Letters - 23 November 2018
From spirituality to support and goodwill
Spirituality
Stephen Feltham’s article on ‘Humility’ and the role of the ego in war (26 October) touches on a yet deeper issue: our disconnection from each other, from life on this the planet and ultimately from God. This is one way of understanding the biblical fall – the loss of connection with the oneness of creation.
The good news is that we are not stuck in an endless cycle of destruction and self-destruction, war without end. Joyce Gee’s poem in the same edition puts it beautifully: ‘That I am a small evolving part/Of the Creative whole.’
Although terrible carnage in places such as Syria and Yemen persist, this planet is more peaceful and prosperous than it has even been. New generations increasingly embrace a sense of connection to the environment, to each other, to all the peoples of this world and even beyond. Spirituality – ‘spirit-in-reality’ – is in evidence everywhere.
Humanity is awakening.
Simenon Honoré
Equality
We should be wary of confusing equality with sameness or uniformity (24 August and 14 September). To speak of the equality of human beings is not to suggest they are the same in any empirical sense, but to say that they are of equal worth, whether before God or humankind. This also means that equality and diversity are completely compatible.
Just for fun, let’s revisit the parable of the triangles. Whilst isosceles and right-angle triangles are not the same they are equal in their triangularity – that the sum of their angles is always 180 degrees.
Peter Knight
Patricia Gosling (2 November), in identifying how the class gulf came about, is getting to the heart of our social disease. I believe this estrangement from the ‘elite’ – government, religion, education – is, rather than logic, the main cause of Brexit: a protest against authority in the hands of a few.
In secondary schooling, this has stymied a true comprehensive approach, but the situation has now become acute.
Young people whose abilities lie in making and creating can be dismissed as ‘failures’. Only ‘grammar’-type subjects are now to be counted, it seems, and these are themselves treated in a highly controlled manner so as to produce economic units. Only literacy and numeracy are allowed to be the ‘building blocks’ – this for those aged fourteen to sixteen, just when the brain is developing the connections between its different faculties.
This type of training will not produce the creative minds we will need in the future, because it is fundamentally structured ‘top-down’. We need all our faculties, intellect, imagination and emotional energy to make things happen. We need to esteem all children and young people for their own qualities as human beings, and give them a stake in ‘making the world a better place’.
No wonder many youngsters switch off, and some find their way to drugs, or knife gangs, or retreat into self-harm. We have promised education for all and not delivered – no wonder an outlet for protest was seized and the Brexit balance was tipped.
Janet Sturge
Remembrance and reconciliation
One hundred years has gone by and throughout the country it has been a time to remember wars and sorrows.
Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday fell on the same day this year. However, this is not often the case, so let’s think of Armistice Day in future by its real meaning. An armistice is the start of a reconciliation – a time to patch up differences, a time to shake hands over old quarrels and a time to make peace.
This is how I believe it should be treated in future years – a day for everyone to try to make a little peace in the world around them. It might just help the whole world.
We shall still have Remembrance Sunday, so that would give Friends two occasions to wear a white poppy.
Judith Wright
Red and white poppies
One of the interesting aspects of remembrance of past and present wars this year has been the growing significance of white poppies. Nevertheless I have heard many recent media comments suggesting that white poppies simply represent pacifism and nothing else. Even on a Radio 4 religious programme there was no inclusion of the countless numbers of innocent civilians killed in wars, just an extension of sympathy from soldiers to their families.
The extent of civilian deaths can perhaps be exemplified from an unusual source. My wife Anne-Marie makes art quilts, and some years ago we visited a quilt exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. One quilt included photos of the first 100 British soldiers killed in the Iraq war, surrounded by over 30,000 hand-sewn squares, the estimated number of Iraq’s civilians, some in extended families, killed during the same period of time.
Thankfully, more people are using white poppies to remember everyone killed in wars, not just soldiers. For the first time this year, Ipswich Meeting laid two white poppy wreaths in nearby Christchurch Park, one on the Cenotaph, the other in the Peace Garden.
Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse, said he would be wearing both red and white poppies this year. However, the three illustrations of poppies in the article he wrote for Radio Times were all red ones. This appears to be a stumbling point at present. I have yet to see any presenter of a national television programme wearing a white poppy.
Richard Stewart
Robin Waterston (2 November) speaks my mind. I have been wearing a red poppy and a white poppy together for a number of years now, and thereby contributing financially in each case.
However, I agree that it is now time to put it behind us and just contribute financially at home to the various relevant appeals.
The emphasis on war that comes to a head in November has become ostentatious, and it encourages the government to treat money spent on armaments as a normal opportunity for display. We want to work for a different world. I shall not wear a poppy next year.
Elaine Miles
‘Something there’
Many thanks to Derrick Whitehouse and Noël Staples for their articles, and to Mary K Stone for her letter (9 November), for reminding us of the unity of our diversity.
Our Meetings for Worship have been described as acts of ‘corporate mysticism’. In Meeting at its best – as well as in many other situations, individual as well as corporate – I feel we experience the mystic’s sense of oneness with everything, including with a mysterious ‘something there’, which we call by many names. For me, it’s William Wordsworth’s ‘spirit… [that} rolls through all things’.
The quotation from the Sufi mystic Rumi, which Derrick Whitehouse offers us, sums all this up.
Judith Smith
Witness and worship
I was sorry to read the letter on ‘Witness and worship’ (9 November). As a recent trustee of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), I can say that we do have staff in London and some of them take senior (and extremely responsible) roles, for which they are paid a fair salary – one they could probably greatly exceed in other walks of life
As for the suggestion that we might have had consultants in to frame the advertisement, is it thought that we do this for all our appointments advertised in the Friend? What nonsense!
Nick Francis
Support and goodwill
I shall miss our Friend and editor’s wise and sometimes humorous words (2 November) at the beginning of the Friend in the ‘Thought for the Week’.
Ian Kirk-Smith and Trish Carn and those who followed have been a great team in continuing the tradition of stimulating, informative and challenging independent Quaker journalism.
Recently, while watching Simon Reeve’s television documentary on Ireland, I felt very ashamed of the English landowners’ part in the Irish famine.
Ian Kirk-Smith has reminded us of the Quaker initiative of the ‘famine pots’ – huge cauldrons of soup, which helped people to survive at that time. He has more than repaid these gestures of support and goodwill.
May we express our gratitude to him and his wife, and send them best wishes across the water for a full and stimulating retirement. I am glad he enjoyed his ‘God job’, and I suggest he now treats himself to a dishwasher.
Christine Hayes
