Letters - 14 September 2018
From a Quaker wedding to the importance of context
A Quaker wedding
Thank you, Rajit Gholap (24 August), for your article about your wedding. You, Rachael and your Quaker registrar of marriages should be congratulated on the thought and care you took to conduct your ‘Solemnisation of a Marriage’.
It is quite right that all your guests should expect and receive a Quaker experience and to do that they need the preparation to enable them to participate in the worship as well as they can.
Using the occasion to express Quaker values rather than secular fashions was entirely valid.
The flexibility of the Quaker wedding is significant, but we should avoid short-changing everyone by truncating it or allowing it to turn into a ‘reception party’.
There is time for jolly speeches, anecdotes, and other rituals over food and drink later.
Barney Smith
A welcome contribution
With all the current debate within Friends about gender assignment, nontheism, ‘God words’, membership and the like, it was good to read Jon Anderson’s very amusing ‘God bothering’ in the 30 August edition of the Friend.
It was very humorous but also had thoughtful comments as a balance. I’m not suggesting this publication should be full of such material but it was a very welcome contribution.
Richard Stewart
Honesty and integrity
I read Simon Risley’s article (31 August) with interest and was reminded of some guidance on truth telling given to me by a Friend many years ago.
Before speaking, we should consider three questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?
If you can answer ‘yes’ to any two of these then speak. Speak even though:
It may be true and kind, but not necessary. It may be true and necessary, but unkind. It may be kind and necessary, but untrue.
David Heathfield
I read Simon Risley’s article with misgivings. While integrity rather than strict detail is what is important fundamentally, flexibility about telling the truth can easily become heedlessness. It is a slippery slope. Even in social situations it is still a matter of trust.
If one is often careless about the truth when one speaks others may feel that they cannot trust one on vital issues. ‘Telling small lies in order to keep the wheels of normal social intercourse turning’ does not seem, to me, to have a strong claim on us. People soon notice insincerity.
Prevarication or deliberate ambiguity, I feel, are only justifiable in cases where to give the exact facts as we know them might be very unkind, or harmful to a person’s health, or where one has not the authority to reveal them.
Diplomacy is for professional diplomats and has its own rules, which are, no doubt, understood by both sides; but I feel certain that more wars are caused by suppressing facts than by trying to see the point of view of others.
Elaine Miles
Quality
It is good of Edwin J Wrigley (24 August) to reflect on the meaning of ‘equality’ – a word often used as a mantra.
Beccy Talmy’s discussion of ‘diversity’ (another mantra, I fear) in the same edition concerns a contrary concept. One cannot have equality and diversity.
As Edwin Wrigley’s teacher of geometry would, I suspect, have said: ‘Isosceles triangles are not identical in all respects with right-angled triangles.’
Jan B Deręgowski
Visit of Donald Trump
Angela Ormrod (24 August) is surprised that some Quakers wished to protest against Donald Trump’s policies on his recent visit to the UK, and is sure that Jesus would have offered him hospitality.
I note, however, that Jesus did not write a polite letter to the authorities concerning the money-changers in the temple, but took direct action of a kind that would presumably have appalled Angela had she been resident in Jerusalem at the time.
My own peaceful walk in London from Portland Place to Trafalgar Square may have offered depressingly little resistance to Donald Trump’s attacks on truth and equality, but I was cheered by the comment of one Muslim woman, who took it as evidence that ‘at least some people care’.
That made it all seem worthwhile.
Martin Drummond
Quaker texts and unintended consequences
Am I the only Friend alarmed by the way important Quaker texts get redacted? When I applied for membership in the mid-1990s I was attracted by the idea that ‘you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.’ This is part of the concluding sentence of George Fox’s letter to ministers 1656 from jail in Launceston.
If the practice of my local Meeting for Worship is typical, this has now been redacted to ‘that of God in everyone’ , which sounds, when it is repeated in ministry (as it frequently is), a bit credal and even idolatrous.
It feels, too, in the tone with which it is sometimes delivered, somewhat conditional. It is OK provided that the ‘that’ is not too big or demanding.
In apparently relieving ourselves of the duty of answering that of God in everyone are there not some unintended consequences we need to consider?
Do we really intend to avoid treating each other with the unconditional positive regard with which God loves us?
Put another way: are we slowly turning from being a Religious Society of Friends, who care for each other and the world, into a posse of rapacious textual cherry pickers and redactors galloping through the steppes of social media?
Christopher J Green
Pope Francis in Ireland
Thousands of empty seats marked the last event of the recent visit of Pope Francis to Ireland. People had paid for them in order to leave them empty. Was this dissent? Early Quakers lived in times of dissent. Many who absented themselves from ‘steeple houses’ suffered for it – and changed history.
The empty seats were not an empty protest. This was a gesture for ‘acceptance’. It was about how we give worth and how we belong to one another. So many had suffered and been treated as worthless: the ‘slaves’ in the ‘laundries’, forgotten babies buried in unmarked graves, and many more.
This was more than dissent. Absence is asking the question: ‘How much do we really matter to one another? and ‘belong together?’
This is about people. It is not a ‘holy showpiece’, but the heart of Christian faith. The life and message of Jesus is about giving worth: ‘[I am come] for those who are lost.’ The empty seats represent the lost, the need to belong, and to care about what we do to one another. It is our present national and international sickness.
John O’Donohue, the Irish poet, author, priest and philosopher said: ‘All absence is full of hidden presence.’ That is the message. As John O’Donohue put it: ‘All embraced in the great circle of belonging, leaving nothing and no one out.’
The empty seats spoke of a sad, sick, hurting humanity, but it is one still capable of hope. ‘Absence’ and ‘silence’ are full of hidden presence. They lead us together into the healing of belonging.
Bernard Coote
Metaphor and God
Many of us talk about ‘God’ as though we know what we are talking about. Surely it is more helpful to acknowledge our human limitations when trying to comprehend ‘that which is beyond’.
All our concepts of ‘God’, whether we are ‘believers’ or ‘non-believers’, are metaphors. Words like shepherd, father, rock and king are clearly not literal descriptions, yet people often use them as though they are.
Other descriptions, such as ‘Light of the world’ or ‘Bread of life’, are plainly metaphorical too, as are more recent attempts to get our minds round mystical paradoxes.
‘The Trinity’ is a metaphor that some find helpful. However, that does not resonate with me. Being mathematically oriented, an image of the Divine that at present I find most helpful is ‘the One whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’.
I am neither a theist nor a nontheist, but believe that we are closer to ‘that which is beyond’ when asking questions than when we think we know the answers.
If we accept that we are all fellow seekers, I suspect that the unity, which comes from that humility, will nurture our spirits.
It may also speak to the wider world.
Howard Grace
Polyamory
I was sad to read the letter from Robin Waterston (24 August). In my opinion, it was full of prejudiced comments about polyamorous people. Robin refers to ‘supposedly willing participants’, implying that participants in the previous writer’s relationships may have been coerced or pressurised. Is it right, or fair, to make such a claim about somebody else’s relationship with no evidence whatsoever?
Robin adds that: ‘It is hard to imagine it not ending in deep hurt for at least one of the participants.’ Rather than base a discussion on what an individual can or cannot imagine, it would be more helpful to look at the evidence.
I have known polyamorous relationships that have ended in hurt. I have known many others that have endured with love and commitment. Similarly, some monogamous relationships end in hurt and others blossom with love.
Robin is right to say that polyamory raises questions of ‘power and genuine concen’. So does monogamy. So do all relationships of any sort at all. We need to explore these difficult questions of power, consent and ethics. This will not be helped by making baseless and dismissive assertions about each other’s relationships and lifestyles.
Symon Hill
Biomass energy
With regard to sustainability, biomass energy is one form of ‘Bioenergy’, but does not use grain to produce electricity.
Home-grown biomass provides renewable, controllable energy and can play an important part in the countryside.
One application is to plant willow on low-lying river valleys unsuitable for arable farming. It slows down flash-floods; it filters out plant nutrients instead of leaching them into lakes and the sea; it purifies water coming from sewage works and the roads; and, most importantly, provides a way of harvesting the sun’s energy that is not dependent on the sun shining, or the wind blowing.
It can be coppiced and stored for use when it is needed for fuelling power stations of all dimensions – local or national. It offers a profitable crop for farmers and landowners; it provides excellent habitat for birds, invertebrates and mammals; and can even be stripped for farm animal fodder.
It is harvested every three or four years, and when everything is taken into account, arguably uses as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it emits while being processed into energy.
It is unobtrusive in the countryside, if thoughtfully planted, and its leafy growth helps filter the air of particulates from motorways and other pollution.
George Macpherson
Peace and principles
Working for peace requires discernment. Everyone likes to think they are discerning, especially activists.
For many years I supported Jewish Voice for Peace, the work of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel’s violence in Gaza. It gave me a warm glow. Now my view has changed completely.
Friends, it seems, have become coopted in the vortex of disinformation that is the conflict in the Middle East.
I believe that allowed the Zion-centric anti-Semitism of some Friends to enable, obfuscate and even support the Syrian genocide.
Once a genocidal despot starts bombing his own innocent people the international community must act. This is a well-established and ethical principle in international law. This is discernment in action.
I believe that if we had acted Bashar al-Assad would have been swept from power, numerous lives would have been saved, and displaced refugees would now be safe in their own homes.
This is the tragedy of our times: our betrayal and abandonment of the people of Syria, of their right to self-determination and freedom, of our international responsibilities, our sanctimonious and self-righteous posturing, our shift of focus onto Israel and away from the true locus of genocidal violence and evil, in us and around us, in our own time.
Jon Long
Render unto Caesar…
Martin Jenkins (6 July) has, I think, ignored the context in which Jesus spoke the words ‘Render unto Caesar….’
Jesus was being asked whether Jewish people should pay taxes to the Roman government of their country. His answer calls for discernment.
Open revolt against Rome in 70AD was suppressed and the temple in Jerusalem was demolished, leaving the ‘wailing wall’ of modern times.
John Dodwell
