From Jnana Hodson’s blog, a look at “The Seed” as a Quaker metaphor:
Considering today’s emphasis on individuality, plurality, and personal psychology, I believe that returning to the metaphor of the Seed holds the most potential for fertile spiritual development and guidance in our own era.
I find the evolution of Quaker metaphors fascinating. Early Quaker sermons and epistles were packed with biblical allusions. I grew up relatively unchurched but I’ve tried to make up for it over the years. I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover using the One Year Bible plan (like a lot of people I suspect, it took me a little over two years) and have been part of different denominational Bible study groups. I try to look up references. But even with that I don’t catch half the references early sermons packed in.
John Woolman lived a couple of generations after the first Friends. We Quaker remember his Journal for ministry of its anti-slavery sentiments, finally becoming a consensus among Friends by the time of its publication in 1774. But other religious folks have read it for its literary value. Open a random page and Woolman will have up to half a dozen metaphors for the Divine. It’s packed and rich and accessible. I find a kind of particular Quaker spiritual truth in Woolman’s rotation of metaphors: it implies that divinity is more than any specific words we try to stuff it into.
Lately Quaker metaphors have tended to become more sterile. I think we’re still worried about specifics but instead of expanding our language we contract it into a kind of impenetrable code. The “Light of Christ” becomes the “Inward Christ” then the “Inward Light” then “the Light” or “Spirit.” We’re still echoing the Light metaphors packed into the Book of John but doing so in such a way that seems particularly parochial to Friends and non-obvious to newcomers. A major New Testament theme is reduced to Quaker lingo.
Jnana Hodson’s problem with “the seed” as metaphor is interesting: “ ‘seed,’ as such, has far fewer Biblical citations than the corresponding complementary ‘light’ or ‘true’ and ‘truth’ do.” I’m not sure I ever noticed that. I like the seed, with its organic connotations and promise of future growth. But apparently the few biblical allusions were rather sexist (spoiler: it often meant semen) and lacking in biological awareness. It feels like Friends are searching for neutral metaphors like “the seed” these days; we also have a lot of gatherings around “weaving.” I certainly don’t think we should be limited to first century images of divinity but I also don’t think we’ve quite figured out how we can talk about the guidance we receive from the Inward Teacher.
The Seed, initially, is the most problematic of the three central Quaker metaphors
I have had some recent thoughts about the seed metaphor. Here they are. Quakers practice waiting the Light — we sit and do what could be called meditation or contemplation. We do it In Meeting for Worship, in private quiet, in Experiment with Light groups, clearness, or threshing, etc.
At this time, it seems to me our conscious, knowing mind is playing the part of a midwife. This image came to me in a meditation time. Deep within, there is something happening as we wait, a growth, an understanding, a transformation, which we are not in direct control of and may be unaware of consciously. What ever the power that is at work in us at these times, we have the role of keeping ourselves in readiness, clearing the way for its work. Margaret Fell (letter to Colonel Osborne, 1657), encourages him to prepare himself inwardly in this way for the coming of ‘the one who baptises with fire and the Holy Spirit’. (‘Let the voice cry through the wilderness, that the way may be prepared for him, the way made straight and the rough paths made smooth.’) This is what I see as the midwife’s role. (no forceps involved!)
As I meditated on this image of my conscious self as midwife to my unconscious deeper self, the metaphor of the Seed took on a new dimension. The Seed is that spark of potential, which is somewhere down there in the dark unknown. I don’t know if 17th Century Quakers knew that there is a female component, the egg, in fertilisation, but the Seed as semen, interacting with my receptive core in a largely hidden process, was a new and vividly helpful image to accompany my sense of myself as midwife, enabling the development and birth of something new. Not creating it. It illuminated the difficult to define boundary between ‘me and not-me’, in spiritual experience and growth.