Letters - 28 March 2014
From testimonies to God
Reflecting on testimonies
Was it fortuitous that Oliver Robertson’s reflection on the grace of God followed immediately after Marisa Johnson’s on the concept of God in the Friend of 14 March?
Perhaps… but I’m thankful that my own Area Meeting didn’t wait a year or two before deciding to ask that a testimony should be prepared for my wife, who died last December. That decision won’t have surprised any of the 200 or so people who, at her Memorial Meeting, heard testimonies from twenty-four of those present whose lives she had touched in a variety of ways during the course of her own.
We remembered, celebrated and gave thanks for that life, and yes, for ‘that of God’ in it too. We Quakers like to use that expression, but we rarely define it. What of God, exactly? Grace? Goodness? Love? I suppose it all depends on our concept of God – and I’m reluctant to share mine. I know yours will be different, and I don’t want to start a debate about their respective validities. Like Marisa, I’m happy to let people follow their own spiritual paths, and if they help me along mine, so much the better.
Kurt Strauss
Genetic modification
I hope Brian Baxter’s article (21 March) isn’t seen as the last word on genetic modification (GM). His horror stories of tumours in rats require one to ask what exactly was the gene added to the maize fed to them and was there a control? If it was a gene for pesticide resistance, that may not be the only and most productive intervention. Americans have been eating and feeding beasts on such maize for decades without a cancer pandemic. Just because Monsanto want to offer pesticide resistant seeds which, like the pesticide itself, have to be bought from Monsanto, a scenario that Friends have already campaigned against, GM does not have to be condemned out of hand. Drought resistance is a GM benefit that might well have more to offer. This isn’t playing God, it is playing Darwin. Have we not all bought F1 hybrid vegetable seeds that mix strains and provide better crops but then set seeds that cannot be regrown.
I am also writing this in reaction to a newspaper report that the Tories may fail to allow mitochondrial gene therapy because some of their potential voters might object. The mitochondria are the organisms in the cells of living animals and plants that convert food and oxygen into energy. Their DNA is completely separate from the cell nucleus that contains the DNA which defines the development and characteristics of the host being. Some humans suffer from mitochondrial defects. Adding mitochondria from a donor does not make the donor a ‘third parent’, and I see no need to use the ‘playing God’ card to arouse concern.
Richard Seebohm
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