Swarthmore Lecture: Life stories
Gerald Hewitson, the 2013 Swarthmore Lecturer, talks to the Friend about the background to this year’s lecture
What was your initial response to the challenge of giving the Swarthmore lecture? The first response was like Juliet’s, on being asked her thoughts on marriage: ‘It is an honour that I dream not of.’ As Juliet grows in the play, in her sense and definition of what her love and marriage to Romeo involved, so I think I grew – both individually as a person and in my sense of being asked to undertake the lecture.
I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder at some of the great names who have given the lecture over the years – lectures that have helped me grow as a Quaker. It would have been very easy to have been either intimidated or flattered by such a pantheon. I simply had to take the next step available to me, trying to keep low, close to the experience.
As I worked on the written text, and then the spoken lecture, increasingly I felt that I was developing prepared ministry. The theme I’d been asked to develop was early Friends. I realised I could not develop this theme without acknowledging, explicitly, the impact of early Friends in my life: the two stories were bound together, along with narrating experiences I’d had, which themselves had allowed me to recognise myself in the story of early Friends.
This lecture is very personal, then?
In a tradition that rests on experience, rather than abstractions, then our life stories become supremely important for us and each other. One of my hopes is that telling this story will give us confidence, as a Society, to release ourselves into our stories – both our individual stories and our corporate (his)story. And yet, paradoxically, since, ultimately, our lives do not belong to us, but to that power early Friends called the Seed, or Source, then the stories are of no significance whatsoever. They are important only insofar as they show us what Quaker faith & practice calls ‘the grace of God’ in our lives – the extent to which we have been faithful and our lives have allowed the Light into the world. Ultimately, whether we see it or not, our lives are but service to this end.
So the lecture is an act of service?
I very much see this task as another piece of service – genuinely no more significant than the person who lovingly serves tea after Meeting. When I first went to Pennsylvania with Friends – accompanying a group of youngsters on an exchange programme – I was interested to hear some American Friends talk of ‘Being Quaker’ – rather than being a Quaker: the language signalled for me that we did not just join an organisation, but committed ourselves to a way of being. As I’ve become absorbed by what is meant by that way of being, I have found that whenever I have undertaken an act of service – not because I felt flattered at being asked to do that job, or because it seemed there was no-one else available – I inherit huge support from my community, from which I grow as a human being: grow in understanding and grow in faith. This project has been no exception.
Can you speak more about your relationship with the Quaker community?
I sense myself as being held up by my community as the apex of a pyramid is supported by a solid base. I am at the lectern simply because there is something I can do to serve; but I could not do it without all those around me. When we are surrounded by a culture of celebrity, it may not be altogether easy for us to recognise this. I have entered a room as Gerald Hewitson, only to be identified as the next Swarthmore lecturer, and felt a subtle change of atmosphere, a shift in eye contact and body language.
You have a concern with injustice and with inequality. Early Friends engaged with these subjects. Why are they important to you?
In this country, and in America, particularly, our generation is seeing a particularly virulent strain of capitalism, which is reversing decades of movement towards a more equitable distribution of income (see Danny Dorling’s Salter Lecture last year). Not only is this destructive of society and individuals (see The Spirit Level) it is also utterly destructive of our planet. The dominance of this particular ‘empire’ is not inevitable, but neither can it be tackled within the terms of the current system. If we are not careful, we take our cue from the world around us, and see our spirituality as having a merely personal dimension. In the lecture I make the point that the word religion comes from the same root as ligature i.e. to bind – religion binds a community together. Religion is comprehensive – incorporating the personal and the social. We are invited not just to see ourselves made over, but to see a new world order. Generations of Friends teach us that when we ourselves turn our lives over, make love the basis of our lives – not in some naïve, soft-hearted sentimental way, but the kind of way we see again and again in the Faithful Lives section of Quaker faith & practice – we are, in however small a way, rewriting history: we are saying, with our own lives, ‘It does not have to be like this’.
Is this a viewpoint restricted to Quakers?
It is a counter-cultural way looking at things, it seems to me, and first Friends were quite explicit in being counter-cultural. Hat honour was not a charming mannerism, but a refusal to participate in the mores of society because they indicated deeper cultural flaws. Counter-cultural values and behaviour, by definition, are not reflected in the world around us, although we do need to seek allies wherever we can find them. For example, I’m just reading the work of Rosamund and Benjamin Zander on The Art of Possibility, and can see immediate connections to the way that part of our necessary transformation is seeing the world anew – transforming the way we see things. William Blake talked of ‘seeing the world in a grain of sand… eternity in an hour’; saint Paul asks us to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind’; George Fox came through a burning sword and all creation had a different smell. These are powerful metaphors for engaging with what I found to be a difficult, and painful, process.
How does this link with your interest in the writings of early Friends?
Early Friends have so much to teach us, because this is what, collectively, they were engaged in. A coherent worldview emerges – one that has real moment for our situation today, with sharp insights into modern psychology and ways of being. From this new world view, Quakers were systematic and unremitting in their intention to reveal the evil of the system – calling for it to be transformed.
So, they spoke out very strongly?
George Fox attacked the social arrogance and wealth of the magistrates and others who:
… spend the creatures on your lusts, in gorgious apparels, and gold rings and needless adorning, instead of covering the naked, and feeding the hungry, …You wallow in the earths treasure like swine in the mire, and never consider that the earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof, and that he hath given it to the sons of men in general, and not to a few lofty ones which Lord it over their brethren.
In this respect, first Friends were challenging the basis of the social order in no less a comprehensive way than Jesus of Nazareth before them; and before him, the Old Testament prophets.
Individual paths and callings vary – working with prisoners and paedophiles, setting up sites for gypsies, challenging arms sales and the renewal of Trident – all these may seem separate and unintegrated activities, but they stem from a deep seated recognition that the fundamental drivers for the activity of the world are awry, and we are offering another, different response.
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