Letters - 07 June 2013
From thank you to epistle concerns
Letter of thanks
Thank you, Friends, for all your support at Yearly Meeting. I am very grateful to all those who assisted me in many different ways over the weekend, from pushing my wheelchair to taking my rubbish to the bin. It can be hard as a disabled person to ask for assistance, but you all made it very easy for me to ask for help when I needed it and also, on occasions, when I didn’t realise I needed it, but you offered and made life easier for me! Thank you also for understanding that sometimes I didn’t need assistance, but I did appreciate you asking.
Dawn Beck in the purple wheelchair
An eye for an eye?
We held Yearly Meeting (YM) on 24 to 27 May with little recognition of the Woolwich event. We were reminded in ministry at YM of the gospel reversal of the eye for a eye doctrine – which neither the Torah nor the Qur’an have managed to catch up with. But my daughters have alerted me to the internet frenzy of racist paranoia which appears to be pushing some of our nation in an almost Nazi direction.
An article by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian on this subject (http://bit.ly/10CwX73) may have been seen by many of us. It balances the context in a way most of us would endorse. But is that enough in our new climate of advocacy?
I went to a local scriptural reasoning group looking at Bible-Qur’an correspondances, which picked up the eye for an eye passages, but saw the Gospel version only in concordance terms. Perhaps Christians should concentrate more on teachings for this world (such as Sabbath made for man not man for the Sabbath) rather than on the salvific orthodoxies of the creeds. And make them audible to the wider world.
Richard Seebohm
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