Interview: Pam Lunn
Pam Lunn, this years Swarthmore lecturer, talks to the Friend about her background, influences and faith.
Costing not less than everything: sustainability and spirituality in challenging times, Pam Lunn’s Swarthmore lecture is at 7.30pm on Monday 1 August in the Big Top. Pam talks to the Friend about her background, influences and faith.
What was your early background?
I was born in 1950 and grew up in a very middle-income, middle-of-the-road ordinary family. My grandparents on both sides were solidly working-class and my parents, in the aftermath of the second world war, were taking the first steps beyond that world. So I’m part of the ‘post-war baby-boom’ generation. A major driver of the post-war reconstruction and development was to make a ‘better life for the children’ and my cohort were the beneficiaries of all that.
Why were you drawn to studying science and mathematics?
After passing the eleven-plus I went to the local state grammar school. I enjoyed school and did well across the board, but the arrangement then was that we had to choose, at age thirteen, between concentrating on arts or sciences. This was the time of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ and it was unthinkable – in a way hard to comprehend now – not to choose sciences if you were good at them. There was an attitude that people who went down the arts route were those who were no good at science.
Additionally, I was already developing what would later be called a feminist sensibility and I didn’t want to do just the girly things. There was a certain attraction in being better than the boys at maths, physics and chemistry!
Who were the key influences in your early life?
I think I was fortunate in my teachers who encouraged me, stretched me and opened doors for me. Also, my maternal grandmother was a very independent-minded woman and I think that somehow rubbed off on me, in ways that are hard to pinpoint; when my mother was displeased with me, she would say: ‘You’re just like your grandmother’.
What influence did the 1960s, a time of great change and idealism, have on you? In what way, also, did it influence your work on women’s history?
I went to university in the autumn of 1968, so during my undergraduate years the ripples from the May 1968 student uprising in Paris were starting to be felt in other universities around the world, including in Britain. It was an exciting and stimulating time, and a time of great idealism and engagement with protest and social justice movements. I think it’s a characteristic of that student generation that we believed we could change the world – I think we still do believe that, actually… it’s just taking a little longer that we initially imagined!
As I left university, and started to engage with the adult world beyond, feminist ideas were starting to percolate through this country. In a sense, the combination of 1960s radicalism with 1970s feminism shaped who I became as an adult woman.
How did you become involved with Quakerism?
I was raised ‘CofE’ and drifted away from that for many reasons. When I was a student I had a close friend who was the daughter of ‘weighty’ Quaker parents (though I didn’t know that term at the time). When visiting during university vacations, I was taken along to Meeting on Sunday. At a later period in my life, when I wanted somewhere (rather than nowhere) to ‘belong’ in a spiritual sense, I remembered this, and went along to my local Quaker Meeting… and the rest is history!
Why has education, particularly adult education, been so important to you in your life?
Although I studied formally in the sciences, I always retained wide-ranging interests and this seemed to me to be the best of both worlds – to have an understanding of the technical aspects of how the world ‘works’, but to remain able to be well-read in the humanities. So I was clear that I didn’t want to work as a professional mathematician – I wanted something broader and people-focused.
Education was an interesting field at the time, with new ideas starting to be brought into schools. I worked in comprehensive schools for some years before moving into adult education, where I’ve remained, in various settings.
You spent a year in Zimbabwe at a very interesting time. How did this come about?
It arose out of the peace education project I had been working for in the preceding period. This was during the Cold War and we were exploring the analysis that the east-west conflict was just the rich club fighting between themselves, and the real divide was between the rich north and the poor south.
The project in Zimbabwe (then newly independent and a beacon of hope) was putting our money (and ourselves) where our mouth was.
What has remained with me is the sense of another place in the world where I can ‘stand’, to see how events look from a radically different perspective from our western European stance.
An example of this is the fact that how we in the west view a ‘simple life’ is still vastly wealthy compared with the people I worked with there.
You have spent two decades at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham – how would you describe its role in the Religious Society of Friends?
This is a huge question! And I give a personal, not an ‘institutional’, answer. As a church that believes truly in the priesthood of all believers, with no separated ministry, all our members need the opportunity to be ‘trained for the ministry’ – that’s why Woodbrooke was founded.
We have the precious gift of a facility (buildings and gardens) and a faculty (employed tutors). As paid tutors we are able to spend our whole time seeking to discern what the adult religious learning needs are (in the broadest sense) of Quakers in Britain and beyond… and then attempting to provide that. We work closely with Friends House staff, members of other Yearly Meetings, a wide variety of individual Friends and interest groups in Britain, and so on.
At our best, we become a visible expression of the collective seeking and growing of Quakers and Quakerism. It’s a huge privilege to have worked there for so many years.
You created the Good Lives project at Woodbrooke and are currently the programme leader for the project. Why is it important to you?
The creation was a shared piece of work between me and my colleague Lizz Roe. It grew out of our shared concern for sustainability issues, and a long period of thought and consultation about how Woodbrooke could rightly address this. A large part of my concern about it, in relation to Quakers, is my sense that engagement with these crucial issues comes from the same ‘place’ as does our Peace Testimony – it’s central to who we are as Quakers. If we’re true to this, then we should be seen in the world in the way that we are about matters of peace and war. That isn’t the case yet – I want to see us living our testimony in such a way that other people think not just, ‘Quakers – peace’ but also, ‘Quaker – peace – the environment’.
In what ways has your faith influenced your life and the way you have lived it?
This could be another whole book, of course. Perhaps, put briefly, I could say that the Quaker phrase ‘acting under concern’ describes the way I’ve tried to live my life, long before I’d heard that description of it.
What is the biggest challenge facing the Religious Society of Friends today?
For me, the crucial and underlying question for us, as Quakers, is: are we content to be merely a support group for people on their individual spiritual journeys, or are we able to rediscover a solidarity as a people of God? The latter would, of course, include elements of the former, but would be something much larger and deeper, much more demanding, much more daunting and challenging. I believe we are called at this time to rediscover what this would mean.
Pam Lunn will give her lecture: Costing not less than everything: sustainability and spirituality in challenging times at 7.30pm on Monday 1 August 2011 in the Big Top at Yearly Meeting Gathering in Canterbury. The book of the same title will be available after the lecture.
The Swarthmore Lecture
The Swarthmore lectureship was established by the Woodbrooke Extension Committee at a meeting held 9 December 1907: the minute of the committee providing for ‘an annual lecture on some subject relating to the message and work of the Society of Friends’. The name Swarthmore was chosen in memory of the home of Margaret Fox, which was always open to the earnest seeker after Truth, and from which loving words of sympathy and substantial material help were sent to fellow workers.
The lectureship continues to be under the care of Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre Trustees, and is a significant part of the education work undertaken at and from Woodbrooke.
The lectureship has a twofold purpose: first, to interpret to the members of the Society of Friends their message and mission; and second, to bring before the public the spirit, aims and fundamental principles of Friends. The lecturers alone are responsible for any opinions expressed.
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