Testimony
[Under development: 10 June 2005]
This page, linking to other pages in this section, is a collation of writing, mostly by other people, that, for me, expresses some or other aspect of existential and spiritual belief: about who I am, about other people, and about the world and universe in which we live.
· To what extent do you articulate your beliefs through
a) writing (your own / by other people)?
b) images (your own / by other people)?
c) music (your own / by other people)?
I have also tried to identify some of the ways in which each passage impinges on the counselling world. Some passages are informed by cognitive therapies, whereas others are more person-centred. There is much about acceptance and change in different ways. The passages are not primarily cognitive in nature, and therefore you may find that your understanding is enhanced by reading the passage aloud.
Perhaps the best known passage regarding acceptance is from Ecclesiastes, in which the writer almost suggests that our life's course is pre-determined. To what extent do you believe your life, and that of others, is already determined?
extract from Ecclesiastes 3
The Desiderata is also well known and well-loved, for it expresses how many people perceive themselves and their place in the world. It is often fruitful to examine the language in which thoughts are expressed. Seen more closely from a Transactional Analysis viewpoint, the Desiderata is the Parent ego-state addressing the Child ego-state. In my judgment, this is the case with much religious writing. By way of contrast, much Quaker writing is located in the Adult ego-state by virtue of the personal and corporate 'ownership' of the writing. Most of my own writing is located within the Adult ego-state, which though problematic to some Christians, Moslems and Jews, can be seen as 'healthy' in terms of self-actualisation. The Desiderata expresses ideas common to cognitive therapies, encouraging a system of beliefs that matches personal experience; and the second paragraph can also be located, albeit loosely, within a pragmatic Egan framework.
Desiderata
Although similar in some ways to the Desiderata, the Quaker Advices are not only not carved in stone, getting rewritten from time to time to reflect the changing world, and therefore consciousness, in which we live, the latest rewriting having been completed in the early 1990s, but are also less comforting. (When should counselling be comforting?) Like the Desiderata, the Advices appear exhortatory, and thereby directive. However, the preamble suggests that to read them as instructions is to miss the point: "Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." (1665) To me, this preamble also suggests a recognition of 'frame of reference'.
extract
from the Quaker Advices
Whilst the Quaker Advices may be uncomfortable, they are certain and safe. Life is not safe, and involves risk-taking. This is brought sharply into focus by Brian Patten's Beckett-like poem Any Volunteers? What kind of risks do you take?
Any Volunteers?
This extract from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar clearly identifies that life is risky ("the enemy increaseth"), but that if we are to live life meaningfully and to the full, it is necessary to take risks: a point emphasised by Carl Rogers. What kind of risks would you not take?
extract from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
In that extract, too, there is a sense of 'striking while the iron is hot'. Shakespeare expresses this even better in Macbeth:
extract
from Shakespeare's Macbeth
In recognising that actions have not only ends but means, Macbeth hopes to conceal his means. During the Second World War, some people, in good conscience, carried out acts that in other circumstances they might have considered wrong. Can the end justify the means? Regarding physical coercion, can the end ever justify the means? In this next passage, Quakers of the seventeenth century believed not.
Quaker Peace Testimony: Declaration to Charles II, 1661
The following passage was written in 1918, and speaks in the language of its time, which is now seen, rightly, as patriarchal and sexist. That apart, the passage was an attempt to express the kind of British society Quakers wished to live in, and the role of the individual in creating that society. What kind of society do you wish to live in? Although Margaret Thatcher thought otherwise, do you believe that there is such a thing as 'society'? What, if anything, is the relationship between a self-actualised person and the society in which they live? What does this imply about the purpose of a counselling relationship?
Quaker Foundations of a True Social Order
However, when this is pulled back into the personal
realm, the outworking stumbles badly in the view of cognitive therapies, as
shown in the passage below. It was written by Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese samurai
by birth, and Under-Secretary-General of the
A Supplication
In contrast, Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Pied Beauty is unrestrained celebration. What do you celebrate? What is the function of celebration?
Pied Beauty
In The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams explores something of the nature of love.
extract from The Velveteen Rabbit
In the following extract from The Prophet, Khalil Gibran looks a little more deeply at the nature of love.
Love, extract
from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet
I wrote the following prayer, based on the prayer commonly known as 'The Lord's Prayer', because it is important to me that my thoughts, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, behaviour and speech remain congruent with each other. The language used is important: the prayer is written in the subjunctive mood, expressing a wish or an expectation that something will be.
Daily Prayer
The next passage is firmly rooted in the 'here and now', and is about recognising truth from fantasy, and what I do with the recognition. What role does luck play in your life? What distinction do you make between luck and acceptance?
Touched by Lightening
The next fragment attempts to define an aspect of my relationship with what makes me human, with motivations and freedom: the course of my life is not predetermined.
God is ... (1)
The next fragment is a humorous description of my relationship with whatever makes me human. In order best to understand this, it helps to be computer-literate.
God is ... (2)
This extract from the Tao teh Ching
(a book written in
extract from the Tao teh Ching
The next passage is chapter 28 of the Book of Job, written between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago. The chapter achieves several tasks. It asks what knowledge is, and what wisdom is, and how they arise. What is it to know something? It sets knowledge within the framework of language - the passage is sumptuous! It also asserts that life and the universe are not simply a figment of human imagination.
God's unfathomable wisdom
The Book of Genesis proposes a way of making sense of the natural world. If I knew little of science, I wonder what ideas I might have had about how everything came into existence.
The account, in Genesis, of the great flood shows how people several thousand years ago tried to make sense of what they found in the natural world. It took observation and care over hundreds of years for natural scientists to recognise that species evolve over time. In his Origin of Species, the nineteenth century naturalist Charles Darwin, proposed a mechanism of species evolution: a form of natural selection. On this understanding rest genetics and genetic engineering.
The following fragment addresses what prompts and motivates me to involve myself in the counselling endeavour. What prompts you? The fragment includes paradox. This is important because paradox is a signpost towards new understanding.
A Song
Brian Patten wrote a poem about a song bird. The bird's song was more public than that of my bird, and therefore Patten is able to link the personal with the social.
Interruption at the Opera House
Brian Patten's iconoclastic 1960s prose-poem below challenges us to think about the value and purpose of authentic behaviour. Although he is ostensibly writing about poetry, I wonder to what extent both existential/spiritual endeavour and counselling are appropriate substitutes. Can you justify any reservations you may have.
Prosepoem Towards a Definition of Itself
I rewrote the following poem in order to acknowledge the relationship between what I felt about me inside and my desire for authentic relationships with other people.
I Wear a Score of Painted Masks
Our understanding of life is also about loss and death. In the poem which follows, Gerard Manley Hopkins equates all experience of loss with a prefigurement of our own death.
Spring and Fall
When death steals a person we love, the feelings are likely to be less muted. How does your experience of loss inform how you
perceive others who are suffering the pain of bereavement? W.H
Auden's poem Stop all the clocks was headlined in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral
Stop all the clocks
