Gorman Lecture 2021: Old Roots, New routes, by Sam Donaldson

‘Do we need to stop trying to keep our Meetings all neat and tidy?’

Beginning his lyrical and meditative lecture, the poet and mindfulness mentor Sam Donaldson set a stark scene for the 300 Friends in Zoom attendance. ‘Our numbers continue to dwindle’, he said: ‘statistically, we may not be here in 100 years time.’ And this decline ‘is happening at a time when our world desperately needs more truth, more equality, more peace, more simplicity, and more sustainability’. This scene could cause us ‘to lose all calm and to descend either into apathetic despair or to rise up uncontrollably into a flame of frustrated fury’, he said, quoting Frodo the Hobbit in Lord of the Rings (‘“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”’). Sam wanted ‘to explore how we as a community can do the best with the time that has been given to us’.

The lecture had two distinct halves. In the first half Friends heard Sam’s reflections on his own personal identity and inner story, which he used as analogy for our communal Quaker identity. In his twenties (the Gorman Lecture is given by a Friend under thirty-five), Sam had begun to experience the highs and lows of mood often labelled ‘bipolar’. During the highs ‘Everything felt so connected, so synchronous,’ he said, offering a poem from that period. The experience taught him a ‘sense of self that is deeper than my separate ego identity’, which he was able to develop, through meditation, into a ‘peace and satisfaction, steadier than anything I knew before.’ Through this process came an awareness of how our inner stories can control our lives, and how it was possible to untangle these with self awareness and compassion. With more poetry, music and illustration, Sam encouraged Friends to consider our collective Quaker story, and asked whether those ‘old roots’, so wonderful in many ways, could actually be ‘holding us back from fully embracing the challenges and opportunities of this present moment, preventing us stepping out and forging new routes’. He had more challenging questions: ‘Do we need to stop trying to keep our Meetings all neat and tidy… and instead loosen up and let go, taking the risk to invite in more discomfort, more fire, more gut, more heart, more passion, more rage, more tears, more laughter and dreams?’

To move on, he suggested three new commitments: to practices that nurture a deep interior stillness; to engaging in ‘real, open, courageous, vulnerable, generative conversations’; and to taking ‘courageous, loving, peaceful, creative action’ to bring about a ‘more beautiful world’.

The second half of the lecture formed a series of guided meditations, which took us through gratitude, honouring pain, seeing with new eyes and ‘going forth’. We came back to words with another poem: ‘an invitation to begin again / to commit ourselves to the never-ending process / of reimagining the human / together.’ n

Yearly Meeting Gathering videos are now embedded at www.quaker.org.uk/ym/programme.

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