This I Know"

Herrymon Maurer is a concerned man, and for Quakers the word concern has a special meaning. Quakers commonly share their concerns with the Meeting to the end that something be done. Herrymon Maurer, 39, a onetime teacher in West China and onetime FORTUNE editor, is a Quaker from Sewickley, Pa., and he voices a passionate concern in his sixth book, What Can I Know? (Harper; $3.50)

He writes as if he might be speaking in Meeting: in a rush and freshly, with a hot honesty that will carry many a reader unsuspecting into deep waters. For Quaker Maurer's concern is that human beings think less, talk less and write less about God and the universe, and start experiencing them.

The Knobby Facts. In other words he says, pay attention to facts. Facts like sticks and stones, running water, a sore toe or a deformed baby may be "perplexing, unexplainable, intolerable, or fearful, but they are the real root of human experience.

Too many people, says Maurer, prefer to turn away from the knobby facts of life, and fall prey to the notion that there must be some great plan or some carefully dovetailed set of plans . . . that is bound to save everybody. Thus there have been waves of enthusiasm for religion as a purely social code, for religion as a distant other-worldly law. and for religion as a sort of snug little hot-water bottle carried in everybody's vest pocket."

In St. Germain-des-Pres or Bloomsbury much of this might be accepted as existentialism. In the stubborn Quaker tradition that distrusts abstractions and relies on ad hoc "leadings," Maurer fights shy of any such cerebral pigeonholes. The very word idea, he holds, has the makings of snare and delusion: "The danger is that one will sit down in the world of ideas and go into a sleep so bewitchingly full of busy fantasy as to make anyone certain that he is clear-mindedly awake. The only chance of staying awake is to take with one into the world of ideas at least a few of God's inescapable facts."

True to the anti-theological attitude of Quakerism, Maurer bears down hard on Western religion, and especially Protestantism, "which at times has given more emphasis to religious concepts than to worship of God. It early assumed a determinism as rigid as that which sciences were later to develop. It gave a new emphasis to abstract analysis of God, evil, suffering ... It made God a formal rather than a creative absolute, for it used him as an explanation of the universe and not simply, as in many other religions, as the fountain of all things."

The Racket of Ideas. Maurer ends his book with no formula for spiritual success and no answer to his own questions & except, like Job, to lay his hand upon his mouth.

He describes sitting up with friends whose child was dying, and "seeking reasonable explanation of God's ways to man ... I tried to pursue it in my mind, distant from the friends with whom I sat. But all at once the search was arrested. An emptiness clamped upon my mind. I did not simply know; I was told that my explaining God had been cursing God. Thus stricken, I reached out my hands to my friends in a way I had not reached out before . . .

"There is no explanation for suffering. There is no explanation for fear. These are, of course, the things above all else that we seek to explain away. But there is no explaining anything . . . How explain laughing and talking and dancing and playing at sports? . . .

"These facts, like all the facts of creation, demand of men and women and children that they meet them. The task is to rid our ears of the racket of ideas and explanations by which we seek vainly and miserably to deafen our selves. It is to listen for encounters with God's facts. This I know."

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