Report on Images & Silence.

This review was prepared for a Breakfast Meeting, held on 10th April 2011, at Aylsham Meeting House. This review was used as an introduction to the meeting, and led to a discussion on the Swarthmore Lecture 1992, called the ‘Presence Images and Silence'.

The 1992 Swarthmore lecture titled Images and Silence was undertaken by two lecturers, Brenda Heales and Chris Cook. The title reflects the author's interest in their main approaches to God, which appear in traditional theology. Their approaches are; relationship between images, religious experiences and worship, and the imageless aspect of God described by some mystics. They suggest that images might come to us in readings, prayer or worship, which leads us into absolute imagelessness and vice versa. The authors are united in their belief that Meeting for Worship is the soul of Quakerism, and the soul's health determines quality of life, wherever it is offered. The lecture is divided into four parts.

In part one the lecturers start by looking at Ministry today. Ministry can be vocal ministry, silent ministry and caring of one for another ministry. Throughout the book they are mindful of all these kinds of ministry. Unless friends experience true ministry in Meeting for Worship, they cannot do the work of God or carry out God's ministry in the world. The aim of all ministries is to have a closer communion with God and a flesh vision of God's purposes. Ministry in Meeting for Worship, where God should be held in awe and wonder, can be turned into either a Meeting for Counselling or a Meeting for Discussion.

Meeting for Counselling is where Friends use ministry to bring their own despairs and problems. Likewise, when Friends use ministry as a forum for their own ideas, thoughts and concerns, it becomes Meeting for Discussion. These matters should be listened to outside Meeting for Worship in a spirit of community. We must be aware of the speaker's opinions and ministering that comes from God, examine our promptings and be submissive to the spirit. We must consider the call we experience in Meeting for Worship, a call for beings to work for humanitarian ideals or for God to bring light into our darkness.

Part two of the lecture Brenda Heales looks at Images towards God. She believes images can help us to the source and power of the Holy Spirit, either personally or collectively. “How can images lead us, or opens us towards God,” she asks. She suggests our need to open ourselves to our inner being by using imagery, particularly signs, symbols and metaphors. She gives us several examples of how reading and the arts helps her, through imagination, both religiously and in seeking God's way. The use of language is important as we try to describe and share our experiences, particularly when using Metaphors and imagery to describe these experiences. Jesus owns language was not exactly bland she points out..

Brenda uses and reviews examples from Julian of Norwich imagery to show how metaphors and image can bring us to experiencing and understanding God.

In part three, Chris Cook looks at the mystics and from their teachings shows how the inner being of God as no words, no images, nothingness; absolute silence. Here God is imageless. He explains when we experience something unknown to us; we associate it with a past experience, turning the unknown into an image we can accept. In the same way we can put images to our experiences of God.

However, we cannot experience with worldly faculties Gods inner being, which is imageless. We do have a faculty, our soul, which recognises its own like and in recognising, it responds. The soul being made in the image of God is like Gods inner being. Within we are as unlimited and image-free as the absolute core of God. We don't need a go-between to experience God, he is within. What Fox calls “that of God within”.

This does not mean we cannot use images, for example mystics used spark, castle, or catching God naked in his dressing room. We, as Quakers, use seed and light. This is the paradox, strangely on the one hand the essence of God and individuals is pure silence and imageless. Yet the sign of silence and imageless is a renewal of images. It is through our inner journey that we learn about being and doing. By taking time to detach ourselves and allow ourselves to be drawn into the silence and inactivity of God, we enter a state of ‘being' so that our ‘doing' may spring from the only true source of creative action.

The lectures in part four ask the question, “What is the ministry of the Religious Society of Friend's to the world”. They answer that Friends minister from and through silence and images, affirming both their experience of God and of the agency of the Holy Spirit. People can be transformed by fully experiencing their images, by examining and testing them, and finding and owning their shared silences. Images and silences open us up to God. They empower us to become people who can listen and speak. The lecturers give a syllabus for experiential learning, a school for our own ministry of images, tutored by the Holy Spirit. They describe areas where images can have a positive effect. The areas they relate being Images from our own traditions, images from our own experiences, images in worship, images in prayer and communicating in images. Part four concludes by looking at ministry and silence. They discuss silence in Meeting for Worship and the many kinds of silence. They compare the similarities between Quakers and the silent orders of the church, and the importance of attentiveness to the spirit and one another. Friends are called to Ministry of silence, not in the monastic way, but in the world, through their distinctive Quaker way.

They show and explain three ways that ministry of silence might express itself.

• Firstly, in haven of silence through Meeting for Worship as Friends have always done, where the Holy Spirit guides the meeting, not friends.
• Secondly, as Silence Carriers where Friends, as individuals, empowered by God, consciously experienced, offer a personal ministry of being, a ‘silence carrier'.
• Thirdly, is a Ministry of Being? Here, Friends offer a ministry of silence by drawing upon the absolute silence of God by recognising a calling to a ministry of being.

At meetings and as individuals Friends can offer a haven of silence. The heart for this is Meeting for Worship, where the ministry of silence and the ministry of images comes together. Here in the deep silence of God is the womb of all true images. Here in absolute silence old images are infused with power and new images are forged. It is in the depths of God's silence that it is possible, safe, necessary, to let go of all images. It is out of this letting go comes power and healing. This power and healing Friends are required to share with the world.

The book ends with an epilogue showing how a painting by Vermeer called “The Kitchen Maid” can be used to illustrate how everyday kitchen objects can lead to spiritual type images. We see in this painting a truth about and for Friends, called to ministry of images and the ministry of silence.

Michael Johnson