felt you were being pushed into doing something by a force you can't control?" or maybe, "Have you ever had an encounter with something you might call God?".

I've never met a Quaker who isn't fascinated by those questions. Quakers have a highly-developed sense of wonder and a constant desire to keep an open mind. They see flashes of the Divine everywhere – in the dancing of a butterfly, or the power of memory, or those fleeting glimpses of the eternal that can catch our inward eye.

And the wonder of revelation is built into Quakers' unique spiritual practice. It is their equivalent of a church service – a communal gathering of anything from two people to about a thousand – and they call it a "meeting". Quaker meetings don't have a formal structure. No two are alike. They are based on silence, stillness, speaking, waiting, listening. As new participants get used to them and their hushed, unpredictable power, Quaker meetings increasingly become a source of spiritual help and a way of finding meaning and purpose.

Between meetings, Quakers keep working on their faith. There's an old Quaker saying they find helpful: Attend to what love requires of you. The language may be antiquated, but the sentiment is anything but. It's a call to positive action. It pulls Quakers out of the realm of spiritual wonder and pushes them into the real world. And it's a tough suggestion – it doesn't have the easy convenience of, say, Attend to what you love or, still more tempting, Do what you like. But behind its toughness lies the combination of kindness and humanity that is a hallmark of Quaker life.

And there are many ways to live it. A large number of Quakers work for peace and social justice, either professionally or in their free time, and they regard the hours they devote to those enterprises as an integral part of their religious lives. Many Quakers pray each day, others never. There are Christian Quakers, Buddhist Quakers, Hindu Quakers. There are huge variations of experience around the role of God in their lives. But, as you might expect from their lack of a creed, the differences and nuances of belief are not seen as obstacles to be overcome. Quakers trust each other to discover for themselves what love requires of them, and to be true to it.

Am I making them sound like saints? I hope not. Quakers are not perfect. They are as flawed, fractious, stubborn and grumpy as anyone else. Like anyone else, they can be thoughtless. Like anyone else, they can be cruel. They know these things about themselves. They reject the idea of sainthood and don't want a reputation for purity.

Their aim is to make sense of the world, to do all they can to mend it, and to live in it peaceably, at the same time helping others to do the same. They have no desire to look good and no patience for the pursuit of moralistic virtue. They are learners in life, not judges of it, and this learning has led them towards some shared understandings and beliefs.

Having started this chapter with a series of Quaker unbeliefs, it seems right to list four basic beliefs that all Quakers seem to me to hold in common:

Quakers believe that formal creeds are unnecessary, because what matters to them is the truth and integrity of personal experience.

Quakers believe that religious doctrines and dogmas are unhelpful and should be set aside.

Quakers believe that regular attendance at Quaker meetings has the power to change people, help them find meaning and give them a purpose in life.

Quakers believe that they should be guided by love and what love requires of them.

It's not an official list – I've based it simply on my own observations. The drawback of writing it down this way, belief after belief after belief, is that you get no sense of the people it describes. I hope to put that right in the chapters that follow, where I'll be saying more about the everyday lives of Quakers, the work they do for peace and social justice, their uniquely transparent ways of reaching business decisions, and the hypnotic magnetism of their meetings.

But I want to focus now on a couple of tiny words from the beginning and end of the list – tiny in size, immense in scope. Quakers talk about them constantly, both separately and as a pair. And they have imbued them with layers of meaning that are seldom recognised by the rest of the world. So, if you want to know more about the ways of Quakers, you need to understand what they mean by love and truth.

Love has the same connotations for Quakers as it has for everyone else – intense affection, sexual drive, warm engagement, passionate involvement. And they are not alone among world religions in extending their loving commitment beyond family and friends to embrace all humanity. Loving others, helping others, finding good in others, even those who have done us harm, can be a tough call, but it's one that Quakers accept with empathy and understanding.

That applies to Quakers' public work in mediation and peacemaking as much as it does to their private lives. It has been the same for centuries. In 1693, when William Penn was making a public case for pacifism, he wrote:

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it. ... Let us then try what Love will do.

And when the eighteenth-century American Quaker John Woolman sought to build bridges of understanding with the Native American community of Wyoming, his attitude was the same:

Love was the first motion, and thence a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life and the spirit they live in.

We all recognise that "first motion" every day in our family lives – it's rarer, perhaps, to find the same sentiment holding sway in the public arena.

As with love, so with truth. All of us can remember lies we've told – to say nothing of the moments when we've casually prefixed a sentence with, "to be honest," as if dishonesty might suddenly emerge as a viable alternative. Quakers are no different, but they have made up their minds to do what they can to avoid deceit. Their decision implies straightforwardness, clarity and a lack of hypocrisy across the board. Quakers once called themselves "Friends of the Truth" and, while they don't use that name these days, the use of truth as a one-word mission statement is still very much alive.

Truth covers so much: a willingness to follow our best instincts; a reverence for human life; an aspiration to live openly, honestly and without skeletons in closets; a commitment to living simply; a respect for the earth; an understanding that the environment is not ours to destroy.

And truth is political, too: it was a Quaker after all, Milton Mayer in the 1950s, who first talked about "speaking truth to power".

And what of the pairing? What of love and truth together as a driving force in Quakerism?

For newcomers, a life based on love and truth can sound delightfully refreshing. For seasoned Quakers, that blending of love and truth lies at the root of everything. There is a muchloved Quaker text that begins:

Take heed ... to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God.

A lot of people, I'm sure, will balk at that suggestion. And for all of us it takes some unpacking. It doesn't say, for example, that love, truth and God are the same thing. Nor does it imply that, if you treasure love and truth, you have some kind of hotline to the Almighty.

What it does say is that love and truth are to be found inside us all, and that they can be compared to – perhaps even equated to – what Quakers call that of God within us.

And it is such a radical and contentious idea that it deserves a chapter to itself.

Inner Light

There have been challenging moments in my life when I've been on the edge of my boundaries and when I've felt supported and held by something that I would call God.

Maya Metheven

Talking about God is risky. It causes clashes, splits and misunderstandings. What counts – and it really is all that counts – is each person's experience of God.

George Fox, one of the first Quakers, gave them a piece of advice in 1656 that they have treasured ever since. He suggested that the actions and behaviour of Quakers could serve as a living example to other people and that, as a result, they would come to "walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one". Quakers love it and quote it all the time, but that doesn't stop some of them finding its three key words – "that of God" – difficult and obscure. For many, just the word "God" comes tainted with memories of a religious education they would rather forget. So they coin their own phrases to match their experience. I have heard "the Spirit", "the Seed", "the Truth", "God Within", "the Spirit Guide", "the Source", and "the Inward Teacher". One of the most common, as well as being among the oldest – it's been around for at least 370 years – is "the Inner Light".

I've never met anyone – atheist, agnostic, non-theist, all religions, no religion – who doesn't have experience of this Light inside us. We may not talk about it, but we can't deny it. We may not want to look at it, but it's there. It has a lot in common with conscience and with the still, small voice. And it is inextricably bound up with the promptings of love and truth in our hearts.

Whatever words Quakers use to express this Inner Light, it is a reality for them. They often talk about it pushing or moving them. It guides them. They feel it.

Some of my Quaker friends have allowed me to quote snatches of their experience:

Light is probably the word I use most of all.

I cannot escape from the embrace of the Spirit within me and all around me.

In my life experience, the Divine has been a reality.

I experience God as the life-force.

Truth for me is the personal encounter with the Divine.

I can live with the term God as energy, force, direction, rather than a thing or a person.

I have had experiences that I can only attribute to the presence of a power beyond myself – an energy quickened by love and truth – which I access without an intermediary.

These quotations originated separately from one another; they were never part of one conversation. What strikes me about them is just how much each of the speakers has in common with the others, and how much of their language is identical: "experience", "energy", "force". These Quakers may not have a formal creed to fall back on, but they share such a wealth of understanding, insight and yes, belief, that in the end it makes little difference.

These people are describing the everyday spirituality of their ordinary lives. Nothing in their statements represents a doctrine they have been taught, or a dogma someone has told them to believe. And it's significant, I think, that two of them talk about encountering an Outer Light as well as an Inner one. The first person talks of the "Spirit within me and all around me"; the other of "a power beyond myself".