Edited by David Nachman

In this author talk from the 2026 FGC Gathering in Burlington, Vermont, Rex Ambler introduces The Truth of Our Life and explores the search for truth at the heart of the Quaker experience. He reflects on his own spiritual journey, the insights of early Friends, and what the Quaker experiment might offer the world today.

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I’m going to tell you a bit about my new book, how I came to write it, and what I was trying to discover in the writing of it, and then, after 30, 40 minutes, you’ll have an opportunity to ask some questions.

Rex Ambler and the Search for the Truth of Our Life

So this book, yes, this book is about truth, and specifically, the truth of our life. Though, I bet that not many people use that phrase, or perhaps even quite get what that phrase is meant to be about. Of course, in contrast to the truth of science or philosophy, something that became worked out very precisely, about what is going on out there, this is a truth that concerns us. And one of the concerns I’ve had, in fact, over the last few years, is that we have come to rely too much on the sort of truth that can be established for us by other people.

So I think it might help if I explained how I came to be concerned about this. It’s been a concern most of my life, I would say, Indeed, his friend, my work and my writing. This book is, in a sense, a kind of summation of what I’ve been looking for and searching and discovering over the last 50 years or so, if not longer. In fact, I think it goes back to when I was a small child, and I was growing up on the southeast side of London in England. And you will realize that that meant that we were very much in the line of fire during the war. So for the first 5 years of my life,  I was being subjected to war and violent conflict. There were bombs dropping near our house, and fortunately not on our house. And in addition to that violence, there was the anxiety that my father had been sent away to Africa, to fight against Rommel in the desert. And my mother was having to cope with a great deal of prejudice and ostracism, because she herself was German.

So here was my father, fighting on one side of the war, and my uncle fighting on the other. It was absurd, and it seemed to me that it was absurd, even then, as a child, but I was also concerned about why people would do something, so violent and hurtful and destructive. There must be something wrong with human beings, if they can’t see the futility of war.

And oddly enough, that question, and that curiosity are still there with me. How is it that people can defend human rights and freedom so strongly in any other sphere of life, but when it comes to great, large assemblies of people, they’re quite happy to accept that it’s all right to kill people. Indeed, to kill them en masse, irrespective of whether they are indeed directly engaged with the war itself.

So that was a concern of mine. And I felt some of that inadequacy myself, of course. I was picking up my own anger at this world, and perhaps at my mother, who was anxious, and overly angry herself, I think because of the crisis of the war. So, I thought, well, if there’s a God, He is not going to like what I do and think and feel deep down here. I’m quite possibly going to be condemned along with everybody else.

So then, I was very impressed when I heard preachers telling me, oh, this was in my teenage years now, that, although I was sinful, as they said, I could be forgiven, and I could be forgiven by God Himself, because He himself had sent his son, to live and to die and rise again, for me. I didn’t understand quite what that meant, but I was somehow reassured. Well, certainly, I needed that sort of reassurance. And I accepted this Christian story, and I went to church, and indeed, I prepared myself at university to become a preacher myself. I thought this was a fantastic story of how the world could be reconciled, and how it’s fundamental ills could be overcome.

But when I was at the university, of course, I was studying history and philosophy, among other things, bits of theology and religion as well, and I realized that this story that I had swallowed, and we’re so happy to believe, had in fact been written by human beings who were not themselves infallible. And even if this Bible was inspired by God, and the man Jesus was inspired by God, these were human beings who were telling me these things. And it became apparent in my studies that part of their concern to impart this message was they wanted to reassure people who were anxious. And indeed, they wanted to be sure that they themselves had a message which justified their being priests or priestesses, or whatever.

So that human element began to raise doubts in my mind as to whether I could trust this story. And for a while, I thought, no, it’s much more grown up, really, to let that story go and look after my own affairs, to become a truly modern person, to take responsibility for my own life, for my understanding of the world. This was the new course—the relatively new secular outlook on the world—the course which I followed. but then after a while, I found that that, too was lacking in one very important respect. And I don’t know if this would echo your experience, but science and philosophy are very good at understanding things that can be measured, observed, carefully determined, and their relationships understood and grasped.

And science indeed, has been extremely successful in that respect, and because of that, we’re able to develop technologies—remarkable technologies like this very technology which has enabled me to speak to you and you to listen to me, which is pretty extraordinary. But there’s one aspect of life where science and indeed philosophy does not help, and that is in helping us to understand ourselves.

When I became aware of this, I realized there was quite an important distinction between objects that we can look at and observe from outside, and subjects like ourselves, who can only be understood from the inside. So how can I better understand myself? How can I deal with the conflicting feelings I have, the confusions of my mind? My doubts about what’s going on in the world, or what people are saying about it?

And that deeply puzzled me. And I began to see that Christianity was, in fact, fudging the issue. It was telling us a story that we had to believe. It was not pointing us to a truth that we could discover for ourselves and know to be true, something that we could see and say, ‘Yes, this is me, this is exactly my condition.’

I did find out, though, that in some other religions across the world, there was an awareness of this inner life which has to be respected, and that there was a knowledge that we could have of ourselves that was quite different fromthe knowledge we have about objects and things out there.

So, you can see this distinction between what is out there and what is in here became pretty important for me. And it is one of the important aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism in particular, but also Sufism, and some aspects of the Jewish faith, particularly in the Hasidim. I took an interest in all these, well, spiritual traditions is how I understood them. They had an understanding that these stories that tell about gods and heroes and human beings and saints, and devils and so on are not to be taken literally. They are evoking and expressing something inside people. There are ways in which we can come to see ourselves in our own situation.

And their philosophers in particular, would make a point of that—well, their teachers, generally, if they were wise, they would recognize that these stories although they are apparently about what happened in the past, or what happens over there, are in fact stories about us, and we have to pick up by ourselves what that meaning is. And they, of monasteries and other practices which enable people to discern what is. In fact, they themselves are experiencing forms of meditation, very often pursued in a highly individualistic way. A person who wanted to know the truth about themselves would go to a guru and see him or her from time to time in order to develop their own inner understanding.

And it struck me that nothing quite like this had happened in Christianity. Why was that? Why was there no recognition that these stories about Jesus being born of a virgin, dying and rising again from the dead, are not to be taken literally, or can’t have to be taken literally, because they’re really telling us something about ourselves.

Well, I came to see that Christianity, in fact, was committed to setting out its faith in a form that anybody could understand, whether or not they had spiritual insight, or were prepared to undertake a kind of spiritual journey. Like Judaism, Christianity is very much based on the community. Not the synagogue, but the church. And so everyone has to be taken account of, and priests from the very beginning, well, from about the second or third century of the Christian story, were having to bear in mind the very weak people. In fact, Paul writes about them as well in his writings, which is one of the reasons I’ve actually written quite a lot about the Bible in this book, which may surprise some of you.

I’m trying to understand there why Christianity put its truth in this objective form of stories about what is going on there, or what was going on in the past. And why, therefore, it becomes necessary in Christianity to believe something even if a part of you tells you this can’t all be true. That’s a paradox in Christianity, no doubt.

Christianity, Spiritual Experience, and the Search for Truth

So I was impressed by the fact that even from the third and fourth century, there were Christians who were beginning to question this objective teaching. The creeds were beginning to come out. “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” and these statements had to be recited every week, as if they were statements of fact, apparently. “And Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died, rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven.” All this remarkable story has to be accepted as true, even though you cannot know how it could be true.

Now, this, to my mind, was deeply questionable. And so it wasn’t surprising that these monks and nuns, as they became known in the 30th century, in the 4th century 15:16:46 left the cities and their worldly churches, all too much committed to the Roman Empire, as a matter of fact.

And they develop communities in the desert, particularly around Egypt, Syria, Palestine, that area in the eastern Mediterranean where the Roman Empire didn’t have so much control. But even then, these remarkable people, these monastics who were seeking God in themselves, in the silence and often on their own, and sometimes in community, they were a bit of a challenge to the church in the cities. But they were demonstrating that it would be possible to be a Christian without actually believing in a creed, or having to read your Bible every day.

And so the bishops actually began to close in on the monastics and limit what they could say and do. They were literally boxed into monasteries and they were told that their teaching had to comply with official teaching of the church. So, the church was even more committed to transforming this doctrine which had originally been a spiritual teaching derived from Jesus and the apostles, into a whole set of beliefs that one is supposed to hold. You’re aware, of course, that Jesus did not teach people that there were certain things they had to believe or there were certain laws they had to follow. The only law, he says, which in a sense is no law, is to love God and your neighbor. So that was one thing, of course, I explored, and the huge transformation that took place after Jesus’ time.

And there was no resistance to that until the time of the Reformation. There were many attempts at Reformation, when Christians in Europe said, no, this can’t be right, Christianity can’t be a set of teachings that you have to accept. It must involve you as a human being, and your whole reality as a human being. You must be able to entrust your whole self to God. So that means you need some kind of experience. That was hinted at by St. Bernard and others as well, but it was never accepted by the church, which insisted on its authority. And of course, the whole structure of the church and its support by the empire, all the nations that is holding, depended on its maintaining this orthodox doctrine, which was the supposedly right interpretation of Christianity.

George Fox and the Beginnings of the Quaker Experiment

So Luther and the other reformers were at least making one very important point which caught on, and had a huge effect at least in the north of Europe, that in order to benefit from the revelation that has come to us in our history, in our Bible, or whatever, we have to open ourselves inwardly to what has been said, and hear it as God’s word to us.

You see the distinction there, between believing something be true and reciting in church, and knowing in your experience, this is God speaking to you. But then 100 or so years later, even this was being called in question. And it was George Fox himself in the 17th century, who recognized that the very attempt to put the truth of God, the truth of spirituality, in words, which we are then to believe, was a way of blocking off that truth.

I don’t think anyone had quite said that before in the West. Fox was remarkably innovative and creative in that way. And it was a matter of, of course, of real anxiety to him. You’ll know that famous passage.

George Fox: “This I Knew Experimentally”

This is perhaps the most well-known passage in George Fox’s Journal, and rightly so, because it tells us almost all we need to know about how the Quaker movement began.

As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people.

I’ll comment on that. There’s 3 different groups of people.

For I saw there was none among them that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them, and in all of them were gone, so I had nothing outwardly to help me, or to tell me what to do, then, oh, then I heard a voice which said “There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition Jesus Christ enlightens and gives grace, faith, and power. Thus, when God doth work, who can let it?”

That is, you know, who can stop it?

“This, I knew, experimentally.”

Now, you’ll be familiar with that, and I wonder if you’ve pondered what Fox meant when he said, “They did not speak to my condition.” I think I’ve come across the idea among Friends that what he was saying is that what they were saying was not true, and I want to hear something that really tells me what is true. I want to find a preacher who knows what my life is about and can explain that to me. Well, indeed, that’s how Fox had been thinking up to this point.

But what he’s saying here is something more fundamental. You see, it goes on,

“When all my hopes in them, and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me or tell me what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice. . . .”

Which is, of course, not something outward. Everything outside himself had been unable to tell him how. He wasn’t expecting somebody else to come along and tell him how he actually was. He was having to give up, and it was only as he had forsaken everything that had been said to him by anybody and everybody else, including the Bible, presumably. But then he heard a voice which told him indeed, what he was really like. And this Christ, of course, was not the Christ of the Bible, in the sense that he was not being told by this voice to go and read his Bible again, because that too was outside him. That was a thing, and it would not speak to his condition. The only thing that could speak to his condition then is something—some truth—inside him.

And that indeed is how he came to describe it. Jesus Christ then is this something, like a deeper self, something very deep inside him, who shows himself initially by enlightening. That’s the very first thing. Jesus Christ enlightened. So this is the light. It’s something in him which enabled him to see himself. Clearly, he says that a bit later in his journal, I think I’ve got it here. It’s a very interesting little passage, more or less on the same page. It’s in the Nickalls edition of Fox’s Journal, if you know that, on page 11.

And then the Lord gently led me along, and did let me see his love which was endless and eternal, And surpasses all the knowledge that men have in the natural state, or can get by history, or books. And, that love let me see myself as I was without him. And I was afraid of all company, for I saw them perfectly where they were for the love of God, which let me see myself.

The Light Within and Quaker Spiritual Practice

This is an aspect, I think of early Friends, that’s been very neglected over the centuries, really. And we have tended to see the Light as a capacity to see what we ought to do. I think you would agree. It’s seen as a form of discernment to know what needs to be done so that we can do it. But Fox was saying, first of all, that the Light shows himself and it then shows him other people where they are, what they’re doing, why they are, what they are. His big anxiety, of course, had been, as he says in the journal, was that he couldn’t understand people. He didn’t know why they couldn’t live up to the morals that they professed, why they wouldn’t be good and truthful. Nor why they were like that. Why they were deceitful, and dishonest. And this seems to have applied to himself as well. He did not understand himself or his own feelings. In another part in the journal, he talks about the groans and the many thoughts and anxieties that troubled him.

How could he understand this?

Well, the answer was, as he came to see more clearly afterwards, you can only hear that deeper voice, or be aware of that deeper light when you let go of everything you’re hearing, even the Christian story. So he has to let go even all this teaching of the preachers about Jesus Christ, what is said for the Bible and allow himself simply to see what’s going on.

And then, of course, he’s able to make a connection with the Bible and the Christian tradition again because he recognizes that even in the Bible, people are expected to experience this inner reality, to find God in themselves. That’s how the prophets gained the insight which they had. They were inspired by God’s Spirit, who entered into them, enlightened them, enabled to see through what human beings were saying and doing so they could see the reality. And what sometimes obscured the reality, as far as Fox could understand, was that people were so fearful and anxious in themselves, they needed stories to tell them who they were.

Well, that’s implicit in what he’s saying. I can’t point to any particular text, but that’s the way I’ve come to understand Fox, because he’s very aware that people will readily go for something, some story, even though they know, at some level, that it can’t be true if it meets their needs as they experience it. He follows Paul in this way; people do recognize that the truth that actually stares them in the face is very difficult to accept. It’s not just that we do things, that we don’t like, and we’re not proud of, and we don’t want to be reminded of this. We want to have an idea of ourselves that makes us feel good.

And this is partly what Fox means by self-will. The self asserts itself. It’s anxious. It just wants to be accepted by other human beings, by God, so it presents itself as ‘righteous’ in the sense that they meant it in those days. But this is a form of deceit, and he sees deceit. It’s not sin that worries Fox so much as this denial of the truth.

And when I went into my studies in the Bible, and you’ll see that in the book, if you get to read it, that was clearly, a fundamental concern of Paul. Paul himself is trying to recover the fundamental truth that people know in their hearts. Go to the epistle to the Romans, the first chapter there, you’ll see it. Knowing in their hearts, that everything derives from an eternal reality, and that people are all one and united in having been created by this one reality—that is the truth, if you like. The oneness of things and their grounding in this eternal, inexpressible mystery that we call God.

But they don’t like this. Of course, it’s too…scary because we cannot actually imagine or understand what is the eternal. Reality is the source of this whole universe and of our own life. We know that we’re all derive from something or other, otherwise, this world wouldn’t be here, and it wouldn’t cohere and belong together, and function the way it does, and yet what could it be that brought this world into being? What could it be that brought us into being, that makes our life possible? It is a mystery.

But we can (and this was another discovery of Fox and the first Friends, although, of course, there were some before that) we can sense that hidden mystery, because at the core of our own being that is a mystery. And indeed, that experience we have when we open ourselves to whatever there is and let our own ideas and assumptions go, we begin to sense a kinship with the ultimate source of life in whatever it is that brings. . . .Well, we see a kinship with the world. We know we’re part of all this. We can feel that kinship and ourselves.

Finding Truth Through the Quaker Way

There was something quite different, though, in Fox’s approach, the Quaker approach, compared with not only the mystics of Christian Jewish history, but even the Hindus and the wisdom of the East. And that is that this unity that we experience includes the whole of life. It took deeply Christian theme, a Jewish theme too, I think, that we experience the whole earth as sacred in some way. And we’re part of it. So we don’t find our true selves by separating ourselves from the world and trying to, as it were, meet God at another level. Now, this is often done looking for a spiritual world, or a mystical one. So Fox is very practical.

We find out the truth about ourselves by understanding what we ourselves are doing. That’s what the Light does, and it always has done. It shows us exactly what we’re doing, the good and the bad. And when we accept that, then we discover that deep within ourselves, there is this extraordinary source of truth, and love and kindness and compassion which links us with the ultimate reality of all, and we find what is true. Our true self.

How Early Quakers Rediscovered Christianity

And that is the way in which those Quakers then reinvented Christianity. What they said was that they had rediscovered Christianity, it was “Christianity revived.” It’s William Penn, I think, who described it that way. So in a way, it was very critical of the Christianity of its time, but it did so in the name of Christianity as it was originally, as it intended to be. And that’s what the early Quakers were discovering and trying to establish. That’s one of the reasons why they were so harshly treated, of course. So what I’m trying to do in the book is to show, really, how this Quaker vision, which emerged with Fox and Margaret Fell and the others, both rejected the Christianity of its time, and also recovered its original meaning.

On the other hand, you can see how it went along with the new enlightenment where human beings were rejecting tradition in order to find out how the world is for themselves. You saw that in the new science, in the new politics, new democratic politics where people decide their fate. You’re not going to rely on what they do, not by relying on a king divinely appointed, but on their own consultations. This democratic spirit where human beings are learning to work things out for themselves to rely on their own knowledge and share things. This was the beginning of the modern movement, or modernity, as we’ve come to call it.

And Quakers were part of that because they were saying, yes, we must do the same, even in religion, we must check out the experience on which it’s based.

The Quaker Experiment: The Inner Light and the Wider World

Of course, it’s not the very precise experience the scientists demand, but that’s because we are looking at ourselves. And therefore, if we need a different sort of observation, we need not a searchlight, literally, to put on the objects. We need an inner light which can show us what’s really going on for us and for other people.

So this was their remarkable invention, and by implication, there was a new way of people joining together and running their life together as a society, a potentially new politics, a new culture where people would, first of all, look to themselves, share the insights that came to them from the Light within, and then act together on that light. In other words, what Quakers have done in their meetings was a model for what could be done in the larger society. And of course, you’re sitting there, in Philadelphia^[1], aren’t you? The very place where this great experiment in Quaker politics was actually lived out, and successfully. The holy experiment William Penn initiated. It was a remarkable simplification, what the Quakers had in mind for the whole world. But, of course, they won. They weren’t encouraged to pursue it, they were persecuted and limited and hemmed in like the very first monastics I was talking about,

A Quaker Spirituality for the Modern World

But there we are, we have a new opportunity now. We have a remarkable alternative both to Orthodox Christianity and to secular modernity. These are the two great movements in our culture which I describe in the book. But we have a kind of third way. This small group of Quakers and these great insights and experiments that we undertook, 350 years ago. So I’m hoping that, indeed, this will be something we can recover, and if that interests you, I think you’ll find the book helpful, pointing to ways in which we can live that vision of truth now.

Rex Ambler Answers Questions from Friends

Margaret Fell and George Fox

Margaret Fell seemed to be more articulate about, uh the thoughts of George Fox than George Fox actually was, it seems to me. What are your comments about Margaret?

Well, yes, I think she was better educated than George Fox. That’s for sure, and she did write well. I’ve read her letters, those that have been published—some of them are quite remarkable, and very moving. But you didn’t have quite Fox’s depth. His grasp of what the Bible was about to what Christianity had been. No, nobody had Fox’s depth. He was a prophet in some ways, you know. But the prophets need interpreters, and that was partly what Margaret Fox did.

Quaker Spirituality, Identity, and the Roots of War

What have you come to understand about your childhood questions of how one large group of people can justify slaughtering another group of people?

I’ve got, I would say, halfway towards an answer, but not the full answer. And the puzzle is that in our society itself, there is this contradiction, which I did, I think, express before: people know that it’s wrong to kill human beings in ordinary life in our own society. But it’s not wrong to kill whole populations by bombing them. That is an extraordinary contradiction in our modern life. And I think Quakers could say they have been themselves very engaged in dealing with that. But, of course, they’ve been very successful in the way they have fought for the rights and freedoms of children and prisoners and the insane. I think you would agree, that the reform movements that Quakers have been involved in, have been largely accepted, apart from this movement against war and the use of violence.

But the problem is, actually, if people do not have a deep sense of who they themselves are, which you gain through meditation and waiting in silence. They have to gain their security and assure themselves by linking up with others and saying, ‘This is my group, these are the people that I recognize.’ And of course, that means that those who do not fit in, because they have a different belief, a different color skin, a different nationality, they become potentially enemies. I’ve noticed this happening in my own country, just in the last few years. I think because of the war in Ukraine. This has created a certain anxiety about our relationship with Russia, which had been fairly positive 20 years ago, after the Gorbachev era. There was a recognition that we people in the world, especially across the North of the globe. and that went, as it were, from Canada and America right across to Japan. There was a great conference of these people to gain—I think it was called the Minsk Agreement—which was to establish security for these people. There was the vision. And we had a part in that, but limited by the Anxieties of the time. This is what I think gets in the way, you see, the sense of insecurity that is provoked by, for example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This breaks down that feeling of a common humanity, and we revert then to our smaller, harder A deep sense of identity.

Experiment with Light and The Truth of Our Life

Thank you for your talk today. I’m very interested in how you see this book related to your earlier books on the light groups, and that practice. So that’s my question—How do the two relate? Those earlier books have been very important to many Friends.

I was, of course, trying to widen the scope of what I’d been looking at. It seems to me what I had discovered, and expressed in those books, was important for Quakers and those who want to be Quaker and to go deep into this unique spiritual vision.

But having done that, I became more aware that the world itself needs this understanding for itself, so that there are insights to be gained from us and from our history that could be adopted by them, even without their becoming Quakers, perhaps. People could learn to meditate in the Quaker way. I call it meditation because I think that does express more for other people what we’re doing when we sit in the silence and open ourselves to the voice of truth, and the light.

Our movement, in fact, has been a model for the rest of the world right from the very beginning. And it still is, but that means we must let go the idea that we are just a little sect. That we’re a group of people who happen to believe the same things. This is not what brings us together. It’s a much deeper thing, a fundamentally human thing. We are experimenting with what it is to be human—what makes for a good human life, and communal life and national life? We experimented with all these things: how we can overcome conflict. And it now has become clear to me that we get to overcome conflict. When we can let go of our self-identity and open ourselves to the reality that is there in front of us. I say at one point in the book, and I think this might be the high point of the book, I say that the world that we discover when we open ourselves to being—reality—in a practice of meditation, it’s the world that you and I inhabit, all of us, this reality here and now. So that if you go along with it, I think it’s something that would be valid for everybody, and for every activity, particularly communal activity. I do make this point in the last two chapters of the book, I spell out how this communal aspect of the Quaker experiment can be important for the modern world, for this group and that group, for conflicts, but also for politics; suggesting that those representing the people should, first of all, be actually engaged with all the people, not just through voting, but through open communication and having meetings, and silent meetings, so that the real concerns are the people can emerge. And then in their gatherings in Parliament, which indeed, happened in Philadelphia, you know, 350 years ago. As William Penn wrote in a letter, I think in 1682, ‘We had a wonderful assembly in Philadelphia,’ he said, ‘We began and ended in silent prayer, and the Lord was in us, and great understanding emerged.’ You will know all this, of course—I discovered this more recently. So, I think we have a model there for the rest of the world, and I’m trying to spell that out as best I can. Also, of course, we’ve got a good understanding of Christianity and so these two movements which have dominated us are both blighted, I suggest, because they have sought to control the world. They have a vision, but then that vision, in both cases, requires that people are fully open to themselves and their own reality, so can they have the humility and sensitivity to appreciate other people, though they’ve not done this. They’ve decided, perhaps because of their own fear of exploring too deeply that they’re going to take control of this project, either the Christian project, and that becomes then the modern church, or the secular project and they take control of knowledge, what we can know and what we can do, and what we decide together in politics.

Quakerism, Modernity, and the Search for Truth

You’ve done a good job, I think, framing how Christianity has created a narrative, and I think we could all answer this for ourselves, how the secular has created a narrative, but I’d be interested to hear you develop that a little bit more. What are the stories that conceal the truth that the secular world has been creating?

It’s a very good question. Because it is indeed a story which they’ve told on the basis of some experiments. I would say it was a reaction in many ways, to the Reformation and the Renaissance, when people became more confident of themselves, to look at things. It was also connected with the growth of cities and universities, and people could learn to read, and books were printed, all that became very important. And so the Catholic Church lost its authority. It wasn’t credible fully. So people were exploring for themselves. The Protestant Reformation was one expression of that, but another was the development of the new science with Galileo and Newton. They were dismissing all the scientific theories they’d inherited from the past, and looking and seeing for themselves. They’d been inspired to this by reading Francis Bacon.

He wrote The Advancement of Learning in about 1603, that sort of time. It was really the first expression of a new culture in which people would not depend on what had been written in the past, all the ideas they’re inherited, but what they themselves could know by observing the world and themselves, for themselves.

Now, you see how the Quakers pick that up. They said, yes, we have to do that—to sit in silence, to look at ourselves for ourselves. Look at one another, see what’s really going on. But others were wary of this because it was delving into the depths, entering the mysteries, and they wanted something they could be more confident in, that was less scary, let’s say.

So the new science provided a kind of model for them, they could know themselves and the world by simply looking.

Is there evidence for summing it up, forming an understanding, a theory of what’s going on, and that would then enable them to control. So what modernity became was not just an assertion of hope in human ability, but assertion of human control of the whole world. So it’s human beings, who were even separating themselves from their own bodies. Because it was the mind, you know, said the philosopher Descartes, the mind that actually understands, and therefore that must be in control of the whole world.

Well, first of all, it seemed like a story of great liberation for human beings, to be free, to understand themselves and to control the world as they wanted. But in setting up and doing that, they set up a huge conflict with themselves, with other people, with nature, with the whole world, and with God. So all this then came to a mighty crisis, and that’s where we are now, you see. We’re in deep conflict with nature, and we’re losing a sense of our common humanity because we’re affirming our own rightness maybe just as…

Even the Western Democrats and Liberal Democrats, you know, All of which is very good, but if that’s our definition of what a human being is, or a true human being, then we’re setting up a conflict with those who don’t think that way. So, does that… does that resonate with you?

Spiritual Development and Quaker Youth

Some theories of psychological and spiritual development suggest that we need to go through stages of progress that require stories. What are the implications of this for the training of Quaker youth, who may not be ready for deep meditation and direct contact with reality?

But this could be to also apply to the whole of Christianity, that the stories were important initially, but we shouldn’t settle for them.

Paul himself, the Apostle Paul makes a distinction between those who rely on others to tell them the truth. This is particularly in his first letter to the Corinthians, if you want to follow it up, in the first couple of chapters. These are children who need other people to tell them how things are. And he doesn’t despise them; he says, it is our task to help them to grow up, and that means they can learn things and know things for themselves. And that’s a big theme. It’s also a theme in John and John’s epistle. I’ve traced that in the book.

So this developmental idea is actually very helpful. I think you’re referring to psychological theories which talk about the role of story particularly in our youth which we need to embrace—because we have an awful lot to take on when we’re young—which is meant to really include the whole world that we’re going to inhabit and we can’t get all the facts about that. We need to frame it, so having a story is very good, but if that story then becomes unquestionable, you see, as that becomes the truth, then we’ve got a wall being constructed, and we’re being hemmed in, and that’s what happened to Christianity.

I feel we could go on for days in this conversation, but you’ll have to get it from the book.

Well, thank you, David, and thank you all there at FGC Gathering, I wish I was with you like I was 10 years ago, but it’s good seeing you and good talking with you, and hearing your wonderful questions and comments. So I hope you have a great time for the rest of your stay [at the Gathering]. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Friends!

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^[1] Although Friends General Conference has its central office in Philadelphia, we actually met in Burlington, Vermont for the 2026 Gathering.