Thoughts on Seeking

This is a reply to a comment made on my previous entry, which I think is important enough to quote in this entry:

I think that it is arrogant to give the ’seekers’ excuse. It’s putting one’s own experiences and, well, class upon the faith. It’s not understanding how different people think and live and if they are just too ’simple’ (in the negative sense) to seek, too bad, they don’t get to share our religion. To me that is an elitist attitude and one that does bother me about the RSOF.

Of course Quakers want answers too, it is presumptuous to think otherwise. Or is that saying bad Quakers want answers, or weak ones? Nothing wrong with wanting answers. And what is one seeking, anyways?

It just makes it sound like working class and people of a less ‘intellectual’ bent (who are rather SMART just not the way many Quakers classify smart) are to be patted on the head and handed a bible with answers.

I think there’s an assumption being made by many Quakers, myself included, that seeking and questioning is harder and more challenging than finding and having answers. I feel this assumption stems from intellectualism, particularly the scientific process where questioning and experimenting is how the field grows and flourishes and having answers and not seeking new ones makes it stagnate.

I do think that thinking for oneself instead of accepting what’s been told to you without question is a good skill to have. And I think this applies to religion and faith as well, that faith that has not been questioned and tried is weaker than faith that has withstood the fires of doubt, questioning, and reason. But this is different than seeking and finding as I understand we Quakers to think of them.

Because we all have intimate access to the Divine (or the thing which connects us all if you happen to be a nontheist Quaker), this means that we believe in continuing revelation. We intentionally leave ourselves open to the possibility that we may be wrong so that we don’t shut God out of our lives. We worry that clinging to an idea too strongly will deny God access to us. We want to be followers of God’s will, which presupposes that we can know what it is, or at least know how to follow it.

These are all good qualities of Quakerism. They are a big part of the reason I, and so many others, find Quakerism so appealing. I want my faith to be connected to the Divine, and to allow the room and the space for my relationship with the Divine to grow.

But there is a danger here, which goes back to the idea that seeking is harder than finding and having answers. Sometimes, we Seekers do find the Truth. Sometimes it kicks us hard in the stomach. And sometimes, this Truth isn’t one we like. It’s uncomfortable and would force us to change our lives too much, or our actions, or something else we’re clinging to.

There is an assumption among Seekers that those who aren’t Seeking currently have never bothered with it, that they take their answers by rote memorization and not by contemplation. But what if some of those who have their answers actually found them by Seeking? What if they found Truth, accepted it as such, and stayed with it, instead of moving on to search for the next truth, maybe one more convenient to their lifestyles?

Sometimes I feel that we Seekers are afraid of finding the Truth, because we wouldn’t know what to do with it then. If we are not Seeking, then what are we doing? And this is, I think, a flaw of ours: that we have become connected to the idea of Seeking. How might we be shutting the Divine out of lives by being too connected to this idea, which is truly nothing more than an idea?

How might we be shutting others out by our assumptions that Seeking is harder, and thus better, than finding?

In some ways, I, as a somewhat professional Seeker (I’m using this term sardonically to mean that I take my Seeking far too seriously), remind myself of a woman who’s lost her keys. And she searches her whole house looking for these keys. And at one point, she touches upon them, but is convinced that those are not really the keys she’s looking for; and so she continues on her search, not knowing she’s already found what she was seeking.

We, as a Religious Society, need to be as open to the possibility of Finding as we are attached to the path of Seeking. We need to respect those who say they have the Truth without assuming they haven’t Sought like we have. We need to have people in our Society who claim to have found the Truth. Otherwise, we’re just like the woman searching for the keys she’s already found.