Page 12 - Quaker News & Views Nov 25 - Jan 26

Uncertainty

Sometime early in membership, I copied a poem onto the flyleaf of our first ‘Quaker Faith and
Practice’: it’s by Yehuda Amichai and called “The Place where We are Right”. I found it expressed
a very reassuring thought, one which I wanted to hold on to, that doubts were….. OK.! I’d
harboured a worry that doubting, being uncertain, was faithless. Instead I discovered that Quakers
were fine with being uncertain, that doubt and faith go together like brothers. (They get us round
the next corner…Ha Ha). As in the poem, doubt allows for shifts of mind, new insights and
perspectives. Here’s the poem:

From the place where we are
right
Flowers will never grow
In the Spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough,
And a whisper will be heard in the
place
Where the ruined
House once stood. Uncertainty Zurich University

‘Doubts and Loves’ forms the title of one of Richard Holloway’s books which I read and warmed to.
Subsequently we have acquired several of his latest works : I counted 6 on our bookshelves. The
most recent purchase is entitled “0n Reflection” (2024 ). The author is in his 90’s now. He’s written
a new book nearly every year since the 1970’s, each one an indication of the stage of his spiritual
journey from being Bishop of Edinburgh to a position which is akin to that of a Quaker Friend. He
quotes a verse from a poem called “Mutations” by Louis MacNeice which expresses a similar idea
to the one above:

“For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation;
The stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue,
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation.”

I do recommend reading “On Reflection”. There’s a passage on page 90 which makes me feel
Yes,Yes, a thousand times Yes!

“…….I am intrigued by the similarities between confident theists and equally confident atheists and
their psychological interchangeability. I belong in neither camp, but my agnosticism is not a weak,
vacillating neutrality, it is a commitment to staying in a place of passionate and curious
Uncertainty. That said, I value the poetry of belief, its myths and narratives, its longing for meaning
and the way it has turned that longing into beauty in word and music. I want that kept around,
purged of arrogance and cruelty, weakened and less certain, but there.”

‘Passionate and curious Uncertainty’ . Hmm…….I am happy with that place!

Courtesy of Pat Yates, Bournemouth

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