Gleanings: The holy mountain
Laurie Michaelis begins a new monthly series: towards a Quaker view of sustainability
Some years ago I spent three summer days with a group of Young Friends at Pardshaw in the Lake District, exploring their witness to ‘that of God in all creation’. In the mornings they generously shared with me – a less-young Friend – their values, visions and ideas for action for a sustainable world. In the afternoons we walked, swam and kept talking.
Their visions were wide ranging: ‘we would be in contact with the earth’, ‘practising arts and crafts’, ‘we would dance all night’, ‘no cars’, ‘no nations or boundaries’, ‘security, trust, safe in our own homes’, ‘everything organic, fairly traded, respecting people and earth’, ‘complement rather than contradict’. I cannot convey the emotional depth and reverence that infused our worship-sharing in the sun; or the effort to wrestle with the complexity of it all, the frustrations, the tensions between our desires and our dreams, our ideals and the ‘Spirit of the Age’.
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