Letters - 08 December 2017
From Nobel Peace Prizes to linguistic genocide
Nobel Peace Prizes
In 1947 Friends Service Council of London Yearly Meeting (the precursor of Quaker Peace and Social Witness) and the American Friends Service Committee were joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Friends are, therefore, in a notable but rather motley group that includes Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Aung San Suu Kyi and Barack Obama.
Rather more notably the group also includes Seán MacBride (the International Peace Bureau and Amnesty International), International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), the International Red Cross (three times), Joseph Rotblat (for ‘efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics’), the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
This year the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for ‘its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons’. Quakers and IPPNW are very much involved in the work of ICAN.
Perhaps, over the customary cups of tea that follow Meetings for Worship on Sunday 10 December, Friends could quietly raise their cups to ICAN and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as, in most cases, while sipping their tea the aAward ceremony will be in full swing in Oslo, Norway.
Frank Boulton
God, words and us
On his visit to Myanmar pope Francis said: ‘Religious differences need not be a source of division, but a force for unity, forgiveness, tolerance…’
In the same spirit I believe God, words and us: Quakers in conversation about religious difference, edited by Helen Rowlands and published in November by Quaker Books (a copy of which, I’m told, has been sent to every Meeting in Britain) has the potential to make the same impact as Towards a Quaker View of Sex.
That essay, written in 1963 by a group of Friends and issued by the Friends Home Service, helped to shape the liberal, tolerant zeitgeist of the 1960s and eventually led to British Friends pioneering same-sex marriage.
The essay called for ‘a release of love, warmth and generosity… that will weaken our fear of one another… this search is a move forward into the unknown; it implies a high standard of responsibility, thinking and awareness – something much harder than simple obedience to a moral code.’
The group of Friends invited to join a ‘think tank’ set up by the Book of Discipline Revision Preparation Group in 2014, whose work resulted in God, words and us, explored ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’, showing us possible ways to reconcile the irreconcilable.
Who knows, it could also aid other churches and faith communities wrestling with similar dilemmas.
Laurie Andrews
Animals and nature
Audrey Urry’s reference to ‘apathy’ (6 October) has stirred me to write this letter, which I have been meaning to do for twenty years! (I am eighty-eight now.)
For my first forty years I was a dedicated vegetarian, and when we bought a smallholding near Winscombe in Somerset I was at last able to set about practising what I had preached.
We were able to create an organic functioning entity, with sheep, cows, hens, a horse, bees, and two or three acres of vegetables. It is not possible to be completely self-supporting on a small scale, but we did what we could, gradually increasing our acreage to about twenty acres.
Over the years I became increasingly convinced that this planet is not just for us, but for all God’s Creation. I beleive that, with our vast population of human beings, we would, if we were all vegetarian, gradually exterminate most of the larger animals, through competition for food.
It takes a lot of land to grow human food, and with what would we fertilise it? Chemicals? Our own sewage alone?
That is bad husbandry, as all good farmers know. (Would we feed even chickens on food grown with only their own dung? They would soon become diseased.)
We would push further and further, using the best land for our food, until there was no more left, and nature took over and said ‘Stop’.
Is that ‘doing what love requires of us’? Is that the sort of world God created and loved?
Janet Arnold
Remembrance
I would like to add to Ian Kirk-Smith’s reflections on creative Quaker responses to remembering the first world war (10 November).
Exeter Quakers were invited to take part in a South West Heritage Trust project called ‘Devon Remembers’, so five of us wrote imaginative pieces connected to local conscientious objectors (COs).
We wrote about an imagined Quaker family living in Exeter coping with the privations of wartime and prejudices from locals, a poem inspired by the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse on Exeter’s war memorial, a family struggling to keep their horticultural farm going, an absolutist conscientious objector in Exeter prison and, perhaps the most poignant, an Exeter Quaker’s poem recalling his two grandfathers fighting on opposing sides.
Our contributions will join many others to be placed in archives and published in a limited edition book. We have just had one small public presentation of our efforts and the whole project will be celebrated next year in Exeter Cathedral.
Not so creative, perhaps, but certainly original was the walk undertaken recently by Devon Quakers and others along the road to nowhere that COs imprisoned in Dartmoor jail were forced to construct.
Penelope Putz
A warning to humanity
Please, Friends, give some attention to the recent statement, originating from the Union of Concerned Scientists, entitled ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice’.
It follows an earlier statement, issued twenty-five years ago, that ‘expressed concern about current, impending, or potential damage on planet Earth involving ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine life depletion, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change and continued human population growth’.
The present statement revisits the earlier one, and draws the conclusion that, with the exception of the ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress on these challenges, and that most of them are getting worse.
It says: ‘By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.’
Please note, Friends, the emphasis placed on population growth. The human population has grown by 35.5 per cent since the last statement – livestock by 20.5 per cent.
The statement has over 15,000 signatories from 184 countries.
Roger Plenty
Linguistic genocide?
In the Friend’s 17 November edition our Friend Gethin Evans wrote of the very real danger of linguistic genocide. I prefer to use ‘cultural genocide’ in the Welsh context.
Having recently returned to the ‘land of my fathers’ after a third of a century spent in mainland Europe, I am painfully aware of the enormously increasing dominance of the English language throughout Wales.
Friends, please contemplate the untold pain and suffering caused by such comments as: ‘Well, they all understand English anyway.’
Pain and suffering? Yes, indeed. Example: Many Welsh children were beaten and punished under the ‘Welsh-Not’ rule which, contrary to some opinion, was in operation well into the twentieth century – witness my father who was born well after 1900.
Many English persons, Friends included, still fail to show respect for Welsh culture; this is the kind of attitude that inflames them if they come across such insensitive behaviour amongst tourists in foreign lands.
It would greatly please me if English Friends visiting or living in Wales would consciously question their attitude to those few Welsh Friends they come across from time to time, and maybe even share that questioning with those Friends. It may even be the start of a much-needed dialogue and, dare I say, ‘friendship’?
Hwyl fawr, a dim rhagor na fy nghariad. (Greetings and no more but my love.)
Bryn Jones
