Quaker Alphabet Blog 2014 - G for Guidance

Sitting in meeting, considering what my next alphabetic blog post might be, it became clear to me that I should write about guidance.

There have been many times in my life when I have needed help with finding what to do or where to go next. I have often brought my perplexity into the silence of worship (sometimes with others and sometimes by myself) and waited for guidance. Help has often come, not always immediately or in the form in which I have expected it. I may be guided to speak to someone, to undertake a new project, to read something or just to continue waiting.

Where does this guidance come from? In the third of our Advices and Queries we are asked to encourage in ourselves a habit of dependence on God's guidance for each day. I'm not sure that I manage the everyday part but I know that I am asking for and receiving guidance from God, my Inward Guide as well as my Inward Teacher. The guidance I receive is gentle but insistent. I am free to ignore it and I often do, but if I follow, however hesitantly, then it is my experience that 'way will open.'

Although I live in quite different times, when I seek for guidance I feel at one with the travelling Friends in past centuries waiting to be guided to the right ship in which to embark on the dangerous ocean and ignoring many others that appear quite suitable to the outward eye. I know that I am waiting for guidance in the same way and from the same source, however foolish and deluded I may seem to some.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 42 - U for 'Unknown, unhonoured and unsung'

This quotation from an almost forgotten poem by a little-known Californian poet, Samuel John Alexander, who garnered one favourable review from the New York Times in 1912 before vanishing into obscurity, sums up my reason for researching, writing and sharing the history of Quakers and others.

I never cease to be amazed at how little most Friends know about the history of the Quaker movement or of the faithful lives of our foremothers and forefathers. A few names will be familiar - George Fox, Margaret Fell, John Woolman, Elizabeth Fry - but what of the less well known? I have gained immeasurably from reading the writings, published and unpublished, of earlier Friends, from listening to these voices from the past, and I want to share that experience with others.

I know that some Friends today think that Quaker history is irrelevant to how we live our lives now but this is very far from the truth in my experience. If we can understand the shifts in emphasis over time, the differences in tradition and how they have developed, then we will be better equipped to face the difficulties of our own time. Do we worry about becoming an aged Society with no appeal to the young? - Friends in the 17th, 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries did too. Can their explorations and solutions help us now?

Our Quaker faith is based on faithfulness - to God, to our Inward Teacher, to our leadings and our testimonies - and it can help us in our struggles to hear stories of what has gone before. As Alice Hayes put it in 1723 'Truly I have thought that if I had met with the like Account of any that had gone through such exercise, it would have been some Help to me.'

Over the years, with varying levels of success, I have tried to encourage Friends to share their spiritual autobiographies as a help to others. I have also published the writings of earlier Quakers and written about their lives in many different places including this blog. All this is because I do not want these people, who I think of as my friends, to remain 'unknown, unhonoured and unsung' and also because I am convinced that they have much to say which can be a Help to us today.