Courting rendition
Sue Curd recommends a gripping novel set in 2030
Respect the laws of the state but let your first loyalty be to God’s purposes. If you feel impelled by strong conviction to break the law, search your conscience deeply. Ask your Meeting for the prayerful support which will give you strength as a right way becomes clear.
Advices & queries 35
The ugliness of our society is on full display in Calais as the inhumane treatment of immigrants is played out. Our government doesn’t recognise ‘that of God in everyone’ – but we do. We begin by holding the situation in the Light and we gather ourselves in expressing our Quaker concern and what might be done. It seems to me that those fleeing from war by default must be for peace. Let’s welcome them. Luke 12:48 says: ‘From those whom much is given, much is expected.’ And so, surely, there will be a blurring of the boundary. We need to discern when our path is to respect the state or move instead towards God’s purposes.
Courting Rendition by Maggie Allder could not be a more timely publication as it explores the muzzy grey borderlines. The book is set in 2030 in Winchester. It’s written as a journal and spans a few months when the writer’s life is turned upside down – remarkable and shocking. The writer is a recently retired teacher who knits, attends a book club and spends time marvelling at a beautiful park from her eco-flat. The journal glides from the ordinary, discerning what is required, into what seems to be quiet, not confrontational, action. The often invisible line between being for or against the state is crossed and there are consequences. Being concerned about homeless families living in tents, writing letters to a prisoner on death row, making a difference – in 2030 these kinds of ‘actions’ are grey areas: ‘So if a stranger comes up to me and tells me I’m a revolutionary [given the original meaning], I feel as I might if I had been told I am a scrounger or a bad neighbour. It is like saying I want to disrupt the orderly life of our country.’
In George Fox’s time it was clear that Quakers were not on the side of government/authority on many issues. Perhaps our periods in history collide in this vision of 2030. Courting Rendition, set just a few years in the future, wakes me up to the possibility of having to discern my path more carefully. The creep of ‘big brother’ – in terms of using everyday technology, being watched and monitored in the writer’s daily routines – seems plausible, probable even.
Much of my life has an internal dialogue going on, a mix of prayer and discernment, weighing up, unsure of what is real, unsure whether my own understanding of what is happening in ‘our’ country, ‘our’ world, is going off the scale or not. The book suggests a time when even in our own Quaker community, as open to all as we are, sharing our thoughts and concerns may be a dangerous act in itself.
It seems to me that writing stories, and weaving in our Quaker perspective, is a powerful way of making us all think. I hope the book is widely read both by Quakers and others. Courting Rendition communicates a good deal of who we are and what we may be called to be.
Courting Rendition by Maggie Allder, Matador, ISBN: 9781784621520, £7.99.
