I am a Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends. I was at meeting for worship in Sheffield this morning and heard R, a prominent Quaker I’d say, speak about her love of passage 1.01 from Advices and Queries. Here it is:
As Friends we commit ourselves to a way of worship which allows God to teach and transform us. We have found corporately that the Spirit, if rightly followed, will lead us into truth, unity and love: all our testimonies grow from this leading.
This relates pretty directly to my last post about cause and effect and the idea that thought is something that comes after as an ordering of the event. In 1.01 Quakers express this idea that God can teach and transform if the Spirit is (rightly) followed. In worship Quakers wait on the Spirit with the belief that there is an urgency to action that comes not from thinking but through alignment with something existing beyond our material bodies, at its most material understood as a form of Jungian human collaborative Spirit. The notion is there that right action is that which aligns with God’s will which is beyond words (thus beyond thought).
When God is however materialised as – for sake of convenience – what Zizek via Lacan calls the big other – then the complicating factor becomes not if God exists but rather what God exists – then the question might become how do we avoid doing what God wills for us?