Advices and queries, 3
May. 18th, 2019 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
notreallystarsThe world is hurting me at the moment. Everything bad and dark and scary seems ten times bigger than it did a few days ago. The planet's fucked, the country's fucked, the NHS is fucked, my mental health is fucked. It hurts.
I have no answers. Faith can have some comfort. For that reason, I thought I'd write about the next passage from Advices and queries and try to turn my mind from the awfulness for a while.
3. Do you try to set aside times of quiet for openness to the Holy Spirit? All of us need to find a way into silence which allows us to deepen our awareness of the divine and to find the inward source of our strength. Seek to know an inward stillness, even amid the activities of daily life. Do you encourage in yourself and in others a habit of dependence on God’s guidance for each day? Hold yourself and others in the Light, knowing that all are cherished by God.
I struggle to tolerate silence as my mental health deteriorates. As the screaming and conflict in my mind grows I feel more and more that I need to have noise to distract me. I'm making a deliberate effort to rely on that less at the moment, but it's hard.
The silence of a Meeting is different. It isn't me alone with the silence pressing in against me. It's a communal experience, it's shared worship even if we don't share each other's ideas about what it is exactly that we're worshipping. Something hard to describe happens during Meetings that doesn't happen when I'm sitting alone in my bedroom trying to focus on anything except the chaos inside me.
As I talked about in the last one, when Quakers use terms like 'God', 'Christ', or 'the Holy Spirit', they often mean something very different to what mainstream culture understands by these terms. For me, 'the Holy Spirit' is just...the Light. There isn't a distincion for me between 'the Holy Spirit', 'God', and 'the Light'. It's just there.
Do I try to set aside times of quiet in which to be open to this? I'm not sure that attending Meeting counts as setting aside times. This feels like a question about what I do as an individual, away from Meeting. And I've tried to, I really have. I can keep going with daily periods of silence for a couple of weeks, but eventually it gets to be too much for me. I'd like to do better with this. I don't know whether trying to have small periods of silence every day is asking too much of myself, as small a thing as it sounds. Maybe I should put aside a shortish period of time twice a week or something instead. I don't know.
'Seek to know an inward stillness'. I'd love to. I'm trying, but I don't know where to find it. I feel like I get there from time to time, and it lasts for a few weeks, but then I come unmoored again and it feels like failure. Realistically I suppose it isn't the kind of thing that I should expect to find and then just keep. Realistically, the process of returning to it might actually be the point.
'Hold yourself and others in the Light, knowing that all are cherished by God.' I'm good with holding others in the Light. Less good with myself, in all honesty. The part of me that came to believe as a teenager in a God who loved everyone except for me has never really gone away. Maybe I'll try holding that in the Light.
I have no answers. Faith can have some comfort. For that reason, I thought I'd write about the next passage from Advices and queries and try to turn my mind from the awfulness for a while.
3. Do you try to set aside times of quiet for openness to the Holy Spirit? All of us need to find a way into silence which allows us to deepen our awareness of the divine and to find the inward source of our strength. Seek to know an inward stillness, even amid the activities of daily life. Do you encourage in yourself and in others a habit of dependence on God’s guidance for each day? Hold yourself and others in the Light, knowing that all are cherished by God.
I struggle to tolerate silence as my mental health deteriorates. As the screaming and conflict in my mind grows I feel more and more that I need to have noise to distract me. I'm making a deliberate effort to rely on that less at the moment, but it's hard.
The silence of a Meeting is different. It isn't me alone with the silence pressing in against me. It's a communal experience, it's shared worship even if we don't share each other's ideas about what it is exactly that we're worshipping. Something hard to describe happens during Meetings that doesn't happen when I'm sitting alone in my bedroom trying to focus on anything except the chaos inside me.
As I talked about in the last one, when Quakers use terms like 'God', 'Christ', or 'the Holy Spirit', they often mean something very different to what mainstream culture understands by these terms. For me, 'the Holy Spirit' is just...the Light. There isn't a distincion for me between 'the Holy Spirit', 'God', and 'the Light'. It's just there.
Do I try to set aside times of quiet in which to be open to this? I'm not sure that attending Meeting counts as setting aside times. This feels like a question about what I do as an individual, away from Meeting. And I've tried to, I really have. I can keep going with daily periods of silence for a couple of weeks, but eventually it gets to be too much for me. I'd like to do better with this. I don't know whether trying to have small periods of silence every day is asking too much of myself, as small a thing as it sounds. Maybe I should put aside a shortish period of time twice a week or something instead. I don't know.
'Seek to know an inward stillness'. I'd love to. I'm trying, but I don't know where to find it. I feel like I get there from time to time, and it lasts for a few weeks, but then I come unmoored again and it feels like failure. Realistically I suppose it isn't the kind of thing that I should expect to find and then just keep. Realistically, the process of returning to it might actually be the point.
'Hold yourself and others in the Light, knowing that all are cherished by God.' I'm good with holding others in the Light. Less good with myself, in all honesty. The part of me that came to believe as a teenager in a God who loved everyone except for me has never really gone away. Maybe I'll try holding that in the Light.