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

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

‘Do we need to stop trying to keep our Meetings all neat and tidy… and instead loosen up and let go...' | Photo: Sam Donaldson

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’.

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