Letter to Josie

Richard Thompson sends a letter to his granddaughter

Josie, our granddaughter, is in her second year at Manchester University, really enjoying her course in Biology with an option in Philosophy. In her first year I sent an email to her about the nature of incessant change in life and the huge whirl of energies influencing us. I asked: ‘Why is there so much change?’ She replied one minute later with: ‘That’s easy! Random mutation to do with DNA.’ That shut me up… until now!

Recently I began to glimpse an underlying order allowing me to take a step forward through this apparent chaos. I wrote her the following letter:

‘Hi Josie!

‘Just as we each have the physical attributes to continuing the human race, I believe we each also have a core of being that can contribute to its evolution. I have recently come across four insights that took me from the apparent meaninglessness of life to something more fascinating.

‘The first was about valuing our insights. On the back of a list of photographic titles, which an old Friend in Oxford Meeting gave us fifteen years ago, she had copied a poem called ‘Openings’ with no author’s name. It included the words:

I have known what it is to be closed up tight
To be lost in myself and alone,

I have known what it is to be growing glad
To be living a life that is real.

‘This reminded me that valuing our inner states is not a strong point in our culture. They are impossible to measure and go through profound changes. It is important to value them and realise that we can learn from every moment in our lives. We can, of course, be mistaken, but valuing our inner experiences opens us to insights about life and meaning. What does the author mean, feeling “to be living a life that is real”?

‘The second insight was a poem by Rumi, which I read coming back on the bus from Wednesday Meeting. The story is about an army captain from Mosul who had to bring back a beautiful woman for the Caliph:

When the captain sees her, he falls in love
like the Caliph. Don’t laugh at this.
This loving is also part of infinite Love,
without which the world does not evolve.
Objects move from inorganic to vegetation,
to selves endowed with spirit through the urgency
of every love that wants to come to perfection.

‘I saw that what counts is the urgency, or the commitment, to come through to pure love, to transform our self-centred love.’

Working inwardly

‘The third “prompting” I received was when I came across an old exercise book in the loft going back to 1973 about… yoga:

If I want to enter wholly into joy, I must do the work inwardly, out of my own substance. I must contain myself and draw my own outlines, bring the different parts of myself into harmony, unite my contradictions, blend my tones, know that I myself am a living symbol of the One; I can be the beauty of my own work. One knows only what one has made. I can know myself by making myself.

‘For me, this means beginning each day by starting again, free from our conditioning. On a personal level, I can value each “seeing” moment and learn from every event. Every circumstance, every person, becomes my teacher. There is a freshness and aliveness in my life.
‘But now I come to a point that will be difficult for someone brought up in orthodox science: it is to see that this energy is active.

‘Quakers say that we can be open to those “promptings of love and truth” that are part of this energy, which ancient wisdom sensed, which we in our culture have forgotten, but which is the only thing which can save life on earth. Humans have experienced this presence in different cultures for centuries.

Seeing the possibility

‘To support this third “prompting”, yesterday I came across a passage of The Way of Man by Martin Buber. In this he sees the possibility of being in the “Here and Now” as “the fulfilment of existence”:

There is something that can only be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfilment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place on which one stands.

Most of us achieve only at rare moments a clear realisation of the fact that they have never tasted the fulfilment of existence, that their life does not participate in true fulfilled existence, that, as it were, it passes true existence by. We nevertheless feel the deficiency at every moment, and in some measure strive to find – somewhere – what we are seeking. Somewhere, in some province of the world or of the mind, except where we stand, where we have been set – but it is there and nowhere else that the treasure can be found, the environment which I feel to be the natural one, the situation which has been assigned to me as my fate, the things that happen to me day after day, the things that claim me day after day – these contain my essential task, and such fulfilment of existence as is open to me.

‘The fourth and last insight is a reappraisal of a statement by the Quaker and philosopher John Macmurray: “All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action for the sake of friendship.” I would like to rephrase this with an evolutionary slant: “All evolutionary knowledge works through action, and all evolutionary action works through friendship.”

‘In other words, knowledge about evolution is great, but doesn’t count unless it leads to some form of action. The action that will save our species is that which develops friendship across the world. Not an “airy-fairy” friendship, but a tough friendship that takes on the difficulties of human relationships.

‘What can we learn from these insights?

1. We can trust our feelings of meaning by sharing them with others.
2. We can have confidence in a new understanding of selfless love.
3. We can try each day to be open to the calm place where we see life more clearly.
4. We can try to make one conscious act of friendship each day.

‘See you soon!

‘Love from Papie and Grandma.’

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