Eden Grace

Oliver Robertson, from the Swarthmore Lecture Committee, speaks to Eden Grace, the 2019 Swarthmore lecturer

Who are you and can you tell us a bit about your background?

My name is Eden Grace and I am a member of New England Yearly Meeting, but I have been non-resident for fourteen years. The first nine years of that I was living in Kenya and working among Friends in East Africa and then five years ago I moved to Richmond, Indiana, where I serve as the director of Global Ministries for Friends United Meeting.

What is Friends United Meeting? How does it connect with other types of Quakers?

Well, unlike Friends in Britain, Friends in North America underwent a series of schisms in the nineteenth century that resulted in, basically, different denominations of Friends, and so we have three large umbrella organisations that represent the theological spectrum of Friends today. Friends United Meeting is the one in the middle.

It’s the largest of the three, and it’s the one that has a rather tenacious commitment to being both fully Christian and fully Quaker. We have both programmed and unprogrammed Meetings, we are an association of thirty-five Yearly Meetings in fourteen countries, ninety per cent of our membership is in East Africa.

Can you tell us something of what the lecture, entitled ‘On Earth as it is in Heaven; The Kingdom of God and the yearning of Creation’, will be about?

I’ve been invited by the lecture committee to help the Yearly Meeting find a deeper theological and spiritual grounding for its commitment to sustainability. The lecture committee has asked me to draw on the relationships that I have among global Quakers to bring in some of the testimonies and experiences of Friends in other contexts. One of the things I will be doing in the lecture is to present several testimonies from Friends in other parts of the world who are witnessing faithfully around the issues of sustainability and climate change.

I will certainly be looking at Quaker work on climate and creation, but also, more broadly, in other Christian and spiritual sources, and trying to draw that in. I think that sometimes we as Quakers forget that we stand in a larger stream and have otherwise voices that we can listen to. In particular, the recent encyclical from Pope Francis, I think, could be very helpful to us in understanding the theological meaning of creation and the care of creation.

You’ve also talked about the role of sin and this being a difficult concept for Friends in the British Quaker tradition.

Yes. I think that liberal Friends – not just in Britain – have a very difficult time coming to terms with the presence of sin and evil in the world, but I think we reject those concepts at our peril. In my life the thing that I have felt compelled to come face-to-face with is the Rwandan genocide, and, if my faith is not adequate to the task of understanding something like the Rwandan genocide, then it is not an adequate faith. Then my faith is too weak and I need to search more.

I think among those in the world who have the greatest privilege and the greatest access to resources, it can be very easy to shrink our faith to a personalised spirituality that doesn’t do an adequate job of understanding the real nature of suffering. For me, the cross and the resurrection are the place that ground a faith that is strong enough, that is real enough, to face even a genocide. And so, when we’re looking at the potential consequences of climate change – in species extinction and perhaps even apocalyptic visions of the future – I think we have to have a faith that can make sense of evil, otherwise those scenarios are just too terrifying.

How have you got a sense of where British Friends are at regarding sustainability and climate justice?

I think the most important thing that I’ve found is just to come here to participate in the Yearly Meeting Sustainability Gathering at Swanwick [in October] and to listen. I am normally a rather vocal person and I found myself being quite clearly led to listen and to observe and to not interject.

One of the things that came really clearly out of that gathering is the spiritual hungering of the people who are on the front lines doing sustainability work, they are yearning to ground that work in a deeper spirituality. And then in the closing worship of the gathering, a Friend was led to rise and read from Romans chapter eight, which is the very passage that I drew from in the title of the lecture. And that was a great sense of confirmation.

Has this deepened your own journey of faith?

Every piece of ministry I take on is an opportunity to deepen my own learning and my own path of discipleship. Sustainability is not my normal area of focus, so it has led me into a lot of learning which I’m really grateful for. And that has an impact not just on my intellectual and spiritual life, but also on the way that I and my family live in our home and the way we look at our energy choices, so the topic has also taught me quite a lot.

What do you hope will be the effect of the lecture on Friends? Or is that not for you to say?

First of all, I’m really clear whenever I minister that the effect of my words is not my job. It’s not something that I can control and it often happens that somebody will hear something that is not what I thought I’d said but is what they needed to hear. My job is to be faithful to the message I’m given. God’s job is to convey that message to the hearts of others. So, having said that, I hope it brings Friends in the Yearly Meeting into a place of deep spiritual worship, which for me is the centre of everything we do as Quakers.

Quakerism is premised on vulnerability, on stripping away all constructs and safety nets and laying ourselves bare to the real presence of the living God in our midst. And that’s an excruciatingly beautiful vulnerability. But it means that there is no guarantee that it’s going to work every time or for everyone. And we enter that space together as a community and sit down on those chairs next to each other knowing we’ve taken a risk by doing so… I think that’s beautiful and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What’s it been like preparing for the lecture? How does it feel?

I’ve undertaken it with fear and trembling, as one should undertake any new ministry, and I think I spent the first six months trying to convince the committee that I wasn’t actually the person they wanted. But it’s proved thus far to be really, surprisingly fruitful and life-giving to me, to be asked to go to take a deep dive into our theological and spiritual tradition, and to draw from that well a bucket of new water for the Society of Friends today. That’s a precious task, so I feel really honoured and energised and spiritually enlivened by that.

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