The sustainable wheel. Photo: Courtesy of FGC Quaker Press.
A Sustainable Life
Laurie Michaelis reviews a new book by Quaker writer Douglas Gwyn
A year or so ago I was chatting with a Friend about our Quaker engagement with sustainability. He said: ‘it’s part of our DNA now.’ And it is. It has long been the focus of conversations in Local Meetings about what it means to ‘let your life speak’. It features strongly in conversations with prospective members. And it was embodied in our Yearly Meeting commitment in 2011 to become a low carbon sustainable community.
Yet, I would characterise much Quaker action so far as ‘good citizenship’. It is what every organisation, community or faith group should be doing. There is a large next step, which is to embrace sustainability as testimony.
So, what does Quaker faith and practice have to say about this Concern? In A Sustainable Life, Doug Gwyn answers with a call to faith: ‘Sustainability is not just one more concern among many, but the framework in which Friends today must contemplate, even rethink, every aspect of our Quaker faith and practice… These are times that call us urgently to reconsider and reinvest.’
You do not have to be interested in green issues to appreciate this book. It is a foundational book about Quakerism that should be in every Meeting’s library.
Many British Friends know Doug from his time as a tutor at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham and from his books on early Friends. A Sustainable Life is rooted in his intimacy with Quaker history and theology. It offers both challenge and guidance to us as a contemporary faith community. Although Doug is from the pastoral Quaker tradition of the American midwest, he was very much at home among British Friends. He includes examples of current Quaker practice in Britain and elsewhere, and ends each chapter with a selection from Britain Yearly Meeting’s Advices & queries.
Sixteen themes
The book explores sixteen themes: aspects of Quaker experience, values and practices. It presents them in pairs that might seem to be in tension or that complement each other as opposing spokes of a wheel. Each pair gets a chapter. The spokes meet at the hub: ‘the place of unknowing we experience as we live within these tensions and paradoxes’ (see above).
Doug’s call to us starts with daily personal practice: becoming more consistently awake in the Spirit; standing still in the Light; and sinking down to the Seed – the source of new life. This is the preparation of our hearts, minds and wills for gathered Meetings for Worship, in which we put ourselves entirely at the disposal of the divine mind and will. From such Meetings ministry and prophetic witness can arise. Ministry is more than sharing intriguing ideas and passionate feelings. Prophetic witness is not just speaking out controversially. True ministry and prophecy arise from our individual and corporate readiness to be God’s instruments in our words, lives and actions.
A revolutionary period
Doug talked to me by Skype about the conception of the book:
‘I had, from childhood, this deep sense of being in a community of species living in balance, and the divine pervading all of it. All that is foundational for what came together in the book.
‘I was in college in the late sixties and the ecology movement was just taking shape. When I received an experience of calling to ministry I hadn’t finished my zoology degree. I always felt a certain excitement studying theology when it related to God’s redeeming work, including the creation and not just humanity. That was one of the reasons I got involved in apocalyptic theology: it was talking about a new heaven and a new earth. I started reading [George] Fox and saw that he had that sense of the creation as part of the redeeming work of the spirit. Having glimpsed a very powerful vision that Fox had from the early chapters of the Journal and other parts of his writings I felt somehow I had to work this out.
‘The historical work was always listening to those Quaker writings from the 1640s and 1650s from my experience coming of age in a similarly revolutionary period, where the whole paradigm was shifting. This book brings that back to my life in the twenty-first century and the dilemmas as I perceive them.’
Different parts of our lives can seem in tension, but Doug reminds us that a sustainable life is an undivided life – one in which we live, speak and act with integrity. It needs to be sustainable for our personal relationships, our finances, our bodies and the biosphere. It means seeking consistency with Quaker testimony as a whole. And it requires constant discernment to address the many dilemmas that arise, sometimes using Quaker practices like clearness committees.
The healthy Quaker community
Doug is currently serving as a Quaker pastor in New England. A large part of his role is to keep the worshipping group ‘together and going someplace’. In the book he writes about the healthy Quaker community as being inclusive, yet clear about its values and practices, and able to challenge individuals to stretch themselves. Such a community also requires people to lead and serve, grounded always in group discernment. Following the undivided life in community means talking through our conflicts, admitting our mistakes, forgiving but not forgetting.
Finding the unity in our Quaker diversity – respecting that of God in everyone even though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways – is a foundation for our peace witness. We may be able to go on to work as prophets and reconcilers in the world, befriending those who might seem to be our enemies and engaging the powers through nonviolent action.
Sustainability is not another ‘testimony’, but a way of ‘re-viewing’ Quaker practice and integrating all the dynamic tensions. If peace was the dominant theme of Quaker testimony in the twentieth century, Doug writes that personal simplicity and the work for a sustainable human society on earth will focus our energies in this century.
Renewal
Like Ben Pink Dandelion’s Swarthmore Lecture, A Sustainable Life invites Friends to a renewal of our corporate spiritual calling or Covenant. In Doug’s wheel he shows how – perhaps as with any true path – that entails holding paradoxes. Doug aims to show through the book that every aspect of Quaker faith and practice is implicit in every other.
‘I felt it was a piece that I was equipped to supply, given my work with the Quaker tradition: to reframe Quaker faith and practice within sustainability, which is the horizon we’re going to be living in for the foreseeable future.
‘I hope it consolidates the spiritual base for Friends already active in green concerns, as well as offering a more compelling case to other Friends who are less concerned, that our faith really does open out in that direction, that it’s always been there but it’s going to have to be there in a much more powerful and integrated way than ever before.’
I hope so, too. I found A Sustainable Life an accessible and compelling description of Quaker faith and practice, its integrity, its roots in the past and its relevance to the present and future.
A sustainable life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation by Douglas Gwyn, QuakerPress of FGC, ISBN: 9781937768553
