Letters - 20 and 27 December 2024
From Reith Lectures to God's biscuits
Reith Lectures
I am listening to the Reith Lectures 2024, whose subject this year is ‘Violence’. There has been a fascinating discussion on whether a person can be ‘an evil person’.
The lecturer has referred to the importance of education in emotional conflict, which occurs in a wide range of normal life circumstances. This has reminded me of how the Society of Friends has, in the past, helped our young people to understand and work on ‘conflict resolution’.
LEAP Confronting Conflict was the instigator of this way of working. I wonder if we still have the opportunity to offer this today. I have referred to this in my book for teenagers George and the Flying Foxes reviewed in the Friend 5 July and available from the Quaker Bookshop.
Sometimes serving prisoners have been in the audience of these lectures and one of the talks is taking place at Grendon Prison.
I commend them to Friends.
Christine Hayes
The Lord’s Prayer
The Lord’s Prayer (see letters 6 & 13 December) would have to be translated into Aramaic from one of the various (and varying) late first- or early second-century Greek sources before it could then be translated into English. How does that help?
And anyway, isn’t the traditional Quaker view that Jesus instructed his followers to pray in that fashion: familiar, conversational, about forgiveness and hope, rather than in his exact words. Whatever they were.
Keith Braithwaite
Aramaic gospel
With reference to Gillie Bolton’s letter (6 December), so far as I was aware the only surviving texts of Matthew’s gospel are in Greek, though some biblical scholars have long suspected that the Greek version shows traces of having been translated from Aramaic.
If, however, this Neil Douglas-Klotz (whoever he is) has discovered the original Aramaic version of Matthew somewhere, then this is the biggest event that has ever happened in the whole history of biblical scholarship and I think we would all like to know where and when he found it, and where it is now.
Alternatively Friends might be interested in this interesting critique available online at: https://tinyurl.com/lordsprayeraramaic.
Peter Bolwell
Meeting for Worship
Shanthini Cawson (6 December) suggests we should put aside our focus on diversity, transphobia, institutional racism, meaningless discussions on white privilege and reparations, and concentrate on worship.
I agree we should concentrate on worship, but surely our Testimony to Equality requires us to address all the issues which it is suggested we should be putting aside, including white privilege.
During thirty-eight years of employment, initially as a probation officer and then a social worker, I was never subject as a white person to the racism my black and South Asian colleagues experienced. Examples included white people objecting to having a black or South Asian probation officer on grounds of race, black officers being verbally racially abused, and a black probation officer being assumed to be a defendant when he entered court during the course of his professional duties.
The racism to which my black and South Asian colleagues were exposed was a challenge which I did not face. Their jobs were therefore harder than mine. That was an example of white privilege.
The concept of white privilege does not signify that those of us who are white are not vulnerable to discrimination and disadvantage. It signifies that black and South Asian people are exposed to racism, which white people of identical or very similar professional and social status do not experience.
In the interests of completeness, I should say that I also had white colleagues who were subject to racism as a consequence of being either Irish or Jewish.
Richard Pashley
Central structures
To the Group to Review Central Structures: You wrote that there is a consensus about simplification but no consensus how to do this. Quakers in Britain will not bring any further simplification suggestions to Britain Yearly Meeting in 2025. There are no clear suggestions about the way forward. Our treasurer announced at 2024 Yearly Meeting that Quakers are facing another financial crisis centrally, needing review and cutbacks to balance the books. Simplification is needed both to help Quakers to manage our personal commitments and our finances. Please may I suggest that Quakers commission an independent governance review for our central structures, and to ask for suggestions (not just a single option) of a modern simplified governance structure.
Quakers are a faith group. The right governance structure will discerned with spirituality. The right ordering of governance is important across the charity sector – there are many charities that offer this service, including risk assessment and performance against Charity Commission criteria. Suggestions for a simplified Quaker governance structure should be clear and un-muddled, evidence based, comply fully with the Charity Commission aspirations for charities, and sustaining. The essential role in governance of our professional management team will become transparent. Quakers have been discussing simplification since 2008. Could Quakers in 2025 take a big step forward that will help us be sustained and go ‘Whoosh’?
David Fish
Likely basis for Quakerdom
In the seventeenth century the world opened up to trade and travel to the east where Buddhism and Hinduism were found to have a meditative basis in which there were purported to be seven levels of consciousness.
For me, the seven levels (aspects) of consciousness from the east are:
1. Dreamless sleep.
2. Dreaming sleep.
3. The waking state in which we have a train of thought.
4. The meditative state in which we are in a state of restful alertness. We do not have a train of thought.
5. Bliss consciousness in which our ego is lost. The equivalent of the Christian ‘rapture’.
6. God consciousness in which we experience a sense of infinity or boundlessness. This is enlightenment.
7. Nirvana, in which it is purported to be the final release from reincarnation.
If seven (nirvana) is indeed the final release from reincarnation then it is likely to be the eighth level of consciousness.
This would allow the seventh level of consciousness to be death consciousness and would not be limited by time. This would explain much that is mysterious to us.
Death is not the end. Nirvana is.
William Summers
In memory of Roger Iredale
In honour and memory of activist, poet Roger Iredale (written before his death on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday).
Poetry wraps us, into dreams of wakefulness.
One of your many gifts sweet poet, your presence could not hide.
Words weaving, like flower seeds into the breeze.
From mind to mind, generation to generation.
A blessing, so like the sweet breath of nature herself.
Dancing seeds, settle amongst weeds, shape the fields unfolding splendour.
For our world… her hidden heart unveiled.
Even the harvester & plough cannot still, eternal voice.
Simon Iredale
God’s biscuits
I’m emailing hoping our Friend Linda Ewles (6 December) hadn’t intended to be offensive, but actually I found her poem very much so. It is reminiscent of the racism of the 1970s. It seems to be acceptable to be quite insulting towards nontheists and atheists.
I’m an atheist myself but enjoy all sorts of biscuits: pink wafers, chocolate-dipped biscuits, jaffa cakes and shortcake. I can happily enjoy a lemon macaron or, as a twelve-year-old, an iced gem, so I don’t know why I warrant the empty biscuit tin.
I wouldn’t seek to insult anyone else’s religious beliefs, I feel that everyone is entitled to their own.
In the same way that 1970s’ jokes weren’t funny, neither is this.
Deepa Parry-Gupta
Comments
Re: the conversation between Helen Oldridge and Lesley Richards about Quakers in Wales
This took me back over 20 years, to my own work with Friends in Wales and the Welsh Borders, seeking new directions. I was asked to join the Outreach Committee rather late in my triennium on the Home Service Committee, as there was a request to have a representative from Central England Area Meeting. I felt very committed to the project, visiting meetings and talking with Friends.
After a very short and incomplete (for me) time, I was taken aback when another Warwick Friend was asked to continue the work, the committee clearly assuming I had served the full triennium. At the time it seemed a loss of the groundwork already done, and I remember feeling disappointed, overlooked.
However, this proved a turning point for me as I put my energy into civic concerns, serving for many years on the local council and seeing new developments both locally and globally. Thus my energy and commitment could serve in other ways than through Friends.
Systems sometimes create gaps, and lost opportunities are a cause to stop and reflect. For Wales – new beginnings right now. For me, a move into a different sphere. We cannot always understand the timings of things and missed opportunities are sometimes seeds that will flourish in their own way.
Bill Evans
By Bill Evans on 19th December 2024 - 11:40
I am grateful for Keith Braithwaite and Peter Bolwell’s comments on the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.
I have a little Aramaic (I used to work with Assyrian Christian clients) and a little Biblical Hebrew. Enough to know that these languages had a small vocabulary. Thus a single word may serve in many different ways - as a glance at Strong’s Concordance will show. Here are some of the meanings of the Hebrew word Olam (עוֹלָם): ever (272x), everlasting (63x), old (22x), perpetual (22x), evermore (15x), never (13x), time (6x), ancient (5x), world (4x), always (3x), alway (2x), long (2x), more (2x).
This means that any passage is open to a variety of interpretations if one so wishes. One reason that catechisms emphasise traditional interpretations.
John Allegro exploited this ambiguity in his book ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ which postulated that early Christianity was a fertility cult which involved taking magic mushrooms.
I came across Neil Douglas-Klotz in the 80s when I was a circle dance teacher. He used this inherent ambiguity to produce some novel translations, which people would chant while performing simple ‘Dances of Universal Peace’. These claimed to be in the Sufi tradition, although they originated in California.
By Ol Rappaport on 19th December 2024 - 18:14
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