Letters - 06 January 2017
From peace and beauty to EAPPI
Peace and beauty
This is an account of Quaker outreach in Lincoln.
At last, we were ready to take a small table and chairs to the High Street where we were going to make and distribute origami ‘Peace Cranes’ – a Japanese symbol of peace. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, two-year-old Sadako Sasaki survived. However, nine years later, she developed leukaemia. In hospital, she folded paper cranes believing the ancient Japanese legend that if she folded a thousand she would be granted a wish – which was for world peace.
Sadako folded several hundred cranes and when she died her family completed the shortfall, burying a thousand cranes with her. Her brother, Masahiro Sasaki, saved five of the cranes – each no larger than a fingernail – and has donated them towards peacebuilding. One of the final cranes is in the 9/11 Tribute Centre where thousands of other cranes made by the families and colleagues of victims of 9/11 also hang. Masahiro said: ‘I hope, by talking about that small wish for peace, the small ripple will become bigger and bigger.’
On Lincoln High Street we folded cranes and Don Sutherland, who has made cranes to raise awareness about many injustices, distributed them to members of the public; children were especially interested and adults commented on their beauty. We told people about Quakers, recounted Sadako’s story and had copies of the Friend available – a Quaker presence amid the incipient Christmas crowd.
Pat Taylor
Post-industrial humanity
What is our value when robots can assemble things; computers can organise our transactions, predict our behaviour, design things; and when we need high earnings to have property in a finite planet with a rising population? We know that the financial and intellectual capital to build and programme computers is in hands that seek to exploit us.
Thank a universal loving God, born of Christianity, for our democracy. But democracy has its limitations. When defensive, when the destitute are near, and they are tempted to random violence and organised revolution, we turn to security, to exclusiveness. People vote Right.
We have two values.
If we raise our children and grandchildren with the air quality, nutrition, space, quiet and education that they need to learn information technology, they can protect themselves from exploitation. If they are raised in love with their fellow humans and a God who loves them, even when humanitarianism seems thankless, they will seek to prevent information technology and those who control it from exploiting their fellow humans.
As people who experience the human condition, we are uniquely well placed to care for each other. We can share, record and treasure the experience, we can form mutual support groups, we can provide social care for one another when we are disabled, out of fellow-feeling rather than a desire for gain. We can transcend the disappointments of personal letdown and rise on the wind in our wings from the prophets.
Friends, we must continue to do so.
Alick Munro
Faith
The essence of faith, Keith Wedmore’s reflection (9 December), is a difficult but important subject. For me, the Quaker way is certainly not Belief – especially with a capital letter.
Mainstream Christian belief was determined by those church people who did a deal with the Romans. They then decided on the beliefs, including those concerning the virgin birth of Jesus and his rising from the grave three days after his death. They then excommunicated the Gnostics who put greater importance on Jesus’ experience of the flow of love connecting us all and his cooperating with it. It is the experience of ‘that of God’ in each of us which is the ground of our belief and you can’t arrange it. We can just give time to be open to it.
A beautiful poem in the current Mid-Thames newsletter by an attender at Newbury Meeting expresses this and concludes: ‘And we, realising the cost involved, promoted him to a safe distance.’
Richard Thompson
We do not have committees
Ian Beesons’ ‘Dibleyfication’ (16 December) of British Quakers does not describe my Area Meeting (AM). Our Properties Committee comprises three men and two women. Our trustees comprise two men and three women, plus two co-opted men.
The trustees’ minutes are not secret, but are distributed to the AM clerk and filed in each Meeting’s library. The trustees’ aim was to relieve the AM of the burden of finance and property so that it could concentrate on Friendly matters; in this it has been successful. Major decisions of trustees are commended to AM for approval or otherwise.
The membership of these bodies is down to AM Nominations looking to the wider membership and being inclusive in its discernment. When the person approached says that they do not have the skills, Nominations needs to say that the name was discerned in full knowledge of what they can provide.
As for the deprecation of committees expressed in the letters page and elsewhere, what was being described, I feel, was committees as seen in the outside world, where the chairman has his/her own agenda and has control of the minutes. We need to remember that Area Meeting (AM) is a Meeting for Worship for Business; and that other bodies like properties, wardenship, elders and so on are all subgroups of AM, and as such are Meetings for Worship for Properties, Business and so on. This may be why my AM’s subgroups work effectively.
Ditch the ego and trust in the Spirit; it works.
Andrew Smith, trustee and AM treasurer
Talking is not enough
Dorothy Woolley (16 December) says that it is ineffective to talk to ‘people of bad faith’ in a violent conflict. She does not say what we should do instead, and some may conclude that violence is the only alternative. Having been in post-war situations, I am doubtful. Can we really imagine that if the USA and its allies intervened with violence in Syria this conflict would come to an end?
There are different ways to talk. Prophetic voices may be needed, but they seldom lead towards peace. Lectures from the moral ‘high ground’ do not usually change governments, as the fate of many UN resolutions shows.
In contrast, the presence of Quaker voices during the Zimbabwe talks in 1980 and the experience of Quaker House in Belfast show that parties which seem committed to heartless and indiscriminate violence can listen, explore other options, and change their behaviour. Talking can be appropriate; indeed, how many large-scale conflicts end without it?
Diana Francis, a Friend with experience of peacemaking, wrote: ‘The notion of inclusion is fundamental in nonviolent approaches to conflict. It means that everyone in a situation of conflict is to be treated as if they were of value and as if they had legitimate needs which should be met. This is not only a profoundly important moral and philosophical commitment; it also represents a vital understanding of what is needed for relatively secure and efficient coexistence (and coexistence is not an option but a necessity).’
Diana Lampen
Quaker Methodists
I was interested to read Michael Hennessey’s letter (9 December) as my mother’s family were Independent Methodists in Salford. I attended chapel and Sunday school there from an early age until I was ten years old, when I was evacuated to Ulverston.
My evacuation foster father had been brought up in Swarthmoor, and we attended Swarthmoor Methodist chapel on Sunday evenings. Occasionally, we would walk back via Swarthmoor Hall. Back home, after the war, I attended my parents’ chapel until I left home. I then became a ‘proper’ Methodist and remained one until 9/11, when I first went to Quakers.
I had heard of similarities between Independent Methodists and Quakers. This surprised me for I had not noticed it.
Independent Methodists do have ministers who have undergone a course of training, have no authority and are unpaid, but they are not pacifists. My parents’ church had several members in the army in 1914-18; some were killed. Others served in 1939-45. One minister, from a nearby church, did become a pacifist after world war two. One of his sermons certainly influenced me some years later when I was considering signing the Register of Conscientious Objectors.
My parents’ church closed before my father died. Some years after, in 2009, I took a lot of photographs to the Independent Methodist records in Wigan. I was on my way to a ‘1652 Country’ course at Swarthmoor Hall!
Brian Hopkins
An eternal indefinability?
Ian Beeson’s excellent three points (16 December) link powerfully in my mind with the review of David Boulton’s book on nontheism (16 December).
Quakerism is ineffable – literally ‘inexpressible’ – its ineffability captures the miracles around us with robust flexibility. I have a healthy vagueness, an eternal indefinability about what ‘God’ means for me, and I hope you do too. Please don’t take that away. Written creeds have always proved unreliable. Our better substitute takes words a step further: ‘Let your life speak’. It is so powerful, so practical, so vital and so easy to lose.
Science is even less definable, since the Higgs boson debacle. ‘Discovered’ in 2013, the so-called ‘God particle’ is now an orphan. It has nothing to do with God, and the last thing it is, is a particle, as Carlo Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity) explains so clearly. In that year’s Sibford Summer School, I predicted this boson would be bereft of fellow subatomic particles, and it is. Science has no ‘bottom’, it can’t resolve our ‘truths’ for us. It no longer works as a system of secure, immutable beliefs – not much does – except, to my perennial delight, the ever practical, nonverbal emphases of Quakerism. Letting your lives speak says more than words ever can. I love my ineffable Quakerism. It illuminates a rational, reliable, flexible path – what would I do without it?
Bob Johnson
Tristimania
Following the article published in the Friend on books about depression (16 September), I’d like to draw people’s attention to an outstanding book recently published: Tristimania by Jay Griffiths.
This is not an easy book to read, but very rewarding. Jay is a fine writer, and the way she describes her bipolar, or as she prefers to call it manic-depressive, episode is very revealing. It is a poetic and scholarly book.
Seeing the highs and the lows from the inside is harrowing, but gripping. She uses metaphors to describe what is hard to put into words. If we want to help, we should try to get in there with the sufferer, share their metaphors and be there beside them.
Lydia Vulliamy
Through a glass darkly
I am saddened by the division described in the review of David Boulton’s book, Through a glass darkly, (16 December).
I know I frequently fail to heed the ‘promptings of love and truth’ but am aware of the experience our first Advice points to. Would we not be better helping each other to discern and act on these promptings rather than fighting each other over where the experience might come from?
Vernon Griffiths
Aleppo
The destructive consequences of invading Iraq, which I did not support, are well known. However, when Britain and America decided not to intervene in Syria in 2013 where a bloody tyrant, supported by his Russian allies, was using chemical weapons this also seems to have some terrible consequences.
This set a precedent for the use of chemical weapons by a great power. Other outcomes seem to have included the destruction of a huge city and war crimes against civilians, the snuffing out of the hopes of the ‘Arab Spring’, in which many Arab people aspired to the freedoms most of us enjoy, and the strengthening of a world power, Russia, which has links with far right political movements in France and elsewhere. This could lead to invasions or war in Europe, with serious consequences for us all.
Russia is on the UN Security Council and has a veto.
This leads me to deep soul-searching and questioning. Quaker faith & practice 24.21 to 24.26 speaks of the ‘dilemmas of the pacifist stand’. At the very least, we need to give some urgent thought to how to confront powerful aggressive forces if we are not to, as Wolf Mendl (1974) says in Quaker faith & practice 24.22, ‘sacrifice others for the sake of peace’.
Neil Simmons
EAPPI representative detained and deported
We are told (16 December) that someone going to a World Council of Churches (WCC) conference in Israel has been refused admittance by the Israeli authorities. There is a bit more to the story.
The WCC has a reputation, in the eyes of some, for being anti-Semitic and this member, Isabel Apawo Phiri, is alleged to be an activist in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Israel has been very tolerant of EAPPI (a WCC project administered by Quakers) up until now.
However, a bill to deny BDS activists entry to Israel has recently passed its first reading in the Knesset by a large majority. The WCC, the BDS movement and EAPPI, in my opinion, have little to do with a ‘just peace’ and, in the view of many, help to prolong the conflict by encouraging the Palestinians to achieve their ends through murder and non-negotiable demands. We Quakers should rethink our involvement in this controversial effort.
Sarah Lawson
info@quakerfriendsofisrael.org.uk
Comments
I am troubled by this letter from Sarah Lawson. I don’t follow her arguments.
1. Words and phrases such as: ‘in the eyes of some’, ‘alleged’,‘in my opinion’, and ‘in the view of many’ coupled with the putting together of items that don’t obviously belong in the same category (‘The WCC, the BDS movement and EAPPI) combine to invite the reader to accept that there is a concerted campaign and that Sarah Lawson’s final sentence is a reasonable conclusion to what she has said.
2. The penultimate sentence: ‘The WCC, the BDS movement and EAPPI, in my opinion, have little to do with a ‘just peace’ and, in the view of many, help to prolong the conflict by encouraging the Palestinians to achieve their ends through murder and non-negotiable demands, really does need unpicking. First, what is meant by, in quotes, ‘just peace’? Second, just how do ‘The WCC, the BDS movement and EAPPI ... help to prolong the conflict by encouraging the Palestinians to achieve their ends through murder and non-negotiable demands’?
3. The fact that the Knesset has voted in the way described is perhaps not surprising when set against the lack of Palestinian participation in Israeli elections. Also the Israeli electorate includes settlers in the occupied territories but not the Palestinians who live there.
4. The BDS campaign is a protest against the unlawful occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands by Israel.
5. ‘This controversial effort’? My own impression is that, if EAPPI is seen as ‘controversial’ by any Quakers, then there are very few who do so.
By JohnN on 5th January 2017 - 12:37
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