Letters - 22 November 2024
From a different sort of kind to the Lord's Prayer
A different sort of king
Damian Entwistle (8 November) points out the tragedy – and, I might add, the grievous sin – that ‘Christ is King’ has become a slogan for fear-fuelled politics. He sees this as a reason to drop the slogan, while setting out how much its users have misunderstood what they say. But let’s not confuse the baby with the bathwater.
What’s clear is that recent users of this slogan don’t see what sort of king Christ is (much like those who expected a warring messiah), and what it means for our political lives that he, and no human ruler or government, is in charge. If Jesus is king, if he alone rules in our hearts, as the early Friends testified, then it’s a profound blasphemy to let politics get in the way of love of neighbour, to let other principalities and powers have any kind of ultimate value.
Something or someone will always be the living centre of our attention. Would that it were Christ, who has come to teach us what it means to give ourselves to love. If we could listen to him above the noise of right and left, then we might hear, with the early Friend Sarah Blackborow, ‘Love is his Name, Love is his Nature, Love is his life’, and we might witness that this is a very different sort of king, that we are members of a very different sort of kingdom.
Matt Rosen
Just one action
Calling all Quakers to join JUST, a new online initiative for peace in the Middle East, inspired by the Quaker American Friends Service Committee Action Hour which has been running for over a year.
We meet for a short time on Mondays at 7.30pm to update ourselves on latest news, witness in silence, take at least one action, and share with others what we are doing locally – our small wins. You can sign up at www.campain.org/just-sign-up. Or email actionhourcampain@googlemail.com for a link.
Nicola Grove
Lichfield
What made George Fox cry ‘Woe unto the bloody city of Lichfield’?
Lichfield Cathedral is built of red sandstone from a nearby quarry, and seventeenth-century buildings in the town would have used the same material. Maybe the red stone in the winter sunlight would have awakened Fox’s sense of the blood of the martyrs.
John Lynes
Transformation
Maris Vigar’s (1 November) account of how Germany Young Friends organised this year’s Yearly Meeting, and the reports written by younger Friends of the Future of Quakerism conference, remind us that there is more we can do to make Britain Yearly Meeting flourish.
It reminds me of my experience when a new curate, beginning my journey in ministry with the Church of England. One month we asked younger people, members of our thriving youth group, to prepare and edit our newsletter. They welcomed the opportunity; they talked to many in the congregation and collected their ideas about the strengths and weaknesses in the parish community.
The result was that the engagement of these young people added greatly to the knowledge of our much older ministry team. Their own response was to be much more integrated in our life and work; years later I returned to find more than one of them still active in the congregation.
Even if there are few younger Friends in our Meetings, we clearly do need to value all who attend, inviting their contributions rather than waiting, perhaps too passively, or as others have suggested by osmosis. Some Christians talk about realised eschatology, building God’s kingdom now; this is the time for all Friends to be invited to play their part in realising our vision for a transformed Quaker community.
Peter Varney
Quaker testimony
To go to our Meeting on Remembrance Day we travelled past our village neighbours congregating at the war memorial.
I pondered the dilemma of wanting to be with both my communities on this day, especially in the light of the current news of elections and conflicts.
In Meeting for Worship I bethought myself to look up our testimony to Charles II (Quaker faith & practice 19.46). I found myself on my feet reading it aloud.
This paper is as absolutely relevant now as it was then.
Should we re-deliver Margaret Fell’s words to Charles III?
Gill Grimshaw
Praise
Thank you for a particularly good collection of articles in the Friend of 8 November.
The one about Nantucket was appalling and challenging, the one about Joseph Conrad perceptive and educative, while I welcomed Keith Braithwaite’s article as strikingly timely and helpful to me personally and I hope to others. Sometimes being a Quaker feels like being a tuning fork.
Dorothy Woolley
Invasive technification
I am hoping that Tim Landsman’s vision of a high-tech, near-future Quaker Meeting (1 November) was an absurd dystopian jest. But I’m not sure.
Some Friends seemingly find the untrammelled promise of tech alluring. Tim’s sketch of us all, isolated in our homes, notionally ‘attending Meeting’ in our virtual reality (VR) helmets, was cleverly done. But I found it dispiriting in every sense of the word, because it was so blithely indifferent to the shared human presence that is vital to gatheredness, and all that that opens us up to.
Encountering simulations of ourselves in an immersive digital environment, no matter how far apart we might actually be, is in no way the equivalent of holding each other in the Light at a distance, which we can do without tech.
Nor does it resemble a relational community sharing common ground. Used like this, VR creates (and reinforces) distance between us, while appearing, superficially and seductively, to do the opposite. It mediates our relationship with each other and places multiple layers of software and pixels between us and wherever we believe the intimations of what love requires come from. Whatever happened to simplicity?
Much digital communication technology is pushed into our lives, upgrade by upgrade, with designed-in agendas by the corporations who want to profit from it, either directly from sales and collateral advertising, or from the data it generates to build artificial intelligence. Complex VR systems customised for faith groups may enable us to sell our actual Meeting houses and give the proceeds to the homeless but, rest assured, these advanced consumer technologies will only exist in a vastly unequal world in which useful but less profitable ‘intermediate technologies’ would do far more good for the poor and dispossessed.
Tim writes in the manner of a Silicon Valley advertorial assuring us that if only we infuse this or that new device into our lives our wellbeing will be immeasurably improved. Quakers should be discerning the untruth at the heart of every new iteration of this claim, not echoing it. Perhaps Tim was helping us to see that? Certainly, some sceptics call what Silicon Valley wants for the world ‘invasive technification’. I stand with them.
Mike Nellis
The Lord's Prayer
A version of the Lord’s Prayer:
Your word cradles my universe,
Rocks me at your hearth,
Frees me to nurture my children,
And to know my heart’s home lies within my own arms.
Fill my belly with the wisdom of the earth,
Help me loosen the knots cleverness has bitten
Into our flesh,
Hold my grasping fists until they open like petals,
And I know ‘I can’.
You are the dance of the ploughshare and the sowing
From harvest to harvest
The earth sings the song of your word.
Drawn from the original Aramaic translated by Neil Douglas-Klotz.
Gillie Bolton
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