Consensual honesty: Tim Ashworth on a ‘tool for effective change’
‘There can be no transforming light without honesty.’
In Eden Grace’s 2019 Swarthmore Lecture, (‘On Earth as it is in Heaven: The Kingdom of God and the yearning of creation’), and in the final chapter of the accompanying book, she considers communication and motivation in relation to the climate crisis. She is acutely aware that facts about the climate crisis can generate fear, and that fear paralyses creative thought and action. ‘The research shows that facts coupled with invitations to concrete action are much more effective than facts alone,’ she says.
As a consequence of this thinking, I am pondering the idea of one simple piece of action as a tool for effective change.
‘Quaker’ was originally a pejorative nickname, arising from the view that outsiders had of the tears and shaking that were sometimes triggered in Meeting for Worship. But our own chosen name for our movement was ‘Friends of Truth’. The capital ‘T’ here can be misleading. It evokes grand religious themes and philosophical ideas. So how about replacing it with ‘honesty’? Down to earth – and revolutionary, everyday – honesty. This is what Friends have been known for: keeping their word, and honest dealing. It brought them commercial success; it also got them into a good deal of trouble. But they knew it carried a power.
When Eden describes the work of John Woolman she uses a resonant phrase for his way of working: ‘meticulous integrity’. It was his concern with ‘holiness in even the smallest detail of everyday life’ that revealed how all issues of justice are interrelated.
I have come to see that the experience that propelled me out of the Catholic priesthood in 1989 was what Friends describe as ‘convincement’. Just as for early Friends, for me it certainly involved a sharpening of physical perception, a new way of seeing the world. But that was tied together with a demanding honesty that precipitated the experience and then sustained the outcome. James Nayler speaks of ‘minding the light’ which will reveal your condition. In my experience of convincement, the light was all about honesty with myself as well as with others. There can be no transforming light – as early Friends conceived it – without honesty.
It is a deep-down human ability to recognise honest words. We have the capacity to recognise the truth when we hear it, and that informs Quaker discernment. The corporate disciplines of Friends are there to ensure that the tendency of our individual minds to become distorted by self-interest and self-protection is countered by the testing of our intentions in a spirit of worship. The witness of Margaret Fell, James Nayler or John Woolman arises out of the conviction that there is no place where the light of God, where honest speech, does not belong.
Eden Grace does not shy away from the acknowledgement that John Woolman was an irritant to his fellow Quakers. That word ‘irritant’ reminds me (and, I’m sure, other readers who are old enough) of the effectiveness of the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s. This movement found ways to deliberately expose, repeatedly and uncomfortably, the minutiae of routine male privilege in the worlds of work, leisure and religion. It is, of course, clear and obvious that the Quaker business method depends upon participants speaking truthfully, but can this same truthfulness become an everyday testimony?
‘Can Quaker Meetings be communities where we learn to hone our ability to speak truth to power by speaking truth to our fellow members?’
This is not a light undertaking. The title of this article, ‘Consensual honesty’, came out of my experience of one-to-one work in which, from time to time, I have shared an agreement with an individual that we move to more direct engagement. It’s riskier but carries the possibility of deeper healing and more substantial change. And it’s important to say explicitly that honesty does not mean being carelessly unrestrained. To be honest and effective involves speaking in a way that can be heard and understood. There are appropriate groups and settings to be considered. Timing matters; we can recognise that someone is just not ready to hear something. Sometimes truth needs to emerge piecemeal over time. While there is a risk that, just as with gentleness, holding back the truth can be avoidance, honest intention is a powerful thing, and accountability through discernment with others – something Friends have well-developed tools to provide – is an effective check to evading what might be difficult.
Is the Quaker community today open to this? Can Quaker Meetings be communities where we learn to hone our ability to speak truth to power by speaking truth to our fellow members? Do we trust that the truth will set us free? Back in 2009 I was working with Alex Wildwood on a book called Rooted in Christianity, Open to New Light: Quaker spiritual diversity. We identified that Friends often felt faced with one particular question: If we are more open and honest with each other about our beliefs, are we not then risking our present valued sense of companionship and community for an uncertain deeper unity that we cannot be sure will emerge?
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul presents the nature of his own leadership role in communities and in witness in the wider world. When he speaks of ‘the word of God’ it carries the sense of speaking in the Spirit, of speaking words from God, the Quaker understanding of prophetic ministry. It is clear that prophetic speaking is not easy, but, he says, ‘we are not cowardly… We refuse to dilute the word of God, but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to each person’s conscience in the sight of God’ (2 Corinthians 4:1-2).
We are seeing clearly the impact of dishonesty in public life. Words have become unreliable. No agreements, no shared basis for action, can be built with them. Every deceitful word undermines community, along with the potential for collectively-owned action. Faced with a threat to humankind that demands a whole range of corporate responses, from local to international, do we not have a tool to hand in pursuit of John Woolman’s ‘meticulous integrity’? He saw that the everyday ‘dilution’ of the truth was a kind of cowardly retreat that obscured what must be faced and dealt with. We cannot demand this of others without practising it ourselves.
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