https://www.quakerranter.org/the-seed-as-quaker-metaphor/ A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley Tue, 03 Apr 2018 16:57:51 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://www.quakerranter.org/the-seed-as-quaker-metaphor/#comment-947772 Sun, 01 Apr 2018 15:08:23 +0000 http://www.quakerranter.org/?p=60450#comment-947772 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.

]]>